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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... readers and viewers for almost four hundred years have testified, Shakespeare's plays continue to be as immediately convincing as they are illuminating. Moreover, they continue to stand as extensions of reality as well as ...
... Reading of Plays: A play is not like a novel or a poem. This is a truism that need[s] to be repeated. Because the playwright must put his ideas for his play into so many words on paper, it is all too easy to read them as if they work ...
... readers; but it is by no means the best place to exhaust the meaning of a play that can legitimately be called a dramatic poem. The full experience of any poetry worth remembering will be solitary, not communal. So it is with the ...
... reader to look again—or as Caliban puts it, to dream again. Thus the present study is simply another look at the perennially mysterious world of comedy that Shakespeare created, seemingly with the back of his hand, when 12 Shakespeare ...
... reader of Shakespeare's earliest comedy; nevertheless, it repeats Coleridge's quip about farce daring to add the two Dromios and thereby adds additional weight to an unwary reader's tendency to assume that Shakespeare by such strategies ...
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 |