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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... least approximate chronological order may tempt one to generalize about what some have called Shakespeare's philosophy, but prudence demands a measure of caution in this regard. Shakespeare was not a philosopher, and there is no ...
... least interesting, if not congenial, Henri Bergson's notions of being as duration rather than as static order and of organic life in all its forms as the product of pluridimensional creative evolution,” to say nothing of Alfred North ...
... least outside academic circles, is the view that the primary function of comedy is to produce laughter. No one, of course, denies that laughter does accompany most comedy; for laughter, if Bergson is right, is the natural response to ...
... least of music comparable in stature to Shakespeare's plays; most musicians know that the "fullness" of that kind of music is at best only approximated in performance. The ultimate fullness, one imagines, occurs in the mind of the ...
... 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 of Shakespeare's comedies we inescapably find ourselves looking ...
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 |