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Replies | Post Reply | Shakespeare Queries From Genuinely Interested Students 4.2.97: Top | Help
One way of getting at many of kinds of questions you're posing -
about character and comic technique - might be to think
about the way the two writers think about reason and about
the more subjective and imaginative components of character.
In AMND, the protestations of Theseus about reason seem too
smug, and the way the male lovers talk about their
experiences seems complacent as well (they always assert that
the love they feel at that moment is natural and rational,
and so never acknowledge the volatility of their own
emotional lives - in and out of the woods). The point,
in an oversimplified formulation, is that humans are volatile
and that reason and order need to accommodate subjective
imagination and desire. But that these things are scary.
So what would self-knowledge be? A recognition of the
limitations of rational self-control?Now look at the Alchemist. The prefatory material puts a
heavy emphasis on "judging spectators" and asserts in effect
that the experience of the audience in the playhouse is
like the experiece of the gulls in the play. Playwrites
are like Alchemists in that they sell you a bill of goods,
and if you can't distinguish flash from truth you're
likely to be vulnerable to wobbly sentimentality and thus
morally vulnerable. This means that Jonson's play puts you
overtly in the position which Theseus takes in AMND - the
position of a judging spectator. And where Shakespeare is
sceptical about the possibility of such objective judgment, Jonson
thinks it's possible and essential.In the play, each of the main gulls is sold a bill of
goods by the alchemist. Drugger wants to be a prosperous
shopowner and to rise to social prominence in the city like
the heroes of citizen comedies by writers like Dekker and Heywood.
Drugger wants to believe that he is a special noble, and
is persuaded that his aunt is the Faerie Queen. This is
clearly a kind of dream from hackneyed fictions as well -
faerie queens figure in Elizabethan literature like AMND.
Mammon, who is a knight, has fantasies of omnipotence like
a parodic version of Marlowe's heroes.So you can say that each of these characters has been sold a bill of goods
by the stage - they weren't judging spectators - and that
as a result they don't have a clearheaded idea about who
they are. And this failure of self-knowlege makes them
vulnerable to the fantasies offered by Face and Subtle.So you could say that Shakespearean comedy is about the
limits of rational self-knowledge and government, and that
Jonsonian comedy satirizes vanity, failed self-knowledge,
the inability to judge, and so on.Does this help?
Posted by Cloten on April 15, 1997 at 10:12:18
In Reply to "Jonson vs Shakespeare (was jonson appeal)" posted by ching on April 14, 1997 at 08:49:09
Replies | Post Reply | Shakespeare Queries From Genuinely Interested Students 4.2.97: Top | Help