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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
It has often been observed that some comic characters, given a touch too much of seriousness, dignity, individuality, or respectability, or being called upon to suffer pain past the limit of comic endurance, may easily be regarded as pathetic or tragic figures. No subject matter is inherently comic; whether it be comic or not depends on the attitude of readers or audience. Thus Shylock, Don Quixote, Alceste, and even Malvolio have been taken by moderns as essentially tragic rather than comic characters, and Falstaff chidden by his king—“How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!”—extracts from modern eyes the indignant tear. Only a hair, it seems then, may divide the comic from the tragic, and some characters of comedy, quicksilver-like, will not remain on the comic side of the boundary.
1 E.g., A. Tilley, Molière (Cambridge, 1936), p. 175.
2 Murry and Bradley as quoted in A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Tragedie of Coriolanus (Philadelphia and London, 1928), pp. 666 and 663; Sewell, Character and Society in Shakespeare (Oxford, 1951), p. 123; Kreyssig, Vorlesungen ùber Shakespeare, seine Zeit uni seine Werke (Berlin, 1874), i, 479; Brown, “Enter the Shakespearean Tragic Hero,” Essays in Criticism, iii (1953), 287; Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare (Princeton, 1947), ii, 156; Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (New York, 1943), p. 199; Famham, Shakespeare's Tragic Frontier (Berkeley, 1950), pp. 263 f.
3 See A. R. Thompson, The Anatomy of Drama, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, 1946), pp. 91,93,133, 219.
4 George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Man and Superman (New York, 1925), p. xxx.
5 Shakespeare's Roman Plays and Their Background (London, 1910), pp. 598, 602, 604; Gervinus, Shakespeare Commentaries (London, 1892), pp. 755, 747.
6 M. R. Ridley, Shakespeare's Plays: A Commentary (New York, 1938), p. 195.
7 Edwin Honig, “Sejanus and Coriolanus: a Study in Alienation,” MLQ, xii (1951), 408; John Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare (London, 1952), p. 307.
8 William Shakespeare: A Critical Study (New York, 1911), p. 551.
9 “The Tragedy of Coriolanus,” English Studies, xxxiv (1953), 1–9.
10 The Theory of Drama (New York, n.d.), p. 206.
11 Cf. Henri Fluchère, Shakespeare, dramaturge élisabéthain (Toulouse, 1948), pp. 160–161.
12 Gervinus is right to insist that “that modesty with which he contemns and rejects all reward, all praise, and all flattery” reveals “excessive pride,” p. 758.
13 Quoted in the Variorum Coriolanus, p. 622.
14 Cf. D. J. Enright, “Coriolanus: Tragedy or Debate?” Essays in Criticism, iv (1954), 4.