ABSTRACT
There is no denying the order brought to bear at the end of most Renaissance comedies. Criticism has often emphasized the happy ending of comedy and the movement from order through disorder to order (see Frye, "Argument"; Jagendorf). This assumption is sound, but it needs qualification. One of the recent qualifications has been, in the English-speaking world at least, to see the ends of comedy, both the endings and the purpose of the plays, as a kind of ideological containment. While these arguments, which find their inspiration in Derrida's breaking down of binary opposites and in Foucault's analysis of power, are suggestive and have provided new perspectives with which to view literary texts in general, and Renaissance comedy in particular, the interests of my essay lie elsewhere (see Belsey). I would like to argue that in Italian, Spanish, English, and French comedies of the early modem period, the very structure of the plays, the way they end, involves disjunction, stress, and rupture. The ends of comedy represent a return to order, but a restoration with loose ends. They are often asymmetrical and leave doubt in and with the audience. Here the exception, while not proving the rule, complicates it, and the comedies are not simply apologies for utopian hope or the existing social and political order. What I am proposing - to see the tragic in the comic, disorder in order, as an unsettling of the end of comedy - is not novel. The difference is one of emphasis, serving as a reminder that the complex ways of representing and seeing the endings of
comedy from sixteenth-century Italy to seventeenth-century France can be forgotten in a fascination with order and pattern. I
The pleasure principle of comedy may predominate in the happy marriage that ends New Comedy and becomes popular in the romantic comedy of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but, the agonistic principle, to use Harry Levin's phrase, pushes the ends of comedy towards Freud's reality principle (Playboys and Killjoys 131). The stresses, ruptures, and the mixing of generic imperatives occur in many Renaissance comedies, including the ones most discussed here. Rather than discuss the whole range of comedy, I shall concentrate primarily on two kinds or aspects, first the "romantic pastoral" - Guarini's II Pastor Fido (1590), Shakespeare's As You Like It (1599) and Twelfth Night (ca. 1600-01), particularly Calderon's No hay bur/as con el amor (ca. 1634-35) - second, and more briefly, "satirical comedy" - Ben Jonson's Volpone (1607) and Moliere's Tartuffe (1664).2 These comedies represent the poles of romantic comedy and romance (tragicomedy) and that of satire. Even in the most romantic of these comedies there is an admission of agon and reality.
Pastoral and romantic comedy involve compensation and escape from the tensions of the world. The idyll of the pastoral contains implicit and explicit reference to its opposite. This absent other might be a social order that needs renewal, a household in which the senex blocks the romantic yearnings of the young, or a world that has fallen from some kind of golden age or Eden. The tragic stress or potential chaos often occurs when the city or court threatens to impinge on the pasture or forest, what Northrop Frye has called the "green world." Sheer confusion can seem, to the characters at least, a threat to their happiness. But even at the end, after the comic recognition has resolved the near catastrophe, there are loose ends and suggestions that the dark and tragic side of life is still there and can reassert itself at any time. This tragic potential is only suggested and in varying degrees, sometimes to the point of being in a very minor key.
