Lady Gregory's 'Humour of Character': A Commedia Approach to Spreading the News (Critical Essay‪)‬

In one regard, reading comic drama hinges on a contradictory invitation issued by the playwright through the text: how might the words summon to the mind's stage an inkling of laughter-provoking incarnation, despite the sheer impossibility of experiencing the full-blown event in advance? Because correspondences between text and theatre practice suggest themselves through consistent traces of performance technique, an array of comedy-oriented patterns can be read provisionally through a play's words, structures, rhythms, and implied actions, suggesting potential 'neighbourhoods' of performative 'outlining'. (1) Owing to the range of genres and attendant techniques accumulated by Western civilization, a comic text may open itself to a number of practical registers, each of which will alter its utterance in actual performance. This potential, of course, remains in flux over time, contingent upon the historical and cultural theatrical moment and the contributions of practitioners. Jonathan Miller submits 'that the afterlife of a play is a process of emergent evolution, during which meanings and emphases develop that might not have been apparent at the time of writing, even to the author'. (2)