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Semester VI - Discipline Specific Elective

English Language and Literary Types

Discussing Different Aspects of as a Literary Type

Kinds Of Comedy In Diverse Historical Periods

Old and New Comedy in ancient Greece

The 11 surviving plays of Aristophanes represent the earliest extant body of comic ; what is known of Greek Old Comedy is derived from these plays, the earliest of which, The Acharnians, was produced in 425 BCE. Aristophanic comedy has a distinct formal design but displays very little plot in any conventional sense. Rather, it presents a series of episodes aimed at illustrating, in humorous and often bawdy detail, the implications of a deadly serious political issue: it is a blend of invective, buffoonery, and song and dance. Old Comedy often used derision and scurrility, and this may have proved its undoing; though praised by all, the freedom it enjoyed degenerated into license and violence and had to be checked by law.

In New Comedy, which began to prevail about 336 BCE, the Aristophanic depiction of public personages and events was replaced by a representation of the private affairs (usually amorous) of imaginary men and women. New Comedy is known only from the fragments that have survived of the plays of (c. 342–c. 292 BCE) and from plays written in imitation of the form by the Romans Plautus (c. 254–184 BCE) and Terence (195 or 185–159 BCE). A number of the stock comic characters survived from Old Comedy into New: an old man, a young man, an old woman, a young woman, a learned doctor or pedant, a cook, a parasite, a swaggering soldier, a comic slave. New Comedy, on the other hand, exhibits a degree of plot articulation never achieved in the Old. The action of New Comedy is usually about plotting; a clever servant, for example, devises ingenious intrigues in order that his young master may win the girl of his choice. There is in New Comedy: on a miser who loses his gold from being overcareful of it (the Aulularia of Plautus); on a father who tries so hard to win the girl from his son that he falls into a trap set for him by his wife (Plautus’s Casina); and on an overstern father whose son turns out worse than the product of an indulgent parent (in the Adelphi of Terence). But the satiric quality of these plays is bland by comparison with the trenchant ridicule of Old Comedy. The emphasis in New Comic plotting is on the conduct of a love intrigue; the love element per se is often of the slightest, the girl whom the hero wishes to possess sometimes being no more than an offstage presence or, if onstage, mute.

New Comedy provided the model for European comedy through the 18th century. During the Renaissance, the plays of Plautus and, especially, of Terence were studied for the moral instruction that young men could find in them: lessons on the need to avoid the snares of harlots and the company of braggarts, to govern the deceitful trickery of servants, to behave in a seemly and modest fashion to parents. Classical comedy was brought up to date in the plays of the “Christian Terence,” imitations by schoolmasters of the of the Roman dramatist. They added a contemporary flavour to the life portrayed and displayed a somewhat less indulgent attitude to youthful indiscretions than did the Roman comedy. New Comedy provided the basic conventions of plot and characterization for the commedia erudita—comedy performed from written texts—of 16th-century Italy, as in the plays of Niccolò Machiavelli and Ludovico Ariosto. Similarly, the stock characters that persisted from Old Comedy into New were taken over into the improvisational commedia dell’arte, becoming such standard masked characters as Pantalone, the Dottore, the vainglorious Capitano, the young lovers, and the servants, or zanni.

Rise of realistic comedy in 17th-century England

The early part of the 17th century in England saw the rise of a realistic mode of comedy based on a satiric observation of contemporary manners and mores. It was masterminded by , and its purpose was didactic. Comedy, said Jonson in Every Man Out of his (1599), quoting the definition that during the Renaissance was attributed to Cicero, is an imitation of life, a glass of custom, an image of truth. Comedy holds the mirror up to nature and reflects things as they are, to the end that society may recognize the extent of its shortcomings and the folly of its ways and set about its improvement. Jonson’s greatest plays—Volpone (1606), Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair (1614)—offer a richly detailed contemporary account of the follies and vices that are always with us. The setting (apart from Volpone) is Jonson’s own London, and the characters are the ingenious or the devious or the grotesque products of the human wish to get ahead in the world. The conduct of a Jonsonian comic plot is in the hands of a clever manipulator who is out to make reality conform to his own desires. Sometimes he succeeds, as in the case of the clever young gentleman who gains his uncle’s inheritance in Epicœne or the one who gains the rich Puritan widow for his wife in Bartholomew Fair. In Volpone and The Alchemist, the schemes eventually fail, but this is the fault of the manipulators, who will never stop when they are ahead, and not at all due to any insight on the part of the victims. The victims are almost embarrassingly eager to be victimized. Each has his ruling passion—his humour—and it serves to set him more or less mechanically in the path that he will undeviatingly pursue, to his own discomfiture.

