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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... farce, both dramatic modes result from a poet's confrontation with the order of the universe and differ principally in the point of view the poet chooses to give us. In tragedy the poet focuses on a protagonist's recognition of his or ...
... farce and kept it farcical. Schlegel, more generous than most, called it “the best of all possible Menaechmi." Coleridge pronounced it "remarkable as being the only specimen of poetical farce in our language" but declined nevertheless ...
... farce daring to add the two Dromios and thereby adds additional weight to an unwary reader's tendency to assume that Shakespeare by such strategies was seeking to enhance a “knockabout farce.” We really do not know how Shakespeare ...
... farce. Part of the appeal of the play, however, lies in its power to tempt us to believe that something unseen and unnamed has here made all things work together for good. Any farce will permit such a view of things, but most farces do ...
... farce" at least a suggestion of an orderly and purposeful universe. It is no wonder that in his exploration of Plautus's Menaechmi he also found a few real people there. To begin with, behind the mask of the shrewish wife of Menaechmus ...
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 |