<strong>COMEDY</strong> IN THE ACADEMY 23Gross absurdities, how all their plays be neither right tragedies,nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns, not because thematter so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and shouldersto play a part in majestical matters with neither decency nordiscretion, so as neither the admiration and commiseration, northe right sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragic-comedy obtained.(Sidney, 1991:67)Sidney’s exasperation with mixed modes stems from a desire to imposeconformity on the drama of the Elizabethan stage, and to lend it somegravity. Yet, as Stephen Orgel tells us, comedy was not ‘simply theopposite of tragedy, but…the largest condition of drama’ during thisperiod (Orgel, 1994:36). There is some anecdotal evidence that thecomic aspects of renaissance drama may have been amongst the mostprominent for contemporary audiences. London doctor and astrologerSimon Forman, for example, records his presence at a performance ofThe Winter’s Tale on 15 May 1611. His report differs considerably frommodern readings of the play as it concentrates almost exclusively on theclown character of Autolycus, which leads him to conclude that the playis about ‘feigned beggars or fawning fellows’ (Rowse, 1976:310).Similarly, the Swiss tourist Thomas Platter, in the playhouse for aperformance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the Globe in 1599,mentions little about the tragedy aside the dance that followed it, whichwas performed ‘exceedingly gracefully, according to their custom, twoin each group dressed in men’s and two in women’s apparel’ (quoted inShakespeare, 1998:1).Throughout the medieval and renaissance periods, therefore, it seemsthat a scholarly definition of comedy, loyal to the Aristotelian blueprint,existed separately from popular plays, poems, and other vehicles forhumour. The academy’s apparent distance from popular culture isconfirmed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is concomitantwith the rise of professional English literary studies. Inspired by theVictorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822–88), and largelyconcerned with what Chris Baldick calls ‘questions of literature’s socialfunction’ (Baldick, 1987: 18), the view of comedy in the universities atthis time is best summed up by a footnote in F.R.Leavis’s study of thenovel, The Great Tradition (1948), that calls the work of eighteenthcenturysatirist Laurence Sterne ‘irresponsible’, ‘nasty’, and ‘trifling’(Leavis, 1972:10). As Baldick says elsewhere, critical opinion held that‘the author’s quality of mind [was] reflected in the quality of the literarywork: to speak of the maturity or integrity of one is to commend the
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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78 GENDER AND SEXUALITYsignificance
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86 THE BODYThey are healthily scept
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92 THE BODYin a department store, t
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94 THE BODYWomen have been systemat
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110 POLITICSalmost laughed, it seem
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112 POLITICSsatisfied by Price’s
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114 POLITICSself-centredness of the
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116 POLITICSwho, in their 1944 essa
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118 POLITICS(Ezrahi, 2001:307). Rut
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120 POLITICS
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122 LAUGHTERevidence for his sense
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124 LAUGHTERdevils to expel, there
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126 LAUGHTERand the meane that make
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128 LAUGHTERHere we find the Christ
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130 LAUGHTERof mutual relation from
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134 LAUGHTERceiling, it started lit
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136 LAUGHTERdeferred. For Nancy, th
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138 LAUGHTERsatisfy their desires a
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140 CONCLUSIONhuman imperfection. W
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142 CONCLUSION
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144 GLOSSARYcenturies. Commedia del
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146 GLOSSARYto problematize the ide
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148 GLOSSARY
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150 FURTHER READINGAn extremely acc
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152 BIBLIOGRAPHYErickson and Coppel
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154 BIBLIOGRAPHYDouglas, Mary (1975
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156 BIBLIOGRAPHYContexts and Critic
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158 BIBLIOGRAPHY——(1987), ‘Wi
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160 BIBLIOGRAPHYSynott, Anthony (19
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162 INDEXCavell, Stanley 87-3Chapli
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164 INDEXmarriage 70-77;in British