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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... representations of it in the relatively imprecise medium of language. This is not to suggest that Shakespeare's conscious motive when he sat down to write a comedy was exploration. 4 Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy.
... suggests that he came to think less of it, and his comment in Hamlet on actors who would introduce improvised business of their own is well known. In any case, producing laughter is at best an 6 Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy.
... suggest it and none ever requires it. For example, when Plautus's twin Menaechmi see strange happenings in Epidamnus, they think madness and send for a doctor. In Shakespeare's version, their counterparts at first think of witchcraft ...
... suggest that triviality characterizes the entire play. On the contrary, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, like The Comedy of Errors (presumably earlier) and Love's Labor's Lost (presumably later), constitutes a serious assault on the domain ...
... suggesting Love, if thou hast sinn'd, Teach me, thy tempted subject, to excuse it! At first I did adore a twinkling star, But now I worship a celestial sun. [II.vi.7–10] Then when he remarks, early in the play, O, how this spring of ...
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 |