Comedy

Moelwyn Merchant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138231870
• eBook ISBN: 9781315313993
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1972, this work pursues the question 'what is comedy?' In its quest for an answer it explores critical theory, psychology, sociology and metaphysics. It also examines the classical origins of comedy, different kinds of comedy, the rituals of comedy, its relationship with other idioms such as 'satire', irony' and 'farce', and compares two major traditions: 'Aristophanic' and 'Shakesperean' comedy. In doing so, the book demonstrates the indefinable and flexible nature of comedy.

This work will be a valuable resource to those studying drama, and in particular, those focusing on classical and Shakespearean plays.

1

The Status of Comedy

The most lamentable comedy and most

cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby.

The ‘mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are no more confused in their categories than most of the theorists and critics who have concerned themselves with the nature of comedy; for the conjunction of ‘lamentable comedy’ and ‘cruel death’ is a permanently recurring affront to the purity of comedy and tragedy as dramatic categories. The intrusion of laughter at the moment of tragic revelation; the porter’s boisterous perception that, located in Macbeth’s castle, he ministers at hell’s gate; the ‘tragic exit’ of Shylock as prelude to radiance in Belmont; the bawdy irony of Lear’s fool; the absurd inarticulacy of a character in Pinter or Beckett: all these deny the clarity with which the critical intelligence from Aristotle onwards has tried to keep tragedy and comedy in proper isolation, in appropriate antithesis. For the assumed opposition of tragic and comic is no mere balance of genres; writers both critical and creative in every age have set up antitheses that assume more than a formal difference in literary kinds between them. Byron describes a ritual and ceremonial contrast as their fundamental distinction:

All tragedies are finished by a death,

All comedies are ended by a marriage,

(Don Juan)

an entry into a profound area of human experience in which the poet anticipates the ‘ritualistic critics’ of today. Horace Walpole looks not to a ritual conclusion but to the level and quality of comprehension involved in comic and tragic experience:

The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.

In the give and take of urbane conversation this convenient distinction may pass and – urbanely – we may refrain from pressing the emotional force of Twelfth Night or Tartuffe, the rational power of Macbeth or Phèdre; ‘those that think’ are manifestly capable of sensibility, ‘those that feel’ of powerful thought. But be that as it may, critics and belletristes have assumed that wit and sensibility, ratiocination and intuition, cool analysis and warm sympathy are among the contrasted means whereby the realms of comedy and tragedy are entered; and already we may suspect that they are being placed in an order of preference, a hierarchy of esteem.

Ben Jonson establishes a third category of difference when, in Every Man in his Humour, he distinguishes between the proper subject matter of comedy and tragedy:

And persons, such as Comœdie would chuse,

When she would shew an Image of the times,

And sport with humane follies, not with crimes.

Except, we make ’hem such by loving still

Our popular errors, when we know th’are ill.

I meane such errors, as you’ll all confesse

By laughing at them, they deserve no lesse:

Which when you heartily doe, there’s hope left, then,

You, that have so grac’d monsters, may like men.

(Folio of 1616)

This is a plausible distinction, between ‘follies’ and ‘crimes’, though insistent doubts concerning Sir Epicure Mammon and Tribulation Wholesome question the moment at which a foible, a ‘humour’ becomes something profounder and darker. Elsewhere, in the critical prose of Timber, or Discoveries, Jonson anxiously maintains the essential seriousness of both genres:

The parts of a Comedie are the same with a Tragedie, and the end is partly the same. For, they both delight, and teach: the Comicks are called

, of the Greekes; no lesse then the Tragicks.

Nor, is the moving of laughter alwaies the end of Comedy, that is rather a fowling for the peoples delight, or their fooling. For, as Aristotle saies rightly, the moving of laughter is a fault in Comedie, a kind of turpitude, that depraves some parts of a mans nature without a disease.

Yet this stressing of the didactic quality in both comedy and tragedy fails to mask the distinction which Jonson himself notes in his creative intention: that comedy is concerned with the foolish, with social aberrations, while tragedy handles ‘crime’, a rebellion against a profounder ethic. Here we appear to have set up a qualitative distinction and are invited to admit that the gravity of comedy, even when it refrains from ticklish laughter, is, in its ultimate moral concern, in some sort less than that of tragedy. Jonson seems to be starting a line of critical vocabulary in which the metaphors carry judgements of value; tragedy is regularly associated with ‘profundity’, ‘gravity’, ‘density of involvement’, ‘earnestness’; comedy with ‘mirth’, ‘levity’, ‘wit’, ‘the sunny malice of a faun’ – the contrasts are sufficiently revealing, even if their implications are not often explored. Nor do Jonson’s successors who seek to redress the critical balance, emphasizing the salutary social function of comedy, always arouse full confidence: Meredith’s ‘thoughtful laughter’ is as disconcerting as Hazlitt’s contrary tone in his distinction between Shakespearian comedy and tragedy:

He was greatest in what was greatest [tragedy]; and his forte was not trifling.

