The Interpretation of the Comedia

Bulletin Of The Comediantes Vol. XI Spring, 1959 No. 1 The Interpretation of the Comedia by Gerald E. Wade, University of Tennessee In The Frontiers of Criticism (a lecture delivered at the University of Minnesota in 1956 and published in that year by the Regents of the University), T· S. Eliot repeats (page 4) an idea that has had much currency in recent years, that, in his words, "every generation must provide its own literary criticism, for . . . each generation brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art." In our time, and most markedly during the last quarter of a century, the criticism of art, including literature, has taken on new aspects, has assumed new directions that dare not be ignored by the competent critics. It is apparent that those of us who covet the most complete comprehension possible of the comedia, whether as an art or as a sociological document, must look into the matter of the "new" criticism that has developed especially in England, France, Germany, Russia and the United States.1 It is beside the immediate point here that future generations will surely find some of these ideas inadequate, even absurd; it is imperative for the comprehension of literature that they at least be given sympathetic examination as part of these "categories of appreciation" of our generation, of its "demands upon art, ... its own uses for art" thit : MrJ Eliât spoke of in the quotation above. We choose to assume for our present purpose that few modern critics will take exception to Mr. Eliot's dictum that our generation has a right to formulate its own corpus of criticism and to accept, modify, or reject previous critical judgments when these are in conflict with it. As applied to the comedia, it follows that this art form must meet modern needs or be forgotten. These needs will of course vary for different persons and places, they may arise from variant circumstances, may find their lodgment in differing temperaments. Now the one aspect of the matter at issus that the present brief paper wishes to investigate concerns the interpretation of drama» Many years ago, in one of our professional journals, two of our most distinguished specialists disagreed quite thoroughly on the meaning of a certain comedia; their names and its title do not need recollection here. Their experience has often been the common one when intelligent readers of playgoers compare notes on a play. Having read the play the two gentlemen disagreed on, I was amazed at what one of them saw in it. Further experience with the very difficult complex that is interpretation, and reading during the intervening years in certain aspects of criticism and allied fields of thought, have made entirely understandable the fact of the widely variant sets of interpretation that those distinguished scholars offered. Mr. Eliot, in his lecture on criticism named above, suggests (page 15), 1) that the meaning of a poem as a whole (the italics are ours, and we also assume he would accept "drama" for "poem") is never exhausted by any explanation, since the meaning is what the poem (play) means to different sensitive readers, and 2) that the unwary reader (or playgoer) is always ex1 BULLETIN OF THE COMEDIANTES Published in the Spring and Fall by the Comediantes, an informal, international group of all those interested in the comedia. Editor Everett W. Hesse University of Wisconsin Madison 6, Wis. Assistant Editor John E. Keller University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, N. C. Subscription: $1 a year posed to the danger of assuming that the interpretation of a piece of literature, "if valid, is necessarily an account of what the author was consciously or unconsciously trying to do." It would seem that Eliot put his finger squarely on two of the most difficult and complex aspects of interpretation and criticism, and that a brief consideration of the matter is in order. One might, in passing, recall once more Eliot's warning (a frequent one among latter-day critics) that the historical or biographical aspects of criticism really have nothing to do with a poem (play...