Playboys and Killjoys: An Essay on the Theory and Practice of Comedy

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Oxford University Press, 08‏/09‏/1988 - 214 من الصفحات
Harry Levin--one of America's major literary critics--offers a brilliant and original study of the whole world of comedy, concentrating on playwrights through the centuries, from Aristophanes and Plautus in classical times to Bernard Shaw and Bertolt Brecht and their recent successors. Viewing the comic repertory as a richly varied yet broadly unified whole, Levin provides a synthesis of theories and practice. Isolating two fundamental aspects of comedy--the ludicrous and irreverent "playboy," whom we laugh with, and the ridiculous and forbidding "killjoy," whom we laugh at--he traces the dialectical interplay of these components throughout history and across various cultures and media. While mainly focusing on the plays and the stage, with discussions of such major dramatists as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Molière, and William Congreve, Levin also includes essays on such related topics as humor, satire, and games.

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الصفحة 97 - To bring a lover, a lady, and a rival, into the fable ; to entangle them in contradictory obligations, perplex them with oppositions of interest, and harass them with violence of desires inconsistent with each other; to make them meet in rapture, and part in agony ; to fill their mouths with hyperbolical joy and outrageous sorrow...
الصفحة 187 - Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour.
الصفحة 199 - SATIRE is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own ; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.
الصفحة 135 - For, to mince matters no longer, man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.
الصفحة 183 - It may, by metaphor, apply itself Unto the general disposition : As when some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his effects, his spirits, and his powers, In their confluctions, all to run one way, This may be truly said to be a humour.
الصفحة 142 - But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their May-pole, which they bring home with great veneration. as thus, They have twenty or forty yoke of oxen.
الصفحة 199 - Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.
الصفحة 15 - But these are all lies : men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
الصفحة 172 - ... of a niggardly Demea, of a crafty Davus, of a flattering Gnatho, of a vainglorious Thraso ; and not only to know what effects are to be expected, but to know who be such, by the signifying badge given them by the comedian.

نبذة عن المؤلف (1988)

Harry Levin is Irving Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Harvard University and author of The Gates of Horn: A Study of Five French Realists, The Question of Hamlet, and Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times.

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