The Meanings of Comedy* - Shakespeare Navigators

58
TIrE SPIRIT OF COMEDY
played; and he was grateful to the r.r'retched players, who gained
their triumph not on their poor stage but in Theseus' fancy.
The high comic vision of life is humane, an achievement of man
as a social being. Meredith addressed himself to "our united social
intelligence, which is the Comic Spirit." He suspected that comedy
is "the ultimate civilizer." If Prospero's comedy is transcendentaily
"open," Meredith's social comedy remains a worldy discipline with,
nevertheless, full moral overtones. In all civilized societies, Meredith
insists, the comic spirit must hover overhead, its lips drarvn in a slim,
hungry smile, wary and tense, thoughtfully eager to see the absurdities
of polite men and women. Kierkegaard might have been describing
Meredith's faun when he said the "comic spirit is not wild or vehement,
its laughter is not shrill." For Kierkegaard, too, the highest
comedy, like the highest pathos, rarely attracts attention by making
great shows. Only the "lower forms of the comical do show themselves
by something extrinsic. The highest in life does not make a showing,
because it belongs to the last sphere of inwardness." No society is in
good health without laughing at itself quietly and privately; no character
is sound without self-scrutiny, without turning inward to see
where it may have overreached itself. The perception of the self as
comic touches the quick; and honest self-inspection must bring a
sense of the comical. This kind of awareness is an initiation into the
civilized condition; it lightens the burden of selfishness, cools the heat
of the ego, makes us impressionable by others.
So the comic spirit keeps us pure in mind by requiring that we regard
ourselves skeptically. Indeed this spirit is an agent of that
civilizing activity Matthew Arnold called "criticism," which is essential
to "culture." It is an activity necessary to middle-class society, where
we gravitate easily toward that dead center of self-satisfaction, the
Philistine. Arnold tells us why criticism brings salvation, and why
culture is criticism:
And thus culture begets a dissatisfaction, which is of the highest possible value
in stemming the common tide of men's thoughts in a wealthy and industrial
community, and which saves the future, as one may hope, from being vulgarized,
even if it cannot save the present. (Culture and Anarchy)
Shakespeare's plays, says Meredith, are saturated with the golden
light of comedy-the comedy that is redemptive as tragedy cannot be.
Consider what happens in Much Ado About Nothing when Benedick
makes the startling comic discovery that he himself, together with
the other mistaken people in the play, is a fool. Here is a moral
perception that competes with tragic "recognition." The irony of