The purpose of this thesis is to examine the elements of folk entertainment, pastime, and ritual in four of Shakespeare's early comedies, The Taming of the Shrew, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Love's Labor's Lost, and A Midsummer Night's Dream, with a view to determining the pattern into which the playwright's use of these elements evolved, and to demonstrate their importance in the development of the sophisticated comedies. This investigation considers these elements in their significance to the Elizabethan society and in their relation to the play in which they appear.
The introduction defines those elements of social ritual and play which are later elaborated upon in their order of appearance in the plays examined. The significance of the evidence derived from such a detailed examination is cumulative, and the reappearance of certain elements in the four plays examined lends weight to the conclusions drawn in each chapter. These conclusions evaluate the role which ritual and entertainment play in each comedy, and the concluding chapter bases on the results of the entire study a more general account of this influence and its significance to Shakespeare's later career. The frequency of references to traditional folk-drama and the structural use of its formal elements indicates the extent of Shakespeare's debt to the popular culture of his time and to a dramatic tradition which derives ultimately from primitive pagan ritual.
The basic elements of the traditional folk-drama most frequently met with in the early comedies centre on the motifs the Maying theme, the "flight to the woods", misrule, and the celebration of the rebirth of the year. In The Taming of the Shrew, situations analogous to those of the Mummers' Wooing sequences further the main action, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona weds the courtly and popular tradition in its use of the "flight to the woods" theme. Maying themes become thematic and structural in Love's Labor's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream, where they supply the pattern of the action. In these, as in later plays, Shakespeare uses polarity, e.g. everyday-holiday, to provide a dramatic perspective for the examination or revaluation of actions, concepts, or ideals. The use of misrule or holiday allows the dramatist to create an action, apart from the ordinary, in which to limit his approach at his discretion. I have used the term "fertility" to indicate a state of ordered harmony in both macrocosm and microcosm which, in the Elizabethan view of nature, was considered favourable to life. This investigation corroborates previous studies indicating that Elizabethan drama is a hybrid growth blending the more consciously artistic elements of the classical drama with the mimetic aspects of a long standing popular tradition. The vitality as well as the universality of Shakespeare's comedy may owe, perhaps, a great deal to the extent of his use of such traditional themes and rituals. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/40140 |
| Date | January 1961 |
| Creators | Thorne, W. Barry |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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