Yet Shakespeare’s comedies are never merely comic, any more than his tragedies are purely tragic: the lightest romance is liable to have its melancholy moments. Love may make the world of the Comedies go round, but – as Lysander reminds Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – its course never did run smooth. Their friend Helena certainly doesn’t find it so: she is forced early on to recognize the ungovernable arbitrariness of the heart. Her realization (I, ii) that her beauty doesn’t necessarily qualify her as fit object for so subjective an emotion as love is as harrowing in its way as the guilty consciousness of her namesake in All’s Well That Ends Well that her love for Bertram is displacing her grief – sincere as that is – for her recently-departed father.

O, were that all! I think not on my father,

And these great tears grace his remembrance more

Than those I shed for him. What was he like?

I have forgot him; my imagination

Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s.

I am undone: there is no living, none,

If Bertram be away.

(All’s Well That Ends Well, I, i, 78–84)

The soliloquies in the comedies frequently offer as much wisdom as they do wit: Viola’s thoughts on women’s susceptibility in Twelfth Night, II, ii, are a case in point. A wary eye has to be kept, though, on just who is speaking and in what frame of mind – the tensions between speech and speaker are part of what gives such life to Shakespeare’s plays. Posthumus’ bitter reaction to his wife’s apparent infidelity in Cymbeline clearly draws on the hackneyed lore of alehouse misogynism, yet the real pain behind it is palpable.

Is there no way for men to be, but women

Must be half-workers? We are all bastards,

And that most venerable man which I

Did call my father was I know not where

When I was stamp’d. Some coiner with his tools

Made me a counterfeit…

(Cymbeline, II, v, 1–6)

That so many of these soliloquies have ‘something to say’ – however debatable – should not really be a surprise: long before soliloquy was seen as some sort of ‘window’ on the innermost individual psyche, it tended to be regarded as a jumping-off-point for more generalized remarks about human morality and the workings of human destiny. The plays of the Roman philosopher and writer Seneca, which exerted so strong an influence on the Elizabethan playwrights, including Shakespeare, were little more than dramatic vehicles designed to carry these lofty commentaries. To a modern taste, which Shakespeare did much to form, such sententiae seem sententious in a more pejorative sense: we prefer to draw our own moral conclusions from what we see rather than be directly preached at. (The more conspicuously high-minded Shakespearean soliloquies may reveal more about the speakers’ self-delusions than about the ways of the world: Brutus’ self-righteous meditations in Julius Caesar are a case in point.) Yet Shakespeare himself, for all his innovation, did not reject the Senecan model out of hand. The English Histories and the ‘Roman plays’ alike abound in generalized speeches on the responsibilities of office, the dangers of wealth and fame and the folly of the passions, all Senecan themes done almost to death by previous playwrights yet revived and re-humanized by Shakespeare. The protagonist’s reflections on his fall in Sir Thomas More are clearly Senecan in thought and feeling while remaining utterly Shakespearean in their psychological vividness and poetic power. In King John, the Bastard’s withering words on the force of ‘commodity’ in the world add a contemporary edge of Machiavellian cynicism to the basic Senecan structure.