ALEXANDER LEGGATT - English stage comedy, 1490-1990: five centuries of a genre
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English stage comedy has weathered centuries of social and theatrical change. How did it survive?
English Stage Comedy 14901990 is a unique and beautifully written study of the comedy of the English stage from the Tudor period to the late twentieth century. Organized thematically, it shows how this remarkably enduring genre has dealt with the tensions of social life, using its conventions as tools for social inquiry.
Through an examination of comedy Alexander Leggatt demonstrates that an approach through genre, neglected in recent criticism, can have much to say about our current concerns with the relations between literature and society.
English Stage Comedy 14901990 surveys five centuries of classic comic drama, focusing on major playwrights such as:
- Shakespeare
- Jonson
- Etherege
- Wycherley
- Congreve
- Vanbrugh
- Goldsmith
- Sheridan
- Wilde
- Shaw
- Coward
- Orton
- Ayckbourn
- and many lesser known figures
Alexander Leggatt is Professor of English at University College, University of Toronto, and is the author of Shakespeares Political Drama (1988, Routledge) and Jacobean Public Theatre (1992, Routledge).
First published 1998
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
1998 Alexander Leggatt
The right of Alexander Leggatt to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Leggatt, Alexander,
English Stage Comedy, 14901990: Five centuries of a genre / Alexander Leggatt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. English drama (Comedy)History and criticism. 2. Literary form. I. Title.
PR631.L44 1998
822` .052309dc21 9812864
ISBN 0-415-18936-5 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-18937-3 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-00431-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-20523-5 (Glassbook Format)
FOR MY STUDENTS
As this project has developed over the years I have accumulated many debts. Some of the ideas were tried out in talks at the University of San Francisco, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, McMaster Universitys Stratford (Ontario) Seminars, the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, the Department of English Colloquium at the University of Toronto, the Symposium on the 1890s at University College, and the lunchtime discussion group at University College. I am grateful to the organizers of these occasions, and to the audiences for their helpful and challenging responses. I am also grateful to the Work in Progress in English Group at the University of Toronto, who helped me think about the relations between literature and social history.
For particular responses to the talks in question, and for the sharing of questions and ideas over the years, I am indebted to Susan Akbari, Ronald Bryden, Eleanor Cook, Mira Friedlander, Linda Hutcheon, Robert Irish, Ejner Jensen, David Rayside and Giles Slade. Linda Hutcheon (again) and J.R. de J. Jackson provided especially valuable support and advice at a crucial stage. David Bevington, Brian Parker, Susan Snyder and John Velz have also provided essential support. At Routledge, Talia Rodgers, Jonathan Bate and Peter Thomson have been helpful and encouraging in their comments on the manuscript, and Talia Rodgers and Jason Arthur have coped resourcefully not just with the usual business of publication but with mysteriously disappearing faxes and chronic postal failures.
I am particulary grateful to Alan Bewell, Brian Corman and Alan Somerset, who read the entire manuscript with great care, and whose comments were invaluable. The imperfections that remain are my own responsibility. Another very special debt is to the students in my graduate seminar, Comic Form in English Drama, who over the years have contributed immeasurably to this project. My debt to them is part of a larger debt acknowledged in the dedication.
Finally, I am grateful to the Killam Program of the Canada Council for the Killam Research Fellowship that, with the cooperation of the University of Toronto, made possible the released time that allowed me to complete this project; without it, this book could not have been written.
Quotations from plays are taken from the editions listed in the Appendix. Quotations have been brought into line with modern British spelling and punctuation, except in the case of Bernard Shaw, whose typographical idiosyncrasies I have preserved, since they are as much a part of his text as the archaisms in Spenser. The presentation of speech headings and stage directions has been regularized. Line numbers are given where available; otherwise, page numbers. The Revels Plays system of decimal numbering for stage directions has been adopted.
The dates given for plays are the dates (sometimes approximate) of first production. The date is given on a plays first appearance in a chapter, and reiterated if it reappears after a significant interval.
Five centuries of a genre
Several lines intersect in the making of a play: the author, the culture, the theatre, actors and audience, and the genre. My concern is with the last of these. English stage comedy forms part of what has been called the longest, most continuous generic tradition in Western literature, tracing its roots back to Aristophanes and Menander, appearing in many different national literatures, surviving centuries of cultural change with its basic conventions stubbornly intact. I am limiting the discussion to one island culture over a mere five centuries, in the hope of taking a closer look, under selected local conditions, at the ways in which this remarkably healthy organism has adapted and survived.
To think of comedy as an organism, a single living entity, is in a literal sense misleading. There is no such thing as comedy, an abstract transhistorical form; there are only comedies. But they accumulate to create a body of case law, a set of expectations within which writers and audiences operate. In a generally cautious and sceptical study of the problems of writing literary history, David Perkins declares: A sorting by genre is valid if the concept of genre was entertained by the writer and his contemporary readers. For in this case the expectations associated with the concept were effective in forming both the work and the responses to it. There are problematic cases (Troilus and Cressida, The Cherry Orchard) but in general if a play is called a comedy, by a writer or by his contemporaries, the expectations involved are clear and firm.
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