Essays and Studies 1950 [antikvár]

I THE BASIS OF SHAKESPEARIAN COMEDY {The substance of a lecture delivered in 1949 at Stratford-upon-Avon at the invitation of Mr. John Garrett, to whom it is affectionately dedicated.) by nevill coghill i The Comedies of Ben Jonson are clearly no laughing matter if we compare them with those of Shakespeare. A harsh ethic in them yokes punishment with derision: foibles are persecuted and vices flayed; the very simpletons are savaged for being what they are, and it is seldom that any but a minor character, if that, gives proof of a nobility or grace of nature. The population of his Comedies in part accounts for this; they are a congeries of cits, parvenus, mountebanks, cozeners, dupes, braggarts, bullies and bitches. If we are shown virtue in distress, it is the distress and not the virtue that matters. All this is done with an incredible, stupendous force of style. In Shakespeare things are different. Princes and dukes, lords and ladies jostle with merchants, weavers, joiners, country sluts, friendly rogues, schoolmasters and village policemen, hardly one of whom is lacking in, or incapable of, a generous impulse. The very butts can think nobly of the soul and have everything handsome about them. Shakespeare wiU not punish even a Bamadine. In all this it is easy to discern the promptings of two opposed temperaments in the use of comic form by these writers; so much so that it hardly makes sense to speak of "comic form" as if it were a single thing of which both had the same theoretical conception, to the discipline of which both were in voluntary and agreed subjection. And because it does not seem to make sense, it is often supposed that Shakespeare wrote under no discipline of form, that he followed no particular and definable tradition of Coniedy, but was simply fancy's child; for what definable form could include The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Measure for Measure and The Winter's Tale? It is the purpose of this essay to show that Shakespeare was not simply following the chances of temperament in designing his Comedies, but that he was following a tradition that evolved during the middle ages