The meaning of satire
Ancient Rome, which originated from political satire literature … It includes poetic and lyrical works of various sizes and contents. In them, the reader is angry, denying different levels – denying images of specific individuals, groups, events. Satire, which is a responsible artistic genre of freedom of speech, must be distinguished from slander and pamphlet.
The artistic value and significance of political satire lies in its socio-moral content, in its lyrical rise, in the height of its satirical ideal. The lyrical subjective color of a satirical work loses the genre of artistic objectivity, so political satire is transient.
CHAPTER II. ANALYSIS OF HIS NOVELS
2.1.Humors and satire in William Shakespeare
When the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays, the First Folio, was published in 1623, its contents page divided them into three categories: Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. The list of Comedies included Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, plays that modern audiences and readers have not found particularly ‘comic’. Also included were two late plays, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, that critics often now classify as ‘Romances’. If we ask ourselves what these four plays have in common with those such as You Like It or Twelfth Night, which we are used to calling ‘comedies’, the answer gives us a clue to the meaning of ‘comedy’ for many of Shakespeare’s educated contemporaries. All of them end in marriage or at least betrothal.
Marriage
Comedies head towards marriage. This is a useful place to start thinking about the typical shape of comedies. Marriages conventionally represent the achievement of happiness and the promise of regeneration. So important to Shakespeare is the symbolic power of marriage that some end in more than one marriage. Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night end with three. In the final scene of As You Like It, Hymen, the god of marriage, takes the stage to preside over no fewer than four nuptial couplings and to celebrate ‘High wedlock’ (5.4.144) in song. All the play’s couples have achieved happiness through misunderstanding. Orlando has wooed Rosalind in make believe, not grasping how his feelings were being reciprocated. Orlando’s brother Oliver, having repented his previous vindictiveness to Orlando, has been smitten by the apparently poor Aliena, not realizing that she is Rosalind’s friend Celia. Phebe the shepherdess had preferred Ganymede (in fact the disguised Rosalind) to the adoring but low-born Silvius, but has learnt her error. Touchstone has won Audrey, the country girl, almost casually by impressing her with his mock courtly talk. This last pairing, founded on vanity and ignorance, seems considerably less satisfying than the other three: even here, in one of the lightest of Shakespeare’s comedies, we are invited not to feel easy about every marriage. In other Shakespeare comedies, some concluding marriages – Claudio and Hero in Much Ado about Nothing, the Duke and Isabella in Measure for Measure – seem designed to look convenient rather than affectionate.
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