| Yvonne Johansson | ‘Pastoral is an impulse which is buried in the human psyche, that is the need to suspend sequential time and project ourselves into a mythical time where humanity enjoyed happiness’ |
| Thomas Haywood (1621) | ‘a comedy is pleasantly contrived with merry accidents’ |
| Thomas Haywood (1621) | ‘A comedy is intermixed with apt and witty jests to present before the Prince at certain times’ |
| C.L Barber (1970’s) | Shakespeare’s comedies followed a comic structure that went from ‘the release to clarification’ |
| Circero (BC) | ‘anyone who tries to define comedy is silly themselves and their silliness is the only laughable thing about them’ |
| Stephen Gosson (late 1500s) | ‘In the theatre, you shall see such heaving,shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by a women, such tickling, such toying… it is a right comedy to mark the behaviour of the audience.’ |
| Edward Dowden(1895) | ‘ Discord is resolved into harmony and the plays tell of the blessedness, of forgiveness of injuries. They show how broken bonds between head and heart may be repaired and reunited. Each play closes with the victory of love’ |
| Northrop Frye (1900’s) | ‘a comedy is not necessarily a play that ends happily. It is a play in which certain structure is present and works through in its own logical end, regardless of whether the cast or author feel happy about it’ |
| Jonathon Dallimore (1980) | ‘Do these plays reinforce the dominant order or do they interrogate it to the point of subversion?’ |
| Dr Eric Langley | ‘is Shakespeare saying be happy with the ending even though the ending may not be an entirely happy one’ |
| Isaac Asanoff | ‘The Fool is no fool’ |
| Erasmus(BC) | ‘fools are the only plain,honest men who speak truthes… and that are heard with pleasure’ |
| Erasmus (BC) | ‘the same thing;which if it came from a wise man’s mouth might prove a capital crime, spoken by a fool, its received with delight’ |
| C.L.Barber (1970’s) | ‘The clown was a recognised anarchist who made abhoration obvious by carrying it to absurd extremes’ |
| Thomas Urquhart (1600’s) | ‘The King of Misrule who were invested that title, to no end but to countenance bacchanalian[drunken revelry] riots and preposterous disorders of the family where he is installed’ |
| C.L.Barber(1970’s) | ‘the release of that one day is understand to be temporary licence and misrule actually implies rule, so that the holiday affirmations in praise of folly are limited by the underlying assumption that the natural in man is only one part of him, the part that will fade away’ |
| Prince Hal(Henry V) | ‘if all the year were plain holidays,the sport would be tedious as the work’ |
| Plato | Love is ‘like a man who has caught the eye disease from someone and unaware that is seeing himself in his lover,as in a mirror’ |
| Jacques Ferrand (1500’s) | ‘Love is a kind of poison that is generated within the body and slips in through the eyes. The eye is a path towards a man’s heart where it generates malign ulcers and a venomous bite’ |
| Plato | love as ‘the most happy condition’ |
| Plato | ‘for he that violently in love, lives not in his own body but in the thing he loves’ |
| Philip Sydney (1500’s) | ‘Nothing can open your eyes more than to see your own action contemptibly set forth’ |
| Philip Sydney (1500’s) | ‘Comedy is an imitation of common errors of our life’ |
| Erasmus (1400’s) | ‘Wisdom is nothing than to be governed by reason and on the contrary folly is to be given up to the willing of our passions, so that the life of man might not altogether disconsolate and hard. As ridiculous as follies are,they make society pleasant and ,as it were, glue it together’ |
| Doctors in 1500’s | ‘invisible and subtle stealth of the plague; that creeps into the body and changes you, and affects you and acts in you’ (like love) |
Twelfth Night Critics Quotes
July 8, 2019