English comedy of the later 17th century is cast in the Jonsonian mold. is always concerned with the same subject—the game of love—but the subject is treated as a critique of fashionable society. Its aim is distinctly satiric, and it is set forth in plots of Jonsonian complexity, where the principal intriguer is the rakish hero, bent on satisfying his sexual needs, outside the bonds of marriage, if possible. In the greatest of these comedies—Sir ’s Man of Mode (1676), for example, or ’s Country-Wife (1675) or ’s Way of the World (1700)—the premium is on the energy and the grace with which the game is played, and the highest dramatic approval is reserved for those who take the game seriously enough to it with style but who have the good sense to know when it is played out. The satiric import of Restoration comedy resides in the dramatist’s awareness of a familiar incongruity: that between the image of man in his primitive nature and the image of man amid the artificial restraints that society would impose upon him. The satirist in these plays is chiefly concerned with detailing the artful dodges that ladies and gentlemen employ to satisfy nature and to remain within the pale of social decorum. Inevitably, then, hypocrisy is the chief satiric target. The animal nature of man is taken for granted, and so is the social responsibility to keep up appearances; some hypocrisy must follow, and, within limits, society will wink at indiscretions so long as they are discreetly managed. The paradox is typical of those in which the Restoration comic dramatists delight; and the strongly rational and unidealistic ethos of this comedy has its affinities with the naturalistic and skeptical cast of late 17th-century philosophical thought.

Sentimental comedy of the 17th and 18th centuries

The Restoration comic style collapsed around the end of the 17th century, when the satiric vision gave place to a sentimental one. ’s Short view of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English , published in 1698, signaled the public opposition to the real or fancied improprieties of plays staged during the previous three decades. “The business of plays is to recommend Vertue, and discountenance Vice”: so runs the opening sentence of Collier’s attack. No Restoration comic dramatist ever conceived of his function in quite these terms. “It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of humankind,” Congreve had written a few years earlier (in the dedication to The Double- Dealer). Though Congreve may be assumed to imply—in accordance with the time-honoured theory concerning the didactic end of comedy—that the comic dramatist paints the vices and follies of humankind for the purpose of correcting them through ridicule, he is, nonetheless, silent on this point. Collier’s assumption that all plays must recommend virtue and discountenance vice has the effect of imposing on comedy the same sort of moral levy that critics such as Thomas Rymer were imposing on in their demand that it satisfy .

At the beginning of the 18th century, there was a blending of the tragic and comic that, in one form or another, had been attempted throughout the preceding century. The vogue of may be said to have been launched in England with the publication of John Fletcher’s Faithfull Shepheardesse (c. 1608), an imitation of the Pastor fido, by the Italian poet Battista Guarini. In his Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry (1601), Guarini had argued the distinct nature of the , maintaining it to be a third poetic kind, different from either the comic or the tragic. Tragicomedy, he wrote, takes from tragedy its great persons but not its great action, its movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of them, its pleasure but not its sadness, its danger but not its death, and from comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive, modest amusement, feigned difficulty, and happy reversal. Fletcher adapted this statement in the address “To the Reader” that prefaces The Faithfull Shepheardesse.

The form quickly established itself on the English stage, and, through the force of such examples as Beaumont and Fletcher’s Phylaster (1610) and A King and No King (1611) and a long sequence of Fletcher’s unaided , it prevailed during the 20 years before the closing of the in 1642. The taste for tragicomedy continued unabated at the Restoration, and its influence was so pervasive that during the closing decades of the century the form began to be seen in plays that were not, at least by authorial designation, tragicomedies. Its effect on tragedy can be seen not only in the tendency, always present on the English stage, to mix scenes of mirth with more solemn matters but also in the practice of providing tragedy with a double ending (a fortunate one for the virtuous, an unfortunate one for the vicious), as in Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe (1675) or Congreve’s Mourning Bride (1697). The general lines separating the tragic and comic genres began to break down, and that which is high, serious, and capable of arousing pathos could exist in the same play with what is low, ridiculous, and capable of arousing derision. The next step in the process came when Sir , bent on reforming comedy for didactic purposes, produced (1722) and provided the English stage with an occasion when the audience at a comedy could derive its chief pleasure not from laughing but from weeping. It wept in the delight of seeing virtue rewarded and young love come to flower after parental opposition had been overcome. Comedy of the sort inaugurated by The Conscious Lovers continued to represent the affairs of private life, as comedy had always done, but with a seriousness hitherto unknown; and the traditionally low personages of comedy now had a capacity for feeling that bestowed on them a dignity previously reserved for the personages of tragedy.

