The Meanings of Comedy* - Shakespeare Navigators

Sypher I rHe MEANINcs oF coMEDY
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evitability or Necessity bears heavily on the tragic hero, who is not
eligible for rescue because in tragedy man must somehow take responsibility
for the flaws in the nature of things or at least pay a
penalty for them. To be sure, the tragic hero meets the Inexplicableby
what logic does Oedipus happen to confront his father on the
road to Thebes and kill him in a namow pass Behind tragedy, too,
is a riddle of the Sphinx, the warning of oracles only hoarsely spoken.
In any case the tragic poet feels some compulsion to look backwards
across the gulf of disaster and help us understand why the hero met
his doom. Or he must fortify us against the Inexplicable and reassure
us that Justice is not wrecked by it; whereas the comic artist can
accept absurdities as the open premises of his account of life and
not be troubled by them. The comedian practices an art of exaggeration,
or overstatement.
The tragic hero, however, must heed some "golden mean" between
extremes; he does not dare play with life as the comic hero does.
The tragic hero meets either/or dilemmas but must pay some penalty
for not being able to conciliate incompatibles. His only refuge from
despair is a stoic endurance between those incompatibles; he must
somehow prove himself adequate to the disasters he suffers. The
tragic poet cannot, like the comic artist or the religious hero, look at
man's struggle from infinite distances and revise its human weight
or its penalties. Tragedy is a form of ethical heroism, suggesting that
"man is the measure," even between desperate choices.
The tragic hero, noble and magnified, can be of awesome stature.
The comic hero refuses to wear the trappings of moral or civil
grandeur, usually preferring motley, or the agility of the clown. He
is none the less man, and Hamlet more than once rouses our suspicion
that the tragic hero is eligible for comic roles: or is it the other way
round, that Hamlet is a comic hero who generates tragic values The
Prince touches his deepest meanings when he has on his antic humor.
Then he needs no grandeur to hide his weakness, which is laughably
naked.
Under the auspices of Fortuna comedy allows a play of character
impossible in tragedy, which requires a hero "greater and better than
most men" but capable of "error." As Aristotle says, the tragic hero
cannot be either "depraved" or simply a victim of "bad luck." Comedy,
however, delights to deal with those who are victims of bad luck,
along with those who are "depraved" or "yisieu5"-[y means of the
grotesque. By disfiguring the hated person in caricature, comedy is
able to elevate hatred to art. Swift evidently saw man as depraved
and vicious, and projected his hatred into the grotesques called Ya-