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COMEDY

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24 <strong>COMEDY</strong> IN THE ACADEMYother’ (Baldick, 1996:164). Comic themes were thought to be local andvulgar, antithetical to a vision of art that believed in its ability tocommunicate beyond the moment of its creation like tragedy. A passagefrom A.C. Bradley’s prestigious British Academy lecture of 1912expresses this idea. ‘Most of the great tragedies’, he writes,leave a certain imaginative impression of the highest value….What we witness is not the passion and doom of mere individuals.The forces that meet in tragedy stretch far beyond the little groupof figures and the tiny tract of space and time in which they appear.The darkness that covers the scene, and the light that strikesacross it, are more than our common night and day.(Bradley, 1929:75)The literary establishment view was that comedy did not belong in suchcultured and profound company, and that ‘Comedy and satire should bekept in their proper place, like the moral standards and social classeswhich they symbolize’ (Frye, 1990:22).FERTILITY AND THE ‘ÉLAN VITAL’ :CORNFORD, BERGSON, LANGER‘The history of literary criticism is also the history of attempts to makean honest creature, as it were, of comedy’, writes David Daniell(Daniell 1997: 102). The first significant modern attempt to makecomedy a ‘serious’ object of study appeared in 1914, written by ascholar of Ancient Greece. Francis Macdonald Cornford’s The Originof Attic Comedy is a combination of literary criticism and anthropologythat attempts to reconstruct the sources and forms of the original comicentertainments. Cornford was part of a Cambridge-based movement ofanthropological classicists, and The Origin of Attic Comedy, like JamesGeorge Frazer’s enormous anthropological survey The Golden Bough(1890–1915), is part of a broader school of Edwardian scholarship thatexamined the ceremonies and beliefs of primitive communities in aneffort to see their influence on modern thinking and social organization.Cornford’s text looks in detail at the structure of Greek Old Comedy,especially that of Aristophanes, and demonstrates its ceremonial rootsand the relationship of its characters to significant elements of seasonalrituals. Cornford argues for an aboriginal relationship between comedyand the religiously sanctioned revel and fertility beliefs that stemmedfrom Dionysial and Phallic ritual (Cornford, 1914:3). The study

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