What we get wrong about Shakespeare’s comedies

The difficulty isn’t that Shakespeare isn’t funny anymore, but that we expect comedy to work in the same way across centuries.

Mark Rylance as Olivia and Stephen Fry as Malvolio in William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (directed by Tim Carroll at the Apollo Theatre in London).

There’s a moment in Blackadder: Back and Forth when Rowan Atkinson’s anti-hero travels in time and meets William Shakespeare. He punches the great bard in the face and says: ‘That is for every schoolboy and …