An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit

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About this book

An Essay on Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit is by George Meredith. The essay says good Comedies are such rare productions that, notwithstanding the wealth of our literature in the Comic element, it would not occupy us long to run over the English list. The essay says a society of cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current.

The text says the light of Athene over the head of Achilles illuminates the birth of Greek Tragedy, but that Comedy rolled in shouting under the divine protection of the Son of the Wine-jar, as Dionysus is made to proclaim himself by Aristophanes. The text says that eastward you have total silence of Comedy among a people intensely susceptible to laughter, as the Arabian Nights will testify. The text says this treble-Dutch lumbersomeness of the Comic spirit is of itself exclusive of the idea of Comedy.

About the author

George Meredith

George Meredith was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era. At first, his focus was poetry, influenced by John Keats among others, but Meredith gradually established a reputation as a novelist. The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) briefly scandalised Victorian literary circles.