The Mikado 1966 Gilbert & Sullivan (NIVEL AVANZADO)

KING LEAR (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

- BBC In Our Time: King Lear.

 

- Paul Cantor, 4 lectures on King Lear.

King Lear (In Our Time) (NIVEL AVANZADO)

King Lear - A Complete Analysis (Shakespeare's Works Explained)

Gilbert and Sullivan: Ruddigore (NIVEL AVANZADO)

The Mythos of Autumn: Tragedy

 Notes from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

 

From the Third Essay —ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM (THEORY OF MYTHS):

The mythos of spring: Comedy

The mythos of summer: Romance

... the Mythos of winter: Irony and satire

The mythos of autumn: Tragedy

(206): "Without tragedy, all literary fiction might be plausibly explained as expression of emotional attachments, whether of wish-fulfilment or of repugnance: the tragic fiction guarantees, so to speak, a disinterested quality in literary experience." 'Realism' as emancipation from dream. Tragedy is not confined to drama or to disastrous endings. The source of tragic effect is not in the mood but in the mythos (Aristotle). Comedy is based on social groups; tragedy focuses on the individual, between the divine and the all too human. 

(207): "The tragic hero is very great as compared with us, but there is something else, something on the side of him opposite the audience, compared to which he is small." The hero is our mediator, wrapped in the mystery of that communion, isolated. What is beyond? (208) "Tragedy seems to lead up to an epiphany of law, of that which is and must be." Fate, etc.—a law superior to the gods themselves (cf. the Father's will, vs. Christ's). 

Revenge tragedy has a simple, binary structure (as opposed to threefold comedy). Revenge may come from another world. The law of nature comprises it as well. Diké, justice; the righhting of the balance = nemesis. Nemesis happens impersonally, unaffected by the moral quality of the human motivation involved. 
- Fate is not external to the hero all the time: normally only after the tragic process has been set going. Admixture of heroism necessary (unlike in irony). 
 - Also, the moral interpretation of tragedy is reductive.  Hamartia is not equivalent to sin. Hybris is frequent as the cause of the hero's downfall. But the morally intelligible process is only a part; catharsis cannot be reduced to a moral interpretation.  At the core: is the innocent sufferer a tragic figure? Tradedy is not concerned with it; it eludes the antitheses good / evil and moral responsibility / arbitrary fate. An archetypal tragic situation in Paradise Lost: man is "sufficient to have stood, though free to fall". Otherwise, we would be in irony or in romance. Proairesis or moral choice as a use of freedom to lose freedom; to come under the consequences of one's act and fate. 

(212): "And just as comedy often sets up an arbitrary law and then organizes the action to break or evade it, so tragedy presents the reverse theme of narrowing a representatively free life into a process of causation". At the end, the hero recognizes the determined shape of the life he has created for himself.

Aristotle's hamartia is a condition of being, not a cause of becoming. At a point, the audience can see both what might have been and what will be. Nemesis is involved with time, whose movement is fatal to the tragic hero as it is beneficial to the comic hero. In irony, unlike tragedy, there is no sense of contact with a timeless world.

Each theory of tragedy is based on a particular tragedy: Aristotle's on Oedipus the King,  Hegel's on Antigone, here Paradise Lost. There are analogies between tragedy and sacrificial ritual; pity and fear are crucial, too, a sense of rightness and wrongness.

(214): "just as the literary critic finds Freud most suggestive for the theory of comedy and Jung for the theory of romance, so for the theory of tragedy we naturally look for the psychology of the will to power as expounded in Adler and Nietzsche." Dionisiac dreams  will impinge upon an Apollonian sense of external order. The vision of the death of the herodraws survivers into a new unity. The hidden world and its remoteness has become visible. Tragedy is a part of quest-myth, a prelude to comedy. It is virtually impossible to make a comedy end somberly; it is not 'natural'. Comic actions in tragedies are contained in underplots, not in the main plot.

Characterization:

The source of the nemesis is an eiron. The withdrawn eiron of comeddy is here a god or a ghost or an invisible force. The "vice" is here a soothsayer or prophet, or a Machivellian villain, who is also an architectus or projection of the author's will. 

The tragic hero is an alazon (unlike in comedy). He is self-deceived by hybris, and often holds a tyrannic or unlawful power: the rightful owner is often a victim. 

Parental figures have the same ambivalence as in other forms. 

The bomolochoi turn here into suppliants, destituted females... They are pathetic, nor tragic. There are terrible consequences if they are rejected, they arouse pity and fear. 

The agroikos here is an outspoken plain dealer, a chorus character. (218) "In comedy a society forms around the hero: in tragedy the chorus, however faithful, usually represents the society from which the hero is gradually isolated." There is an embryonic germ of comedy in tragedy, just as the refusal of festivity is tragic in comedy. 

Love and society are not integrated in tragedy: love is reduced to passion and social activity to duty: cf. Antigone. 

The phases of tragedy go from heroic to ironic. The first three correspond to teh first three of romance; the last three correspond to the last three phases of irony.

1) The hero is given the greatest dignity  in contrast to others: the stag pulled down by wolves. Often a calumniated mother.

2) The tragedy of innocence in the sense of inexperience. Often characters survive, adjusted to adult situations.

3) An emphasis on the completeness of the hero's achievement. The paradox of the downfall which is a triumph, or a triumph with an impending tragic resolution.

4) The typical fall of the hero through hamartia (the tragic flaw).

5) In this phase the heroic element decreases, the ironic one increases; the characters are seen from further away and in a smaller perspective. The ironic perspective is attained by putting characters in a state of lower freedom than the audience (e.g. cultural inferiority). Tragedies dealing with existential projections of fatalism belong here. They deal with metaphysical or theological questions rather than social and moral ones.

6) A world of shock and horror, with central images of sparagmos (dismemberment), mutilation, cannibalism and torture. The hero is too agonized to achieve a heroic status; often a villainous hero. Demonic epiphanies, glimpses of undisplaced demonic vision. The chief symbols are teh prison, the madhouse, the torture chamber. The victim experiences horror at being watched by public exposure.
 

MACBETH - FULL SHOW | Shakespeare Season | The Shows Must Go On

Henry Purcell DIDO AND AENEAS - OPERA LIVE STREAMING

David Bevington on THE TEMPEST

 

The Tempest

4. SHAKESPEARE: COMEDIAS

 

Terminamos con The Tempest el tema 4, y pasamos al tema 5, las tragedias de Shakespeare, en los días que quedan de noviembre.

