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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... never lost sight of the human situation—or, more likely, he never thought for long to look at anything else. Thus his comedies exhibit a series of transformations of the conventional or stereotyped views of almost all the basic human ...
... never know. What is important is that he wrote plays which repeatedly encourage us to see life as a process, infinitely variable (to borrow Langer's phrase) but marked by recurrences which in their rough regularity constitute a rhythm ...
... never blotting a line. Even allowing for exaggeration, that report should tell us that Shakespeare—lie Mozart, who is said to have written in the same way—was not merely turning out scripts for a theatrical performance. The theater is ...
... never words were music to thine ear. That never object pleasing in thine eye, That never touch well welcome to thy hand, That never meat sweet-savor'd in thy taste, Unless I spake, or look'd, or touch'd, or carv'd to thee. How comes it ...
... never reprehended him but mildly," says Luciana, “When he demean'd himself rough, rude, and wildly" (Vi.87-88); and we believe her. Rough, rude, and wild though he may be, Antipholus of Ephesus is himself not without redeeming aspects ...
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 |