Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I
- PART II
- Introduction to Part II
- 6 Drama of disappointment: character and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy
- 7 Laughter and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy
- 8 Epilogue: Jonson and Shakespeare
- Plays and editions cited
- Works cited
- Index
Introduction to Part II
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- PART I
- PART II
- Introduction to Part II
- 6 Drama of disappointment: character and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy
- 7 Laughter and narrative in Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy
- 8 Epilogue: Jonson and Shakespeare
- Plays and editions cited
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
In Part 1 I have deliberately avoided putting very much emphasis on how the function of conventions might be determined differently according to genre. Instead, I have attempted to show that conventions tend to work the same way irrespective of genre, and that what is strained when the conventions of one genre enter the world of another is the audience's understanding of the genre, not the convention. Genre presents an interpretive framework that defines the physical space of the stage; the conventions I have discussed in Part 1 make use of the physical elements of the stage in order to complement as well as to unsettle the interpretive, theatrical space created by the genre. Puns and asides and disguise are basically comic conventions, but they occur frequently and with their comic nature intact in tragedy. The convention of complicating a romantic plot with the possibility of incest is fundamentally tragic, but is just as frequently found as an important element of comic plots. Even the convention of graphic mutilation or dismemberment, which would seem to be obviously and exclusively tragic, can have, as we see in Faustus, Orlando, Cymbeline, and Revenger's Tragedy, an importantly dual function. The broad cross-genre use of the expository speech or scene, the echo, and the dark scene illustrate above all the flexibility of these conventions.
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002