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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... declare the whole thing farce. Part of the appeal of the play, however, lies in its power to tempt us to believe that something unseen and unnamed has here made all things work together for good. Any farce will permit such a view of ...
... declaring, "I am one that am nourish'd by my victuals." For the most part, however, these are conventional clowns who amuse by performing the business expected of them; but there are two other characters, and a possible third, who share ...
... declare to the protesting Silvia, “I grant, sweet love, that I did love a lady; / But she is dead" (IV.ii.104-5), and hear Julia's bitter aside, “I am sure she is not buried." Minutes later she tells her amiable companion, the Host of ...
... declares his love for Julia, we believe him: Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphis'd me, Made me neglect my studies, lose my time, War with good counsel, set the world at nought; Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought. [I.i.66 ...
... declare that all the icy perfection he once thought he adored in Silvia's face he now spies "more fresh in Julia's with a constant eye." What these two have discovered, and discovered movingly for the attentive spectator or reader, is ...
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 |