Shakespearean Comedy and the Senses

2018 ◽  
pp. 235-249
Author(s):  
Kevin Curran
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sensory Experience ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Powerful Source ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Senses

In Shakespeare’s comedies, sensation is both a problem and a solution. It is the source of division and the grounds of unity. This paradox is consistent with the early modern period’s mixed conception of the senses. If antitheatrical tracts and clerical literature denounced sensory experience as an impediment to truth and spiritual understanding, printed defences of theatre and a variety of medical and psychological tracts treated the senses as a powerful source of knowledge and judgement. This essay traces how Shakespeare’s treatment of the senses relates to both of these traditions. It addresses the connection between this double rendering of sensation and comic form and concludes by considering the ethical implications of sensory experience in the theatre. Examples are drawn from a variety of plays, including The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It.

scholarly journals Shakespeare Comes to Indonesia

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (25) ◽  
pp. 99-119
Author(s):  
Michael Skupin
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Indirect Influence ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Dutch Translation ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Lengthy Discussion

This paper discusses the circumstances of Shakespeare’s arrival in Indonesia via the translations of Trisno Sumardjo, published in the early 1950’s. Biographical material about the translator will be presented, and there will be a discussion of the characteristics the Indonesian language and of Indonesian verse which would determine the expectations of his readers, such as rhyme, meter and style, that would influence his renderings of the poetic passages in the Bard’s plays. These are illustrated in a sampling of passages from As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice. The Dutch translation of L. A. J. Burgersdijk was an indirect influence on the translations, and not always for the good. The paper concludes with a lengthy discussion of the extremely difficult problems that Sumardjo encountered in his translation of King Lear. This Lear was not published during the translator’s lifetime, Sumardjo’s prestige notwithstanding because he was not satisfied with the solutions he proposed.

5. Shakespeare and comic form

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley Wells
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost

Nearly half of Shakespeare’s plays, extending throughout his career, are written in comic form though they play a wide range of variations on it. ‘Shakespeare and comic form’ describes the five earliest as the lightest in tone, but in the five that follow, Shakespeare introduces an antagonist who must be expelled before the play can end happily. The later comedies were written for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The plays considered are The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night.

Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

Two Hamlets

Tempo ◽  
1969 ◽  
pp. 6-12
Author(s):  
Stephen Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Original Text ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Although Shakespeare has in the past been freely plundered for musical settings of every kind—from song to opera—it still seems a fair generalisation to say that his best work does not lend itself to this kind of treatment. Perhaps the most successful of all Shakespeare operas in English is Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which follows closely the text of one of the less substantial comedies. Of The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, no satisfactory opera has apparently been made (though Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict contains charming music), and for much the same reason—namely Shakespeare's unrivalled genius for linguistic imagery—the great tragedies have resisted direct musical setting, Boito's Otello and Piave's Macbeth being, of course, free derivatives, not translations. Only in our own century has it become normal to set Shakespeare's tragedies in the original text, translated or otherwise.

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