Las clases del Dr. García Landa terminan en noviembre, y en diciembre y enero los temas 6-8 estarán a cargo de otro profesor.

___________________________

Two lectures on Shakespeare's comedy (or 'tragicomedy', or 'romance') The Tempest:

- David Bevington on The Tempest.

 

- 400 Years later: Shakespeare's The Tempest  and Early America:

a video lecture on William Shakespeare's The Tempest

 

___________________________ 

 

NIVEL AVANZADO: 

Paul Cantor on The Tempest

David Bevington on The Tempest

 

Más sobre otras comedias de Shakespeare.

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Julie Taymor's film of The Tempest, with Helen Mirren as 'Prospera':

Y (por comparar adaptaciones e interpretaciones) una versión para televisión de 1960 (bastante recortada).

______________________

 

Commentary of some passages in The Tempest: 

1.2  Caliban

2.1 Gonzalo's utopia

3.3 The vanishing banquet

4.1 The masque / Our revels now are ended:

 PROSPERO

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismay'd: be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my, brain is troubled:
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity:
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose: a turn or two I'll walk,
To still my beating mind.

 

 

 

5.1 Reconciliation and abandoning Rough magic

 

 

Prospero's farewell:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

_____________________

 

 

Seguimos con The Tempest,  amén de otras comedias.

- The Merchant of Venice (Shylock and the trial)

- A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act 5, Pyramus and Thisbe)

Una canción de The Tempest:



Marjorie Garber, a lecture on The Tempest




 
- An online edition of The Tempest (Shakespeare Online, MIT). With commentary of main issues, etc.


A tutorial summarizing The Tempest:

 

 ________________

 

NIVEL AVANZADO:

Paul Cantor on The Merchant of Venice (video lectures).

_______________

Interludio: 

José Luis Esteban, gran cómico aragonés, nombrado Alumno Distinguido de nuestra Facultad.

_______________

Trataremos las comedias de Shakespeare con un poco de teoría de la comedia, análisis de algunas escenas, y centrándonos luego más en The Tempest.

 

The TEMPEST  (Open Source Shakespeare) 

Comedy, dramatism and theatricality in Shakespeare:

- Foregrounding of performance

- Mechanism and complication

- The dialectics of scripted / unscripted action

- Complex use of sources and materials.

Theatricality in Twelfth Night. (Analysis of 1.5, 5.1).

 

 - The early comedies (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew).

 

Katherina's final monologue in The Taming of the Shrew.

 

 

 

Theories of humour:

Bergson, Le  rire.   Theory of automatism and liberation from automatism.

Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. Humour as an escape from repression and authority.

Priestley: Emphasis on the observation of character and the incongruities it leads to.

(Social dramatism: incongruities of different social roles on the same individual).

Desire, sexuality and manners:  Comedy as the liberation from a suffocating system of manners and regulated desire.

Langer: Humour and laughter as the by-product of a system of conventions. Emphasis on the comedy as a work of art and an aesthetic artifact which invokes certain conventions and plays with them.

Examples from Twelfth Night  (E.g. Feste and the rioters vs. Malvolio's puritanism; courtship of Olivia and Viola).

 

 

 

 

Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. Comedy as the mythos of spring.  Phases of comedy:

- Comedies of manners, which put emphasis on satire and the blocking characters.  (Ironic phase, Quixotic phase, New Comedy)

- Romantic comedies, emphasizing the scenes of discovery, liberation and reconciliation. (Romantic comedy, romances, collapse of comic worlds).

An order of harmony and stability is disrupted by blocking and ambitious characters, and then is restored with the liberation of desire and the punishment of social vices.

Aristotelian criticism (Tractatus Coislinianus) -Types of comic characters: eiron, alazon, bomolochos

Frye adds the agroikos or killjoy. 

- Kinds of comedies:  Old comedy, New comedy, Commedia dell' arte, romantic comedy, comedy of humours and comedy of manners....

Emphasis on different comic resources (Sypher):
obscenity, Bergsonian automatism, Farce and slapstick, Wit and verbal battles, comic characters (Falstaff, Mercutio... who may disrupt the logic of the plot), Comedy of ideas vs social folly, High comedy, empathy and wisdom.

Algo de cara a las comedias:

Después de las Historias de Shakespeare pasamos a las Comedias. Aquí unos temillas sobre la comedia teatral y su tradición. 

Y aquí un excurso sobre la comedia romántica en el cine. No es lo mismo, pero the fundamental things apply.


Unas notas sobre Much Ado About Nothing—and its afterlife.


Resumen y versión cinematográfica de TWELFTH NIGHT.

400 Years Later: Shakespeare's "The Tempest" and Early America

David Bevington, "The Tempest as Utopia" (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Paul Cantor on THE TEMPEST (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Henry Purcell - The Fairy Queen

An Augustan opera based on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream  (—not on Spenser's Faerie Queene): Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen:

Ten Things I Learned From Shakespeare

Shakespeare in Love

Shakespeare in Love. Dir. John Madden. Written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. With Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow. USA: Universal, 1998.

 

—oOo—

The Merchant of Venice (NIVEL AVANZADO)

From Paul Cantor's series on Shakespeare and Politics, three lectures on The Merchant of Venice:

Alumno distinguido 2020 : José Luis Esteban

3. SHAKESPEARE: OBRAS HISTÓRICAS

El 11-N Pasamos a las Comedias (tema 4) con The Tempest como lectura principal.

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NIVEL AVANZADO: 

Hay interesantes conferencias sobre las Historias de Shakespeare (y otras obras) en Shakespeare and Politics, de Paul Cantor, en Harvard.  En concreto sobre Henry V pueden verse sus lecciones aquí.

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El 4 y 5 de noviembre seguimos con las Histories de Shakespeare, centrados en Henry V y con selecciones de otras obras.

Aquí hay una edición en red de Henry V (MIT). 

 

- A video lecture on Henry V: Dr Kat on Henry V.

 

- Focus on: 

The ambivalent ideology of the work (e.g. the 'Alexander the Pig' episode (4.7), or Bardolph's hanging (3.7).

