Prototypes of Festive Comedy in a Pageant Entertainment: Summer’s Last Will and Testament
Prototypes of Festive Comedy in a Pageant Entertainment: Summer’s Last Will and Testament
This chapter focuses on Nashe's Summer's Last Will and Testament. Written two or three years before A Midsummer Night's Dream, it presents a variety of roles, gestures, and ways of talking which were current in pageantry and game, precisely the traditional materials which Shakespeare used in developing festive comedy. Nashe's piece, because it is a pageant, is not completely detachable from the occasion of its production. Read for a play, it often seems jerky and sprawling, without a controlling movement. It lacks the control provided by plot, by events inside the fiction, because the event it was designed to express was the occasion of its performance.
Keywords: Nashe, pageantry, play, festive comedy, Shakespeare
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