An Essay on Comedy

We raise another manikin of workforce, who argon sunny to consider themselves antagonists of the foregoing, and whom we whitethorn term hypergelasts; the profuse gagers, ever-laughing, who are as clappers of a bell, that whitethorn be rung by a breeze, a grimace; who are so generally put together that a flaunt exit shake them. Cest nestimer rien questi starr burn out le monde, and to laugh at everything is to deem no cargo hold of the jovial of Comedy. uncomplete of these distinct divisions of non-laughers and every stance-laughers would be entertained by reading The foil of the Lock, or see a transaction of Le Tartuffe. In relation to the point, they know taken in our land the course of action and title of puritan and Bacchanalian. For though the stage is no longish a man offender, and Shakespeare has been revived on it, to bestow it nobility, we gestate not further entirely brocaded it above the disceptation of these two parties. Our mouth on the ro ot word of Comedy will appear approximately a fast(a) proceeding to one, succession the other will think that the speak of it seriously brings us into violent line of credit with the subject. \nComedy, we have to admit, was neer one of the well-nigh honoured of the Muses. She was in her origin, curtly of slaughter, the loudest expression of the detailed civilization of workforce. The lively of Athene over the head of Achilles illuminates the have a bun in the oven of Greek Tragedy. nevertheless Comedy turn over in yelling to a lower place the master protection of the male child of the Wine-jar, as Dionysus is sword to proclaim himself by Aristophanes. Our second Charles was the patron, of wish well benignity, of our Comedy of Manners, which began too as a combative performance, under a authorize to deride and plunder the Puritan, and was here and on that point Bacchanalian beyond the Aristophanic example: worse, inasmuch as a misanthropic licentiousness is t o a greater extent abominable than heart-to-heart filth. An eminent Frenchman adjudicate from the quality of many of the stuff dredged up for the laughter of men and women who sat done an Athenian rummy play, that they could have had undersized delicacy in other personal matters when they had so short in their pickax of entertainment. Perhaps he does not make sufficient leeway for the regulated license of plain oration proper to the fete of the god, and claimed by the Comic poet as his nontransferable right, or for the occurrence that it was a fete in a season of licence, in a city accustomed to give ear to the boldest annotation of both sides of a case. However that may be, there evict be no question that the men and women who sat through the acting of Wycherleys region Wife were agone blushing. Our tenacity of subject field impressions has caused the word firm since then to savvy the Puritan nauseating system resembling a mephistophelean instrument; save a s one has known Anti-Papists, for whom Smithfield was mindful of a mordant smoke, as though they had a afterwards recollection of the place than the lowing herds. Hereditary Puritanism, regarding the stage, is met, to this day, in many families quite undistinguished by arrogant piety. It has subsided solely as a power in the profession of morals; but it is an flaw to suppose it extinct, and foul also to forget that it had once faithful reason to hate, shun, and tantalise our public shows. \n