The sexualization of war as masculine aggression (cf. the scene of courtship with princess Catherine)

Henry's conversation with the soldiers in disguise (& "ceremony" soliloquy, 4.1.200)

The conclusion and link with the Henry VI plays.

Un pasaje de Henry V que comentamos en clase (3.1): algo más sobre la retroalimentación entre la vida y el teatro.

También una reflexión sobre el belicismo de la obra: "Enriques Quintos y la guerra de agresión." 

Y quien se meta más en el asunto de Henry V, de sus interpretaciones ideológicas, y de sus adaptaciones cinematográficas, puede encontrar aquí un PDF más extenso de un artículo que escribí hace poco sobre el tema: "Adaptation, Appropriation, Retroaction: Symbolic Interaction with Henry V."

 

_______

 
De las Historias, comentamos una escena de Richard II, la escena de la deposición del rey.

Obsérvese la teatralización del valor simbólico del rey y de la fragilidad de las convenciones e instituciones sociales.

Aquí unas notas sobre Richard II with and Without Shakespeare.

 

 

Orson Welles: Campanadas a Medianoche, o Falstaff (based on Henry IV)

 

Henry IV - Full play (a theatrical performance).

Richard III: a theatrical performance.

—"Winter of Our Discontent" monologue (I.i).

 

Richard III as a Civil War play (Wars of the Roses)

- A "Tudor Myth" play

- A study in tyranny

- An engaging and theatrical character

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Fuera de programa - Si os perdisteis la Medea de Ana Belén, que pasó en su momento por el Principal, podéis ver esta que se representó en nuestra Facultad: https://youtu.be/jlGfctojeOw

Para las funciones del Teatro Principal, quien quiera entradas con reducción de precio puede pedir bonos en la oficina del Vicerrectorado de Estudiantes.

_______________________

 

Seguiremos a fines de octubre con una introducción histórica a Shakespeare —y a sus obras históricas. Usaremos el texto de Henry V.   Una versión cinematográfica hay aquí (Laurence Olivier, 1944).

 

 

Henry V: 

St. Crispin's day speech, "Band of Brothers" speech, before the battle of Agincourt:







Historical drama

- Origin in moralities  (Bale, King Johan)

 
- Exemplary lives:  
    Boccaccio, De casibus virorum illustrium, 1363-4
    The Mirror of Magistrates (1559)

-Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors (1612)

Shakespeare tetralogies:
1st tetralogy, (c. 1589-94): 
Henry VI (3 parts), Richard III
2nd tetralogy (c. 1595-99):
Richard II, Henry IV (2 parts), Henry V
Isolated plays: King John, Henry VI
Plus: historical tragedies, romances, Roman plays...

Historical sources: 
Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1577, 2nd ed. 1587.
Edward Hall, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancaster and York, 1548.

Topics: leadership, personality, decision and choice, ethics of ruling, kingship, patriotism, factions and civil war, the play and limits of power, conflict of roles (dramatism).

Construction: non-historical and theatrical characters; use of coincidence and fusion, symbolic scenes.  

-The dynamics of present action / retrospection.

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

William Shakespeare (1564-1616), born and dead in Stratford-upon-Avon, leading dramatist with the King's Men at the Globe Theatre, London; poet and actor; collaborated with Ben Jonson and John Fletcher; major writer of history plays, comedies, tragicomedies, tragedies and dramatic romances. Total dramatist, both realistic, poetic and metadramatic, with a keen sense of the stage and of social dramatism; artificer of creative language, of complex and diverse characters, and of fast-moving plots usually based on previous dramas or stories.




WORKS BY SHAKESPEARE

 

EARLY WORKS (1589-93):

Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Henry VI (3 parts)
Richard III

and later (1593-97)

The Taming of the Shrew
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Love's Labour's Lost
Romeo and Juliet
King John
Richard II
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Merchant of Venice

Venus and Adonis (1593)
The Rape of Lucrece (1594)


MIDDLE WORKS (1598-1604)

Henry IV (2 parts)
Henry V
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
Julius Caesar
As You Like It
Hamlet
Twelfth Night
Troilus and Cressida
All's Well that Ends Well
Measure for Measure


LATER TRAGEDIES (1605-8):

Othello
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony and Cleopatra
Coriolanus
Timon of Athens


ROMANCES AND LAST WORKS

The Sonnets (1609)

Pericles
Cymbeline
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest

Henry VIII
The Two Noble Kinsmen


Collected plays in the "First Folio", a.k.a.
Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories and Tragedies, 1623.

 

Empezando con la primera unidad sobre Shakespeare, traed a clase el texto de Henry V. AQUÍ TENEMOS UNA EDICION EN RED (MIT)

Puede oírse una versión leída de la obra AQUÍ.

Hablaremos de las obras históricas sobre la base de ésta, y pasaremos rápidamente a las comedias, y a las tragedias.
 

Pasaremos rápidamente por una introducción biográfica a Shakespeare.  Puede leerse algo al respecto en la Wikipedia, o en esta introducción biográfica del Oxford Companion.

Más materiales introductorios a Shakespeare, aquí.


Recordad que una cosa que deberíais haber hecho es haceros YA con los libros necesarios para la asignatura. Quien no lo haya hecho, que lo haga ahora. Una buena sugerencia es comprarlos de segunda mano por Internet: http://www.amazon.co.uk

También se pueden obtener los textos (normalmente con menos comentario) en Internet, por ejemplo en Shakespeare Online. The Sonnets

O en Google Books, un sitio que os recomiendo especialmente por su utilidad. Aquí está Shakespeare's Sonnets.
Y otra cosa, fundamental: hacer en el horario semanal un pequeño sitio para las lecturas de esta asignatura. ¡Para ponerse al día!




________________

Haremos una introducción a la figura de Shakespeare. Necesitaremos el texto de Henry V,  más adelante los de The Tempest y Macbeth. En cuanto a los "fragmentos" de otras obras al margen de las cuatro que entran enteras, ya entregaré yo (o ya he entregado) fotocopias o los veremos en la web.



En Project Gutenberg tenéis los textos de todas las obras de Shakespeare. Por ejemplo The Tragedy of Richard II.

Es muy aconsejable ver las películas de la primera obra teatral del programa, Henry V, basadas en esta obra—las dirigidas por Laurence Olivier y Kenneth Branagh. AQUÍ ESTÁ LA DE LAURENCE OLIVIER.

