Shakespeare's Comedies Research Articles

Stage, page, scandals, and vandals: William E. Burton and nineteenth-century American theatre

In this first modern book-length biography of native Englander William E. Burton, theatre historian David L. Rinear explores s diary, letters, published reviews, and various reminiscences to reveal the tumultuous personal and professional lives of the mid-nineteenth-century actor/manager and his role in American literary history. Page, Scandals, and Vandals: William E. and Nineteenth-Century American Theatre provides insight into the cultural and artistic climate of an early period in American history when the country was still forming a national identity.Burton fled England in 1834 and came to America in the wake of a public scandal caused by his marriage to a sixteen-year-old orphan. was then already married with a ten-year-old son. Settling in Philadelphia, the thirty-two-year-old actor rapidly established himself in the city s theatrical productions and quickly became an audience favorite.In 1837, while continuing to act, founded and edited The Gentleman s Magazine, a monthly literary publication later called Burton s Gentleman s Magazine.Burton hired struggling author Edgar Allan Poe as coeditor, and the journal achieved literary acclaim as it first published many of Poe s short stories and poems.Burton sold the journal in 1841 and used the money to build a new theatre, which he managed, although the depression of the early 1840s soon drove his venture out of business. After declaring bankruptcy the following year, worked as a touring actor before returning to theatre management in 1845. For the next thirteen years, managed a succession of theatres in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York.Burton s work as a producer of Shakespearean comedies and romances marks him as the first of the intellectual theatre managers to raise the theatrical experience from mere popular culture to high art. made a fortune in his ventures, amassed the finest private Shakespearean library in the country, and built a grand seaside estate in Glen Cove, Long Island. Shrewd in his personal affairs and in business, also had a violent temper, which led him to viciously attack his competitors. His peculiar domestic relationships marred his brilliant career as an actor, manager, and man of letters; he may have been married to three women at once and lived with two of these women simultaneously.Fully revealing s contributions to American culture, Rinear traces s personal and professional pursuits from his emigration to his death in 1860. Bolstered by twenty-two illustrations, Stage, Page, Scandals, and Vandals sheds light on the history of American entertainment during the antebellum era, exposes the ruthless business practices required to succeed in theatre and literary magazine publishing, and reveals a sense of what constituted celebrity status in mid-nineteenth-century America.

Review: The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theater

Review: The Taste of the Town: Shakespearian Comedy and the Early Eighteenth-Century Theater

Urban Misidentification in The Comedy of Errors and the Cony-Catching Pamphlets

This essay argues that the cony-catching pamphlets of the 1590s form a central context for Shakespeare's early comedy. The play and the pamphlets point to an early modern fascination with misidentification as a gauge of the social order. Social exchange itself, fraught with cultural assumptions that inhibit communication, gives rise to misidentification. This allows criminals to insert themselves into social circles at will, while causing general chaos even in the absence of devious intent in Shakespeare's comedy. Both the play and the rogue texts leave us with the impression of a social order that is already destabilized from within.

"The world must be peopled": Shakespeare's comedies of forgiveness

This performance-oriented study proposes the dramatic subgenre of to describe four Shakespeare plays that have traditionally been staged as if they were romantic comedies. 'The Two Gentlemen of Verona', 'Much Ado About Nothing', 'All's Well that Ends Well', and 'Measure for Measure' all feature young heroes who behave badly, apologize weakly, yet quickly earn the complete forgiveness of their societies. This book suggest feminist stagings of the comedies of forgiveness designed to reveal how society deals with masculine fickleness, suspicion, lust, and sexual irresponsibility by channelling male erotic desire towards courtship, marriage, legitimate procreation, and childrearing.

Shakespeare in a Blender

As a collective with four to six members at any one time, A Company of Fools’ mandate is to create innovative and accessible pieces based on the works of William Shakespeare. The company, which currently consists of core members Margo MacDonald, Scott Florence, Elizabeth Logue, Stéfanie Séguin and Al Connors, interprets this mandate two ways: as full-length shows performed with their own spin (most often using elements of clown) and as “Shakespeare in a blender” (a collage piece, a show made up of a collection of themes from Shakespeare or Shakespeare rewritten with improvisational elements involved.) In both instances, the result is generally irreverent – a function of the very physical, presentational and interactive style of the players. Described variously as a Shakespeare comedy troupe, an antidote to boring, conventional Shakespeare, and (by one of the members) as what happens when “the Marx Brothers make coffee for the Monty Python gang at a slumber party where everyone is watching Bugs Bunny” (Florence, Interview), Ottawa’s A Company of Fools has maintained its entertaining, exuberant take on Shakespeare by not taking their source material too seriously. Through their adaptations of Shakespeare, especially the re-workings of scenes in new contexts with unexpected twists, the Fools – as they are commonly called in Ottawa – seem to epitomize a most Canadian attribute: their cultural productions do not disrupt Shakespeare as a dominant cultural figure but playfully adapt his writing and situations for their own comedic ends.

