ABSTRACT
The kind of comedy that was practiced by William Shakespeare has repeatedly challenged definition. Though his last comedies have been retrospectively classified as romances, most of their components are equally characteristic of his earlier ones: love, adventure, coincidence, recognition, and occasional pathos. Shakespeare merely seems concerned to promise his audience a pleasant surprise by evoking a winter holiday, even as he did with the opposite season in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare loaded his dice on the side of carnival, in that hungover hanger-on, Sir Toby, as against the Lenten Malvolio, that prince of wet-blankets. But Shakespeare was writing a comedy-and, what is more, a comedy written in defense of the comic spirit. He could commit himself, in this case, to the wisdom of folly and to the ultimate foolishness of the conventional wisdom. But, in his dramaturgy, he was moving onward to care, to death, to mourning, and toward tragedy.
