ABSTRACT
This book began with an analogy that has evolved into a thesis. In the beginning, I noted a certain stylistic similarity between the comedies of the Restoration stage and the comedies of 1930s Hollywood film. It seemed a coincidence worthy of remark and occasional pedagogical elaboration that two such different times, places, and cultures could sustain generic interest in the witty pair at the center of each genre and could relish the barrage of language characteristic of these repartee-laden dramatic worlds. The rapidfire back and forth of Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday conveys the sort of heightened communication-attentiveness to nuance, repetition, double entendre, connotation, body language-one hears and imagines (and in good performances witnesses) in scenes between The Man of Mode’s Harriet and Dorimant or The Way of the World’s Millamant and Mirabell. It was the two genres’ similar approach to dialogue, their obvious pleasure in the exchange of spoken words, that initially prompted my bringing them together in order to think about the kinds of dramatic energy and psychological (or philosophical) commitment necessary on the parts of writers, actors, characters, and audiences alike to fully realize the performative moment. Wit, far from being a superficial feature of each genre’s style, is an essential component of each dramatic world. In addition, the couple at the center of each canonical text of Restoration comedy and Hollywood comedy alike epitomize the brilliance of the well-formulated phrase (the carefully constructed argument, the clever twist on words, the effortless redirection of topic) while also demonstrating the power of attentiveness and reciprocity-subjects far from superficial to the genres or to the ages in which the genres flourished. When I encountered the work of Stanley Cavell, I began to think more deeply about this analogy. Cavell has acknowledged that the back and forth of witty exchange in the Hollywood comedies of remarriage can take the form (as it does in Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night) of “incessant bickering,” but, of course, marriage itself “entails a certain willingness for bickering,” as well as the recognition that there is a kind of “bickering that is itself a mark, not of bliss exactly, but . . . of caring.”1 Cavell calls this insight “a little parable of philosophy,
or of philosophical criticism” (PH, 86). Further, he remarks, “the quarrels of romance and the tirades of matrimony, arguments of desire and of despair” are “[s]o essential . . . to the genre of remarriage that . . . [they] may be taken . . . to pose the problem: What does a happy marriage sound like?” (PH, 86). This central question is tied to (either as cause of the focus, as its effect, or a combination of both) certain features of the film industry unique to the times that produced the genre-the recent introduction of sound as well as the nature of the screen presences and individual strengths of talent possessed by the actors employed in what is known today as the “classical Hollywood” period:
Since the sound of argument, of wrangling, of verbal battle, is the characteristic sound of these comedies-as if the screen had hardly been able to wait to burst into speech-an essential criterion for membership in that small set of actors who are featured in these films is the ability to bear up under this assault of words, to give as good as you get, where what is good must always, however strong, maintain its good spirits, a test of intellectual as well as of spiritual stamina, of what you might call “ear.”
