Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy

University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, British Isles English Language and Literature 2014 Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy J. A. Bryant Jr. University of Kentucky Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Bryant, J. A. Jr., "Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy" (2014). Literature in English, British Isles. 97. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/97 Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy This page intentionally left blank J.A. Bryant, Jr. Shakespeare & the Uses of Comedy THE UNIVERSITY PRESS OF KENTUCKY Copyright © 1986 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: Lexington, Kentucky 40506-0024 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bryant, J. A. (Joseph Allen), 1919- Shakespeare and the uses of comedy. Bibliography; p. Includes index. l. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616-Comedies. I. Title. PR298l.B75 1987 822.3'3 86-7770 ISBN 978-0-8131-5632-3 For Allen, Virginia, and Garnett This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgments IX 1. Shakespeare's Exploration of the Human Comedy 1 2. The Comedy of Errors 14 3. The Two Gentlemen ofVerona 27 4. Love's Labor's Lost 40 5. A Midsummer Night's Dream 57 6. The Merchant of Venice 81 7. The Taming of the Shrew 98 8. The Merry Wives ofWindsor 114 9. Much Ado about Nothing 125 10. As You Like It 146 11. Twelfth Night 165 12. Troilus and Cressida 179 13. All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure 203 14. Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale 221 15. The Tempest 233 Notes 253 Index 266 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments It is a pleasure to acknowledge some of the support I have received during the course of this study. I am grateful first of all to the University of Kentucky for leaves of absence and to the staff of its Margaret I. King Library for generous assistance more times than they will remember. I am grateful, too, for the encouragement and support of my colleagues, especially John Clubbe, John Cawelti, Jerome Meckier, Armando Prats, and Robert Hemenway. I wafl.t also to thank George Core for both support and forbearance over the years and for permission to reprint substantial portions of my essay entitled "The Mer chant o{Venice and the Common Flaw," which appeared in the Sewanee Review, 81 (Summer 1973), and was copyrighted by the University of the South in that same year. Substantial portions of chapter 8 are reprinted by permission of the Mod ern Language Association of America from my article "Falstaff and the Renewal of Windsor," which appeared in PMLA, 89 (1974). The Houghton Mifflin Company has graciously given me permission to take quotations from The Riverside Shake speare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (197 4 ). This page intentionally left blank 1 Shakespeare's Exploration of the Human Comedy The subject of this book is Shakespeare's exploration of the human situation through the mode of dramatic comedy. It is a book with many predecessors and almost as many creditors, most of whom will be acknowledged as their contributions appear. Several comprehensive works have proved valuable throughout, however, and deserve to be acknowledged at the outset. These include the volumes of E.K. Chambers on Shake speare and the Elizabethan dramatists, still vastly useful after more than half a century, the source studies of Geoffrey Bull ough, Muriel C. Bradbrook's The Growth and Structure of Eliz abethan Comedy, Leo Salingar's Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy, L.C. Knights's Explorations, Francis Fergusson's The Idea of a Theater, and the books and essays of Northrop Frye. Yet even among such well-established contributions as these, presuppositions about the nature of comedy vary, and that variation increases rapidly as one goes farther afield. For this reason it may be wise to set down at the beginning some of the presuppositions that have determined the shape and direc tion of the present undertaking, especially those having to do with the nature of comedy and poetry. This book proceeds on two major assumptions: first, that most art is a manifestation of humanity's perennial quest for meaning and therefore constitutes an exploration of the known world or some aspect of it; second, that comedy is at 2 Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy once the primal and the most comprehensive form of literary art. As critics from Aristotle's time to the present have attested, comedy as we know it in the West took its being either directly or indirectly from some of the primitive forms of religion, particularly Greek religion, which gave an intelligible shape to humankind's perception of the recurring process of birth, mat uration, death, and renewal.1 Our forms of tragedy ultimately derive from this same indeterminate matrix, as does the di thyramb; but all the forms we now call comic retain some thing of the recognizable sweep of their ancient source in that they too celebrate the renewal of the race in its perpetual displacement of the decadent and dying with a vigorous if callow youth. Shakespeare, of course, began his work with the literary examples that were immediately at hand-a couple of Roman comedies in a school textbook, some fragments of Greek ro mance transmitted through Gower, a handful of prose tales but being the kind of artist he was, from the beginning he used his materials as devices for exploration rather than as mere models or molds, supplying all of them, of whatever deriva tion, with freshly observed characters and events and letting matter and form participate, as it were, in a mutual reshaping process. This is why his plays, even the earliest ones, are unlike any produced by his contemporaries. He never lost sight of the human situation-or, more likely, he never thought for long to look at anything else. Thus his comedies exhibit a series of transformations of the conventional or stereotyped views of almost all the basic human relationships-between married people, between parents and children, between lovers, sib lings, friends, enemies, and strangers. The comedies are also revitalizations of those relationships; for as readers and view ers for almost four hundred years have testified, Shakespeare's plays continue to be as immediately convincing as they are illuminating. Moreover, they continue to stand as extensions of reality as well as representations of it, and consequently they invite exploration in their own right. Alexander Pope wrote that to study Homer is to study nature. He might with equal justice have written the same of Shakespeare. Exploration of the Human Comedy 3 The present study consists of chapters on each of the come dies through Twelfth Night (ten in all), one chapter dealing with the so-called dark comedies, one on the last plays, and one each on Troilus and Cressida and The Tempest as representatives of those two special groups. All seventeen of these plays, however, with the possible exception of Pericles, which has been left out of consideration, can with justice be called comedies; for at or near the center of each of them is the action that has distin guished comedy since the Renaissance, the mating game of the young, which from Shakespeare's time to ours has played a determining role in the perpetuation of the human race. This action has long served as the main trunk of our social tree, and all those special branches that from time to time have given warmth, character, and enhanced meaning to individual mat ing actions-the discovery of love, the recognition of the role of sacrifice in human intercourse, the acceptance of the inev itability of death, and the generation of charity-are best thought of as subsidiary actions. In Shakespeare, of course, these subsidiary actions often turn out to be more arresting than the central one; but the main trunk is always there and, except in two of the comedies, always dominant at the end, where the assurance of social continuity is expected to justify any licentiousness that has developed in the course of the so called comic business. Taking the comedies in at 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 evidence that he ever thought systematically about the nature of human beings, society, or the cosmos. It is more likely that writing was the means by which he did most of his thinking, letting his reflections take the form of dramatic fictions which ostensibly did nothing more than present in lively fashion the commonplaces beloved of those minds he was expected to address. Today we see that many of those fictions, seemingly innocent enough when prof fered as entertainment, embodied ideas which, had they been recognizable at the time, might have brought him ridicule, 4 Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy censure, or worse; and sometimes, as in his now widely recog nized anticipations of the work of Freud and Jung, he achieved insights which would not be articulated fully until the present century.

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