Paul Cantor: Shakespeare and Comedy

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2021

⏱️ 84 minutes

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Summary

What is the nature of comedy? How does it differ from tragedy? What can we learn from Shakespeare’s comedies that we might miss if we focus only on tragedies? In this Conversation, Paul Cantor presents a tour-de-force analysis of the nature of comedy—and explains how and why Shakespeare's comedies exemplify it. As Cantor shows, comedy portrays human beings as worse than they are in order to puncture the sometimes unrealistic and destructive aspirations for ourselves and for our desires. Comedy is therefore meant to show us it’s a mistake to take too seriously things that do not necessarily deserve to be taken seriously. Too often our pride or self-importance leads us to make much ado about nothing. Cantor explains how Shakespeare’s comedies are a necessary complement to his tragedies—and as pointing to a workable middle way between the desires and even dreams humans have, and the conventions and accommodations they need to live together and flourish.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Conversations. I'm Bill Crystal. Very pleased to be joined again by my friend Paul
0:21.2	Cantor, Professor of Literature at the University of Virginia. He has been a guest on many conversations,
0:27.5	ranging from topics from Shakespeare to popular culture to fiction to the Western in movies and
0:34.2	novels. But today we're going to talk about Shakespeare and comedy. Before we get into that,
0:40.2	I should say that you can watch a whole series of lectures by Paul, excellent lectures on Shakespeare,
0:46.4	at the Shakespeare and Politics page of great thinkers, TheGreatThinkers.org. So go to TheGreatThinkers.org,
0:54.0	click on Shakespeare and Politics and you get a very well curated page with Paul's lectures and
0:59.7	actually the earlier conversations you've had on Shakespeare, etc. But enough of the promotion,
1:04.4	let's get to the topic. So, Paul, thanks for being with me.
1:08.7	Pleasure being here. And now it's virtual.
1:12.0	Yeah, I know. Next time. Next time in reality. So Shakespeare and Comedy. So you wanted to talk
1:20.8	about comedy. It's most people Shakespeare, the tragedies come to mind first and they're more
1:26.0	serious and heavy and weighty and all that. I assume you have a slightly different view if you
1:30.8	want to discuss comedy here. Yeah, I think comedy doesn't get enough attention. And I recognize
1:38.1	that Shakespeare's tragedy is a very great place. I'd say that King Lear and Hamlet are
1:43.4	to have raised work. But I think we tend to underestimate the comedies because we don't understand
1:49.8	paradoxically their seriousness. And there's a way in which the comedies take up subjects seriously
2:00.3	in a way that maybe the tragedies don't. And so I've always felt that the comedies tend to be neglected
2:09.4	or discussed in superficial ways. It's well known that you can't explain numerous. There's
2:15.2	nothing worse than trying to analyze a joke. And so I think it's pretty clear that the scholarship
2:21.3	on the tragedies is more interesting than that on the comedies. But I do think that there's something
2:28.4	to be learned from the comedies that we can't learn from the tragedies. And here I take my clue
	...

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