Para una primera aproximación a las obras de Shakespeare, es más que recomendable verse algunas películas basadas en ellas. Algunas se encuentran en Internet (posiblemente todas, en un sitio u otro).  Aquí hay una lista de las principales películas basadas en obras de Shakespeare. Algún fragmento de unas pocas veremos en clase.

*con asterisco las especialmente recomendadas.


Antony and Cleopatra. Dir. J. Miller.
As You Like It. Dir. Peter Stein 
As You Like It. Stratford Ontario Company.
Hamlet. Dir. Laurence Olivier.
Hamlet.  Dir. Grigori Kozintsev.
Hamlet. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli.
*Hamlet. Dir. Kenneth Branagh.
Hamlet. Dir. Michael Almereyda.
(Hamlet): Hamlet Goes Business. Dir. A. Kaurumaski.
Henry IV, Part 1. Dir. David Giles.
Henry IV, Part 2. Dir. David Giles.
*(Henry IV, I and II: ) Chimes at Midnight (or Falstaff). Dir. Orson Welles.
*Henry V. Dir. Kenneth Branagh.
*Henry V. Dir. Laurence Olivier.
Love's Labour's Lost. Dir. Kenneth Branagh.
Julius Caesar. Dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
King Lear. Dir. Laurence Olivier.
*King Lear. Dir. Grigori Kozintsev.
*Macbeth. Dir. Roman Polanski.
*Macbeth. Dir. Orson Welles.
(Macbeth:) Throne of Blood. Dir. Akira Kurosawa.
*The Merchant of Venice. Dir. Michael Radford.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Dir. Elijah Mohinsky.
A Midsummer Night's Dream. Dir. Michael Hoffman.
*Much Ado About Nothing. Dir. Kenneth Branagh.
*Othello. Dir. Oliver Parker.
Richard III. Dir. Laurence Olivier.
*Richard III. Dir. Richard Loncraine.
*(Richard III). Looking for Richard. Dir. Al Pacino.
*Romeo and Juliet. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli.
Romeo and Juliet. Dir Baz Luhrmann.
The Taming of the Shrew. Dir. Franco Zeffirelli.
The Tempest.  Dir. John Gorrie.
(The Tempest) Prospero’s Books. Dir. Peter Greenaway.
Titus Andronicus. Dir. Julie Taymor.
Twelfth Night. Dir. John Sichel.
*Twelfth Night. Dir. Trevor Nunn.

Ficción fílmica sobre Shakespeare: 
 
Shakespeare in Love.  Dir. John Madden.
Anonymous. Dir. Roland Emmerich.


También recomendables:
Elizabeth, (y su continuación) Elizabeth: The Golden Age,  Dir. Shehar Kapur.


Tengo unas bibliografías más completa sobre películas de Shakespeare. Buscad, claro, en English Authors- Shakespeare: http://bit.ly/abibliog

Algunas pueden verse en Internet (éstas y otras). Por ejemplo Looking for Richard de Al Pacino.
________


Recordad que: la lectura detenida y cuidadosa de los textos, con diccionario, es esencial. Para mejorar vuestro nivel de comprensión del inglés. Dudas que tengáis, las marcáis y las vemos en tutorías. Pero la costumbre de leer de modo sistemático y con horario fijo, para las distintas asignaturas, es importante que la desarrolléis si aún no la habéis adquirido.



Puede verse MACBETH en esta producción de los años 80:






Si os gustan las comparaciones, aquí hay otra versión de Macbeth, con Ian McKellen y Judi Dench, de la Royal Shakespeare Company, 1978 (una selección con los soliloquios):

__________________________________

Hay una edición en red de las obras completas de Shakespeare en Project Gutenberg:

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Paul Cantor on Henry V (NIVEL AVANZADO)

 

From Paul Cantor's Shakespeare and Politics, 2 series of lectures on Henry V. 

1st series, 3 videos:

 

 

 

 

Second series, 4 videos:

 

 

  

—oOo—

TWELFTH NIGHT

 

Twelfth Night

from the Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

Twelfth Night, or What You Will, a comedy by *Shakespeare probably written 1601. John *Manningham saw a performance of it in the Middle Temple in February 1602; it was frist printed in the *Folio of 1623. Shakespeare's immediate source for the main plot was 'The History of Apolonius and Silla' in Barnabe *Rich's Riche His Farewell to Militarie Profession (1581). This is derived from Belleforest's version, which by way of *Bandello can be traced back to a Sienese comedy Gl'Ingannati (The Deceived), written and performed 1531.

 

Sebastian and Viola, twin brother and sister and closely resembling one another, are separated in a shipwreck off the coast of Illyria. Viola, brought to shore in a boat, disguises herself a youth, Cesario, and takes service as page with Duke Orsino, who is in love with the lady Olivia. She rejects the duke's suit and will not meet him. Orsino makes a confidant of Cesario and sends her to press his suit on Olivia, much to the distress of Cesario, who has fallen in love with Orsino. Olivia in turn falls in love with Cesario. Sebastian and Antonio, captain of the ship that had rescued Sebastian, now arrive in Illyria. Cesario, challenged to a duel by Sir Andrew Aguecheek, a rejected suitor of Olivia, is rescued from her predicament by Antonio, who takes her for Sebastian. Antonio, being arrested at that moment for an old offence, claims from Cesario a purse that he had entrusted to Sebastian, is denied it, and hauled off to prison. Olivia coming upon the true Sebastian, takes him for Cesario, invites him to her house, and marries him out of hand. Orsino comes to visit Olivia. Antonio, brought before him, claims Cesario as the youth he has rescued from the sea; while Olivia claims Cesario as her husband. The duke, deeply wounded, is bidding farewell to Olivia and the 'dissembling cub' Cesario, when the arrival of the true Sebastian clears up the confusion. The duke, having lost Olivia, and becoming conscious of the love that Viola has betrayed, turns his affection to her, and they are married.

 

Much of the play's comedy comes from the sub-plot dealing with the members of Olivia's household: Sir Toby Belch, her uncle, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, his friend, Malvolio, her pompous steward, Maria, her waiting-gentlewoman, and her clown Feste. Exasperated by Malvolio's officiousness, the other members of the house make him believe that Olivia is in love with him and that he must return her affection. In courting her he behaves so outrageously that he is imprisoned as a madman. Olivia has him released and the joke against him is explained, but he is not amused by it, threatening, 'I'll be reveng'd on the whole pack of you.' 

