THE BITTER AND THE SWEET OF TRAGICOMEDY: SHAKESPEARE'S ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL AND MONTAIGNE
2014; Wiley; Volume: 102; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/tyr.2014.0029
ISSN1467-9736
Autores Tópico(s)Renaissance Literature and Culture
Resumo6 3 R T H E B I T T E R A N D T H E S W E E T O F T R A G I C O M E D Y S H A K E S P E A R E ’ S A L L ’ S W E L L T H A T E N D S W E L L A N D M O N T A I G N E A R T H U R K I R S C H When Polonius announces the arrival of the stage players in Hamlet , he o√ers a catalogue of the various dramatic genres they can perform: ‘‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historicalpastoral ; scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ, and the liberty, these are the only men.’’ Polonius’s list is characteristically labored but also enlightening, since Shakespeare’s plays themselves are in fact distinguished, above all others, by their ability to mix, if not hyphenate genres. Ultimately derived from the blending of sacred Christian history and secular comic material in the medieval drama of the Incarnation in the mystery cycles, Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is commonly characterized by double plots, one plot in varying degrees elevated and serious, and the other light and comic, where each action is metaphorically related to the other, the practice that Sir Philip Sidney pejoratively dismissed as ‘‘the mingling of clowns and kings,’’ ‘‘mongrel tragicomedy.’’ Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596–97), with its mixture of Shylock’s mercantile world of Venice and Portia’s fairy-tale 6 4 K I R S C H Y world of Belmont, is a notable example, as are the two parts of Henry IV (1597–98), with their combination of the worlds of Falsta√’s tavern and English royal history. In each of these plays the two distinct and generically contrasting plots are frequently juxtaposed, as in cross-cut shots in film; and however interpreted – whether, for example, one inclines in sympathy more toward the world of Belmont and the Venetian aristocracy than to Shylock’s humanization of the stereotype of the Jew, or more toward Falsta √’s comic warmth than to Hal’s cold politics, the plots function together dramatically as a metaphor in action and produce the sense of the multiplicity of experience that was a mark of Shakespeare ’s genius from the first. Beginning around 1603–4, however, in his so-called problem plays All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, Shakespeare turned toward a more ironic conception of tragicomedy, one in which the two generic elements are more inextricably intertwined , and more unsettling. In these plays, as in all four of the last romantic tragicomedies, rather than composing metaphorically parallel threads of action that are occasionally joined, the tragic and the comic actions are mutually dependent and often conflicting. They form what in All’s Well is called a ‘‘mingled yarn, good and ill together,’’ a continuously integrated action that finally does not purge its discrepant elements – as Shylock and Falsta√ are at least nominally purged at the ends of their plays – but incorporates them. This change in Shakespeare’s work was partly stimulated by the popularity in English theater in the opening years of the seventeenth century of the kind of tragicomedy crystallized by the Italian playwright Giovanni Battista Guarini in his Il pastor fido (1590), and by his subsequent extensive theoretical justification of the play’s form in the Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1601). An anonymous English translation of the play, The Faithful Shepherd , was published in 1602, and Guarini’s critical ideas spread rapidly. By 1606 he had become fashionable enough in England for the modish Lady Would-Be in Jonson’s Volpone to declare in an aside: All our English writers, I meane such, as are happy in th’ Italian, T H E B I T T E R A N D T H E S W E E T O F T R A G I C O M E D Y 6...
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