ABSTRACT
The comic device of juxtaposing different styles, and ultimately different kinds of experience, has led Shakespeare increasingly to set two kinds of art against each other: an art that orders life into self-consciously formal designs, and an art that conveys an image of experience as disordered and uncontrollable. We tend to think of the latter as ‘realistic’, because it is hard to perceive in our own lives the finished shape we see in comedy; and if we are to see the Noah' Ark endings as reflecting one possibility in reality, we need to suspend a certain natural scepticism. The effort may be worthwhile, for the easy assumption that ‘real life’ has no pattern may indicate nothing more than our own failure to perceive the pattern, and part of the business of art is to keep us alert to the deeper order beneath the seemingly random surface of experience — the order that Sidney called a golden world. That, at least, was how the Renaissance regarded art; and Shakespeare, like most of his contemporaries, asks us to accept many seeming improbabilities for the sake of the truth they embody. He retains, however, a dramatist' fascination with opposing visions. In the comedies, this frequently leads to his defining the limits of the golden world by showing a disordered world outside it. The ending of Twelfth Night provides our clearest image of this opposition. Here, the integrity and the internal conviction of the golden world are great enough to persuade us that it is no less valid an image of life than the uncomfortable sight of the battered knights, the angry steward and the clown shut out in the wind and the rain. But the split between the two visions is more radical than before, and the balance is closer: even in The Merchant of Venice, Shylock was finally kept out of sight, if not out of mind; in Twelfth Night two different plays seem to be ending simultaneously on the same stage, and whatever the tensions of previous comedies, we have never felt this before. Shakespearian comedy as we have known it breaks apart: the device of opposing visions finally destroys the art it serves.
