The Meanings of Comedy* - Shakespeare Navigators

52
TIIE SPIRIT OF COMEDY
prick us, do we not bleed"), the Elizabethan audience probably did
not see the Jew in this double way but took his grotesque figure to
be a hateful and hated image of greed. The higher the social charge
in comedy, the less the audience is likely to care about distinguishing
truth from prejudice. The classical instance would be The Clouds, a
play in which Aristophanes evidently leads a pack of right-minded
Athenians in hounding down sophists who have insulted the gods and
shaken the ordinary pieties. Never mind what questions the sophists
really asked; never mind whether we can answer their questions-we
must quell these troublemakers:
Strike, smite them, spare them not, for many reasons: BUT Mosr BEcAUsE
THEY HAVE BLASPIIEMED THE CODS.
The attack in Molidre's Highbrow Ladies is not so blunt, but it is
none the less based on the premise that women are not entitled to
be foppish; they must be conveniently stupid.
Usually the comedian will address us with most assurance when he
is conservative, when he affirms the security of any group already
unsure of itself. In middle-class societies, particularly, the comic artist
often reassures the majority that its standards are impregnable or
that other standards are not "normal" or "sane." Then the comedian
banishes doubt by ridicule and is the "diplomatic artist." 12
Yet this defense of the status quo occurs in a society where there
is a hidden conflict in social standards; and the comedian may appear
on the other side of the barricades, with the revolutionaries. Falstaff
gleefully invites us to join him in making bohemian sallies among
the ranks of the Philistines, bringing confusion to their hosts. The
very appearance of Shylock as a s)'rnpathetic villain indicates the
malaise in Elizabethan society about "rugged individualism." Similarly
the figure of Tartuffe is a focus for the conflict between an
ideal of personal integrity and the unscrupulous piety of an acquisitive
class. In despising Tartuffe we despise our own hypocrisy, whether it
be a false puritan asceticism or the slippery indulgence of the Jesuits.
Tartuffe could be born only in a society anxious about its honesty.
He is a sign of what we reject.
Or else the comedian can evade the conflict, relieving the stress
between competing ideals by laughter. He may enable us to "adjust"
,"tn fn, Oork Voyage and the Golden Mcan Albett Cook advances the ingenious
but somewhat narrow-gauge theory that tragedy ventures to make the
Dark Voyage toward Risk and Wonder, whereas comedy stays safely within
the limits of a Golden Mean. This is a tenable argument, certainly; however, the
distinction can hardly be made this simply, and the comedian is often a "revolu.
tionary" as well as a "diplomatic" artist.