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. |
From inside the book
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... Shakespeare, of course, began his work with the literary examples that were ... plays, even the earliest ones, are unlike any produced by his contemporaries ... Shakespeare's plays continue to be as immediately convincing as they are ...
... Shakespeare's time to ours has played a determining role in the perpetuation of the human race. This action has long served as the main trunk of our social tree, and all those special branches that from time to time have given warmth ...
... Shakespeare the sixteenth-century man was about any of these matters we can most likely 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 ...
J. A. BryantJr. however, the native humility that is said to have been Shakespeare's ... Shakespeare perennially fascinating; and it characterizes to some degree ... plays; but his mature practice suggests that he came to think less of it ...
... play, or Roman comedy. Thinking of this sort has prevailed when we hear that the ... Shakespeare's last comedies to invent new classifications altogether, the ... plays have invoked special criteria by which Exploration of the Human Comedy 7.
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 |