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3 books match the query 'English drama (Comedy)'
Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies
An Essay on ComediesStuart M. Tave
University of Chicago Press, 1993
Through dreams and shadows and strangeness, through blinding charms and eye-opening counter-charms, through moments of mortification and laughter—thus Stuart M. Tave traces the journey of the lovers, clowns, and fairies who populate comedies from A Midsummer Night's Dream to Waiting for Godot. Tave avoids the pitfalls of theory, taking instead a close look at particular works to give us a sense of the relations between certain dramas and novels that are called comedies. The result is a wonderfully readable book that renews our delight in the enchanting possibilities of literature.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, in its "perfection," is Tave's point of departure. Its characters fall neatly into the three groups of Tave's title and fulfill to perfection their functions of desire, foolishness, and power. From the magical concord of Shakespeare's resolution, Tave moves to works whose character face ever greater difficulties in reaching a happy conclusion. From Jonson and Austen to Chekhov and Beckett, he meets comedies on their own terms, illuminating the complex and individual genius of each. A masterpiece of practical criticism, Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies rediscovers the pleasure of reading comedies.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, in its "perfection," is Tave's point of departure. Its characters fall neatly into the three groups of Tave's title and fulfill to perfection their functions of desire, foolishness, and power. From the magical concord of Shakespeare's resolution, Tave moves to works whose character face ever greater difficulties in reaching a happy conclusion. From Jonson and Austen to Chekhov and Beckett, he meets comedies on their own terms, illuminating the complex and individual genius of each. A masterpiece of practical criticism, Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies rediscovers the pleasure of reading comedies.
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Playing Dirty
Sexuality and Waste in Early Modern ComedyWill Stockton
University of Minnesota Press, 2010
Playing Dirty is full of dirty jokes. Arguing that the early modern excremental body is in many ways an erotic body, Will Stockton—with humor and dry wit—reads psychoanalytic theory through early modern comedies, claiming that it is helpful, rather than inimical, to the project of historicizing the body.
Noting that psychoanalysis has traditionally operated in a paranoid framework that relentlessly produces evidence of the same “truths,” Stockton turns to a minority practice in psychoanalysis—associated with Jean Laplanche—to develop a more “playful” analytic for literary studies. This analytic brings together different discourses of sexuality and the body and allows individual writings to reform psychoanalytic wisdom about sexuality, waste, and comedy. Through original explorations of works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir John Harington, Thomas Nashe, and Geoffrey Chaucer, Stockton further encourages the reconciliation of psychoanalysis and queer historicism. He focuses in large part on the less-often-read texts of the early modern English canon, assessing the ways in which these books have been purged from the canon in the name of generic purity.
Playing Dirty builds on recent calls by Renaissance and medieval queer scholars for a method of literary analysis that is less constrained by the boundaries of periodicity and the supposed exigencies of historicism. To take Playing Dirty seriously is to accept its invitation to “play”—to queerly disrupt the modern divide in moving promiscuously between texts past and present.
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Women and Comedy
Rewriting the British Theatrical TraditionSusan Carlson
University of Michigan Press, 1991
The first comprehensive study of its kind, this book explores the contradictory connections between women and dramatic comedy. Women and Comedy shows how a genre that has been used historically to restrict women's behavior is being reconfigured to express women's triumphs. It thus redefines the assumptions with which both traditional comedy and contemporary women's plays are read and viewed. Challenging a critical consensus that has seen comedy as a haven for female power, Carlson argues that traditional comedy is deeply sexist, welcoming strong women characters only because it can contain their power. Through an analysis of a range of comedies by Shakespeare, Congreve, Maugham, Shaw, and Ayckbourn, the author shows that even in these plays self-consciously about liberated females, women gain only a limited freedom, a freedom that the endings of the plays work to negate. This negotiation is seen to result in part from the comic structure itself, which privileges a merely temporary inversion and an ultimate return to the status quo. Carlson then examines the transitional work of three writers – Aphra Behn, Henry James, and Ann Jellicoe – whose heroines follow an unorthodox trajectory through their comic worlds. While the work of these writers clearly remains within the mainstream comic tradition, the author notes in them a subtle departure, most notably in their description of the heroine as subject rather than object, which prefigures the full-scale transformations of women in comedy by contemporary women writers. The book then examines contemporary comedy that revises traditional comic structure at the same time as it explores fundamental social change. In making her case for the difference of contemporary comedy by women, Carlson examines the reformulations of structure and character and considers issues of community, self, and sexuality in a broad range of plays by individual playwrights and by the new women's theater collectives. Women and Comedy is an important work for students of British drama and will appeal to theater practitioners, critics, feminist scholars, and all those interested in the performing arts.
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