Page - 25 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 04/02

24 | Toufic El-Khoury www.jrfm.eu 2018, 4/2, 23–37 been the subject of significant transformation and also how the production con- text has influenced the conventions of comedy. First, the basic narrative structure of Greek new comedy, or Menandrian comedy (fourth century BCE), the dominant comic model in western theater until the seventeenth century and based in the Greek and Latin traditions, be- came obsolete when the conception of marriage started to change. The narra- tive structure of new comedy was summarized by Northrop Frye: What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will. In this simple pattern there are several complex elements. In the first place, the movement of comedy is usually a movement from one kind of society to another. At the beginning of the play the ob- structing characters are in charge of the play’s society, and the audience recognizes that they are usurpers. At the end of the play the device in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and the moment when this crystallization occurs is the point of resolution in the action, the comic discovery, anagnorisis or cognition.1 This narrative model remained the comic convention in western theater until the beginning of the seventeenth century (Molière respected it, while parody- ing it, in most of his popular plays – see, for instance, L’Ecole des femmes or the subplot of L’Avare). Playwrights in various countries had begun, however, to take liberties with it: Shakespeare in England, Lope de Vega in Spain, and Cor- neille in France (though less popular for his comedies than Molière, he contrib- uted substantially to the genre2) were modifying the comic dynamics of the cen- tral conflict. The main change was in the representation of the principal young couple: while in the new comedy model the obstacle the lovers must overcome is externally imposed, in the comedies of the abovementioned authors, the ob- stacles are a product of the couple’s own actions and desires. Conflict takes place within the intricacies of reciprocal affection rather than in the midst of social or generational opposition. 1 Frye 1990, 163. Charles Mauron gives a differently detailed account of this narrative convention in his Psychocritique du genre comique: “The young girl, the object of dispute, is the property of the father who guards her or the Ieno who sells her. The emancipation by marriage is henceforth the story’s challenge. The general raits if the new comedy are thus established for many centuries. Its necessary types – rich father (and his avatars), young and penniless lover, cunning servants, young girls and courtesans – will pass under slightly modified forms from antiquity to modern comedy, bringing with them a whole procession of much older grotesque figures: parasite, cook, rural figures, blowhard sol- dier, etc.”, Mauron 1970, 80, my translation. 2 The plays that epitomize those changes are La Galerie du Palais (1631) and La Place Royale (1633) by Corneille, The Gardener’s Dog (1618) by Lope de Vega, and The Taming of the Shrew (1592), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), and Much Ado About Nothing (1599), among others, by Shakespeare.