Acting Funny

Acting Funny

Author: Frances N. Teague

Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9780838635247

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Finally, these assumptions lead to the corollary that such hierarchies are natural and immutable and not fashioned by critics.


Shakespeare’s comic theory

Shakespeare’s comic theory

Author: Thomas Allen Nelson

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2019-03-18

Total Pages: 100

ISBN-13: 3111629724

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No detailed description available for "Shakespeare's comic theory".


Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths

Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths

Author: Camille Wells Slights

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 1993-01-01

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 9780802029249

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Challenging the traditional view that Shakespeare's early comedies are about the experience of romantic love and constitute a genre called romantic comedy, Camille Wells Slights demonstrates that they dramatize individual action in the context of social dynamics, reflecting and commenting on the culture in which they originated. Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths sheds new light on ten Shakespearean comedies: The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labor's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night. In a diversity of comic forms - from rollicking farce to tragicomedy - these plays offer varying perspectives on the forces that make and mar human communities. Dramatizing tensions between savagery and civilization, autonomy and dependence, and isolation and community, Shakespeare's comedies both reflect and comment on the society that produces them. Slights eschews viewing these comedies as endorsements of the prevailing ideologies of sixteenth-century England or as subversions of that hierarchical, patriarchal culture. They can be most fruitfully understood as imaginative forms that present cultural practices, institutions and beliefs as human constructions susceptible to critical scrutiny. While exposing the injustice and brutality as well as the assurances and satisfactions of social experiences, Shakespeare's comedies represent people as inescapably social beings. By combining historical scholarship with formal analysis and incorporating insights from social anthropology and feminist theory, Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths offers new readings of Shakespeare's early comedies and analyses the interaction between the plays and the social structures and processes of early modern England.


The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy

The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy

Author: William C. Carroll

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 1400854814

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This book argues that the idea of metamorphosis is central to both the theory and practice of Shakespearean comedy. It offers a synthesis of several major themes of Shakespearean comedy--identity, change, desire, marriage, and comic form--under the master trope of transformation. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Comic Transformations in Shakespeare

Comic Transformations in Shakespeare

Author: Ruth Nevo

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9780415352703

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In this study of Shakespeare's ten early comedies, from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night, the concept of a dynamic of comic form is developed.


Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment

Author: Kent Cartwright

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-11-11

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 019263965X

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Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment argues that enchantment constitutes a key emotional and intellectual dimension of Shakespeare's comedies. It thus makes a new claim about the rejuvenating value of comedy for individuals and society. Shakespeare's comedies orchestrate ongoing encounters between the rational and the mysterious, between doubt and fascination, with feelings moved by elements of enchantment that also seem a little ridiculous. In such a drama, lines of causality become complex, and even satisfying endings leave certain matters incomplete and contingent—openings for scrutiny and thought. In addressing enchantment, the book takes exception to the modernist vision of a deterministic 'disenchanted' world. As Shakespeare's action advances, comic mysteries accrue—uncanny coincidences; magical sympathies; inexplicable repetitions; psychic influences; and puzzlements about the meaning of events—all of whose numinous effects linger ambiguously after reason has apparently answered the play's questions. Separate chapters explore the devices, tropes, and motifs of enchantment: magical clowns who alter the action through stop-time interludes; structural repetitions that suggest mysteriously converging, even opaquely providential destinies; locales that oppose magical and protean forces to regulatory and quotidian values; desires, thoughts, and utterances that 'manifest' comically monstrous events; characters who return from the dead, facilitated by the desires of the living; play-endings crossed by harmony and dissonance, with moments of wonder that make possible the mysterious action of forgiveness. Wonder and wondering in Shakespeare's and other comedies, it emerges, become the conditions for new possibilities. Chapters refer extensively to early modern history, Renaissance and modern theories of comedy, treatises on magical science, and contemporaneous Italian and Tudor comedy.


The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy

The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy

Author: Alexander Leggatt

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780521779425

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An accessible, wide-ranging and informed introduction to Shakespeare's comedies, dark comedies and romances, first published in 2001.


The Shakespearean Comic and Tragicomic

The Shakespearean Comic and Tragicomic

Author: Richard Hillman

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781526144072

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Richard Hillman's latest book on the French connections of early modern English drama shows that Shakespeare regularly inflected the models provided by Italian comedy and tragicomedy by evoking French material, dramatic and non-dramatic. Such inflection especially bears on the tragic overtones that menace or complicate comic resolutions.


The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies

The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedies

Author: Susan Snyder

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2019-01-29

Total Pages: 197

ISBN-13: 0691196621

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Comic elements in Shakespeare's tragedies have often been noted, but while most critics have tended to concentrate on humorous interludes or on a single play, Susan Snyder seeks a more comprehensive understanding of how Shakespeare used the conventions, structures, and assumptions of comedy in his tragic writing. She argues that Shakespeare's early mastery of romantic comedy deeply influenced his tragedies both in dramaturgy and in the expression and development of his tragic vision. From this perspective she sheds new light on Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. The author shows Shakespeare's tragic vision evolving as he moves through three possibilities: comedy and tragedy functioning first as polar opposites, later as two sides of the same coin, and finally as two elements in a single compound. In the four plays examined here, Professor Snyder finds that traditional comic structures and assumptions operate in several ways to shape the tragedy: they set up expectations which when proven false reinforce the movement into tragic inevitability; they underline tragic awareness by a pointed irrelevance; they establish a point of departure for tragedy when comedy's happy assumptions reveal their paradoxical "shadow" side; and they become part of the tragedy itself when the comic elements threaten the tragic hero with insignificance and absurdity. Susan Snyder is Professor of English at Swarthmore College. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy

Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy

Author: Jonathan Goossen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-01-02

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1351658689

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Jonson, Shakespeare, and Aristotle on Comedy relates new understandings of Aristotle’s dramatic theory to the comedy of Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare. Typically, scholars of Renaissance drama have treated Aristotle’s theory only as a possible historical influence on Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s drama, focusing primarily on their tragedies. Yet recent classical scholarship has undone important misconceptions about Aristotle’s Poetics held by early modern commentators and fleshed out the theory of comedy latent within it. By first synthesizing these developments and then treating them as an interpretive theory, rather than simply an historical influence, this book demonstrates a remarkable consonance between Aristotelian principles of plot and its emotional effect, on the one hand, and the comedy of Shakespeare and Jonson, on the other. In doing so, it also reveals surprising similarities between these seemingly divergent dramatists.