The Meanings of Comedy* - Shakespeare Navigators

Sypher I rHo MEANTNGS oF coMEDY
3I
"Let usr" says Millamant to Mirabell, "be as strange as if we had
been married a great while, and as well bred as if we were not
married at all." The edge of this comedy is sharpened by sanity as
well as verbal wit, and, as Meredith clearly saw, Molidre magnified
comedy of manners to the dimensions of a criticism of life. Our most
provoking social critic is Shaw, although Pirandello soars farther into
a crystalline sphere of ideas. The world of Aristophanes could have
been shaped only in the sophisticated theatre of an Athens that had
begun to examine its own conventions. Aristophanes is like Erasmus
or Gide, who serve as the intellectual conscience of a nervous and
self-scrutinizing society where all is not now so well as it might be
or has been or seems to be.
At the radiant peak of "high" comedy-a peak we can easily sight
from Meredith's essay-laughter is qualified by tolerance, and criticism
is modulated by a sympathy that comes onJy from wisdom. Just
a few writers of comedy have gained this unflinching but generous
perspective on life, which is a victory over our absurdities but a victory
won at a cost of humility, and won in a spirit of charity and
enlightenment. Besides Shakespeare in, perhaps, The Ternperf, one
might name Cervantes and Henry James and Jane Austen, or Thomas
Mann in his Magic Mountai,n, when pliable, diseased Clavdia yields
carelessly to the stricken llans Castorp in a scene where the grimness
of human life, its folly and its error, are seen clearly and with a perverse
tenderness: "Petit bourgeois!" she says to him-"/oli bourgeois
d Ia petite tache humide." For they both know that the body, love,
and death are all three the same thing, and that the flesh is sickness
and desire, and life only a fever in matter. This is how "high"
comedy chastens men without despair, without rancor, as if human
blunders were seen from a godlike distance, and also from within the
blundering self. The deep humiliation and reassurance in Don Quixote's
madness and recovery, with his resignation, detachment, and
self-awareness, are all confirmed by the experience of Shakespeare's
Benedick-to whom Meredith appealed. After proving himself as
foolish as the rest of the rvorld, Benedick comes to a vision of the
human condition: "For man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion."
Benedick speaks without bitterness, bias, or pride; and has
learned, like Hans Castorp, to accept the irxufficiency of man without
being damaged.
So the range of comedy is more embracing than the range of tragedy;
and if tragedy occurs at some middle point in ethical life where
failure is weighed against man's nobility of spirit, comedy ventures
out into the farther extremes of experience in both directions. toward