Shakespeare and the Uses of ComedyIn 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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... Moreover, they continue to stand as extensions of reality as well as representations of it, and consequently they invite exploration in their own right. Alexander Pope wrote that to study Homer is to study nature. He might with equal ...
... Moreover, in his numerous presentations of the woman disguised as a male (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Cymbeline) sometimes accounted for as a happy accident of a theater with ...
... Moreover, the merchant tells Antipholus that a fellow Syracusan has been arrested in Ephesus that very day and will die if he cannot find money to pay the forfeit; but Antipholus is not concerned about life and death, even of a fellow ...
... a chain in order to demonstrate that affection, and he conscientiously tries to make good on that promise. Moreover, it really is a business matter that makes him late on the fateful day of 20 Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy.
... Moreover, the songs which were to have concluded the entertainment within the play, a dialogue between the owl and the cuckoo, winter and spring, conclude the play itself but in reverse order, with winter having the last word and Don ...
Contents
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 |