Recent research shows how much of a social climber Shakespeare was. The knowledge gives us new insight into characters like Malvolio and Othello.
Tag Archives: Comedy
Shakespeare Was Malvolio
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, Jane Austen, social climbing, Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Comedy & Sentiment, a Potent Mixture
Literature that moves the heart seems opposed to comedy, but sometimes they work together.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Charles Dickens, Clarissa, couples comedy, Henry Fielding, Henry MacKenzie, Jane Austen, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Man of Feeling, Old Curiosity Shop, Oscar Wilde, romantic comedy age of sensibility, Samuel Richardson, Sense and Sensibility, Thomas Hobbes, Tom Jones Comments closed
Why Do We Laugh? Various Theories
Whether you see laughter as benign or hostile may come down to what kind of person you are.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Anthony Ashley Cooper, Laughter, Leviathan, Mikhail Bakhtin, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Hobbes Comments closed
The Tragicomedy of High School Dating
“She Stoops to Conquer” captures all the pain of adolescent dating failures.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Dating, Oliver Goldsmith, Relationships, She Stoops to Conquer Comments closed
The Horror of Sex without Love
Sex without love, the subject of several sex comedies this past summer, was also an issue explored by poets and playwrights in the British Restoration.
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Against Constancy, Country Wife, Film, Friends with Benefits, John Wilmot, Libertine, No Strings Attached, sex, Sex without Love, Sharon Olds, William Wycherley Comments closed
The Greatest Clown of Them All
Film Friday I have wonderful childhood memories of going to the movies with my parents. That’s why I am particularly fond of the opening scene of James Agee’s novel Death in the Family (1957), where six-year-old Rufus is shown attending a Charlie Chaplin short with his father. The year is 1915. I have seen many […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged Charlie Chaplin, Death in the Family, Film, James Agee Comments closed
A Punch in the Gut of Excessive Sobriety
Punch and Judy Let’s declare another comedy Friday and celebrate again the wit of Henry Fielding. My first passage is a continuation of the mock epic encomium (expression of praise) to the book’s heroine that I posted yesterday: Reader, perhaps thou hast seen the statue of the Venus de Medicis. Perhaps, too, thou hast seen the gallery […]
Henry Fielding’s Comic Touch
I’ve just written a series of serious posts about literature and virtue, but since it’s Friday, let me go out of the week on a light note. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones is not admired the way it once was, but one would be hard pressed to find any novel that is funnier. I share here […]
