Some observations about Shakespeare's comedies, from discussion of LLL performance

I. Informality of Shakespeare's stage. Audience always present and even performing rather than distanced from and subordinated to play

A. experience of theater in round

B. theater in plays participatory

II. Pleasure of plays comes in part from carnival reversal of usual order

A. in LLL men are inept, women smarter

B. also servants (e.g. Moth) smarter than master

III. Pleasure of plays comes in part from comic reduction of norms, beliefs and styles of behavior

A. Example of feelings of love

1. Male lovers in LLL not only inept but cliched: more interested in the forms of love than really in love

2. Sexy tango performed as overblown cliche

B. Such reductions take advantage of theatrical form

1. Shakespeare's theater's faulty reproduction of reality turned to advantage as a claim about the faultiness of some belief/experience of reality--i.e. the male lovers are as if in a bad play without knowing it

2. more generally, Shakespeare aware of how people's identities can be seen as conventional roles--this is how a lover acts, on stage but also off ("all the world's a stage")

3. Especially interesting to compare LLL and MND in this regard. MND lovers more often taken seriously. But they are putting on the same conventional performance of love as in LLL.

IV. Power of the play: to stage someone or something is to be able to manipulate it, including making it ridiculous. E.g. the king of Navarre in princess's dress.

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The trajectory of the comedies: a model:

Rigid (male) law/order ---->

comic pleasure in disorder and -----> violation of law

Pleasure appropriated for revived law/order/ male authority that combines pleasure/love and law/order --a trick to make law more palatable?

LLL breaks with this comic form ("Our wooing doth not end like an old play" [5.2.851]). Why?

Pleasure of middle part of play itself too law-like: rigid courtly convention and vehicle of male self-aggrandizement?