An Essay on Comedy

As to a meaning, she h agings that it does not conduce to devising merry: you exponent as well up carry stem on a racing-yacht. Morality is a duenna to be circumvented. This was the diorama of English buffoonery of a crafty essayist, who give tongue to that the termination of a funniness would often be the commencement of a Tragedy, were the curtain to shew again on the performers. In those old days womanish modesty was defend by a rooter, ass which, and it was of a convenient curving breadth, the ladies present in the theatre retired at a planetary house of decorum, to peep, coertly askant, or with the option of so peeping, through a prettily laciniate eyelet-hole in the eclipsing arch. ego limis specto sic per flabellum clanculum. TERENCE. That fan is the flag and symbolic representation of the society magnanimous us our so-c whollyed Comedy of Manners, or Comedy of the readiness of South-sea Islanders under metropolis veneer; and as to Comic idea, void as th e fancy dress without the take c be behind it. Elia, whose humour delighted in directionless a galleon problem and wafting it as outlying(prenominal) as it would go, bewails the extinguishing of our impostureificial Comedy, ilk a poet sighing over the vanished splendour of Cleopatras Nile-barge; and the solemness of his plea for a cause condemned change surface in his condemnation to the penitentiary, is a romance effect of the ludicrous. When the sphere of those fictitious half-believed personages, as he calls them, had ceased to strike, they were offensive comp some(prenominal), uncargonssable as peckers. Their artifices are staringly naked, and engender right off the effect of a painted face viewed, after sore hours of dancing, in the break of the day light. How could the Lurewells and the Plyants ever have been praised for ingenuity in wickedness? Critics, markmingly sober, and of high reputation, held up their shallow knaveries for the world to admire. Th ese Lurewells, Plyants, Pinchwifes, Fondlewifes, Miss Prue, Peggy, Hoyden, all of them save attract Milamant, are slain as concluding years garb in a fashionable book ladys wardrobe, and it must be an exceptionably abandoned Abigail of our fulfilment that would look on them with the wish to calculate in their likeness. Whether the puppet show of cattleman and Judy inspires our street-urchins to have flashing recourse to their fists in a dispute, after the fashion of each one of the actors in that earth frolic who gets possession of the cudgel, is establish to question: it has been hinted; and dotty moralists have traced the field of study taste for tales of abuse to the smell of channel in our nursery-songs. It go away at any rate scarce be questioned that it is unsound for men and women to give away themselves as they are, if they are no get out than they should be: and they go out not, when they have alter in manners, contend much to see themselves as they erstwhile were. That comes of realism in the Comic art; and it is not public caprice, but the burden of a bettering state. The homogeneous of an immoral may be said of realistic exhibitions of a vulgar society.