 

The play's gentle melancholy and lyrical atmosphere is captured in two of Feste's beautiful songs, 'Come away, come away, death' and 'When that I was and a little tiny boy, / With hey, ho, the wind and the rain'.

A TV performance of Twelfth Night:

You may also try to watch the 1996 film version, dir. Trevor Nunn

Much Ado About Nothing (and its afterlife)

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble:

Much Ado about Nothing, a comedy by *Shakespeare, written probably 1598-9, first printed 1600. Its chief sources are a novella by *Bandello and an episode in Ariosto's *Orlando Furioso. The play has always been a popular one in performance.

Ths prince of Arragon, with Claudio and Benedick in his suite, visits Leonato, duke of Messina, father of Hero and uncle of Beatrice. The sprightly Beatrice has a teasing relationship with the sworn bachelor Benedick. Beatrice and Benedick are both tricked into believing the other in love, and this brings about a genuine sympathy between them. Meanwhile Don John, the malcontented brother of the prince, thwarts Claudio's marriage by arranging for him to see Hero apparently wooed by his friend Borachio on her balcony—it is really her maidservant Margaret in disguise. Hero is publicly denounced by Claudio on her wedding day, falls into a swoon, and apparently dies. Benedick proves his love for Beatrice by challenging Claudio to a duel. The plot by Don John and Borachio is unmasked by the 'shallow fools' Dogberry and Verges, the local constables. Claudio promises to make Leonato amends. Claudio promises to make Leonato amends for his daughter's death, and is asked to marry a cousin of Hero's; the veiled lady turns out to be Hero herself. Benedick asks to be married at the same time; Beatric, 'upon great persuasion; and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption', agrees, and the play ends with a dance.

From the Oxford Dictionary of Shakespeare, by Stanley Wells:

Much Ado about Nothing. Shakespeare's comedy ws first printed in *quarto in 1600, probably from the author's manuscript. This edition was reprinted in the First *Folio (1623). The play was not mentioned by *Meres in 1598, and is usually dated 1598-1600. It is based on a traditional story which had been told by Ariosto in his Orlando Furioso (1516, translated 1591), and by Bandello, translated into French by *Belleforest. It was played at Court in 1613, and a poem by Leonard *Digges printed in 1640 suggests that it remained popular. William *Davenant adapted it as The Law Against Lovers (1662), with little success.

 

The original play was performed in 1721, and there were further revivals in 1739 and 1746, but it did not fully regain its popularity until David *Garrick first played Benedick, in 1748, after which he revived it regularly until he retired in 1776. His first, and greatest, Beatrice was Mrs. *Pritchard. 

 

During the later part of the century Frances Abington and Elizabeth Farren shone as Beatrice. Charles *Kemble succeeded as Benedick from 1803, and the play's popularity during the nineteenth century culminated in Henry Irving's *Lyceum revival of 1882, in which Ellen *Terry gave her legendary Beatrice, which she went on playing for a quarter of a century.

 

The most famous twentieth-century production is John *Gielgud's at Stratford-upon-Avon, first given in 1949, when he did not appear in it, but revived in 1950 with himself as Benedick and Peggy *Ashcroft as Beatrice, and repeated several times during the 1950s.

Much Ado about Nothing has proved to be one of Shakespeare's most resilient plays. Twentieth-century productions have frequently updated the action. Hugh Hunt directed it in modern dress in 1947. Douglas Seale, at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1958, in costumes of about 1851, Franco *Zeffirelli, at the *Old Vic in 1965 in a farcical version set in late nineteenth-century Sicily, John *Barton at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1976 in a setting of nineteenth-century British india with Judi *Dench an unusually serious, and wholly credible, Beatrice, and Terry *Hands, also at Stratford-upon-Avon, in 1982. Susan Fleetwood and Roger Allam played Beatrice and Benedick in Bill *Alexander's production (Stratford, 1990) and Kenneth *Branagh directed a lively and successful film in 1993, playing opposite Emma Thompson as Beatrice. The play was enjoyable in all these varied interpretations. Critics have been troubled by the moral ambiguities of the Hero-Claudio plot, but theatrically the sub-plot characters of Beatrice and Benedick, along with Dogberry and the Watch, have always carried the play to success.

Comedy (Reiss)

Comedy
 By Timothy J. Reiss.

From the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

I. DEFINITION
II. ANCIENT
III. RENAISSANCE AND MODERN EUROPEAN
IV. RELATION TO TRAGEDY

I. DEFINITION.  Like tragedy (q.v.), the Western tradition of comic theater is considered to have begun with the ancient Greeks. Such a claim is however less clear than that made on behalf of tragedy, if only because no known culture appears to lack some form of comic performance. This fact has inspired various speculative theses concerning laughter—like reason and speech—as one of the defining characteristics of humanity. As in the case of tragedy, therefore, we need to distinguish with some care between speculative generalizations about the "comic spirit," and that more precious historical description needed to annlyze the function of comedy in society.   We must also discriminate between such description and attempts to analyze the "psychology" of laughter, because the event of comedy and the eruption of mirth are by no means the same. (I should add that althought the term "comedy" has been applied to any literary genre that is humorous, joyful, or expresses good fortune, what follwos will concern above all the theater, even if some observations have a broader application.)

The name "comedy" comes from Comus, a Greek fertility god. In ancient Greece "comedy" also named a ritual springtime procession presumed to celebrate cyclical rebirth, resurrection, and perpetual rejuvenation. Modern scholars and critics have thus taken comedy to be a universal celebration of life, a joyous outburst of laughter in the face of either an incomprehensible world or a repressive socio-political order. Carnival, festival, folly, and a general freedom of action then indicate either an indifference to and acceptance of the first, or a resistance to the second. But scholars have taken such notions yet further: if tragedy represents the fall from some kind of "sacred irrationality," comedy on the contrary becomes the triumphant affirmation of that riotous unreason, marking some ready acceptance of human participation in the chaotic forces needed to produce Life. The comic protagonist's defeat is then the counterpart to the tragic protagonist's failure, both versions of some ritual cleansing by means of a scapegoat—in this case one representing life-threatening forces. Such speculations have been advanced in one form or another by classicists (F. M. Cornford, Jane Harrison, Gilbert Murray), philosophers (Mikhail Bakhtin, Susanne Langer), and literary critics (C. L. Barber, Northrop Frye), not to mention anthropologists and even sociologists.

