A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment by Elizabeth Kraft;

Author:Elizabeth Kraft; [Kraft, Edited by Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350187740
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2020-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 5.1: Charlotte Munson (Miranda), Charles Pasternak (Marplot), and Brian Mani (Sir Frances) in The Busy Body. Photo Brynn Yeager, 2017.

HARLEQUIN DANCER

While much of the history of comic embodiment in the eighteenth century must be sketched in the gaps, omissions, and interstices of the print record, the influence of continental practices, especially commedia dell’arte, is writ large. Commedia troupes toured England by the mid-sixteenth century had woven their stock characters, the zanni (servants), the old men, the lovers, and the military men, into Elizabethan comedy. Commedia’s groups of characters included low working-class tricksters, the “odd bodies” of the old men (pantaloons), soldiers (the Miles Gloriosus, Il Capitano), the doctor, and the hunchbacked servant (Pulcinella), along with the lovers (including Columbina, the witty servant), providing a set of types realized as actions.

Particular Renaissance players, including Richard Burbage and the clown Will Kemp, were directly involved with commedia productions. Commedia was thus both part of the English comic tradition and its useful other, illustrating the superiority of English wit and humor over pantomime’s low physicality. Yet commedia also had some elite ties. John O’Brien argues that the resurgence of pantomime in the eighteenth century strengthened its Stuart connections through court masques under Charles I and the early commedia adaptations of the Restoration stage, including Ravenscroft’s Scaramouch a Philosopher (1677) and Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687). O’Brien sees in Britain’s adopted commedia legacy a logic of Foucauldian “governmentality,” which imagines a population and its management through entertainment (O’Brien 2004: 45). His thesis about the political significance of pantomime and commedia grounds my approach to the kinetic logics that made bodies readable through the grammar of embodied affect and emotion that subtended the stage comedies of the eighteenth-century British stage.

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