What are comedic conventions and how are they employed by Shakespeare in Twelfth Night?

Answer 1

Conventions in drama generally are tacit agreements between the performers and audience, e.g. that although the audience is plainly visible, the actors cannot see them (the fourth wall convention) or that actors can appear to be doing something like shooting each other without really doing so, but the audience will treat the situation as if the actions and their effects were real. In addition to this kind of conventions, there are customs as to the way plots and action in a comedy will work out. And there are also tropes or particular devices or stock characters employed in all forms of narrative, which are particular in this kind of drama. Some kinds of convention underlying some forms of jokes amount to stereotypes on which the joke is based: the dumb blonde, for example, or the parsimonious Scotsman. Shakespeare employs all of these kinds of convention in his comedies. Twelfth Night employs the convention (of the customary type) referred to in A Midsummer Night's Dream and subverted in Love's Labour's Lost, which may be called the "Jack will have Jill" convention, whein the play ends with the cast pairing off and marrying. It also uses the convention of a "humorous man", or a person who is ridiculed for having a particular characteristic. In Twelfth Night this is Malvolio; in As You Like It, Jaques; in Merchant of Venice, Shylock. The "eternal triangle" found in many romantic comedies, is well-exemplified in Twelfth Night, where Viola loves Orsino who loves Olivia who loves Viola in her masculine disguise. Twelfth Night is one of many Shakespearean comedies in which a young woman disguises herself as a boy. This is a common trope, and in modern times relies of the theatrical convention that everyone will mistake a woman in boy's clothes for an actual boy. (In Shakespeare's day, the audience had to forget that the person playing Viola actually was a boy and not a girl.) Several conventional characters are employed in this play: one is the drunken but loveable rogue (Sir Toby), akin to Sir John Falstaff. Another is the gull or mark of the rogue, here Sir Andrew, but essentially the same character as Roderigo in Othello. Both of these characters are committed to a hopeless project of wooing, as is Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Twelfth Night also has the stock character of the "all-licensed fool" in the person of Feste. Finally we have a soubrette (a witty and devious female servant) , a conventional character in French and Italian comedy, in Maria. Shakespeare also uses this character type in, for example, The Two Gentlemen of Verona.