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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... tragedy ultimately derive from this same indeterminate matrix, as does the dithyramb; but all the forms we now call comic retain something of the recognizable sweep of their ancient source in that they too celebrate the renewal of the ...
... tragedies. He began with what he and all his contemporaries knew, or could easily discover for themselves, and expanded that fund of knowledge into visions of authenticity that we are still unable to assess completely. It should be ...
... tragedy; thus the study of individual comedies frequently becomes, with them, a series of exercises in literary taxonomy. Thinking of this sort is usually at work whenever we find such characters as Launcelot Gobbo, Shylock, Falstaff ...
... tragedy. It is true that from as far back as we have any record comedy has stood in contrast to tragedy as one of the two principal modes of dramatic poetry; and we have Plato's word for it (in the Symposium) that Socrates once argued ...
... tragedies we thought we had confronted but, after the death of the protagonist, managed to escape. The world of Shakespeare's tragedies is, after all, at several removes from our own. It is like ours, certainly, but greater and more ...
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 |