Page 67 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

66 How to write critical essays
agreement with the title’s bald assertion. A paragraph would
tend to begin by implicitly admitting the essay’s failure to
progress: ‘One of the most notable examples in Twelfth Night
where playfulness and seriousness mingle is the joke played
against Malvolio by Sir Toby, Feste and Maria.’ The structural
weakness here betrays an intellectual floppiness back at the
planning stage.
The writer should have thought about the precise
implications of terms like ‘playfulness’ and ‘seriousness’. There
should have been curiosity about the various methods by which
a literary and dramatic text can signal such a dichotomy of
tone. There should have been discrimination between more or
less evenly balanced attempts to both amuse and challenge an
audience. One comedy should have been distinguished from
another in terms of how, how often, and how insistently it
offers such ambiguous moments. Had such issues been properly
considered, the writer would have seen that a particular speech
or scene needed to be considered at a specific stage of an
overall, developing argument rather than just included
anywhere.
A more promising start to a paragraph introducing the sub-
plot’s plot against Malvolio in Twelfth Night would be any of
the following:
The latent pun in ‘playfulness’ is far more relevant in
Twelfth Night than in As You Like It. Malvolio is the victim
of a play-within-a-play.
Seriousness, however, is not just a matter of potential
tragedy in plots which eventually still stagger to the relief of
a comic conclusion. The voiced thoughts of the characters
may be more or less serious as they try to make sense of the
events in which they are involved. The ploy of inviting
Malvolio to give portentous weight to a quickly scribbled
forgery relies on his own gravity. The playful trick works
because its victim takes himself so seriously.
There are, however, episodes which impose more strain on
an audience’s capacity to laugh and sympathize at the same
time. Is it the careless playwright or the carefully discredited
character of Sir Toby who is the sub-plot’s arch-plotter and
goes too far in the joke against Malvolio?