ABSTRACT
The ‘mechanicals’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are no more confused in their categories than most of the theorists and critics who have concerned themselves with the nature of comedy; for the conjunction of ‘lamentable comedy’ and ‘cruel death’ is a recurring affront to the purity of comedy and tragedy as dramatic categories. Shakespeare – or at least his first editors in the Folio of 1623–was in the same ambivalence of mind over this ‘sour comedy’, this ‘tragical history’ or ‘comical satire’ of Troilus and Cressida’s love. Horace Walpole looks not to a ritual conclusion but to the level and quality of comprehension involved in comic and tragic experience: The world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel. The considerations seem largely to have turned on the question of status–the relative esteem in which tragedy and comedy are held.
