SOURCE: “Shakespeare's Poesis: Use and Delight in Utopia,” in Comic Persuasion: Moral Structure in British Comedy from Shakespeare to Stoppard, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 24-40.

In the following essay, Rayner examines the moral dimensions of appetite, virtue, and love in Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night.

Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?

Twelfth Night

Virtue and appetite, sobriety and revelry, respectability and knavery, constancy and mutability: the opposition of moral conditions like these defines a fundamental moral tension in many comedies. Comedy often operates out of the collision of desires and restrictions. And appetite in its various manifestations (lust, hunger, greed) is the bodily version of the moral condition. It is the corporeal principle of desire, the irreducible human reality that comedy as a genre tends both to indulge and restrain. In the extreme and exaggerated form of comedy, we...