This juxtaposition of ‘greatest’ and ‘trifling’ is a forthright declaration that the status of tragedy is in itself higher than comedy; and indeed an audience may well feel that it is about a graver business when it assists at a tragic performance than when it ‘relaxes’ in the presence of comedy. An analogous assumption may be heard obliquely in the tone of a puritan in 1600 as he characterizes ‘romish’ liturgical practices:

Their comedicall dancing masses, skipping and hopping about the altar like apes,

while even in his sober assessment of comedy in the Apology, Sidney makes no more powerful a claim than that it is ‘an imitation of the common errors of our life’, those follies which in Jonsonian terms are so much less reprehensible than crimes.

Yet it will be the argument of this essay that there are critical standpoints from which it would seem that comedy has a nobler metaphysical quality than these traditional tones and phrases would imply; that particular comedies in our Western literatures have attitudes which go beyond this mildly therapeutic role, the mere chastisement of folly; that Aristophanes, Shakespeare, Molière or Brecht provide us with teasing problems of evaluation if we attempt to confine their comedy simply to social correction.

But we must begin our exploration of the genre with dictionary definition, if this ‘Critical Idiom’ is to be pursued into the proper sphere of practical criticism. Even here we are not on completely unambiguous ground, for the O.E.D. derives the noun from comœdia, in turn from the Greek

‘either of

, a revel, merrymaking, or of its probable source

village,

, singer, minstrel … The

was thus originally either “the bard of the revels” or “the village bard’” – a not insignificant distinction in itself. This ambiguity in the very derivation of the word is continued in the O.E.D. citations of early uses in illustration of its question-begging definition: ‘A stage play of a light and amusing character with a happy conclusion to the plot’; the Chronicle of Troy (1430) has in fact a subtler definition than this in denying its uniformly ‘light and amusing character’:

A comedy hath in his gynnynge, [beginning]

A pryme face, a maner complaynguage,

And afterward endeth in gladnesse,

while Chaucer, in Troylus and Criseyde, half a century earlier, marks the conclusion of his work:

Go, litel bok, go, litel myne tragedye,

Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye,

So sende myght to maken som comedye!

Shakespeare – or at least his first editors in the Folio of 1623 – was in the same ambivalence of mind over this ‘sour comedy’, this ‘tragical history’ or ‘comical satire’ of Troilus and Cressida’s love. The significance, however, of the passage from Chaucer in our present exploration is the interesting order and relationship, that with God’s help he will be sent ‘myght to maken som comedye’. It would be hazardous and unbalanced to press the argument too far but it is certainly a modest and justifiable conclusion that the progress from tragedy to comedy (from Troylus to the Canterbury Tales?) was for Chaucer in no sense an anticlimax, a movement from a serious game to mere literary trifling. To return for a moment to the dictionary definition: the first sub-definition reads, ‘a mediaeval narrative poem with an agreeable ending cf. Dante’. It is certainly no over-statement to regard the cosmic sequence from Inferno to Paradiso by way of Purgatorio as a progress towards ‘an agreeable ending’; Dante’s poetic achievement of the beatific vision, after the ‘secular’ powers of Vergil had taken him to the limit of insight granted to human reason, gives the most substantial ground for the subsequent nature of comedy, an intellectual and spiritual standpoint which gives the literary form its claim to insights as grave and weighty as those of tragedy.

These considerations seem largely to have turned on the question of status – the relative esteem in which tragedy and comedy are held. For, apart from particular plays – which rates the highest, the author of The Frogs or of Lear, of Volpone or Phèdre, of Twelfth Night or Brand? – there appears to be the begged question, that it is nobler to be a tragedian than a comedian, that to be tragic is to participate in sublimity, to be comic is to have affinity with the pitiable. These questions, whether posed or begged, have overtones, intellectu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE
• PREFATORY NOTE
• 1 The Status of Comedy
• 2 Psychological Theories of Comedy
• 3 The Classical World
• 4 ‘Comic Relief’
• 5 ‘Comical-Satire’ and ‘Tragi-Comedy’
• 6 The Ritual of Comedy
• 7 Certain Relationships of Comedy
• 8 The Aristophanic and Shakespearian Traditions
• CONCLUSION: The Metaphysics of Comedy
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX