Abstract
The third chapter of Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage is headed ‘The Clergy Abused by the Stage’•It is a long, resentful chapter which documents in detail the stage tradition by which clergymen are used as comic butts. Collier believes that he knows the reason for this tradition. ‘The Clergy’, he observes,
are no small rub in the Poet’s way, ‘Tis by their Ministrations that Religion is perpetuated, the other World refresh’d, and the Interest of Virtue kept up.… Therefore that Liberty may not be embarrass’d, nor Principles make Head against Pleasure, the Clergy must be attack’d, and rendred ridiculous.
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Notes
Jeremy Collier, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (London, 1698; 1730 ed., reprinted Hildesheim, 1969) pp. 63–4, 81.
See R. H. Helmholz, Marriage Litigation in Mediaeval England (Cambridge, 1974) pp. 34–8.
See Gellert S. Alleman, Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy (Philadelphia, 1942) pp. 7–9.
Olive M. Busby, Studies in the Development of the Fool in Elizabethan Dranu (London, 1923) pp. 15–18.
R. H. Goldsmith, Wise Fools in Shakespeare (Liverpool, 1958) pp. 1, 26–7.
E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage, 2 vols (London, 1903) vol. i, pp. 372–89.
William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London, 1951) pp. 119–20.
John Doran, A History of Court Fools (London, 1859.
Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (London, 1953) p. 343.
Virginia Birdsall, Wild Civility: The English Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage (Bloomington, Ind., 1970) p. 30.
John Cleland, Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (London, 1970) pp. 190–7.
Harvey Cox, The Feast of Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity and Fantasy (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) pp. 137–8.
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© 1983 Australian National University
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Nelson, T.G.A. (1983). The Fool as Clergyman (and Vice-versa): an Essay on Shakespearian Comedy. In: Donaldson, I. (eds) Jonson and Shakespeare. The Humanities Research Centre/Macmillan Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06183-9_1
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