SOURCE: Kennedy, William J. “Comic Audiences and Rhetorical Strategies in Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Molière.” Comparative Literature Studies 21, no. 4 (winter 1984): 363–82.

In the following essay, Kennedy compares Machiavelli's Mandragola, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and Molière's L'Avare.

Since antiquity, comic theory has pursued two different approaches. One analyzes the structure of the comic object and seeks to explain the comic action itself. Its proponents include Aristotle, Quintilian, most Neo-Classical theorists, and in the twentieth century Henri Bergson, Northrop Frye, and Susanne K. Langer.¹ The other analyzes the psychology of the perceiving subject and seeks to explain the audience's response to the action. Its proponents include Plato, Hobbes, Kant, Baudelaire, and in the twentieth century Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Ernst Kris.² These approaches are not mutually exclusive; indeed the second presumes the first while the first fulfills itself in the second. Examples abound from all periods. Between 1500 and 1700 dramatic practice...