:Shakespeare's Dramatic Genres

Note on Texts The Genres in Theory The Genres Staged Mr William Shakespeare's Comedies History Tragedy Epilogue Notes Further Reading Index

As You Like It, Rosalynde, and Mutuality

Over years, critics have noted a variety of thematic oppositions in As You Like It: fortune versus nature, country versus court, a view of time medium of decay versus time medium of fulfillment, contrary notions of identity, the conspicuous narrative artifice of opening scenes versus equally prominent theatrical artifice in forest scenes, two different manipulative modes, and, most recently, concerns of a generally privileged versus the concerns of wage laborers, servants, and clowns.' Even play's title seems to refer to an opposition between audience and author, leading George Bernard Shaw, for one, to read it as a snub of audience's taste: here is what you, spectators, like (but I, playwright, do not).2 Are oppositions placed in a kind of balance by end of play (at least in character of Rosalind), dissolved by play's skeptical treatment of seemingly clear-cut distinctions, or are they necessarily partial and constrained gestures toward recognizing value of what might have seemed to Shakespeare and his audience to be culturally subversive attitudes?3 It all appears to hinge on whether we think Shakespearean comedy creates harmony among discordant elements, acts like a solvent on social constructions of difference, or serves to contain (though not always completely) threats to dominant social and cultural order its characters might sometimes express or embody. None of these formulations, however, addresses what I would argue is most important aspect of drama: dynamic nature of relationship between audience and play, spectator

Borrowing the Language of Lawyers: the Rhetoric of the Law in Shakespeare's Comedies

Borrowing the Language of Lawyers: the Rhetoric of the Law in Shakespeare's Comedies

Deaths in the Family: The Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy

ISTRESSED BY THE CRITICAL HABIT of imposing fanciful connections from Shakespeare's life onto his plays, C. J. Sisson declared that dramatizing of Shakespeare the man has gone too far.'1 irritant immediately at hand for Sisson in The Mythical Sorrows of his 1934 British Academy lecture, was J. Dover Wilson's 1932 study Essential Shakespeare: A Biographical Adventure. But the claims that bothered Sisson had history: behind Dover Wilson was Dowden's more-or-less biographically based periodization of Shakespeare, and behind Dowden was Coleridge, and infecting both Dowden and Coleridge and other English writers from Hallam to Swinburne to Frank Harris, Sisson complained, were the Germans. From Friedrich Schlegel, originator of the Shakespeare who appeals to Nazi Germany, as'rather an old-Northern poet than Christian poet';' to Georg Brandes, who believed Shakespeare's sufferings drove him, in Timon of Athens, to anticipate Schopenhauer, a feat which to Brandes appeared to be wholly praiseworthy, the biographical fantasies of German criticism had occluded the essentially Christian of Shakespeare's drama with gloom-haunted pseudo-romantic sentimentalism:'2 As the title of his lecture suggests, Sisson was particularly troubled by critics who found in the tragedies, from Hamlet on, the despair and disillusionment of poet who has been plunged into melancholy by events in his own life as well as by the spirit of the times. Sisson forcefully captured the absurdity of this tendency in his brief summaries of the offending critics. Bernhard Ten Brink claimed, Sisson wrote, that raging bitterness of spirit supervened in Shakespeare's drama beginning in 1601 and reigned unabated until Shakespeare found renewed hope after 1607:

