ABSTRACT
With the publication of Shakespeare and the Power of Performance has done more to value the power of comic performance in drama ranging from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance than Robert Weimann. Weimann's criticism is most exemplary when it employs Renaissance conceptions of, and indeed language about, performance, something especially evident, in engagements with the comic. From Weimann's methodology, one can find new applications of his work on the power of comic performance through attention to "contrarietie", "Vice-descendants", "personation", and overlooked yet fundamental aesthetic and dramaturgical principle to which the author draws attention – "grose indecorum". As with their monolithic conception of humanist notions of comedy, Weimann and Douglas Bruster have accepted several related developmental/evolutionary arguments about Shakespearean drama. Hamlet himself is, in fact, an extension of what Weimann and Bruster identify as Shakespeare's earlier experimentation with figures of a hybrid clown-hero, "mingling vulgar Vice and worthy history", in the titular figure of Richard III.
