The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 - Critical Studies

Summary

Prominent among several new studies of the artistic conventions and historical contexts in which Shakespeare worked is L. Salingar’s comprehensive and masterly account of the traditions of comedy. Salingar’s main interest is in the plot conventions from which comedy derives its dual nature ‘as performance and as representation’, and he traces in detail four lines of genealogical descent that are combined in Shakespeare. The first of these involves a ‘reasoned speculation’ that there existed from the Middle Ages a continuous tradition of popular romance drama, secular and religious, which was Shakespeare’s ‘point of departure’. A full and perhaps disproportionately long discussion of the evolution of classical comedy focuses on the development of the intrigue-plot, with its ‘invitation to the audience to enjoy an exhibition of some form of deceit that distinguishes comedy from romance in the theatre’. Salingar points out that in learning ‘the pleasure of contrivance’ and ‘juggling with the complicity of the audience’ Shakespeare applied the principles of classical comedy to the Elizabethan popular stage more thoroughly than any of his predecessors. The festive element, much discussed in recent criticism of the comedies, is related here to the example of Italian Renaissance comedy in its association of deception, trickery and surprise with carnival masking, ‘an explosion of high spirits licensed and ratified by custom’.