ABSTRACT
Most scholars believe that during the five or six years that followed the completion of Twelfth Night, Shakespeare wrote the major tragedies and three more comedies—Troilus and Cressida, All's Well that Ends Well, and Measure for Measured 1 . There is no need to search for implicit judgements before arguing that these comedies are not simply carefree, escapist entertainments. Even on a very superficial level, their overt moralizing, in didactic or gnomic speeches about justice, order or true nobility, marks them apart from earlier comedies. They have been distinguished as ‘comical satires’, but together with a more direct exposure of vice and folly, they have a more intense dramatic focus, an immediacy of feeling in moments of doubt or suffering which unites the audience in sympathy with individual characters; such a shifting response is alien to pure satire and the audience is forced to search for some other mode of reaction which can respond to both elements. Because of the moral issues which they so clearly raise, the three comedies have also been called ‘problem plays’. But again this title has only a specialized application, for each play has a last scene which most pointedly does not explicitly resolve the issues raised earlier. All's Well and Measure for Measure seem to conclude with precipitous theatricality, as if in the middle of a battle some one came along and said that the soldiers were only toy soldiers and must be fitted back into their box; and in neither play is the presiding figure portrayed with the impressive simplicity or mystery which would make him readily acceptable as a deus ex machina. So much is unresolved at the end of Troilus and Cressida that it has been suggested that the surviving text is merely the first part of a two-part play. 1 One might argue that these comedies are simply failures, but recent productions have vindicated their stage-worthiness and recent criticism has pointed out the subtlety of much of their dialogue and characterization. Many critics prefer to believe that they are perplexing because they were meant to be so, that they are not merely didactic but designed to vex and disturb. For the present it is sufficient to say that no one can read or see these plays without being involved with, and in some measure perplexed by, deep and serious issues.
