Publication details
“With mirth in Funerall, and with Dirge in Marriage”: Shakespeare and Early Modern Frivolous Drama
| Authors | |
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | John Dryden, in his Preface to his adaptation of Troilus and Cressida (1679), instructs that two different independent actions distract the attention and concernment of the audience, and consequently destroy the intention of the poet; if his business be to move terror and pity, and one of his actions he comical, the other tragical, the former will divert the people, and utterly make void his greater purpose. In this he voices French classicists anxious to secure as well as control the audience responses in favour of an unambiguous generic refinement. Pre-classicist drama, not exempting Shakespeare, deals with modes and genres in a more playful and liberated way. Such generic and interpretive fuzziness has been called frivolité (in Ivo Osolsobě's semiotic analysis of French vaudevilles). Shakespearean drama – at the most obvious level – is frivolous in that it distracts a unified action by multiple plots. At more refined levels it plays with the immediate response of the audience by cynical repartee (as Faulconbridge's in King John or Touchstone's in As You Like It) or by constantly drawing attention to the imperfect impersonation on the stage – as in Henry V or in Antony and Cleopatra where Cleopatra wonders "What poore an Instrument | May do a Noble deede" before admitting the Clown, who secures sufficient frivolité for her dying scene. The paper analyzes varieties of frivolité in Shakespeare and his contemporaries observing the varied ways in which the buskin combines with the sock. |
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