Shakespeare and the Uses of ComedyUniversity Press of Kentucky, 15. 7. 2014 - 280 strán (strany) 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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... appear. Several comprehensive works have proved valuable throughout, however, and deserve to be acknowledged at the outset. These include the volumes of E.K. Chambers on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, still vastly useful ...
... appears to us to have been the beginning), the composition of plays was for Shakespeare a species of making—poetry in its original and noblest sense, one of those activities wherein the finite human mind may seek to lay hold on reality ...
... appears, and we laugh (presumably with relief) when it is defeated or discredited. Being creatures of habit, however, we laugh also at fossil rigidities that have little or no bearing on the comic action at hand—the so-called comic ...
... appears on the first page of J.L. Styan's influential The Dramatic Experience: A Guide to the 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 ...
... appears in Act III, scene i. In Plautus's version, as in the numerous treatments that have come out since Plautus's time, something like the following takes place: Jupiter and Mercury disguise themselves respectively as Amphitryon and ...
Obsah
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 |