A commenter asks “What do you see as the distinction between tragedy and comedy in classical theater?” I started to answer in a comment, but it got too long, so I’m promoting my answer to a post.

First of all, I have to question the notion that Shakespeare is classical theatre. Shakespeare obeyed none of the classical unities from Aristotle – there is never unity of action (Shakespeare delighted in subplots), and rarely unity of time or place. Shakespeare is “classical” in the sense that his work is foundational for subsequent English-language culture, but many of Shakespeare’s works that we consider most seminal (Hamlet, for example) don’t even really make sense except in the context of generic expectations that they frustrate (the question “why does Hamlet delay?” only comes to mind if you already know how a revenge tragedy is supposed to work), and as such Shakespeare is far more modern than classical.

The simplest and frequently-made distinction between comedy and tragedy is that tragedy ends in death while comedy ends in marriage. But Shakespeare’s first three comedies – A Comedy of Errors, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Taming of the Shrew – all meet this most basic criterion only technically; the thrust of their stories lie elsewhere.

A Comedy of Errors does have a marriage at the end – Antipholus of Syracuse exits to wed his brother’s wife’s sister. But the structure of the play is of a farce embedded within a romance. The farce, which occupies the bulk of the play, revolves around mistaken identity among two sets of identical twins. But this is embedded within a romance frame: a father, searching for his lost children, is captured and sentenced to death, only to be redeemed by those very same lost children, and to recover his long-lost wife to boot. This romance theme – the recovery of what seemed irrevocably lost – is what provides the emotional punch to the end of the play, and what, in retrospect, deepens the farce (particularly the role of the two Dromios therein). The romantic comedy between Antipholus of Syracuse and Luciana is not quite an afterthought, but it is at best a subplot.

Two Gentlemen of Verona ends with a double marriage, and comes closest to a straightforward romantic comedy plot. But comparison with A Midsummer Night’s Dream reveals a crucial difference. In both plays, we’re dealing with two pairs of lovers, and an estrangement of proper affection that causes two men to chase the same woman, which affections get properly sorted at the close so that every man can marry his destined bride. In Dream, as we would expect of the genre, the essential relationships are these romantic ones. In Two Gents, though, the essential relationship is between the two men. Valentine is so moved at the end by Proteus’s apology that he offers Proteus the woman Valentine himself loves and that he has been fighting for the entire play if Proteus wants her so much. This is very tough for modern audiences to buy, and I’ve often wondered whether it was any more plausible in Shakespeare’s day, but whether this was intended by Shakespeare to be satiric or played straight, it’s a clear indication of where the central thrust of the story lies. So, again, technically it’s a comedy that ends in marriages, but the thrust of the story actually undermines this conclusion.

And finally, Taming of the Shrew, one of my favorite of Shakespeare’s comedies. Again, the play ends in a wedding – Lucentio’s marriage to Bianca – but this wedding is the culmination of a subplot, not the main plot. The main plot is the marvelous story of Petruchio and Katherine. And they get married in Act III. Shrew isn’t exactly a “comedy of remarriage” as Stanley Cavell terms them, because there’s no estrangement between husband and wife that needs to be repaired. (That’s the essence of a romance plot, most fully realized in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale.) Rather, it’s about love blooming, unexpectedly, within a marriage inauspiciously begun. This is a decidedly modern story – the antithesis of the classical – for a variety of reasons, the most important of which, I would argue, is that the plot hinges on the agency of the female character. Petruchio, as of Act III, already has the girl. The hero has won the prize. The arc that remains is Katherine’s arc; she, ultimately, is the protagonist of the story.

The point I’m making, I guess, is that Shakespeare, from the very beginning, had a modern yen for frustrating and complicating generic expectations, and that this is the opposite of what a “classical” author does, which is establish a genre. I’ve illustrated how this is true in comedy, but it’s also true in tragedy. Hamlet depends for its effectiveness on an audience’s understanding of how a revenge tragedy works, and the recognition that this particular revenge-tragedy protagonist is not playing by the rules. But it’s not just Hamlet. Lear is a monumental achievement, arguably the paradigm tragedy in the Shakespeare canon. But it denies us precisely what Aristotle said tragedy was intended to achieve – namely, catharsis. Indeed, between the plot and subplot, the play methodically undermines, even mocks the very idea of theatrical catharsis – and does so not by alienation but by a process that further deepens the audience’s emotional involvement in the drama. It’s marvelous – but it’s a genre-shattering move, not a genre-establishing one.

If Shakespeare was ever a “classical” playwright, I would argue it was in his late romances that violated all the classical conventions of Aristotle. Structurally, they are comedies, but they are not stories about union but about rebirth, reconciliation, even renunciation; if they end in marriages the significance of these is not that the boy has finally got the girl but that life will finally go on. Winter’s Tale is the greatest of them, but Pericles, The Tempest, and even Cymbeline obey clear generic rules, and drive the audience towards an emotional payoff that is clear and consistent. It’s a mixed emotion – a bittersweet one – but it’s in no way an ambiguous one. These are plays that aim to and do achieve catharsis, and that don’t undermine themselves along the way. In that sense, even though they violate all of Aristotle’s rules, even to the point of not being clearly comedies or tragedies, they are classical, and have much more claim to be so than Shakespeare’s ostensibly more “orthodox” comedies or tragedies do.