Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare by Alexander Leggatt

Abstract

from the Renaissance to the Victorian Age presented to Professor A.S.P. Woodhouse. Another species of collective volume is the departmental show­ case publication bearing some such name as Studies by Members of the Utopia English Department. With such books motives of advertising, if not collective vanity, begin to edge in upon the field of scholarship. We need not lament that such books have never had a vogue in Canada. Other collective volumes preserve the papers read at conferences. Canada is rather strong on these. But what rationale lies behind Some Facets of "King Lear"? Is it all a matter of fashion? Team research is in vogue not only in the sciences, where it is often necessary and inescapable, but in the humanities, which so often to their own disadvantage try to follow the patterns of the sciences. But, though the preface to this book speaks of "the values of collective and co­ operative scholarship" we find nothing of the "team" approach in Facets. "Prismatic criticism" is a not very suitable metaphor for each contributor losing no time in riding off in his own direction and doing his own thing. Humanists, thank Heaven, are incurable individualists. We happen to have benefited from the publication of this book since it contains so much that is good. But we need a foreword to explain the cryptic comment in the "Afterword" that this was Rosalie Colie's "most characteristic project." 242 English Studies in Canada g .p .v . a k r ig g / University of British Columbia Alexander Leggatt, Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974)- x, 167. $10.00 Citizen Comedy in the Age of Shakespeare was written before Alexander Leggatt's excellent Shakespeare's Comedy of Love (1974) and is in effect a pilot study. It locates what might, ambitiously, be claimed as a genre: it is certainly a helpful term. "For this writer it means comedy set in a predominantly middleclass social milieu" (p 3). Here a necessary reflex is called into play, and Leggatt adds: "That definition, however, raises the considerable problem of defining the middle class." Quite: that was, and is, the name of the game. Hence one falls back upon the available categories of occupation and status: "I have selected plays which do not deal predominantly with the court or the aristocracy, but with the fluid, often ill-defined, area that lies between this and the lowest class of workmen, servants, rogues, and vagabonds." This seems an entirely reason­ able way of framing the term. Much less convincing is the decision to deal only with plays set in England. Leggatt justifies this on grounds of convenience - it restricts the discussion to reasonable limits - and because I am most interested in comedies depicting contemporary social situations 243 Reviews situations the audience themselves might be expected to face - and I feel, as Ben Jonson came to feel, that this can be done most effectively by using a native setting, to which the audience can clearly relate. (Pp 4-5) This is an honestly acknowledged preference. But it is not clear why Leggatt sides with the author of The Alchemist against the author of Volpone, one no less committed to the view that comedy presents “ an image of the times." And if Jonson came to believe in an explicit confrontation between audience and situation, Shakespeare did not. It is important to the argument to consider why. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that Shakespeare never, unless compelled by circumstances, sets a play in England. The histories, of course, define their own location. The Merry Wives of Windsor is a camp follower of Henry IV. King Lear and Cymbeline, set in the mists of pre-history, scarcely count as “ English." The great bulk of the canon exploits a foreign mise-en-scene. Why? The foreign-ness, sometimes a species of the exotic, strengthens the romantic element in the comedies. It distances and thus protects the political plays, indemnifying the author against the charge of direct commentary on affairs of state. Always it enables the playwright to construct a complete society, one adapted to his immediate dramatic ends - the cold and mercantile Venice, the...