Shakespeare and the Uses of ComedyUniversity Press of Kentucky, 2014/07/15 - 280 ページ In Shakespeare's hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies—from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night—he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse. Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early and late, dutifully concerned himself with the production of laughter, the presentation of young people in love, and the exploitation of theatrical conventions that might provide a guaranteed response. Yet these matters were incidental to his main business in writing comedy: to examine the implications of an action in which human involvement in the process of living provides the kind of enlightenment that leads to renewal and the continuity of life. With rare foresight, Shakespeare presented a world in which women were as capable of enlightenment as the men who wooed them, and Bryant shows how the female characters frequently preceded their mates in perceiving the way of the world. In most of his comedies Shakespeare also managed to suggest the role of death in life's process; and in some—even in plays as diverse as A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, and The Tempest—he gave hints of a larger process, one without beginning or end, that may well comprehend all our visions—of comedy, tragedy, and history—in a single movement. |
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... death, and renewal." Our forms of tragedy ultimately derive from this same indeterminate matrix, as does the dithyramb; but all the forms we now call comic retain something of the recognizable sweep of their ancient source in that they ...
... death, and the generation of charity—are best thought of as subsidiary actions. In Shakespeare, of course, these subsidiary actions often turn out to be more arresting than the central one; but the main trunk is always there and, except ...
... death, usually the untimely death of a person in high place and more often than not a death in some degree unwarranted. The notion of substance can become downright mischievous whenever the genre-minded critic is working with something ...
... death remains, comedy normally does not dwell on that, but rather invites our ridicule of any person or thing that has attempted to resist the flow, including those members of the community—parents, magistrates, rival suitors, spiritual ...
... death for the father of the twins. Answering either question involves a reference to the traditional pattern and function of comedy, both of which require the displacement of the senex or parent, and a general recognition of the lovers ...
目次
1 | |
14 | |
27 | |
40 | |
5 A Midsummer Nights Dream | 57 |
6 The Merchant of Venice | 81 |
7 The Taming of the Shrew | 98 |
8 The Merry Wives of Windsor | 114 |
10 As You Like It | 146 |
11 Twelfth Night | 165 |
12 Troilus and Cressida | 179 |
13 Alls Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure | 203 |
14 Cymbeline and The Winters Tale | 221 |
15 The Tempest | 233 |
Notes | 253 |
Index | 266 |