Shakespeare's Treatment of his Sources in the Comedies

This study of Shakespeare’s comedies in relation to their sources is intended to throw light on the interpretation of Shakespeare’s comedies and his craftsmanship. The book offers explanations of Shakespeare’s ideas or his reading of life as reflected in his work in comedy. The author focuses on finding out the “meaning” of each comedy and the method Shakespeare has employed in building it up from the source materials.The introductory chapter investigates the nature of his craftsmanship and the technique he has generally adopted in the comedies. The succeeding chapters (I---IV) deal with Shakespeare’s handling of the sources in the individual plays and chapter V with the role of the clown in Shakespeare’s comedies. A chapter on “The Comic in Henry IV” is included since no treatise on Shakespeare would be complete without a consideration of Shakespeare’s greatest achievement in comedy: Sir John Falstaff.The author shows how Shakespearean plays contain observations on the complexity and variety of life and make out a plea for accepting life as it is. It is here that Shakespeare’s plays are superior to the sources which aim either at telling a moving intricate tale or at direct moral teaching. In spite of excisions here and there Shakespeare complicates the story by amplification and combination subtilizes the characters and affiliates both plot and character to a dominant idea.