Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment

Shakespeare and the Comedy of Enchantment argues that enchantment constitutes a key emotional and intellectual dimension of Shakespeare's comedies. It thus makes a new claim about the rejuvenating value of comedy for individuals and society. Shakespeare's comedies orchestrate ongoing encounters between the rational and the mysterious, between doubt and fascination, with feelings moved by elements of enchantment that also seem a little ridiculous. In such a drama, lines of causality become complex, and even satisfying endings leave certain matters incomplete and contingent--openings for scrutiny and thought.

In addressing enchantment, the book takes exception to the modernist vision of a deterministic 'disenchanted' world. As Shakespeare's action advances, comic mysteries accrue--uncanny coincidences; magical sympathies; inexplicable repetitions; psychic influences; and puzzlements about the meaning of events--all of whose numinous effects linger ambiguously after reason has apparently answered the play's questions. Separate chapters explore the devices, tropes, and motifs of enchantment: magical clowns who alter the action through stop-time interludes; structural repetitions that suggest mysteriously converging, even opaquely providential destinies; locales that oppose magical and protean forces to regulatory and quotidian values; desires, thoughts, and utterances that 'manifest' comically monstrous events; characters who return from the dead, facilitated by the desires of the living; play-endings crossed by harmony and dissonance, with moments of wonder that make possible the mysterious action of forgiveness. Wonder and wondering in Shakespeare's and other comedies, it emerges, become the conditions for new possibilities. Chapters refer extensively to early modern history, Renaissance and modern theories of comedy, treatises on magical science, and contemporaneous Italian and Tudor comedy.

Kent Cartwright, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland

Kent Cartwright is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Department of English of the University of Maryland. His teaching and scholarship have focused on sixteenth-century British literature, especially drama, and on late medieval British literature. He has also written on the status of the
undergraduate English major. He has edited The Comedy of Errors, for The Arden Shakespeare, Third Series (Bloomsbury, 2017). His other books include Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Shakespearean Tragedy and Its Double: The Rhythms
of Audience Response (Penn State University Press, 1991). He is editor of A Companion to Tudor Literature (Blackwell, 2010) and the author of numerous articles on Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. He has served as president of the Association of Departments of English (USA) and as a trustee of the
Shakespeare Association of America.