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The Theatre Breeds Comedy ANDREW KENNEDY The fertile coupling of theatricality with comedy is a phenomenon often observed but seldom discussed as a proper topic of comparative criticism. Let me start with a case paradigm and show in a scene what happens, on a small scale, when a play exhibits one of its acts of breeding. In Beckett's Endgame, placed in the middle of the inspection scene, where the blind Hamm first hugs the walls of his enclosed space and then orders Clov to view the dead universe from tiny windows, a sudden transformation takes place. Clov, instead of raising his telescope once more to inspect the universe, suddenly turns it on the auditorium: I see . .. a multitude . . . in transports ... of joy. Pause. That's what I call a magnifier. He lowers the telescope, turns towards HAMM. Well? don't we laugh?1 And the audience laughs, though the scene is not all that comic or all that flattering to spectatorial narcissism. No, what has happened is that Clov the Son has stepped into the role of Clov the Clown and, in directing his telescope at the audience across the invisible barrier of that once-famous "fourth wall," he has broken it down. From the little explosion that marks the collision of two planes - the scenic and the spectatorial - the corresponding explosion of laughter follows . Abruptly, a closed play (embodying claustrophobia in a structural stasis) has been opened up to the many-levelled and mobile world of comic theatricality. What, briefly, are the historical and theoretical perspectives of this comic theatricality? We can still learn a lot from watching the incongruous casting and rehearsal and the eventual wrecked performance of "The ·most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby.,,2 For here all the signs of the theatre - from potentially tragic gestures and words to every item of scenery and would-be illusionist tricks - are being "translated" (like Bottom 474 ANDREW KENNEDY himself) into the signs of comedy. The performance proceeds from error to error towards chaos. And the way this comedy is generated - the theatre as dream-machine broken down by its mechanics - is at least as interesting as is its parodic form. The target of that parody is partly, as Anne Righter (Barton) has shown, those medieval plays with direct address, "written before the idea ofthe self-contained play had been established."3But, I would add, the play is also a theatrical breaking down of the relatively rigid limits of a self-contained or neo-classical comedy. By transforming the play text into an unruly plaything, the wrecked performance links with the festive element in A Midsummer Night's Dream, nearer in spirit to Aristophanes than to Plautus.4 The internal walls come tumbling down, long before Wall makes his farcical exit (in 5.1.203), opening up the resources of comedy as the theatre reflects and deconstructs itself. The emergence of the theatre-mirroring, self-reflexive and parodic playwithin -play went with the new Renaissance delight in perspective and in play with a bent towards comedy. (The alternative meanings of the verb forms of ludo, Robert Nelson reminds us, included "frolic, dallying, wantonness, mockery, sport, banter, deception, delusion , make-believe, play."s) After Shakespeare, three centuries of English theatrical burlesque have one main target: the distance between stage illusion and everyday reality.6 In the process of performing this or that mock-play within the play , the conventions of its stage are expanded until they explode. In Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) a Citizen and his Wife - actors in the audience virtually take over the production of the play with improvisations that flatter their own grocer's trade. In Buckingham's The Rehearsal (1671, 1672) the author (Mr. Bayes, based on Dryden) is present to delight the actors and his acquaintances with a running commentary on his play - a device ingeniously expanded by Sheridan in The Critic or a Tragedy Rehearsed (1779, 1781). The egregious author, Mr. Puff, flanked by the gullible Dangle and the negative critic Sneer, watch, to the accompaniment of their own debate on dramatic theory, the calamitous rehearsal of Puff's THE SPANISH ARMADA historical...

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