This trend in comedy was part of a wave of egalitarianism that swept through 18th-century political and social thought. It was matched by a corresponding trend in tragedy, which increasingly selected its subjects from the affairs of private men and women in ordinary life, rather than from the doings of the great. The German dramatist Gotthold Lessing wrote that the misfortunes of those whose circumstances most resemble those of the audience must naturally penetrate most deeply into its heart, and his own Minna von Barnhelm (1767) is an example of the new serious comedy. The capacity to feel, to sympathize with, and to be affected by the plight of a fellow human being without regard for rank in the world’s esteem became the measure of one’s humanity. It was a bond that united the fraternity of humankind in an aesthetic revolution that preceded the political revolutions of the 18th century. In literature, this had the effect of hastening the movement toward a more realistic representation of reality, whereby the familiar events of common life are treated “seriously and problematically” (in the phrase of the critic Erich Auerbach, who traced the process in his book Mimesis [1946]). The results may be seen in novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48) and in middle-class such as George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731) in England; in the comédie larmoyante (“tearful comedy”) in France; in Carlo Goldoni’s efforts to reform the commedia dell’arte and replace it with a more naturalistic comedy in the Italian theatre; and in the English , exemplified in its full-blown state by plays such as Hugh Kelly’s False Delicacy (1768) and Richard Cumberland’s West Indian (1771). Concerning the sentimental comedy, it must be noted that it is only in the matter of appropriating for the bourgeoisie a seriousness of tone and a dignity of representational style previously considered the exclusive property of the nobility that the form can be said to stand in any significant relationship to the development of a more realistic mimetic mode than the traditional tragic and comic ones. The plots of sentimental comedy are as contrived as anything in Plautus and Terence (which with their fondness for foundling heroes who turn out to be long-lost sons of rich merchants, they often resemble); and with their delicate feelings and genteel moral atmosphere, comedies of this sort seem as affected in matters of sentiment as Restoration comedy seems in matters of . Oliver Goldsmith, in his “A Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy” (1773), noted the extent to which the comedy in the England of his day had departed from its traditional purpose, the excitation of laughter by exhibiting the follies of the lower part of humankind. He questioned whether an exhibition of its follies would not be preferable to a detail of its calamities. In sentimental comedy, Goldsmith continued, the virtues of private life were exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the distresses rather than the faults of humankind generated interest in the piece. Characters in these plays were almost always good; if they had faults, the spectator was expected not only to pardon but to applaud them, in consideration of the goodness of their hearts. Thus, according to Goldsmith, folly was commended instead of being ridiculed. Goldsmith concluded by labeling sentimental comedy a “species of bastard tragedy,” “a kind of mulish production,” a designation that ironically brings to mind Guarini’s comparison of tragicomedy in its uniqueness (a product of comedy and tragedy but different from either) to the mule (the offspring of the horse and the ass but itself neither one nor the other). The production of Goldsmith’s (1773) and of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777) briefly reintroduced comic gaiety to the English stage; by the end of the decade, Sheridan’s dramatic burlesque, The Critic (first performed 1779), had appeared, with its parody of contemporary dramatic fashions, the sentimental included. But this virtually concluded Sheridan’s career as a dramatist. Goldsmith had died in 1774, and the sentimental play was to continue to govern the English comic stage for over a century to come.

The comic outside the theatre

The great comic voices of the 18th century in England were not those in the theatre. No dramatic satire of the period can exhibit anything comparable to the furious ridicule of human triviality and viciousness that Jonathan Swift provided in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). His Modest Proposal (1729) is a masterpiece of comic incongruity, with its suave blend of rational deliberation and savage conclusion. The comic artistry of is equally impressive. Pope expressed his genius in the invective of his satiric portraits and in the range of moral and imaginative vision that was capable, at one end of his poetic scale, of conducting that most elegant of drawing-room epics, The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), to its sublimely inane conclusion and, at the other, of invoking from the scene that closes The Dunciad (1728), an apocalyptic judgment telling what will happen when the vulgarizers of the word have carried the day.

When the voice of comedy did sound on the 18th-century English stage with anything approaching its full critical and satiric resonance, the officials soon silenced it. John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) combined hilarity with a satiric fierceness worthy of Swift (who may have suggested the original idea for it). The officials tolerated its spectacularly successful run, but no license from the lord chamberlain could be secured for Gay’s sequel, Polly, which was not staged until 1777. The Licensing Act of 1737 ended the theatrical career of Henry Fielding, whose comedies had come under constant fire from the authorities for their satire on the government. Fielding’s comic talents were perforce directed to the novel, the form in which he parodied the sentiment and the morality of Richardson’s Pamela—in his Shamela and Joseph Andrews (1742)—as brilliantly as he had earlier burlesqued the rant of heroic tragedy in Tom Thumb (1730). Comedy of the sort that ridicules the follies and vices of society to the end of laughing them out of countenance entered the English novel with Fielding. His statement in Joseph Andrews concerning the function of satire is squarely in the Neoclassic tradition of comedy as a corrective of manners and mores: the satirist holds the glass to thousands in their closets, that they may contemplate their deformity, and endeavour to reduce it, and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame.

