Unlike the contrast between the sacred and the taboo, the opposition of
"comic" and "tragic" is not a way of categorizing experience that we
find in cultures all over the world or even at different periods in
Western civilization. Though medieval writers and readers distinguished
stories with happy endings from stories with unhappy endings, it was not
until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--fifteen hundred years
after Sophocles, Euripides, Plautus, and Terence had last been performed
in the theaters of the Roman Empire--that tragedy and comedy regained
their ancient importance as ways of giving dramatic coherence to human
events. Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage
charts that rediscovery, not in the pages of scholars' books, but on the
stages of England's schools, colleges, inns of court, and royal court,
and finally in the public theaters of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century
London.
In bringing to imaginative life the scripts, eyewitness accounts, and
financial records of these productions, Bruce Smith turns to the
structuralist models that anthropologists have used to explain how human
beings as social creatures organize and systematize experience. He sets
in place the critical, physical, and social structures in which
sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Englishmen watched productions of
classical comedy and classical tragedy. Seen in these three contexts,
these productions play out a conflict between classical and medieval
ways of understanding and experiencing comedy's interplay between
satiric and romantic impulses and tragedy's clash between individuals
and society.
Originally published in 1988.
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