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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... critics from Aristotle's time to the present have attested, comedy as we know it in the West took its being either directly or indirectly from some of the primitive forms of religion, particularly Greek religion, which gave an ...
... critic is working with something like Troilus and Cressida (witness editors' disagreement about the proper classification for that ... critics dealing with these plays have invoked special criteria by which Exploration of the Human Comedy 7.
... critics who have inclined to be approving have praised "romantic" elements that Shakespeare either added or developed from hints that he discovered in Plautus. This was the burden of H.B. Charlton's criticism” and more recently that of ...
... critics of the play have treated unfairly, also has lively moments, though unfortunately too few of them. One of his better sallies comes early in Act II. He has been standing by, indulging in knowing asides, while his master Valentine ...
... critics over the years. The artificiality of Valentine's soliloquies in and of itself should signal to us that the conventional comic plot of this play was not meant to be taken seriously. Of course, change of a mechanical kind does ...
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 |