How much these theories help us understand what comedies are is another, and perhaps a different, question. For in the last resort such arguments depend on the assumption that beneath all and any particular comedy is some kinde of profound universal "carnival", a common denominator of the human in all times and places. Recalling Nietzsche's Gay Science, Jean Duvignaud has thus spoken of 'laughter that for a fleeting moment pitches humans before an infinite freedom, eluding constraints and rules, drawing them away from the irremediable nature of their condition to discover unforeseeable connections, and suggesting a common existence where the imaginary and real life will be reconciled" (229-30). But theories of this sort depend upon the idea that one can obtain the deepest comprehension of comedies by removing them from their distinct historical moment and social environment. They forget that such carnival and such laughter aree themselves the creations of a particular rationality, just as Dante's Divine Comedy universalized a particular theology. Even so seemingly fantastic a theater as that of Aristophanes (ca. 485-385 B.C.) is misconstrued by a theory that neglects comedy's essential embedding in the social and political intricacies of its age and place (Athens during the Peloponnesian Wars).

Setting aside these broad metaphysical speculations, then, we must look at accounts of laughter as a human reaction to certain kinds of errors. By and large, these may be divided into two theories. The one asserts that laughter is provoked by a sense of superiority (Hobbes' "sudden glory"), the other that it is produced by a sudden sense of the ludicrous, the incongrous, some abrupt dissociation of event and expectation. The theory of superiority is the more modern one, developed mainly by Hobbes, Bergson, and Meredith. It presumes our joy in seeing ourselves more fortunate than others, or in some way more free. Bergson's notion that one of the causes of laughter is the an abrupt perception of someone as a kind of automaton or puppet, as though some freedom of action had been lost, is one version of this.

The theory of comedy as the ludicrous or as the dissociation of expectation and event has a longer pedigree. It begins with Aristotle and has come down to us via Kant, Schopenhauer, and Freud. In the Poetics, Aristotle mentions another work on comedy, now lost; what remains are a few comments. In Poetics 5 Aristotle remarks that comedy imitates people "worse than average; worse, however, not as regards any and every sort of fault, but only as regards one particular kind, the Ridiculous, which is a species of the Ugly. The Ridiculous may be defined as a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others" (tr. Bywater). Similar remarks exist in his Rhetoric and in a medieval Greek manuscript known as the Tractatus Coislinianus, Aristotelian in argument and possibly even an actual epitome of Aristotle's lost writing on comedy (ed. Janko, 1984). Save for suggesting some detail of dissociative word and action, this text adds little to what may be gleaned from extant texts of Aristotl. It does make a parallel between comedy and tragedy, however, by saying that catharsis (q.v.) also occurs in comedy "through pleasure and laughter achieving the purgation of like emotions." The meaning of such a phrase is not at all clear, although it suggests comedy as an almost Stoic device to clean away extremes of hedonism and to root out any carnivalesque temptations.

Although both theories involve the psychology of laughter, the superiority theory seems less particularly applicable to comedy than that of incongruity, for the latter seeks both to indicate devices specifically provocative of laughter and to explain their effect on a spectator. The "Aristotelian" analyses suggest several matters. First, their kind of laughter requires oddness, distortion, folly, or some such "version of the ugly," but without pain. Such laughter thus depends on sympathy. Second, although this theory is kinder than that of superiority, it too has its part  of cruelty, just because of the touch of ugliness. Third, theories of superiority and of incongruity both take laughter as means, as commentary upon or correction of what we may call the real or even "local" world_unlike metaphysical theories, which make mirth an end in itself and an escape into some "universality." Fourth, both these theories (which supplement rather than oppose one another) require the laughter to be aware of some disfiguring of an accepted norm. Comedy and laughter imply a habit of normality, a familiarity of custom, from which the comic is a deviation. It may indeed be the case that comedy, like tragedy, shows the construction of such order, but above all it demonstrates why such order must be conserved.

II. ANCIENT. The fourth theory would at least partly explain why comic competition was instituted at the Athenian Dionysia some 50 years after that for tragedy (in 486 B.C.). Aristtle has told us the first competition was won by Chionides, who with Magnes represented the first generation of writers of comedy. Around 455 a comic victory was won by Cratinus, who with Crates formed a second generation. Many titles have survived and some fragments, but these constitute near the sum total of extant facts about Athenian comedy until Aristophanes' victory with Acharnians in 425. We know that in this competition Cratinus was second with Kheimazomenoi, and Eupolis third with Noumeniai. These names tell us little, but we may perhaps assume that Aristophanic comedy was fairly typical of this so-called Greek "Old Comedy": a mixture of dance, poetry, song, and drama, combining fantastic plots with mockery and sharp satire of contemporary people, events, and customs. Most of his plays are only partly comprehensible if we know nothing of current social, political, and literary conditions.

Aristophanes did not hesitate to attack education, the law, tragedians, the situation of women (though it is clearly an error to take him for a "feminist" of any kind), and the very nature of Athenian "democracy." Above all he attacked the demagogue Cleon, the war party he led, and the war itself. This says much about the nature of Athenian freedoms, for Aristophanes wrote during the struggle with Sparta, when no one doubted at all that the very future of Athens was in question. Aristophanes' last surviving play (of 11, 44 being attributed to him) is Plutus (388), a play criticizing myth, but whose actual themes are avarice and ambition. Quite different in tone and intent from the preceding openly political plays, Plutus is considered the earliest (and only extant) example of Greek "Middle Comedy."

