tragedy part I of III: contours of comedy in romeo & juliet and antony & cleopatra

funny jokes occur in tragedy just as tragic events occur in comedy. however, the same ironic structures that articulate light-hearted humour in comedy can be repurposed in tragedy to create deep melancholy

professor Leah Scragg identifies in a quarter of William Shakespeare’s later plays a plot trope she calls ‘putative death’, whereat someone pretends or is thought to be dead. This is almost uniformly a comic trope, but it occurs in two of shakespeare's tragedies: Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra.

In the way the trope occurs in them it is a tragic joke. It is no coincidence it should occur in tragedies concerned with love and romance for Shakespearean comedy is likewise concerned. But where Shakespearean comedy often ends in marriage, these plays end in marriage’s grim inversion: the titular lovers joining each other in death.

Victor Raskin defines a joke as the ironic reversal from the set-up’s ‘semantic script’ to another by way of a ‘script-switch trigger’ in the punchline. A semantic script is, put simply, a line of discourse. As an illustrative example, the insouciant and salacious Enobarbus talks about Cleopatra thus:

Under a compelling occasion let women die. It were pity to cast them away for nothing – though between them and a great cause they should be esteemed nothing. Cleopatra catching but the least noise of this dies instantly. I have seen her die twenty times upon far poorer moment. I do think there is mettle in death, which commits some loving act upon her, she hath such celerity in dying.

The initial semantic script is the death of women. The script-switch occurs at ‘die twenty times’, where Enobarbus’s exaggeration makes the initial script unreasonable and so triggers a switch to a salacious pun on ‘dying’, which Terri Bourus glosses as ‘(playing on the sense [of] “coming to (sexual) climax”’. This activates a paraprodoskian effect on what has been said so far and an anticipation of double entendre in what is to come. ‘Nothing’ becomes a misogynistic pun on vagina and matter of small consequence, like the title  of Much Ado About Nothing, which play also uses the putative death trope. The death/orgasm pun of the next line implies that Antony acting coldly to Cleopatra would only excite her more. And as for ‘mettle’, ‘loving act upon her’, and ‘celerity’ there seems to be some suggestion of vigorous masturbation.

Tragedy thus interacts with rather raucous, somewhat misogynistic comedy but not, necessarily, in a way that adds to one’s understanding of tragedy. In this regard, it is not the mere existence of jokes in a tragedy, but the specifics of Enobarbus’s punning that adds to one’s understanding, for in conflating death with sexual pleasure he anticipates the play’s tragic inversion of marriage.

This inversion is the tragic punchline in both Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet, utilizing a dark interaction between the generic expectations of comedy and tragedy. Peter Brooks writes that ‘the traditional comic structure [in theatre is] the resistance of an older generation of “blocking figures” to the plotting of the younger generation, seeking erotic union.’ This clearly applies to Romeo and Juliet, who are blocked by their feuding parents, and more abstractly to Antony and Cleopatra, who are blocked by politics and mutual suspicion born from infidelity. The ‘seeking [of] erotic union’ can thus be read as the initial semantic script of both tragedies. Yet unlike in Shakespearean comedy where this ‘seeking’ is resolved with marriage, to which end putative death is often a means, in each play it is resolved with putative death that is tragically reified as real death.

The putative death trope is initiated by Cleopatra when she says to Mardian ‘go tell him I have slain myself. | Say that last I spoke was “Antony”’. This false news causes the erotically burdened suicide scene between Antony and Eros, which like Enobarbus’s punning synthesizes sex, love, and death. This, in turn, causes Cleopatra’s death. The structure of events is comically farcical even if the events themselves are not. After Antony’s knave dies, he enjoins death and ‘erotic union’ as he intends to ‘be | A bridgegroom in my death, and run into’t | As to a lover’s bed’. Before, however, Antony asks Eros to kill him. He tells him to ‘Draw that thy honest sword […] Draw, and come’. It is rote to read swords as cocks but here it seems impossible not to. ‘Come’ yokes resolution to death, emphasis, and semen. Though the character refuses to fulfil this deathly, homoerotic command, Eros – named for the Greek deity of sex and love – still kills Antony, as indeed he dies for love of Cleopatra. The passion of suicide becomes tantamount to romantic passion.

Just so with Cleopatra. ‘The pretty worm of Nilus’ that bites her is likewise phallic and its venom a deathly inversion of semen. That she considers it ‘pretty’ and ‘puts it to her breast’ reinforces its sexual connotations. Death as ‘erotic union’ is the trigger that switches the comic semantic script to tragic script by frustrating comic generic expectation of marriage. And by combining elements of each genre into a grim synthesis, it heightens tragic feeling by compounding the irony of the lovers’ deaths. Their ‘erotic union’ becomes precisely coextensive with its destruction. It is a joke, but a deeply sad one. 

The death scene in Romeo and Juliet is, of course, quite comparable. Juliet’s putative death causing Romeo’s death in turn causing her death follows an identical if accelerated structure. Sex and love are likewise yoked to death. When Juliet stabs herself, ‘O happy dagger, | This is thy sheath! There rust and let me die’, there is a pun on ‘sheath’ and the Latin word vagina. Likewise, when Romeo enters the Capulet tomb, he apostrophizes to it ‘Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death’. In ‘womb of death’ there is a disturbing sense in which he impregnates the tomb with his own body, as indeed it is already pregnant with Juliet’s, as a symbolic replacement for the consummation of their marriage.

That their ‘erotic union’ is frustrated but not their legal marriage recalls Capulet’s threat to Juliet that ‘An you be mine, I'll give you to my friend; | And you be not, hang, beg, starve, die in | the streets’. He represents the primary ‘blocking figure’ in Romeo and Juliet. His control is not overcome but ultimately capitulated to, just as the play is not actually a comedy but a tragedy, and so must capitulate to its generic expectations of death and misfortune. The script-switch trigger, of course, is the young lovers’ deaths. The accelerated format of the putative death trope as compared to Antony and Cleopatra heightens tragic feeling even further. For the immediate resolve to declare ‘Thus with a kiss I die’ and to ‘be brief’ evidences their steadfast dedication to one another. But even as it is proved and they are symbolically sexually enjoined, it is really destroyed. This is the ironic tragic punchline.

In each play, the interaction of tragedy with comedy adds to one’s understanding of tragedy by showing how, firstly, comic structures can be redeployed to good effect; secondly, the linchpin role that irony plays in both genres; and thirdly, how necessary grave misfortune is to tragic feeling.

The putative death trope as it occurs in Shakespeare’s comedies convey no tragic feeling because it has little gravitas there. It serves a very different function, which is to replace heaviness of death with lightness of life, not to increase burden. Joke structure, further, conveys no tragic feeling unless deployed in a specific way.

It seems that it must concern grave misfortune. And it must be concerned with it in a way that is distinct from the flippancy typically endemic to comedy – a flippancy, indeed, that the putative death trope normally conveys – but rather give a sense, as Adrian Poole puts it, that ‘this death is special’. In each play considered apart, I think the tragic jokes do this very well. It promotes their deaths to a high and melancholy irony. There is, however, something vaguely humorous in the fact that both plays’ tragic jokes are essentially the same.