| Popis: |
Mel Brooks once said, “tragedy is when I prick my finger, comedy is when you fall down an open manhole and die.” Brooks accomplishes something here that many scholars would envy: a definition of comedy, in terms of tragedy, that is itself very funny. While I won’t attempt to sustain Brooks’ level of humor in what follows, I am interested in what seems like a basic truth of comedy in his definition—that is, that there is often an important differentiation between I and you, or more generally between I and not-I, in comedy, as well as a distancing of suffering or catastrophe from those who are laughing. More specifically, I am interested in the way a sense of historical difference has been built into reconstructed early modern playhouses, such as Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, to comic effect. Focusing on Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, I argue that this tension derives from the juxtaposition of two “images”: that of the architecture of the interior of the Globe, and that of the modern spectators. The juxtaposition of these two images creates a special comic tension “off stage,” one that our laughter frequently releases when our attention is drawn to it by the actor. While much critical attention has been paid to the historical dimension of performance at the reconstructed Globe, these issues of sense perception and the Globe’s use of daylight have been neglected. Henri Bergson points out that the combination of historical periods can be comic, but he only considers fictional examples. More recently, in Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life, Agnes Heller has formulated a view of the comic as derived from an essential divide in existence that helps us apply Bergson’s framework off |