"Her filthy feature open showne" in Ariosto, Spenser, and Much Ado about Nothing

Scholars have long identified Ludovico Ariosto's famous tale of Ariodante and Ginevra as the primary source for Edmund Spenser's Phedon-Claribell episode in book 2 of 7he Faerie Queene.1 They also typically cite Spenser's and Ariosto's versions of the story among probable subtexts for the Hero-Claudio plot in William Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing.2 Recently, Much Ado's concern with the violence underpinning chivalric romance ideals, on the one hand, and the affinity between its representations of theatrical practice and those found in contemporary attacks against the stage, on the other, have been noted by John Traugott andJeanHowardrespectively.3 This article, too, will discuss Shakespeare's comedy together with epic-romance and antitheatrical rhetoric. In so doing, however, it will examine not only the familiar motif of a beautiful woman falsely exposed as a whore but another juxtaposed with it in both Ariosto and Spenser and appropriated, in turn, by English antitheatricalists: the beautiful enchantress exposed as a whorish hag. The enchantress herself has a long literary history, one in which erotic pleasures and dangers frequently stand, in part, for the pleasures and dangers of representation itself. Plutarch is perhaps the first explicitly to employ the analogy between a romance hero confronting a temptress's wiles and a reader facing literary seductions. His How the Young Man Should Study Poetry admits Plato's charge (in the Republic) that even allegorical poetry may corrupt young men: 'Bad may be found in the head of the cuttle-fish; good there is also,' because it is very pleasant to eat but it makes one's sleep full of bad dreams and subject to strange and disturbing fancies, as they say. Similarly in the art of poetry there is much that is pleasant

:Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives

Elizabethan Fictions is a study of the works of John Lyly, George Gascoigne, Geoffrey Fenton, William Baldwin, and a number of other English writers in the context of changing attitudes to fiction in Elizabethan England. Both the censors and the writers of the time were aware that the developments in Elizabethan prose threatened to transform the nature of fiction itself, and it was felt that these destructive capabilities might constitute a material threat to the security of the Elizabethan state. Maslen explores their violations of current conventions, their mockery of contemporary platitudes, their self-conscious stylishness, and their subtlety, and makes the case for these fictions to be seen as the precursors of Shakespeare's comedies, Sidney's prose epics, and the satires of Marlowe and Nashe.

Professional Voices/Classroom Portrai: Where There’s a Will, There’s a Playt

Describes a popular yearly activity at one middle school in which a production of a Shakespearean comedy becomes the centerpiece of an interdisciplinary unit on the Elizabethan Period involving language arts, social studies, math, science, music, art, technical education, home economics, and the learning center.

A Preface to Shakespeare's Comedies: 1594-1603.

List of illustrations. Prefaratory note and acknowledgements. Prologue Shakespeare's England- an overview. Part One: Contexts of Comedy. 1 Laughter and Elizabethan Society. 2 Fools, clowns and jesters. 3 An audience for comedy. 4 Twentieth century readers of comedy. Part Two: Critical Analysis. 5 Shakespeare's early comedies 1588-94. 6 A Midsummer Night's Dream c.1595. 7 Much Ado About Nothing 1598-9. 8 As You Like It c. 1599 9 Twelfth Night. Part Three: Reference Section. Short Biographies. Further Reading. Appendix: The Theatre of Shakespeare's London. Index

A preface to Shakespeare's comedies, 1594-1603

A preface to Shakespeare's comedies, 1594-1603

Shakespeare and Classical Comedy: The Influence of Plautus and Terence

This book surveys Shakespeare's comedies, charting the influence upon them of the ancient playwrights, Plautus and Terence. Robert Miola analyses these sources, and places the comedies in their Renaissance context, as well as in the larger context of European theatre. Discovering new indebtedness, and discerning new patterns in previously attested borrowings, Shakespeare and Classical Comedy presents an integrated and comprehensive assessment of the complex interactions of the Classical, Shakesparian, and other Renaissance theatres. Robert Miola re-evaluates Plautus and Terence in the light of the Greek antecedents, and gives special attention to Renaissance translations and commentaries, Italian theorists, and playwrights, as well as contemporary dramtist such as Middleton, Joson, Heywood, and Chapman. Four broad catergories organize the discussion - New Comedic errors, intrigue, alazoneia, and romance - and each is illustrated by illuminating readings of individual Shakespearian plays. The author keeps in view Shakespeare's eclecticism, his habit of combining disparate sources and traditions, as well as the rich history of literary criticism and theatrical interpretation. The book concludes by discussing the presence of New Comedy in tragedy, in Hamlet and King Lear. Robert Miola's thoroughly researched book ranges over a vast amount of European drama, from Aristophanes to Beckett and Ionesco. It makes an important contribution to our understanding not only of Shakespeare and of his foremost antecedents, but also of his artistry and achievement.

“Good night, sweet prince”: Saying goodbye to the dead in shakespeare's plays

Abstract Themes of death and loss have often been treated with greater eloquence in literature than in psychology and the helping professions. This article explores the treatment of bereavment and mortality in some of Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies, illustrating his deep understanding of the place of loss in human life.

