Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy

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University 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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目次

1 Shakespeares Exploration of the Human Comedy
1
2 The Comedy of Errors
14
3 The Two Gentlemen of Verona
27
4 Loves Labors Lost
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

9 Much Ado about Nothing
125

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著者について (2014)

J.A. Bryant Jr., is professor of English at the University of Kentucky and author of other studies in comedy, including The Compassionate Satirist: Ben Jonson and His Imperfect World.

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