REVIEWS Leo Salingar. Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. New York and London: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Pp. x + 356. $18.00. In this learned and far-ranging study, Leo Salingar places Shake speare “at a meeting-place of medieval, classical and renaissance tradi tions” (p. 19) in order to investigate sources, influences, and artistic choices. After an introductory chapter which deals deftly with such topics as Fortune, artifice, disguise, and anomalies in the mirror concept, Salingar provides a series of chapters organized around the three tra ditions. Chapter 2, devoted to medieval romance, starts with three preShakespearean plays (Clyomon and Clamydes, Common Conditions, and The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune), then treats some medieval heroines, with particular emphasis upon the links between two four teenth-century plays (the Dutch Esmoreit and the French Oton) and The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, and ends with a section on The Comedy of Errors in relation to Apollonius of Tyre and with evidence for the survival of medieval staging. After an introductory section on artificial order and comic errors, Chapter 3 provides a lengthy treatment of the trickster figure in Aristophanes and New Comedy; the next chap ter starts with an historical account of the concept of Fortune and then deals with that concept in Aristophanes and New Comedy, concluding with remarks on Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. Chapter 5 offers a general account of Italian comedy with detailed treatment of three plays (Gl Tngannati, Ariosto’s Suppositi, and Bibbiena’s Calandria) and dis cusses Shakespeare’s indebtedness, with a major section on his comic double plots. The final chapter, which deals with Shakespeare as a pro fessional playwright, treats such topics as wit, the play within a play, the conflict between love and law, and the importance for Shakespeare of Italian novelle. “The medieval tradition,” Salingar argues, “was Shakespeare’s start ing-point” with a hold “too deep to be shaken off” (p. 75). Classical comedy then provided necessary guidelines and materials, such as the “delineation of Fortune in dramatic plots, the role of the trickster in conditioning the presentation of Fortune, and the tradition of drama as an adjunct to seasonal celebrations” (p. 174); to classical comedy, more over, Shakespeare owed “his underlying conception of comedy as a form of theatrical art using logically connected plots to arouse and satisfy expectation and at the same time addressing itself to the spectators’ sense of irony” (p. 174). From the Italians, Shakespeare drew “a famil iarity with Plautus and Terence as contributors to the modern stage, a 350 Reviews 351 group of new dramatic motifs, such as that of the heroine in male dis guise, and, above all, a taste for varied movement in a comedy and intricate plotting” (pp. 190-91). Salingar also stresses Boccaccio’s im portance as “the greatest creative writer whose influence can be felt widely diffused through Shakespeare’s plays, however indirectly” (p. 323). Shakespeare was thereby “using the forms of New Comedy to reshape medieval romance,” while “creating comedies that seem aware of their place in the life of a nation, as perhaps no other comedies had been since the time of Aristophanes” (p. 325). This brief summary cannot do justice to a book which moves easily through medieval, classical, and renaissance materials, providing Sug gestive comments about comic traditions and astute insights into in dividual plays. All readers will benefit from the author’s breadth and critical skill. Yet the book’s multiplicity, its greatest strength, can also puzzle the reader. As Salingar himself points out, given Shake speare’s complexity as a dramatist “it is impossible, or at least, artificial, to isolate one thread in the composition of his plays from the others” (p. 190). Since the chapter divisions necessitate just such isolation of threads, there are difficulties to overcome, difficulties not always mas tered. For example, The Comedy of Errors is treated in some detail in three different chapters (and more briefly elsewhere), each time from a different angle, but there is no weaving together of these threads. Occasionally the chapters appear to be discrete units with little rela tion to each other; for example, for a fuller discussion of the term “exemplary...
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Apr 1, 1978
Robert Weimann + 1
