COMEDY IS ESSENTIAL

COMEDY IS ESSENTIAL

1. Sources of Comedy

   • Poor Tom
   • Lear
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   • Gloucester
     • Polonius-like character - old and foolish
   • The Fool

2. Purpose of Comedy

   • Entertains a wider audience
     • Shakespeare wrote his plays for the King's Men, comedic characters may have been fathomed for this reason.
   • Comic relief
     • Feeling of Hope
     • Ensures that the play is still enjoyable
     • Evil characters use mockery / comedy to justify or lighten their actions
       • Regan: "Let him smell his way to Dover"
   • Wilson Knight
     • "Though its impact usually appears vastly different from that of tragedy, yet there is a humour that treads the brink of tears, and tragedy whIch needs. but ,an infinitesimal shIft of perspective to dis­close the varied riches of comedy"
     • "it is an error of aesthetic judgement to regard humour as essentially trivial."
     • A shifting flash of comedy across the pain of the purely tragic both increases the tension and suggests, vaguely, a resolution and a purification.
     • the Fool is used as a chorus, pointing us to the absurdity of the situation. He is indeed an admirable chorus, increasing our pain by his emphasis on a humour which yet will not serve to merge the incompatible in a unity of laughter. He is not all wrong when he treats the situation as matter for a joke. Much here that is always regarded as essentially pathetic is not far from comedy.
       • the Fool in King Lear [...] attempt[s] to heal the gaping wound of the mind's incongruous knowledge by the unifying, healing release of laughter.
       • The Fool sees, or tries to see, the humor­ ous potentialities in the most heart-wrenching of incidents:
     • A sense of self-directed humour would have saved Lear. It is a quaity he absolutely lacks.
       • Edgar now succeeds the Fool as the counterpart to the breaking sanity of Lear; and where the humour of the Fool made no contact with Lear's mind, the fantastic appearance and incoherent words of Edgar are immediately assimilated
     • Herein lies the profound insight of the Fool: he sees the potentialities of comedy in Lear's behaviour.
     • if Lear could laugh - if the Lears of the world could laugh at themselves - there would be no such tragedy.
   • Role of fool / bedlam beggars in society
     • Types of madness
     • Some madmen were feared, and others were entertainment
       • Madness was used as comedy - real life