Abstract
Christopher Sly, during his brief exaltation, is to be entertained with ‘a pleasant comedy’. ‘Is not a comonty/A Christmas gambol or a tumbling-trick?’ he queries, if the usual emendation of the Folio reading is correct. ‘No, my good lord,’ says the page who is impersonating his wife, ‘it is more pleasing stuff.’ ‘What, household stuff?’ asks Sly. ‘It is a kind of history’, replies the page. The real lord has just expatiated on the therapeutic value of comedy: it will frame a sick mind ‘to mirth and merriment / Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life’.1
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Notes
Parrott, Shakespearean Comedy (1949, 1962) p. 43.
Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (1938, 1979) p. 23.
Bradbrook, The Growth and Structure of Elizabethan Comedy (1955, 1973) p. 4.
Salingar, Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (1974) p. 30.
Baldwin, William Shakespeare’s Five-Act Structure (1947, 1963) pp. 576, 668.
See Absalon Pederssøn, Dagbok (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1963) under ‘1567 Martius Dies. 12.’: ‘Agerede her Jon Scholemester Comoediam Phormionem haffuer han oc ladit agere de andre fra Andria, paa S: Gregory dag’ (p. 129). (‘Jon schoolmaster here acted the comedy Phormionem; he has also had acted the others from Andria, on St Gregory’s day.’)
See Baldwin, pp. 231–42, 714–15; and Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (1950, 1964) p. 6.
See Salingar, p. 17, and J. Dennis Huston, Shakespeare’s Comedies of Play (1981). Shakespeare, Northrop Frye has taught us, wrote essentially romantic New Comedy, works descended from Menander, Plautus, and Terence and distinguished by teleological plots in which an alienated lover moves toward sexual fulfilment, marriage, and a renewed society’ (Huston, p. 59).
See also John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies (1957) ch. II, ‘Experiments in Comedy’.
See Rose, Shakespearean Design (1972).
See also Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (1971), esp. ch. 1.
Wain, The Living World of Shakespeare (1964, 1966) pp. 92–4.
See also John Russell Brown, ‘The Presentation of Comedy’, in Shakespearian Comedy, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14 (1972) pp. 28–9.
See Alfred Harbage, ‘Intrigue in Elizabethan Tragedy’, in R. Hosley, ed., Essays on Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama (1963) pp. 37–44. Norman Sanders has a questionable statement about intrigue in his essay on Greene and Shakespeare: ‘The comedies of both are comic explorations of the nature of love. Both writers realized that this exploration could not be achieved by adopting the intrigue type comedy; love’s many facets, its gradations and its effects could only be shown in the interplay of characters and situations to which the narrative form of comedy gave scope’ (Early Shakespeare, pp. 40–1). It is the ‘only’ in the last sentence I mainly object to.
Meagher, ‘Economy and Recognition: Thirteen Shakespearean Puzzles’, SQ 35.1 (1984), [7]–21.
See also William A. Ringler, Jr., ‘The Number of Actors in Shakespeare’s Early Plays’, in G. E. Bentley, ed., The Seventeenth-Century Stage (1968) pp. 110–34. On the basis of character counts and doubling charts, Ringler fixes the regular number of actors in speaking parts in Shakespeare’s early plays at twelve men and four boys. His limitation to these numbers seems rather too rigid, however.
Wells, ‘The Failure of The Two Gentlemen of Verona’, in Shakespeare Jahrbuch 99 (1963), [161]–173.
Marco Mincoff (who dates it in the autumn of 1589) and Brian Morris are probably the main contenders for the priority of TS. See Mincoff, ‘The Dating of The Taming of the Shrew’, ES 54.6 (1973) 554–65, and Morris’s Introduction to the Arden TS (1981) p. 61. Coleridge impressively heads the list of the contenders for LLL. Fleay placed it first on the basis of metrical tests and has been joined by such more recent scholars as T. W. Baldwin, H. B. Charlton, and Alfred Harbage.
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© 1986 Kristian Smidt
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Smidt, K. (1986). Introduction. In: Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Early Comedies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18421-7_1
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