William Shakespeare and the Sense of Comic

Simonetta de Filippis

William Shakespeare and the Sense of Comic

Authors

Simonetta de Filippis

University of the studies of Naples "L'Orientale"

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7745-9333

Keywords:

Shakespeare, comedy, research, identity, metatheatre

Synopsis

Publisher: UniorPress

Series: Miscellaneous

Pages: 320

Language: Italian

NBN: http://nbn.depositolegale.it/urn:nbn:it:unina-24887

Abstract: Comedy is a genre difficult to define for its ambiguity and elusivenness; however, it is probably its flexibility and undefined contours that make it particularly suitable to Shakespeare’s experiments of new forms in his dramatic writing. The great dramatist, with his inexhaustible creative vein, pursues a constant, endless research of new languages and new forms and ways as to the structuring of the dramatic discourse: themes, places, characters, theatrical functions and solutions, metatheatrical elements, the mixing of different theatrical genres, are arranged in the Shakespearean comic matter producing light and pleasant texts; however, these comedies are always of great substance and complexity, and their problematic dimension is often emphasised by what can be defined as a “dark comic mode” which makes the Shakespearean comedy a sophisticated and refined tool for critical analysis.

The contributions of this volume discuss Shakespeare’s comic writing, examining its theatrical functions, its connections with popular traditions and with the social and economic problems of the time, specific linguistc choices and uses, powerful characters such as Falstaff who has gone beyond the boundaries of his own texts to come to new life in works by other authors and other arts, re-writings and appropriations by different cultures, contemporary Italian theatre productions. Shakespeare’s most popular comedies – from The Taming of the Shrew to Twelfth Night, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to The Merchant of Venice, from As You Like It to Cymbeline – are studied and discussed by different critical perspectives in the single essays of this collection, offering, as a whole, a rich and organic view of Shakespeare’s comic writing.

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Author Biography

Simonetta de Filippis, University of the studies of Naples "L'Orientale"

Is Professor of English Literature at the Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”. In the field of Shakespearean studies, she has published a number of essays on The Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Pericles, The Tempest and Henry VIII. She is the author of a book on Shakespeare’s “Last Plays” (Teatro come sperimentazione. Shakespeare e la scrittura romanzesca, Bulzoni 2003); in 2012 she organised the conference Shakespeare e il senso del tragico and edited its proceedings (Loffredo, 2013). She has also published on Twentieth century novelists and playwrights (V. Woolf, J. Joyce, G. B. Shaw) but her main focus of interest within that period is D. H. Lawrence: she is the editor of the Cambridge University Press and the Penguin editions of Lawrence’s Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays (1992, 1999) and has published essays on Lawrence’s travel writings, plays and short novels in national and international publications; she also edited the proceedings of two international Lawrence conferences: D. H. Lawrence and Literary Genres (Loffredo, 2004) and D. H. Lawrence: New Critical Perspectives and Cultural Translation (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). Among her other publications: The literary gaze (UNI Press-“L’Orientale” 2008) – a literary survey from the Middle Ages to the end of the XVII century – and the volume The Phantom in the Opera, co-edited with Bianca Del Villano, a number of the online review Anglistica (2008). She is currently working on the critical edition of A Room with a View within the CUP project for a new edition of E. M. Forster’s novels.