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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... course of this study. I am grateful first of all to the University of Kentucky for leaves of absence and to the staff of its Margaret I. King Library for generous assistance more times than they will remember. I am grateful, too, for ...
... course, began his work with the literary examples that were immediately at hand—a couple of Roman comedies in a school textbook, some fragments of Greek romance transmitted through Gower, a handful of prose tales— but being the kind of ...
... course, these subsidiary actions often turn out to be more arresting than the central one; but the main trunk is always there and, except in two of the comedies, always dominant at the end, where the assurance of social continuity is ...
... course, denies that laughter does accompany most comedy; for laughter, if Bergson is right, is the natural response to any rigidity that impedes or presumes to impede the life process which true comedy celebrates.” That is, we laugh at ...
... course give us much more. Nevertheless, the closest approach to the fullness of the music that the composer conceived will most likely occur in the quiet study of a trained and perceptive reader who 8 Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy.
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 |