Genre Critic Quotations Flashcards
(18 cards)
R W Maslen - “only comedy’s extraordinary flexibility - its capacity to reinvent itself repeatedly in response to new developments - has enabled it to survive its own indiscretions”
R W Maslen - “comedy as a uniquely flexible medium, adapting itself with chameleon promptness to every innovation”
Laroque - “in his festive, green-world comedies […] he chose festivity and mirth rather than the city intrigue and comical satire advocated by his colleague and rival, Ben Johnson”
Laroque - city comedies “that take up the tricks of humours and the cruel games of deception…insist on dissonance and cacophony or on men who have no music in them”
K. J Holzknecht - “Elizabethan audiences expected amusement when they came to the theatre and they were not interested in moral or sociological problems”
McNamara - “The categorisation of the play as a comedy has much to do with its structure as with its ability to make us laugh”
Tony Martin - The ending “undermine[s] the sense of marriage as a satisfying resolution of difficulties”
Brendan Jackson - the play “sits uneasily within the comic genre” / “testing comic boundaries”
Naomi Conn Leibler - “with city comedy, the city itself is the subject and focus and the citizens are what they are and do what they do largely because their city is a bigger animal than they are”
“these figures, marked in medieval morality-play fashion by names reflecting their function or typology, are squeezed into behaviours that set them apart, isolate them from any larger sense of community”
Barton - Shakespeare’s later work “appears to embody some of the problems of a Shakespeare, now seemingly disillusioned with that art of comedy which, in the past, had served him so well”
Tony Martin - “far from the ultimately life affirming world we expect in a comedy, the play is deeply mired in situations of existential anguish and despair, moral depravity and the threat of irrevocable family division”
C L Barber - Marriage is “an expression of the going-on power of life”
Philip Edwards - “A strong magic is created: and it is questioned”
Tony Martin - “we re being taken into a world that is darker than is appropriate for comedy”
Tony Martin - “an atmosphere of sombreness and mortality hang over the play”
Edward Dowden - The later comedies are “serious, dark, ironical”
J. W. Lever - “A conscious experiment in the new medium of tragicomedy”
Charlotte Lennox - Shakespeare was “resolved to torture it into a comedy”