The situation of comedy was, however, quite different from that of tragedy, for anothe powerful tradition existed. This was centered in Sicilian Syracuse, a Corinthian colony, and claimed the earliest comic writer, Epicharmus, one of the authors at the court of Hieron I in the 470s. We know the titles of some 40 of his plays. Othe comic poets writing in this Doric tradition were Phormis and the slightly younger Deinolochus, but the Dorians were supplanted by the Attic writers in the 5th c. and survive only in fragments. The best known composer of literary versions of the otherwise "para-" or "ub-" literary genre of comic mime was another Sicilian, Sophron, who lived during the late 5th c. From the 4th c. we have a series of vase paintings from Sicily and Southern Italy which suggest that comedy still throve there. The initiative had largely passed, however, to the Greek mainland. Plutus is an example of that Middle Comedy whose volume we know to have been huge. Plautus' Latin Amphitruo (ca. 230 B.C.) seems to be a version of another one, and, if so, one characteristic was the attack on myth. (Aristophanes' earlier Frogs [405], attacking Euripides and Aeschylus, tried in the underworld, may well be thought a forerunner.)

By the mid 4th c., so-called "New Comedy" held the stage. Among its poets the most celebrated and influential was unquestionably Menander (c. 342-290 B.C.).  His "teacher" was a certain Alexis of Thurii in southern Italy, so we can readily see how the "colonial" influence continued, even though Alexis was based in Athens. He is supposed to have written 245 plays and to have outlived his pupil. We know of Philemon from either Cilicia or Syracuse, of Diphilos from Sinope on the Black Sea, and of Apollodorus from Carystos in Euboea—worth mentioning as illustrating the great spread of comedy. Until the 1930s, however, only fragments seemed to have survived. Then what can only be considered one of the great literary discoveries turned up a papyrus containing a number of Menander's comedies, complete or almost so. These plays deal not with political matters or criticism of myth, but with broadly social matters (sometimes using mythical themes). The situations are domestic, the comedy is of manners, the characters are stock.

The widespread familiarity of comic forms helps explain why comedy was soon diffused once again over the Greek and roman world. By the mid 3rd c., not only had itinerant troupes spread from Greece throughout the Hellenistic world, but already by 240, Livius Andronicus, from Tarentum in southern Italy, had adapted Greek plays into Latin for public performance. Like Gnaeus Naevius and later Quintus Ennius, this poet composed both tragedy and comedy. From the 3rd c. as well dates Atellan farce (named from Atella in Campania), using stock characters and a small number of set scenes, and featuring clowns (called Bucco or Maccus), foolish old men, and greedy buffoons. These farces were partly improvised, on the basis of skeletal scripts, much like the commedia dell'arte of almost two millennia later. The influence of Etrurian musical performance, southern Italian drama, Greek mime, New Comedy and Atellan farce came together in the comedies of Titus Maccius Plautus, who wrote in the late 3rd c. (he is said by Cicero to have died in 184). By him 21 complete or almost complete comedies have survived. A little later Rome was entertained by the much more highbrow Publius Terentius Afer (Terence), by whom six plays remain extant. These two authors provided themes, characters, and style for comedy as it was to develop in Europe after the Renaissance (though farces, sotties, and comic interludes [q.v.] were widely performed in the Middle Ages).

III. RENAISSANCE AND MODERN EUROPEAN. As in the case of tragedy comedy was rediscovered first in Italy. While humanist scholars published and then imitated both Plautus and Terence (see IMITATION), vernacular art developed alongside wuch efforts. The early 16th c. saw the publication of much school drama in both Latin and Italian, while just a little later there developed the commedia dell'arte, wholse influence was to be enormous.This was a comedy of improvisation, using sketchy scripts and a small number of stock characters—Harlequin, Columbine, Pantaloon, the Doctor and others—placing these last in various situations. These plots were as frequently derived from antiquity as they were from folk art. Later on, these two forms of comedy tented to feed one another; the popular Comédie italienne of the late 17th-c. France was one outcome. The Commedia's influence was equally visible in Marivaux (1688-1763) and Goldoni (1707-93), though in the case of the first, the Italienne was just as important. The Commedia survives vividly in our own time in the theater of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which has put the old characters to work in the service of powerful political satire.

Apain vied with Italy on its development of comedy, starting with the late 15th-c. Celestina of Fernando de Rojas, written in Acts and in dialogue but never really intended for performance. By the late 16th c., Spain's theater was second to none in Europe. Lope de Vega (1562-1635), Calderón (1600-81) and a host of others produced a multitude of romantic and realistic comedy, dealing mainly with love and honor. They provided innumerable plots, themes, and characters for comic writers of France and England. These two countries started rather later than the South, but, like them, benefited from both an indigenous folk tradition and the publication of Latin comedy. The influence of Italian humanist comedy was significant in both nations during the 16th c., and that of Spain particularly in France in the early 17th c.

In France, humanist comedy gave way in the late 1620s to a romantic form of comedy whose threefold source was the prose romance and novella of Spain, Italy, and France, Spanish comedy (especially that of Lope and Cervantes), and Italian dramatic pastoral. The first influential authors in this style were Pierre Corneille (1606-84) and Jean de Rotrou (1609-50). Thew were followed by many, including Cyrano de Bergerac, Thomas Corneille , and the poet whom many consider the greatest writer of comedy of all times, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molière (1622-73). He wrote an enormous variety, in verse and prose, rangin from slapstick farce to something approaching bourgeois tragic drama. Comédie ballet, comedy of situation, of manners, of intrigue, and of character all flowed from his pern. He did not hesitate to write on matters that provoked the ire of religious dévots or of professional bigots, nor did he shirk the criticism of patriarchy, and many of his plays have political overtones. Having begun his theatrical career as leader of a traveling troupe, Molière made full use of folk tradition, of provincial dialect, of Commedia and of farce, as well as of Classical example. Many of his characters have become familiar types in French tradition (e.g. the "misanthrope," "tartuffe," "don juan"); many of his lines have become proverbial. While his plays do contain the now familiar young lovers, old men both helpful and obstructive, wily servants both female and male, sensible wives and mothers (whereas husbands and fathers are almost always foolish, headstrong, cuclolded, or downright obstructive); they bear chiefly upon such matters as avarice, ambition, pride, hypocrisy, misanthropy, and other such extreme traits. What interests Molière is how such excess conflicts directly with the well-regulated and customary process of ordered society.

