{"title":"Encountering the Present II","authors":"Andy Kesson","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198727682.013.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198727682.013.5","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter rereads the generic boundaries of Shakespeare’s writing by exploring two different, and potentially opposed, meanings of the word ‘comedy’ in the sixteenth century. On the one hand, comedy was a recognizable classical concept, representing a range of generic possibilities with implications for tone, prosody, character range and narrative expectation. On the other hand, comedy had also become a vernacular English word which might mean little more than play or story, with no implication about content or style. This chapter suggests that Shakespeare was much more active than previously recognized in creating a dramatic genre built around self-consciously classical principles. The subsequent canonization of Shakespeare’s idiosyncratic take on the genre has in turn inflected the way the much more fluid work of his contemporaries has been read and understood. This chapter explores the multiple meanings of comedy in this early period alongside Shakespeare’s active intervention within it.","PeriodicalId":421471,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy","volume":"129 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122901473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Shakespearean Comedy and the Early Modern Domestic Sphere","authors":"C. Richardson","doi":"10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198727682.013.9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/OXFORDHB/9780198727682.013.9","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is about the relationship between comic form and domestic politics—about how Shakespeare makes comedy out of household encounters, and how his plays might have intervened in current political thinking about family life and gender relations. Bringing the plays into dialogue with a range of contemporary prescriptive literature about household practice, it argues that the relationship between comedy as a genre and the patriarchal ideals of domestic organization which structured early modern society was a turbulent one, and that this adds to the plays’ political purchase and their theatrical power. The essay looks in detail at relationships between household heads, children and parents, and servants and their masters, focusing on the qualities of submission and authority which Shakespeare develops in his verse and staging—it aims to answer the question, just how does he put domestic encounters on the early modern stage?","PeriodicalId":421471,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Comedy","volume":"13 3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-09-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130521205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}