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"Soul of the age!" Ben Jonson eulogized Shakespeare, and in the next breath, "He was not of an age but for all time." That he was both "of the age" and "for all time" is, this book suggests, the key to Shakespeare's comic genius. In this engaging introduction to the First Folio comedies, Paul A. Olson gives a persuasive and thoroughly engrossing account of the playwright's comic transcendence, showing how Shakespeare, by taking on the great themes of his time, elevated comedy from a mere mid-level literary form to its own form of greatness-on par with epic and tragedy. Like the best tragic or epic writers, Shakespeare in his comedies goes beyond private and domestic matters in order to draw on the whole of the commonwealth. He examines how a ruler's or a court's community at the household and local levels shapes the politics of empire-existing or nascent empires such as England, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Venice, and the Ottoman Empire or part empires such as Rome and Athens-where all their suffering and silliness play into how they govern. In Olson's work we also see how Shakespeare's appropriation of his age's ideas about classical myth and biblical scriptures bring to his comic action a sort of sacral profundity in keeping with notions of poetry as "inspired" and comic endings as more than merely happy but as, in fact, uncommonly joyful.
Paul A. Olson is Kate Foster Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the author of several books, including The Kingdom of Science: Literary Utopianism and British Education, 1612-1870 (Nebraska 2003) and The Journey to Wisdom: Self-Education in Patristic and Medieval Literature (Nebraska 1995).
Preface; List of Illustrations; List of Maps1. On Historical Understandings of Shakespeare's Works; 2. Shakespeare and the Invention of Grand Comic Form; 3. Shakespearean Comedic Myths; 4. Biblical Intertext and Biblical Holiday: Comedy and Sacred Story; 5. Comedy and Empire: The Comedy of Imperial Conquest; 6. Measure for Measure as Form, Myth, and Scripture; 7. And In Conclusion
A persuasive and thoroughly engrossing account of Shakespeare's comic transcendence
"This book provides a provocative, useful and direct invitation to students to read these plays just as seriously as they would Hamlet or Antony and Cleopatra."-Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, Times Literary Supplement - Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Times Literary Supplement) "This book teaches delightfully and about the art of instruction and the art of living and growing quite as much as about the art of Shakespeare the commercial dramatist who always gives audiences more than they pay for."-Leonard R. N. Ashley, Biblotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance - Leonard R. N. Ashley (Biblotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance) "This book's bibliographical apparatus makes it a valuable library addition and may lead some readers to the mapping of uncharted landscapes in the study of Shakespeare's comedies."-F. Nicholas Clary, Sixteenth Century Journal - F. Nicholas Clary (Sixteenth Century Journal)