Fielding’s scenes of contemporary life display the same power of social criticism as that which distinguishes the engravings of his great fellow artist William Hogarth, whose Marriage à la Mode (1745) depicts the vacuity and the casual wantonness of the fashionable world that Fielding treats of in the final books of Tom Jones. Hogarth’s other series, such as A ’s Progress (1735) and A Harlot’s Progress (1732), also make a didactic point about the wages of sin, using realistic details heightened with grotesquerie to expose human frailty and its sinister consequences. The grotesque is a recurrent feature of the satiric tradition in England, where comedy serves social criticism. Artists such as Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson worked in the tradition of Jonson and the Restoration dramatists in the preceding century.

The novel, with its larger scope for varied characters, scenes, and incidents, rather than the drama, afforded the 19th-century artist in comedy a literary form adequate to his role as social critic. The spectacle of human society is regularly presented by the 19th-century novelist in comedic terms, as in Vanity Fair (1848), by William Makepeace Thackeray and the Comédie humaine (1842–55) of Honoré de Balzac, and with the novels of Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and George Meredith.

20th-century tragicomedy

The best that the comic stage had to offer in the late 19th century lay in the domain of . The masters of this form were French, but it flourished in England as well; what the of Eugène Labiche and Georges Feydeau and the of Jacques Offenbach were to the Parisian stage the farces of W.S. Gilbert and the young Arthur Wing Pinero and the operettas that Gilbert wrote in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan were to the London stage. As concerns comedy, the situation in England improved at the end of the century, when Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw turned their talents to it. Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is farce raised to the level of high comic burlesque. Shaw’s choice of the comic form was inevitable, given his determination that the contemporary English stage should deal seriously and responsibly with the issues that were of crucial importance to contemporary English life. Serious subjects could not be resolved by means of the dramatic clichés of Victorian . Rather, the prevailing stereotypes concerning the nature of honour, courage, wisdom, and virtue were to be subjected to a hail of paradox, to the end of making evident their inner emptiness or the contradictions they concealed.

Shaw dealt with what, in the preface to Major Barbara (1905), he called “the tragi-comic of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination,” and his use of the word tragicomic is a sign of the times. The striking feature of modern art, according to the German novelist Thomas Mann, was that it had ceased to recognize the categories of tragic and comic or the dramatic classifications of tragedy and comedy but saw life as tragicomedy. The sense that tragicomedy is the only adequate dramatic form for projecting the unreconciled of modern life mounted through the closing decades of the 19th century. Ibsen had termed The Wild Duck (published 1884) a tragicomedy; it was an appropriate designation for this bitter play about a young man blissfully ignorant of the lies on which he and his family have built their happy life until an outsider who is committed to an ideal of absolute truth exposes all their guilty secrets with disastrous results. The plays of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov, with their touching and often quite humorous figures leading lives of quiet desperation, reflect precisely that mixture of inarticulate joy and dull pain that is the essence of the tragicomic view of life.

A dramatist such as August Strindberg produces a kind of tragicomedy peculiarly his own, one that takes the form of bourgeois tragedy; it lacerates its principals until they become a parody of themselves. Strindberg’s Dance of Death (1901), with its cruelty and pain dispensed with robust pleasure by a fiercely battling husband and wife, is a significant model of the grotesque in the modern theatre; it is reflected in such mid-20th-century examples of what came to be called as Eugène Ionesco’s Victims of Duty (1953) and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Almost equally influential as a turn-of-the-century master of the grotesque is Frank Wedekind, whose Earth Spirit (1895) and its sequel, Pandora’s Box (written 1892–1901), though both are termed tragedies by their author, are as much burlesques of tragedy as The Dance of Death. Their grotesquerie consists chiefly in their disturbing combination of innocence and depravity, of farce and horror, of passionate fervour issuing in ludicrous incident that turns deadly. Wedekind’s celebration of primitive sexuality and the varied ways in which it manifests itself in an oversophisticated civilization distorts the tragic form to achieve its own grotesque beauty and power.

