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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... audience. Nevertheless, the present study proceeds on an equally valid premise that Shakespeare differed from most of his contemporaries in that the plays he wrote were private accomplishments as well as public ones. That is, the ...
... in the point of view the poet chooses to give us. In tragedy the poet focuses on a protagonist's recognition of his or her own expendability in the eternality of process and tempts audiences to see Exploration of the Human Comedy 11.
... audiences have not always perceived. Shakespeare reminds us, at least once in every comedy and sometimes even explicitly, that golden lads and girls are no more immune to process than are their elders. Thus, in submitting to the charm ...
... audiences probably had asked no more than that he amuse them for the space of a sunny afternoon. One suspects that even for Shakespeare, backward glances, if he ever indulged in them, produced more than a few surprises. 2 The Comedy of ...
... audience to see a meaningful pattern in the day's events: Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail Of you, my sons, and till this present hour My heavy burthen [ne'er] delivered. The Duke, my husband, and my children both, And you ...
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 |