Shakespeare's Festive Comedy
Subtitle: a Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom
By: C.L. Barber
Edition: New ed. / with a new foreword by Stephen Greenblatt.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 301
ISBN-13: 9781400839858; 9780691149523
Subjects: Manners and customs in literature; Literature and society; Criticism and interpretation; Humorous plays; DRAMA; English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh; LITERARY CRITICISM; Shakespeare; Festivals in literature; History; Comedies; European
Description: 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.
Notes: First printing 1959.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: One. Introduction: The Saturnalian Pattern; title: Through Release to Clarification; title: Shakespeare's Route to Festive Comedy; title: Two. Holiday Custom And Entertainment; title: The May Game; title: The Lord of Misrule; title: Aristocratic Entertainments; title: Three. Misrule as Comedy; Comedy as Misrule; title: License and Lese Majesty in Lincolnshire; title: The May Game of Martin Marprelate; title: Four. Prototypes of Festive Comedy in a Pageant Entertainment: Summer's Last Will and Testament; title: "What can be made of Summer's last will and testament?"; title: Presenting the Mirth of the Occasion; title: Praise of Folly: Bacchus and Falstaff; title: Festive Abuse; title: "Go not yet away, bright soul of the sad year"; title: Five. The Folly of Wit and Masquerade in Love's Labour's Lost; title: "lose our oaths to find ourselves"; title: "sport by sport o'erthrown"; title: "a great feast of languages"; title: Wit; title: Putting Witty Folly in Its Place; title: "When ... Then ..."; title: The Seasonal Songs.; title: Six. May Games and Metamorphoses on a Midsummer Night; title: The Fond Pageant; title: Bringing in Summer to the Bridal; title: Magic as Imagination: The Ironic Wit; title: Moonlight and Moonshine: The Ironic Burlesque; title: The Sense of Reality; title: Seven. The Merchants and the Jew of Venice: Wealth's Communion and an Intruder; title: Making Distinctions about the Use of Riches; title: Transcending Reckoning at Belmont; title: Comical/Menacing Mechanism in Shylock; title: The Community Setting Aside Its Machinery; title: Sharing in the Grace of Life; title: Eight. Rule and Misrule in Henry IV; title: Mingling Kings and Clowns; title: Getting Rid of Bad Luck by Comedy; title: The Trial of Carnival in Part Two; title: Nine. The Alliance of Seriousness and Levity in as You Like It; title: The Liberty of Arden; title: Counterstatements; title: "all nature in love mortal in folly"; title: Ten. Testing Courtesy and Humanity in Twelfth Night; title: "A most extracting frenzy"; title: "You are betroth'd both to a maid and man"; title: Liberty Testing Courtesy.