Recently, I worked on Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. Simon uses the same rhetorical tools that Shakespeare used. Now, you don’t have to study Shakespeare to get repetition, antithesis, and lists, but when you have worked on speeches that use those tools simultaneously and much more frequently, it does make it easier to work on more contemporary texts.
Simon uses repetition constantly throughout every single scene. The wordplay Barefoot in the Park is lively. Often, when a character uses a specific word another character picks up on that word and uses it for a different purpose. For example:
Corie: What are you doing?
Paul: I’m checking to see if the windows are closed?
Corie: They’re closed. I checked.
Paul: Then why is it windy in here?
Corie: I don’t feel a draft.
Paul: I didn’t say draft. I said wind. There’s a brisk, northeasterly wind blowing in this room.
Corie: You don’t have to get sarcastic.
Paul: I’m not getting sarcastic. I’m getting chapped lips.
(Act 1 pg. 20)
In this sequence of dialogue, the characters use repetition and antithesis. In my experience, Paul is using repetition to reject or twist what Corie is saying. Paul also uses antithesis twice, draft/wind (wind also gets a near-immediate repetition) and sarcastic/chapped lips. This dialogue drew laughter quite frequently. Throughout the play, Paul and Corie repeat each other to either seduce, hurt, or tease each other. Their use of language at least means they are listening. In another conversation they are talking past each other through the use of antithesis:
Corie: That’s wonderful…I just thought we were going to spend tonight together.
Paul: We’ll spend tomorrow night together. I hope I brought those affidavits.
Corie: I brought a black nightgown.
Paul: Marshall had everything laid out when I was at the office…It looks simple enough. A furrier is suing a woman for non-payment of bills.
Corie: I was going to cook you spaghetti with the white clam sauce…in a bikini.
(Act 1 pg. 16-17)
Corie is using food and sexuality as antitheses, or alternatives, to seduce Paul away from his work. Paul and Corrie listen to each other enough to use each other’s word choices against the other, but not enough to pick up on each other’s needs and desires. That’s where, I feel, the comedy comes in.
Where does Shakespeare come in? Well, all of Shakespeare’s plays feature repetition and antithesis, however, I felt that Beatrice and Benedick are a good couple to compare with Paul and Corrie. While Barefoot in the Park is only 60 years old, compare the dialogue above to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing:
Benedick: God keep your ladyship still in that mind. So some gentleman or other shall scape a predestinate scratched face.
Beatrice: Scratching could not make it worse an twere such a face as yours were.
Benedick: Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.
Beatrice: A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours.
Benedick: I would my horse had the speed of your tongue and so good a continuer.
(1.1.109-116)
In this sequence, Beatrice and Benedick, attempt to prove they hate each other by playing with each other’s words. The way they twist the other’s words is electric. It is hard to watch two people pick up on the words the other is saying and repurpose them and come up with antitheses to compare them to so quickly and not believe they don’t have some kind of chemistry. These two couples obviously have that type of chemistry and challenge each other down to their very words. Sometimes, it makes for something romantic, but in this case, it creates comedic chaos.
Does either of these couples make it a week after the play without attempting to destroy each other? Who knows! But the tools these playwrights provide the actors definitely make the texts more fun to play. The constant twisting and hammering that Paul and Corrie do to each other is the comedic fodder of the play. Now, what that says about us as audience members is an entirely separate thing. We love to watch people dig at each other in this way.
So, how are the two texts different? Shakespeare’s texts, and most Early Modern texts for that matter, layer these tools in more frequently and often more subtly. Barry Edelstein describes Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric as “spinning plates.” Simon frequently spins one plate at a time to great comedic effect. That great comedic effect could be because the plate is actually more like a glass frisbee being whipped back and forth between two actors at breakneck speed. Shakespeare, on the other hand, makes actors attempt to spin several plates at once and frequently, we actors drop a few. It is just like when I learned to dribble two basketballs at once; when I cut down to just one ball, things got a lot easier and I was able to do more with the one ball I was left dribbling. The point is that plays written in the last 60 years use the same tools that plays written 400 years ago used, we prefer our ill-suited couples to be witty, and actors can use tools they learn in any genre for another one.