As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women by Penny Gay

Reviews305 are at odds and disintegrating on all sides. Being staged in numerous cities of the world in synchronized spectacles, its dramatization of symbolic and seemingly unrelated images thus comprises a unified image such as Pound perceived in Haiku. For all his scholarship Lee is sometimes confused about dates: for instance, he writes that the Japoniste painter Whistler introduced Japanese art through Ezra Pound to Americans in Paris who had contacts with Impressionist painters. However, by the time Pound was living in Paris and London, Whistler had already died (in 1903, when Pound was eighteen years of age). Likewise, it is odd to say that Gordon Craig first learned about Japanese art through his "friendship" with Whistler and Impressionist artists when, in fact, there was an age difference of nearly forty years between the two: rather, Whistler was the best friend of Craig's father, the Japoniste architect and theater designer W. E. Godwin. The Japanese translation is well executed in smooth, idiomatic expressions , with the exception of some technical terms that are vague. The overall presentation of intercultural and interdisciplinary research is illuminating and will help the reader understand the extremely intricate nature of theatrical inter-fusions over the past century. One hopes that this study will be made available to a wider audience through an English translation in the near future. YOKO CHIBA St. Lawrence University Penny Gay. As She Likes It: Shakespeare' s Unruly Women. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Pp. xii + 208. $16.95 (paperback). In As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women, Penny Gay examines post-World War II British productions of Shakespeare's comedies from a materialist feminist position to demonstrate the "retextualization " that occurs in dramatic performance and its importance in stage representations of gender (p. 178). Her study, which focuses on the multiplicity of stage interpretations and the relationship between a director's conception of a play and contemporary cultural ideology, undercuts the traditional view of one pure Shakespearean text. As she puts it, "In our postmodern culture, directors know that there is no such thing as a simple 'trust in the given material'; it has no intrinsic life, and it must be read in such a way as to engage an audience which itself reads intertextually" (p. 72). Gay is strong in proving her main point, that no such thing as a '"true Shakespearean' criterion" exists, for "Fashions in gender performance are as much subject to historical change as any other fashions" (p. 26). Gay effectively demonstrates that 306Comparative Drama the belief in a timeless and apolitical Shakespearean production has been undermined in recent years through examination of the performance histories of five comedies: Twelfth Night, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Much Ado About Nothing. In tracing the histories of these productions, Gay deals with the problem of comedy on which much feminist criticism of the 1980's was centered. In Shakespearean comedy, Gay contends, "a conventional (patriarchal) community is revitalised by the incorporation, through the institution of marriage, of the remarkable energies of a charismatic female presence; yet she has spent much of the play flouting patriarchal protocols" (p. 178). This paradox, she argues, can lead to productions that open up possibilities for feminist revisions less likely to emerge "in the study" of these plays (p. 178), but often these possibilities are closed off because of the anti-feminist social climate in which they are produced. In her study, Gay locates an overall pattern in the history of gender and the Shakespearean stage—a pattern that coincides with social conditions of the time. In the post-World War II era, for instance, productions endowed Shakespeare's unruly women with the illusion of an underlying, essential "femininity" to mitigate their threat to traditional gender ideology; in the I960's to 1970's, however, this attitude began to shift, and stage productions that were clearly influenced by the woman's movement challenged complacently conservative representations of Shakespeare's comic heroines. Conversely, in the early eighties (under Thatcher's tenure), an anti-feminist backlash transformed these same transgressive female characters into either "bitches" or "vulnerable outsiders" on stage (p. 179). Currently, there appears...

Books

Journal Article Books Get access Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream: Making an Opera from Shakespeare's Comedy William H. L. GodsalveMadison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995 237 pages, $39.50 Joe K. Law Joe K. Law Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 12, Issue 3, Spring 1996, Pages 89–91, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/12.3.89 Published: 01 March 1996

Shakespeare's Paradoxical Victory: the 1990s

The fall of communism in Poland has meant that theatre is no longer a substitute for normal public and political life—the Denmark of Hamlet has ceased to be the necessary metaphor for our prison, and the attractions of a gloomy Prince, representing repressed Poland, have waned. There is now a burgeoning interest in Shakespearian comedy, shared by theatre people and their spectators.

Shakespeare's Early Comedies: Myth, Metamorphosis, Mannerism

Shakespeare's Early Comedies: Myth, Metamorphosis, Mannerism