COMEDY

86 THE BODYThey are healthily sceptical of the pretensions and promises ofpoliticians, and their own unabashed physicality makes them insiston recognizing and celebrating man’s links with nonhumancreation. Monstrous egoists and opportunists, they are enemies ofsociety, but also its raffish saviors.(Barton, 1985:133)In the final battle at Shrewsbury, Falstaff carries a bottle of wine wherehis pistol should be, falsely boasts of killing Percy, feigns death to avoidinjury, and ultimately lives, enacting the image of a carnivalresurrection, and a life-affirming, if dishonourable, alternative topolitics and warfare. As C.L.Barber writes: ‘Whereas, in the tragedy,the reduction is to the body which can only die, here reduction is to abody which typifies our power to eat and drink our way through ashambles of intellectual and moral contradictions’ (Barber, 1963:213).Just as the end of 2 Henry IV sees Falstaff banished from Hal’spresence on pain of death, and kings and carnival strictly kept apart,after the renaissance the grotesque appears to have been relegated to themargins of comedy. Neo-classical comedies of manners privileged witover physical humour, and revised concepts of authorship meant that theonus fell increasingly on performers to respect the integrity of the text tothe detriment of clownish improvisation. At this stage, we can seecomedy draw away from the body and privilege plot, evinced by theplays of Molière, Marivaux, Etherege, Wycherley, and others, whoseplays accelerate action verbally while simultaneously decreasing thespace it occupies.Although the grotesque withdrew from comic literature, it enjoyed acoincidental rise in the graphic arts, especially as caricature. Caricature,taken from the Italian, caricare, meaning ‘to overdetermine’ or ‘tooverload’, isolates particular features in its subjects, the nose, say, andenlarges, alters, or otherwise manipulates them in order to emphasizeparticular qualities of appearance. Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), whowrote a series of articles on caricature, considered it an example of the‘comique absolu’, or absolute comic, because its grotesque distortionshad the power to shock the viewer into an awareness of the ironicduality of life, ‘at once embodying and exposing the division andfragmentation of the modern subject, representing and revealing theterrifying and exhilarating otherness of modern experience’ (Hanoosh,1992:4). Caricature operates according to the principle that we are allpotentially monstrous, as the prominently exaggerated or alteredfeatures communicate the identity of the subject depicted, and so