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11 ‘Tickling the senses with sinful delight’: the pleasure of reading comedies in early modern England Hannah August In the introduction to Shakespearean Sensations (2013), Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard foreground the degree to which early modern antitheatricalists’ anxieties about the theatre are couched in descriptions of sensory affect. They cite Stephen Gosson’s complaint that plays’ ‘straunge consortes of melody [...] tickle the ear’, the actors’ ‘costly apparel [...] flatter[s] the sight’, while their ‘effeminate gesture[s] [...] ravish the sence
F OR EVERY 1950S British comedy assimilated into the academic canon, there are many which have fallen into obscurity, reinforcing the alleged disposability of the form. One of the highest-profile casualties is The Horse’s Mouth (Ronald Neame, 1958), which was justly celebrated at the time for Alec Guinness’s performance as aggressively antisocial artist Gulley Jimson
Aldous Huxley once said, ‘We participate in a tragedy; at a comedy we only look’. 1 In 1954, Ingmar Bergman found himself on the precipice of calamity, a key participant in his own real-life tragedy. Allegedly contemplating suicide on a Swiss mountain pass, suffering from a flopped film project, a broken marriage, and a failed love affair (not to mention agonizing stomach cramps), he explained, ‘I had two alternatives: write Smiles of a Summer Night [1955] or kill myself.’ 2 Bergman had what he
were all actually made in Britain. The legacy of the 1950s is being felt to this day. The modest and genial mayhem of comedies like The Parole Officer (2001) and Lucky Break (2001) recall the filmic material of stars like Norman Wisdom, Tony Hancock and Peter Sellars in their 1950s heyday, just as Hugh Grant’s bumbling comic hero in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) is essentially the Ian Carmichael ‘silly ass
7 Millenarianism and utopianism in the new Ireland: the tragedy (and comedy) of accelerated modernisation KIERAN KEOHANE and CARMEN KUHLING There is a mode of vital experience – experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life’s possibilities and perils – that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience ‘modernity’. To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time, that threatens to
κωμῳδοποιὸν εἶναι. But the substance of it was, he said, that Socrates was driving them to the admission that the same man could have the knowledge required for writing comedy and tragedy – that the fully skilled tragedian could be a comedian as well. Plato, Symposium
in a near-future scenario where extreme weather events – a consequence of a carbon-based energy regime – realise the predicted effects of climate change. In the rest of this chapter I examine how the Science in the Capital trilogy combines ‘proleptic realism’ and the ‘structural comedy’ to identify and analyse the problems associated with addressing the climate crisis. I explore how the trilogy considers the radically transformative potential of sustainable alternatives and ask how it accounts for the failure to adequately address climate change in the trilogy
respect. Charles has taught his young double to speak elegant German. He has also taught him how to act. He discovers that his pupil has a natural gift almost the equal of his own. Joseph Charles is preparing a light comedy whose plot relies on the presence of a pair of identical twins. The play was written for himself, as virtuoso, to double both parts, but for a joke he allows
occupied a kind of wasteland for most of the 1950s, limited in their artistic ambition and social reach, confined to the lower-middle-class parochialism of Ealing comedy on the one hand and the torpor of upper-middle-class country-house drama on the other. In this version, rescue came in the form of working-class realism (though earlier in the decade for theatre than for film), which extended the social basis of
. Two models of exemplarity In much of Cavell’s writing on film he seeks to show us that the protagonists of the films he terms “remarriage comedies” live a form of perfectionism that he upholds as desirable for contemporary democratic society: moral perfectionism. However, there appear to be two ways in which we can interpret exemplarity in Cavell