Why should Johnson have thought Shakespeare’s comic parts were spontaneous, and that his tragic parts were laboured? Here; it seems to me, Johnson, by his simple integrity, in being wrong has happened on some truth much deeper than he knew. For to those who have experienced the full horror of life, tragedy is still inadequate. Sophocles felt more of it than he could express, when he wrote Oedipus the King: Shakespeare when he wrote Hamlet : and Shakespeare had the advantage of being able to employ his grave-diggers. In the end, horror and laughter may be one only when horror and laughter have become as horrible and laughable as they can be ; and—whatever the conscious intention of the authors—you may laugh or shudder over Oedipus or Hamlet or king Lear—or both at once then only do you perceive that the aim of the comic and the tragic dramatist is the same : they are equally serious. So do the meanings of words change, as we inspect them, that we may even come to see Moliere in some lights as a more serious dramatist than Corneille or Racine: Wycherley as equally serious (in this sense) with Marlowe. All this is suggested to me by the words of Samuel Johnson which I have quoted- What Plato perceived has not been noticed by subsequent dramatic critics; the dramatic poet uses the conventions of his day; there is potential comedy in Sophocles and potential tragedy in Aristophanes. and otherwise they would riot as such good tragedians or comedians as they are. It might he added that when you have comedy and tragedy united in the wrong Way. or separated in the wrong way, you get sentiment or amusciflelit.
The distinction between the tragic and the comic is an account of the way in which we try to live; when we get below it, as in King Lear, we have an accent of the way in which we do live.