One great artist of the grotesque and of tragicomedy in the 20th century was the Italian Luigi Pirandello. His drama is explicitly addressed to the contradictoriness of experience: appearances collide and cancel out each other; the quest of the absolute issues in a mind-reeling relativism; infinite spiritual yearnings are brought up hard against finite physical limits; rational purpose is undermined by irrational impulse; and with the longing for permanence in the midst of change comes the ironic awareness that changelessness means death. Stated thus, Pirandello’s themes sound almost forbiddingly intellectual, but one of his aims was to convert intellect into passion. Pirandello’s characters suffer from intellectual dilemmas that give rise to mental and emotional distress of the most anguished kind, but their sufferings are placed in a satiric frame. The incongruities that the characters are furiously seeking to reconcile attest to the comic aspect of this drama, but there is nothing in it of the traditional movement of comedy, from a state of illusion into the full light of reality. Pirandello’s characters dwell amid ambiguities and equivocations that those who are wise in the tragicomic nature of life will accept without close inquiry. The logic of comedy implies that illusions exist to be dispelled; once they are dispelled, everyone will be better off. The logic of Pirandello’s tragicomedy demonstrates that illusions make life bearable; to destroy them is to destroy the basis for any possible happiness. The absurd

In their highly individual ways, both Samuel Beckett and Ionesco employed the forms of comedy—from tragicomedy to farce—to convey the vision of an exhausted civilization and a chaotic world. The very endurance of life amid the grotesque circumstances that obtain in Beckett’s plays is at once a tribute to the human power of carrying on to the end and an ironic reflection on the absurdity of doing so. Beckett’s plays close in an uneasy silence that is the more disquieting because of the uncertainty as to just what it conceals: whether it masks sinister forces ready to spring or is the expression of a universal indifference or issues out of nothing at all.

Silence seldom reigns in the theatre of Ionesco, which rings with voices raised in a usually mindless clamour. Some of Ionesco’s most telling comic effects come from his use of dialogue overflowing with clichés and non sequiturs, which make it clear that the characters do not have their minds on what they are saying and, indeed, do not have their minds on anything at all. What they say is often at grotesque variance with what they do. Beneath the moral platitudes lurks violence, which is never far from the surface in Ionesco’s plays, and the violence tells what happens to societies in which words and deeds have become fatally disjunct. Ionesco’s comic sense is evident as well in his depiction of human beings as automata, their movements decreed by forces they have never questioned or sought to understand. There is something undeniably farcical in Ionesco’s spectacles of human regimentation, of men and women at the mercy of things (e.g., the stage full of chairs in The Chairs or the growing corpse in Amédée); the comic quality in these plays is one that Bergson would have appreciated. But the comic in Ionesco’s most serious work, as in so much of mid-20th-century theatre, has ominous implications that give to it a distinctly grotesque aspect. In Ionesco’s Victims of Duty and The Killer (1959), as in the works of his Swiss counterparts—Friedrich Dürrenmatt, author of The Visit (performed 1956) and The Physicists (1962), and Max Frisch, author of The Firebugs (1958)—the grotesquerie of the tragicomic vision delineates a world in which the humane virtues are dying, and casual violence is the order of the day.

The radical reassessment of the human image that the 20th century witnessed is reflected in the novel as well as in drama. Previous assumptions about the rational and divine aspects of humans were increasingly called into question by the evidences of irrationality and sheer animality. These are qualities of human nature that writers of previous ages (Swift, for example) have always recognized, but hitherto they were typically viewed as dark possibilities that could overtake humanity if the rule of reason did not prevail. Only in the mid-20th century did the savage and the irrational come to be viewed as part of the normative condition of humanity rather than as tragic aberrations from it. The savage and the irrational amount to grotesque parodies of human possibility, ideally conceived. Thus it was that 20th-century novelists as well as dramatists recognized the tragicomic nature of the modern human image and predicament, and the principal mode of representing both was the grotesque. This took various forms: the apocalyptic nightmare of tyranny and terror in Franz Kafka’s novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926); the tragic farce in terms of which the Austrian novelist Robert Musil described the slow collapse of a society into anarchy and chaos, in The Man Without Qualities (1930–43); the brilliant irony whereby Thomas Mann represented the hero as a confidence man in The Confessions of Felix Krull (1954); and the grimly parodic account of Germany’s descent into madness in Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum (1959). The English novel contains a rich vein of the comic grotesque that extends at least back to Dickens and Thackeray and persisted in the 20th century in such varied novels as Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928), Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954). What these novelists had in common is the often disturbing combination of hilarity and desperation. It had its parallel in a number of American novels—such as John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969)—in which shrill farce is the medium for grim satire. And the grotesque is a prominent feature of modern poetry, as in some of the work of W.H. Auden.