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 schoolgirl for the next four hundred years. Have you any idea how much suffering you’re going to cause? Hours spent at school desks trying to find one joke in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’

I can appreciate the frustration. I felt it once myself. At school I was forced to study Shakespeare’s comedies even though I couldn’t make sense of them. I remember being dragged along to productions that were indecipherable to me. I heard adults laughing at lines that were apparently hilarious but left me numb. It was almost as if they were laughing to show that they were sufficiently educated to crack the code.

The reality is that comedy ages much quicker than other genres, but that doesn’t mean that Shakespeare’s comedies are not worthy of our attention. Having spent my adult life immersing myself in his work, I have not only cultivated an appreciation of the comedies in particular, but I now understand that Shakespeare was not simply our finest tragedian; he was our finest comedian too.

That is to say, something about our education system has failed to initiate children into the joys of Shakespeare. This wasn’t always the case. I recently read a book about New York in the mid nineteenth century, in which the author described how poor street kids would routinely act out scenes from Shakespeare in their spare time. I cannot for one moment accept that they were more literate than the children of today. Something has definitely changed.

Or consider this passage from John Dover Wilson’s book Shakespeare’s Happy Comedies (1962):

‘I once tried Dogberry [the buffoonish constable from Much Ado About Nothing] upon a typical Elizabethan audience: I had been asked to lecture on Shakespeare to 288 male prisoners in Lincoln gaol, but learning from the chaplain that 60 per cent of them were illiterate, instead of a lecture I read them the Dogberry scenes, and at once had the whole prison roaring with laughter over the antics of the constable.’

If Wilson tried this in a prison today, would it elicit the same response? It’s unlikely. Yet it’s fascinating to see that even as late as 1962, Dogberry’s humour still had the desired effect on an audience who hadn’t the educational advantages that most of us have enjoyed.

Having taught Shakespeare to secondary school pupils, sixth formers and undergraduates, I have repeatedly observed a commonly shared experience. The reader is making progress, perhaps even enjoying the play in question, carried along with the characters and scenarios and the beauty of the language, but then he or she collides with a brick wall. Something doesn’t land, and it derails their experience.

Let me explain by way of a specific example from Much Ado About Nothing. Beatrice has sworn off all men, but of course we know that she’s in love with Benedick. At this point in the play – act 2, scene 1 – she is telling her uncle Leonato that God has so far sent her no husband.

BEATRICE
For the which blessing I am at him upon my knees every morning and evening. Lord, I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face! I had rather lie in the woollen.

So far, so comprehensible. She doesn’t want an immature husband. There’s a potentially sticky moment with the phrase ‘I had rather lie in the woollen’, but most readers will soon work it out. She is saying that she would rather sleep in scratchy blankets without sheets rather than be kissed and bothered by a bearded face. The scene continues:

LEONATO
You may light on a husband that hath no beard.

BEATRICE
What should I do with him? Dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting-gentlewoman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.

All well and good. The meaning is clear and the humour very much still lands. She’s finding reasons why no man would suit her, whether he be young or old. The language here seems almost modern in tone; the epigrammatic structure makes the lines sound as though they could be from the pen of Oscar Wilde. Her ideas are presented as a form of logical syllogism, when really this is just cynicism. It is ironically self-aware because she’s using wit as a form of self-defence. But then she says this:

BEATRICE
Therefore I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bearward and lead his apes into hell.

And now we’re stuck. What on earth is a bearward? And why is she saying she’ll lead apes into Hell? Has she gone completely insane?

We should reassure ourselves at this point that this is a joke that worked well in 1598, but less so in 2026. The bearward was the keeper of the bears. He would lead them from town to town, or look after them at the Beargarden on the south bank near the Globe Theatre. A well-known proverb at the time had it that women who refused to marry would end up leading apes into Hell as punishment for their frigidity. Beatrice is telling her uncle that she would accept that punishment happily so long as she didn’t have to deal with men.

Up until this point in the scene the jokes had ben effective, even to a twenty-first century sensibility. Then we find ourselves stuck on a joke that only works if you understand the meaning of a ‘bearward’ and are familiar with the proverbial fate of spinsters in Shakespeare’s time. I used to console my students in such situations, reminding them that Shakespeare’s plays are poems, and that poetry is not a riddle to be solved. We become needlessly fixated on the references and allusions that evade us, rather than reading the text through and relishing it holistically.

My new series of lectures on Shakespeare’s comedies has just been released by the Peterson Academy. In these talks, I attempt to reassure those who are relatively new to Shakespeare not to feel alienated because the jokes have dated. This, to me, is the first hurdle for modern audiences to overcome. While watching Much Ado About Nothing, we cannot stop mid-performance, check our annotated edition, work out what leading apes to Hell means… and then decide to laugh. The performers would be halfway through the next scene by that point. And besides, genuine laughter is spontaneous, not considered.

So don’t get hung up on the difficulties of the language. The more you read, the more your brain will lock into the meaning, and you will find that the rewards are endless. The humour in a play like The Merchant of Venice may have dated to such a degree that we forget that it’s a comedy, but the impact of Shakespeare’s comedic masterpieces is not dependent on our laughter, because they are poetically, thematically and conceptually so much more than mere exercises in entertainment. They are, in other words, works of art. The jokes may have aged, but the poet’s vision has not.

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Here’s a trailer for my latest series of lectures for the Peterson Academy. Those who enrol will also get complete access to a range of fantastic courses by leading academics. It provides a university-level education at a fraction of the cost and without all the ideological nonsense. You can enrol here.

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