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"C. L. Barber"
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Shakespeare's Festive Comedy
In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity.
\"I have been led into an exploration of the way the social form of Elizabethan holidays contributed to the dramatic form of festive comedy. To relate this drama to holiday has proved to be the most effective way to describe its character. And this historical interplay between social and artistic form has an interest of its own: we can see here, with more clarity of outline and detail than is usually possible, how art develops underlying configurations in the social life of a culture.\"--C. L. Barber, in the Introduction
This new edition includes a foreword by Stephen Greenblatt, who discusses Barber's influence on later scholars and the recent critical disagreements that Barber has inspired, showing thatShakespeare's Festive Comedyis as vital today as when it was originally published.
eBook
A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle
Two questions have confronted me in reading Milton’s Ludlow Mask. How does Milton succeed—and I feel he does succeed—in making a happy work which centers, seemingly, on the denial of impulse, when typically in the Renaissance such works involve, in some fashion or other, release from restraint? Second, what is the form of the piece? how does it relate to Renaissance comedy and allied traditions? The answer to the question about its form, with which I shall begin, will I hope provide means for understanding how it orders and satisfies feeling.
The work of criticism, as against the
Book Chapter
Shakespeare’s festive comedy
In this classic work, acclaimed Shakespeare critic C. L. Barber argues that Elizabethan seasonal festivals such as May Day and Twelfth Night are the key to understanding Shakespeare's comedies. Brilliantly interweaving anthropology, social history, and literary criticism, Barber traces the inward journey--psychological, bodily, spiritual--of the comedies: from confusion, raucous laughter, aching desire, and aggression, to harmony. Revealing the interplay between social custom and dramatic form, the book shows how the Elizabethan antithesis between everyday and holiday comes to life in the comedies' combination of seriousness and levity.
eBook
Preference for Counseling Approach as a Function of Emotional Locus of Control and Personal Relevance
Finds that subjects with an internal emotional locus of control favour cognitive workshops whereas externals prefer behavioural workshops. Using a personal relevance measure finds involved subjects prefer the approach consistent with their perception of the origin of their emotions whereas uninvolved subjects show no preference. (Original abstract-amended)
Journal Article
The Merchants and the Jew of Venice
When Nashe, inSummer’s Last Will and Testament, brings on a Christmas who is a miser and refuses to keep the feast, the kill-joy figure serves, as we have noticed,¹ to consolidate feeling in support of holiday. Shakespeare’s miser inThe Merchant of Venicehas the same sort of effect in consolidating the gay Christians behind Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strained.” The comic antagonist as we get him in Nashe’s churlish Christmas, uncomplicated by such a local habitation as Shakespeare developed for Shylock, is a transposed image of the pageant’s positive spokesmen for holiday. Summer reminds him,
Book Chapter
The Folly of Wit and Masquerade in Love’s Labour’s Lost
It seems likely that when inLove’s Labour’s LostShakespeare turned to festivity for the materials from which to fashion a comedy, he did so because he had been commissioned to produce something for performance at a noble entertainment. There can be no doubt about this in the case ofA Midsummer Night’s Dream, though just what noble wedding was graced by Shakespeare’s dramatic epithalamium no one has been able to determine.¹ But though nothing inLove’s Labour’s Lostpoints unambiguously out across the dramatic frame to an original occasion, the way the fairy blessing does at the end of
Book Chapter
Introduction
Much comedy is festive—all comedy, if the word festive is pressed far enough. But much of Shakespeare’s comedy is festive in a quite special way which distinguishes it from the art of most of his contemporaries and successors. The part of his work which I shall be dealing with in this book, the merry comedy written up to the period ofHamletand the problem plays, is of course enormously rich and wide in range; each new play, each new scene, does something fresh, explores new possibilities. But the whole body of this happy comic art is distinguished by
Book Chapter
Rule and Misrule in Henry IV
The two parts ofHenry IV, written probably in 1597 and 1598, are an astonishing development of drama in the direction of inclusiveness, a development possible because of the range of the traditional culture and the popular theater, but realized only because Shakespeare’s genius for construction matched his receptivity. We have noticed briefly in the introductory chapter how, early in his career, Shakespeare made brilliant use of the long standing tradition of comic accompaniment and counterstatement by the clown.¹ Now suddenly he takes the diverse elements in the potpourri of the popular chronicle play and composes a structure in which
Book Chapter
Testing Courtesy and Humanity in Twelfth Night
The title ofTwelfth Nightmay well have come from the first occasion when it was performed, whether or not Dr. Leslie Hotson is right in arguing that its first night was the court celebration of the last of the twelve days of Christmas on January 6, 1600–1601.¹ The title tells us that the play is like holiday misrule—though not just like it, for it adds “or what you will.” The law student John Manningham, who saw it at the Middle Temple’s feast on February 2, 1602, wrote in his diary that it was “much like the Comedy
Book Chapter