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COMEDY-Theories of Comedy SHAKESPEARE Theories of Comedy • Between the 1520s and the 1590s, something astonishing happens to English Comedy; for one thing, it becomes quite suddenly ‘funny’, and despite Changes in audiences and linguistiC usage, audiences today Can still find Shakespeare amusing or we Can even be delighted or even moved • No doubt that many of the Tudor Comedies achieved the aim of entertaining their immediate audiences and modern stagings Can Certainly be entertaining, Capitalising on the aCrobatiC energy of live performanCe and the ability of talented actors to take command of the individual moment. • However, there is a Change taking place within that 70 years, in the nature and the quality of those dramatiC texts; partly to do with the language of comedy. ‘…our English tongue, which hath been the most harsh, uneven and broken language of the world…is now, by this secondary means of playing continually refined, every writer striving in himself to add a new flourish unto it; so that in process, from the most rude and unpolished tongue, it is grown to a most perfect and composed language…’ (Thomas Heywood’s ‘An apology for Actors, Book III, 1612) LANGUAGE; • MuCh of the effeCt of Comedies suCh as ‘As You Like It’, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ depends on the skilful manipulation of language; often language of a highly artificial kind • Shakespeare took the ornate, sophistiCated language, highly Conceited language of dramatists like John Lilly, who was working in the 1570-80s, and he made this language of eloquence not merely performative but also functional – as he matures he makes language not only a beautiful skin, but the bones of the plot, theme, and character ‘THE POETICS’ – ARISTOTLE • Aristotle declares that plot is the soul of the drama, and all the other 5 elements are subordinate to it – there was also a huge Change in plot ‘what creature is in health, either young or old, but some mirth with modesty glad to use?’ (Nicholas Udall, Prologue to ‘Ralph Roister Doister’, 1552) • Udall is anxious to avoid the charge of abuse and skerility in comedy; he does not want it to be assoCiated with all of those things that Castelvetro idenfities as the Causes of laughter: * ‘laughter is provoked by pleasurable objects, situations, sayings etc., apprehended through the senses or the imagination, they may be divided into four classes: 1. We are pleased when we see, for the first time, or after an absence, persons who are dear to us, and acquire or recover things we value highly 2. Jests plays by others…jests are a sourse of very great pleasure to us, and they make the victim so ridiculous that we are moved to laughter. The cause of this laughter is the sin of our first parents, which o corrupted our nature that we rejoice at the bad fortune of others as well as at our own good fortune. 3. …wickedness of soul and physical deformities, together with the actions which spring from them. But they are laughable only when they are presented to us in disguise 4. things that pertain to carnal pleasures, like the privy parts, sexual intercourse, and the memories and representations of both.’ • Udall Claims a positive function for his Comedy- it causes ‘health’ and it ‘voids pensiveness’, disposing of overthought, which is an early instance in English of the notion of the comic or comedic catharsis, which is a counterpart to Aristotle’s notion of tragic catharsis/purgation of pity and fear achieved. • Udall’s emphasis is on mirth, and a spectator’s mental state and humour which is more dependent on a suCCession of entertaining moments than on a plot movement as a whole. ‘but our comedians think there is no delight without laughter, which is very wrong, for though laughter may come with delight, yet cometh it not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter; but well may one thing breed both together: nay, rather in themselves they have…a kind of contrariety…laughter almost ever cometh of things disproportioned to ourselves and nature. Delight have a joy in it, either permanent or present. Laughter have only scornful tickling’ (Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesie’) SHAKESPEARE Theories of Comedy • Here, Sidney attacks the tendency of English comic dramatists to think that there can be no delight without laughter; laughter has a delight in it which he terms ‘convenience’ (‘con venio’ meaning coming together, concord without selves and nature) • Laughter for Sidney is a ‘scornful tickling’; a distortion or deformation of the ideal state and nature. ‘…our intent was at this time to move inward delight, not outward lightness, and to breed soft smiling, not loud laughing: knowing it to the wise to be as great pleasure to hear counsel mixed with wit, as to be foolish to have sport mingled with rudeness.’ (John Lyly, Prologue to ‘Sapho and Phao 1584) o PiCking up on that theme emphasising inward delight; rather odd exponents of ComiC drama in dismissing the essential nature of laughter, partiCularly when it is Caused by the deformation of ‘scornful tickling’ as opposed to harmony ‘Comedy is mild, gentle, willing for to please …delighting in mirth, mixed all with lovely tales’ (Anon. ‘a pleasant comedy of Mucedorus and Amadine (1598)) • Emphasis on mirth shown by Udall but also an element of plot as signifiCant, in the ConCern with ‘lovely tales’, and more vitally in the notion of bringing things with ‘joy to pass’; comedy actually makes things happen • Comedy Causes transformations to plots, to Characters and perhaps to societies at large; this may also involve the ‘first item’ in Castelvero’s list of comedic pleasure*= dominant element in the final phase of Shakespeare’s comedies, the so called romances or last plays e.g. ‘The Winter’s Tale’, and the finding of Perdita, the daughter who’s name means lost, and the Coming baCk to life at the end of Hermione (the wife who has supposedly been dead for 16 years) • These plot centred functions of comedy though are not obvious to even the most sophisticated of CritiCs such as Sidney: ‘comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he representeth in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be: so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one…so that the right use of comedy, will I think, by nobody be blamed’ (Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poesie’) o Rather text book definition of Comedy; it Can expose folly therefore amend behaviour = it is didactiC and Corrective rather than akin to satire; by depiCting human mistakes and misbehaviours, in the most ‘ridiculous’ light, the comic dramatist makes it impossible for the audience to behave in the same way • Sidney with all his genius fails to develop a theory of Comedy that will be adequate to sum up the ComiC achievement in England during the time; he is Composing his work in 1580, before the major ComiC works of Shakespeare • One of the problems for CritiCs like Sidney was the early modern and Medieval Comparisons of tragedy and comedy; Aristotle devotes his Poetics to tragedy – it does give us some clues as to his understanding of comedy in the surviving part of the poetics, but he does admit to uncertainty, even ignorance as to the actual origins of comedy: ‘comedy has had no history because it was not at first treated seriously…who furnished it with masks, or prologues or increased the number of actors – these and other similar details remain unknown. As for the plot, it came originally from Sicily; but of Athenian writers Crates was the first who, abandoning the ‘iambic’ form, universalised his themes and plots’ (Aristotle, ‘Poetics’) o He seems to view tragedy and Comedy in antithetiCal terms; Comedy as the opposite image of tragedy o While epiC and tragedy are Clearly high mimetiC modes – they depict reality in an elevated way – comedy and satire qualify as low mimetic modes o In terms of evolution, the tragedy supposedly evolves out of the dithyramb – the hymns to the god Dionysus, Comedy is the spawn of the phalliC songs, the sexual basis is at the heart • While tragedy depiCts men as better than in actual life, Comedy depiCts them as worse than in real life; we find perhaps a ComediC Counterpart to the tragiC notion of hamartia (missing of the mark) we find a ComediC counterpart in comedy’s dependence on some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive: SHAKESPEARE Theories of Comedy ‘comedy is…an imitation of characters of a lower type – not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly.’ (Aristotle, ‘Poetics’) • There is a second book that deals extensively with comedy but which has been lost from the poetics; the loss of the second book does mean that theorists of comedy in the 16th century are faced with a huge gap – to fill that gap they then have to depend on the surviving examples of Classical comic dramatists and on the scattered observations of the later critics; dramatist making comic capital out of this knowledge gap: ‘comedy is a fable involving diverse arrangements of civic and private concerns, in which one learns what is useful in life and what on the contrary is to be avoided.’ (Cicero) o The useful and the avoidable; comedy is defined as the ‘imitation of life, the mirror of custom, the image of truth’ acCording to Donatus • Inverto Echo ‘The name of the Rose’; the blind old monk Loges, who symbolises the alleged intellectual conservativism of the catholic middle ages, he wants to block access to a work which seems to elevate laughter and to legitimate the ComiC distortion of the human face, whiCh was made in the image of God; this monk is willing to Commit murder, suiCide, and burn the abbey in order to stop this perniCious text being seminated.
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