It’s Only A Comedy Because It Has a Happy Ending.

It’s Only A Comedy Because It Has a Happy Ending.

When I first read to the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I was a little jarred by the light tone after the heavy drama of the preceding acts. The conclusion to the main plot seems to have occurred in Act IV, with all conflicts resolved and the lovers all properly in love with the right people. The play performed by the craftsmen, intended simply as a way for the happy couples to waste the hour or so before bed, seems out of place after the gravity of the previous four acts. It was only after some thought that I realized that it does have significance: The absurd performance of The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe is meant to provide a direct opposition to the struggles of the characters throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Pyramus and Thisbe is, despite its full title, a tragedy centered around love that cannot be returned; the ill-fated lovers cannot be together because they are physically separated by a wall. The same can be said about the couples in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though the obstacles they face are of a psychological rather than a physical nature. Hermia and Lysander are separated by Egeus’s wish for Hermia to marry Demetrius; Helena is separated from Demetrius by his desire to pursue Hermia; Oberon and Titania are separated by their own stubbornness in regards to the fate of the Indian boy. When the fairies throw love-in-idleness into the mix, it really gets ugly.

The problems that keep the lovers apart are undoubtedly serious ones, and the characters involved certainly don’t take them as anything resembling a joke. Hermia threatens to claw out Helena’s eyes for stealing away Lysander, and Helena is truly hurt by the “prank” Lysander and Demetrius play in “pretending” to love her. Titania is also in love with the donkey-headed Bottom (which is frightening if you think about it in terms of real life), and she would have remained the monster’s adoring lover if not for Oberon’s decision to reverse the curse of love-in-idleness. All of the emotions felt by the characters are real to them and wouldn’t have seemed at all funny, and in this respect I don’t find the play comical. However, by the final act the characters’ conflicts are resolved, so despite all the serious moments, we can call A Midsummer Night’s Dream a comedy.

Contrastingly, Pyramus and Thisbe is a humorous tragedy (at least in the hands of the “rude mechanicals”). The audience regularly makes jokes at the expense of the craftsmen, who perform the play so poorly that it’s laughable. Yet in the end it still is a tragedy because the lovers never get their happily ever after. Thus Pyramus and Thisbe turns a tragic plot into something funny, the opposite of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has a more serious air but ultimately is considered a comedy.

I think Shakespeare’s inclusion of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is his way of proving that tragedies can be funny just as comedies can be serious. The classification of a story as a tragedy or a comedy depends entirely on the ending, after all. Perhaps the perception of comedies as “funny” is just a result of the relief of tension felt at the end of the play; if you are smiling at the end, you oftentimes forget how serious things were up to that point. Tragedies that are funny until the sad ending aren’t nearly as common as comedies that are serious until the happy end, but I’m sure they exist somewhere.