May Games and Metamorphoses on a Midsummer Night

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost

This chapter examines Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. It argues that the whole night's action is presented as a release of shaping fantasy which brings clarification about the tricks of strong imagination. We watch a dream; but we are awake, thanks to pervasive humor about the tendency to take fantasy literally, whether in love, in superstition, or in Bottom's mechanical dramatics. As in Love's Labour's Lost, the folly of wit becomes the generalized comic subject in the course of an astonishing release of witty invention, so here in the course of a more inclusive release of imagination, the folly of fantasy becomes the general subject, echoed back and forth between the strains of the play's imitative counterpoint.

The Alliance of Seriousness and Levity in As You Like It

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Prose Romance ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines Shakespeare's As You Like It. The play is very similar in the way it moves to A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labour's Lost, despite the fact that its plot is taken over almost entirely from Lodge's Rosalynde. It argues that the reality we feel about the experience of love in the play, reality which is not in the pleasant little prose romance, comes from presenting what was sentimental extremity as impulsive extravagance and so leaving judgment free to mock what the heart embraces. The Forest of Arden, like the Wood outside Athens, is a region defined by an attitude of liberty from ordinary limitations, a festive place where the folly of romance can have its day.

The Folly of Wit and Masquerade in Love’s Labour’s Lost

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Fresh Start ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
Exciting Action

This chapter examines Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. It argues that the most striking thing about the play is how little Shakespeare used exciting action, story, or conflict; how far he went in the direction of making the piece a set exhibition of pastimes and games. The play is a strikingly fresh start, a more complete break with what he had been doing earlier in his career. The change goes with the fact that there are no theatrical or literary sources, so far as anyone has been able to discover, for what story there is in the play—Shakespeare, here and in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and nowhere else, makes up everything himself, because he is making up action on the model of games and pastimes.

The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealth’s Communion and an Intruder

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Direct Influence ◽  
Large Structure ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Symbolic Action ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
Organic Combination

This chapter examines Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. This play as a whole is not shaped by festivity in the relatively direct way as in Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play's large structure is developed from traditions which are properly theatrical; it is not a theatrical adaptation of a social ritual. And yet analogies to social occasions and rituals prove to be useful in understanding the symbolic action. The chapter pursues such analogies without suggesting, in most cases, that there is a direct influence from the social to the theatrical form. Shakespeare here is working with autonomous mastery, developing a style of comedy that makes a festive form for feeling and awareness out of all the theatrical elements, scene, speech, story, gesture, role which his astonishing art brought into organic combination.

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.

Introduction: The Saturnalian Pattern

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. L. Barber
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Henry Iv ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost ◽  
Many Sources ◽  
Direct Use ◽  
Artistic Tradition

This chapter explores the connections between Shakespeare's comedies and Elizabethan holidays. It argues that the saturnalian pattern came to Shakespeare from many sources, both in social and artistic tradition. It appeared in the theatrical institution of clowning: the clown or Vice, when Shakespeare started to write, was a recognized anarchist who made aberration obvious by carrying release to absurd extremes. The cult of fools and folly, half social and half literary, embodied a similar polarization of experience. One could formulate the saturnalian pattern effectively by referring first to these traditions: Shakespeare's first completely masterful comic scenes were written for the clowns. But the festival occasion provides the clearest paradigm. It can illuminate not only those comedies where Shakespeare drew largely and directly on holiday motifs, like Love's Labour's Lost, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Twelfth Night, but also plays where there is relatively little direct use of holiday, notably As You Like It and Henry IV.

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