COMEDY

30 COMEDY IN THE ACADEMYreduction to narrative units, literary difference is lost through theabsorption into a homogenized structural model. A recurrent problem ofcomedy criticism is its focus on structure and plot over character anddialogue, a result of both the critical prejudice that tragic heroes areindividuals, and the practice of writing comic ones as types. The secondobjection would be the extent to which a large part of The Anatomy ofCriticism depends on our acceptance of Frye’s overall thesis that literaryforms, at least in the originary phases of their development, mirror theprocession of the seasons in what amounts to a grossly extendedpathetic fallacy. Does all literature conform in tone to the overbearinginfluence of four seasons? Are all writers informed by an unconsciousforce that imposes itself on their work through an enigmatic process ofarboreal ventriloquism? Is it entirely inconceivable that a narrativecould be constructed and read outside those terms?Another influential Shakespearean, C.L.Barber, believed thatstructural readings of literature failed to grasp the truth of art. In hisShakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959), he indirectly challenges Fryewith an accusation of insensitivity, writing that, ‘No figure in the carpetis the carpet. There is in the pointing out of patterns something that isopposed to life and art, an ungraciousness which artists in particular feeland resent’ (Barber, 1963:4). For Barber, literature is full of moments of‘design beyond design’ that possess a vitality that resonates muchfurther than the generic and narrative structures in which they areplaced. Barber’s intention, and the nature of his contribution to theunderstanding of comedy, was to demonstrate the relevance of theElizabethan social practice of holiday festivities that inform comedy andare reflected in it. This is a sixteenth-century remodelling of The Originof Attic Comedy, privileging an historicist methodology that holds anunderstanding of original context above other means of reading aliterary text. The practices he invokes include festivals like ‘thecelebration of a marriage, the village wassail or wake… Candlemas,Shrove Tuesday, Hocktide, May Day, Whitsuntide, Midsummer Eve,Harvest-home, Halloween and the twelve days of Christmas seasonending with Twelfth Night’ (Barber, 1963: 5). Such holidays providethe basis for the staged folly, disguise, and masquerade of any number ofShakespeare’s plays. For Barber, comedy is essentially ‘saturnalian’, anexperience of pleasurable merrymaking and social inversion namedafter the revels devoted to the Roman god Saturn. Saturnalian comedy isneither satirical nor political, but devoted to a process Barber calls‘release and clarification’. ‘Release’ refers to the loosening of socialcontrols during holidays, and leads Barber, like Freud, to ascribe comic