Having followed a similar trajectory to that of its southern neigbours in the first half of the 16th c., England created a comic trad. unique in variety and longevity. The extraordinarily diverse comedies of Shakespeare (1564-1616) and the so-called comedy of humors (q.v.) favored by Jonson (1573-1637) seemed about to create two distinct comic traditions. Shakespeare wrote in almost every mode imaginable: aristocratic romance, bitter and problematic farce, comedy of character, slapstick farce, and the almost tragic Troilus and Cressida. If any comedy may be analyzed with some "metaphysical" theory it is no doubt Shakespeare's, with its concern for madness and wisdom, birth and death, the seasons' cycles, alove and animosity. Yet Shakespeare's comedies remained unique, and he had no successor in this style. Jonson's more urbane comedy of types and of character, satirizing manners and morals, social humbug and excess of all kinds, and falling more clearly into the forms already seen, was soon followed by the quite remarkable flowering of Restoration comedy, with a crowd of authors, including Dryden, Wycherley, Congreve, Behn, and Centlivre, among many others. They produced a brittle comedy of manners and cynical wit whose major impression is one of decayand an almost unbalanced self-interest. They were in turn suceeded by a widely varied 18th-c. comedy from the staunch complacency of Steele through the political satire of Gay to the joyous and mocking cynicism of Goldsmith, Inchbald, and Sheridan. This tradition was pursued thorugh the late 19th and early 20th centuries by a series of great Irish dramatists: Shaw, most notably, then Wilde, Yeats, Synge, and O'Casey.

During this period France was equally productive, but with few exceptions failed to attain the quality represented by the names just mentioned. At the turn of the 17th c., Regnard produced serious and significant social satire, as did Lesage (esp. in Turcaret, 1706). Marivaux dominated the first half of the 18th c., as Voltaire did the middle and Beaumarchais the end. If any new form appeared it was doubtless the comédie larmoyante, a sentimental drama whose main (and stated) purpose was to draw the heartstrings; in a way, it did for comedy what the later melodrama did for tragedy. In the 19th c. Musset produced his delicate comedy of manners, while Dumas fils and others strove to produce a comedy dealing with society's ills. This culminated on the one hand in Scribe's "well-made play," on the other in the "realist" drama of Zola and Antoine at the end of the century.

In other European lands, authors tended to be isolated: in late 19th-c. Norway, Ibsen, in early 20th-c. Russia, Chekhov; slightly later in Italy, Pirandello. To mention them so briefly is to be unjust, for they were all major creative figures. In many ways they foreshadowed that breakdown of traditional comedy that marks the mid to late 20th c. Laughter tends to become mingled problematically with that sense of discomfort in the world and uneas in the self which is perhaps a principal sign of our age. Among representative authors one might mention such as Witkiewicz, Mrozek, and Gombrowicz from Poland; Brecht, Dürrenmatt, and Handke from Germany; Switzerland, and Austria; Adamov, Ionesco, Arraabal, and Beckett in France; Capek, Fischerova, Havel, and Kohut in Czechoslovakia; Pinter, Arden, Bond, Stoppard, Benton, Hare, and Churchill in England; and Hellman, Albee, Baraka, and Simon in America. All have been writing plays that sport ironically with the political, social, and metaphysical dimensions of the human condition. Usually such issues are no longer held separate, and all are fair game for an ambiguous, perplexed, and uncertain derision. Such theater is now widely distributed, as strong in Latin America as in Czechoslovakia, in Italy or Spain as in Nigeria. It is almost as though comedy had lost a sense of that social norm to which we referrred at the outset, as if it were increasingly imbued with an inescapable sense of the tragic.

IV. RELATION TO TRAGEDY. Comedy had from the start a rather ambiguous relation to tragedy, and it was never difficult to see in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusai an inversion of Euripides' Bacchae, for example. A celebrated passage at the end of Plato's Symposium has Socrates obliging Agathon and Aristophanes to agree that comedy and tragedy have the same source. Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard has been played as both comedy and tragedy; so has The Merchant of Venice. Even the elements compounding the confrontation may be identical, as in Macbeth, Jarry's Ubu Roi, or Ionesco's Macbett. When the comic protagonist acquires attributes of typicality or of some absolute, then comedy may take on overtones of tragedy. A critic of Molière's Tartuffe (1667) remarked that whaterver "lacks extremely in reason" is ridiculous: anything contrary to a predictable reaction or an expected and habitual situation is absurd. This is of course straight from the Aristotelian tradition, but the emphasis on excess is significant. It shows just how close comedy always was to tragedy, explaining such comedies as Dom Juan or Le Misanthrope. Both focus on an idealism either misplaced or preposterous. Don Juan's ideal self is misplaced because it serves a violent and injurious sexuality; Alceste's self-righteous scorn becomes comic when he refuses even the most innocent concession, and his responses become inappropriate to his urbane surroundings. Yet if he lowered his tone to suit his milieu he would fall short of his ideal: the dilemma is that of dissonance between the dieal and the situation where it is expressed—incongruity again. The excessive ideal in this case contradicts society's needs and fails its norm.

Tragedy appears to require a world view such that a recognized human quantity may be pitted against a known but inhuman one (variously called Fate, the gods, the idea of some Absolute, etc.), permitting the "limits" of human action and knowledge to be defined. Comedy seems rather to oppose humans to one another, within essentially social boundaries. And if, as both the superiority and the incongruity theories hold, comedy is essentially a social phenomenon, then wherever humans are will be somehow conducive to it; whereas tragedy seems to signify a moment of passage from one sociocultural environment to another. That social nature of comedy may be why its characters sem to us so down-to-earth, pragmatic, and familiar. Even where a theater's real (and external) social context is very different, we can still recognize creatures of a social order. That is also why comedies are in league with their audience, obtaining their spectators' sympathy for what are given as the dominant social interests. Volpone menaces that order, as do Shylock, Tartuffe, and Philokleon (Aristophanes, Wasps). Volpone and Shylock are defeated in the name of the Venetian Republic, as is Tartuffe in that of the King, and Philokleon in that of a city longing for peace. In Palutus' Epidicus, the eponymous slave—archetypal outsider for 3rd c. Rome—is absorbed into and becomes a part of the social system. In Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, the actors remain at loose ends because they are unable to situate either themselves or a social order. Similarly, Beckett's two tramps remain despairingly expectant at the end of Waiting for Godot. Comedy has always emphasized the conservation of an order it may well have helped construct. When we can no more grasp or even envisage that order, then derisive irony may make us laugh, but it also leaves us painfully disturbed. See also BURLESQUE; DRMATIC POETRY; FARCE; GENRE; GREEK POETRY, Classical; PARODY; TRAGICOMEDY.


—oOo—

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