In Our Country’s Good, Wertenbaker also similarly uses this technique, with ‘shitty’ Meg telling Second Lieutenant Ralph Clark that she will ‘play’ him ‘tight as a virgin’ and will ‘play with any part you want’. With Gonzalo being an ‘honest old councillor’, such a way of speaking would seem out of place with his class position, strengthening the element of danger in his situation whilst still being humorous. A violent storm risks the lives of all those on the ship in this opening scene, therefore providing a three dimensional atmosphere to the audience from the offset of the play. In Act One Scene One of The Tempest, Gonzalo says ‘I’ll warrant him for drowning, though the ship were no stronger than a nutshell and as leaky as an unstanched wench’, the words ‘unstanched wench’ referring to menstrual bleeding and ‘leaky’ implying sexual incontinence. Not only do these provide light relief for the audience after a more intense and sombre scene in both plays, but also reveal the transition from innocence to experience in Miranda in The Tempest. One of the potentially most obvious ways in which both Wertenbaker and Shakespeare utilise comedy is through arguably crude sexual innuendos. Whether included in dialogue or stage directions, comedy creates light and shade in both plays and thus heightens the importance of themes such as love, power and class divisions. This can also be said about ‘shitty’ Meg in Our Country’s Good, and in both plays most characters take part in some form of comedy. In The Tempest, the characters of Trinculo and Stephano are arguable almost entirely for comic effect, even having their own sub-plot comic in nature. Comic elements are often said to be integral in both in Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker and The Tempest by William Shakespeare.
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