The Genre of Comedy Ready Reference. Comedy From classical Greek times

The tradition of comedy that Shakespeare inherited and developed was as mixed as that of tragedy but considerably richer in examples. The classical models were Plautus, as Meres notes, and Terence, whose influence on structure and character in Elizabethan comedies is more observable than that of Seneca in the early tragedies. The plots of Plautus and Terence work out of tight spots through deceptions and mistakings to a gratifying conclusion in recovery of lost children, exposure of impostors, and removal of impediments to youthful male desire. But English comedy also had deep roots in popular festivals, characterized variously by song and dance, disguising, ritual abuse, and the mocking or up-ending of authority under the chaotic rule of temporary kings or queens. Tied as they were to the round of the agricultural year, the festivals celebrated fertility through individual sexual coupling as well as communal rites. In both their elaborate pretences involving disguise and their usual conclusion in the mating of the young, festive practices merged easily with the classical comedy plot. The clowning spirit infiltrated serious medieval drama, to enliven the Flood story with Noah's shrewish wife and even the Nativity with the chicanery of Mak the sheep-stealer, and to leaven the moralities' action of fateful moral choice with the antics of the Vice. Like tragedy, comedy was fed from non-dramatic sources as well, ballads and romance narratives such as Amadis de Gaule and Heliodorus' Aethiopian History, that presented strenuous quests and much-tried loves in a climate of wonders.

Romance, classical structure, and festive elements had already begun to come together in drama when Shakespeare began writing, in such school and university plays as Ralph Roister Doister (1552) and Gammer Gurton's Needle (1553) and later in John Lyly's fantasies written for the boys' companies and comedies of the adult popular theatre by George Peele and Robert Greene (1580s and 1590s). While the school plays feature clowning, romance elements come into their own with such comedies as The Old Wife's Tale (Peele) and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (Greene).

Courtship is the staple activity in the comic drama of Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries, driving the main plot or, less often, a subplot (as when Antipholus of Syracuse woos Luciana around the edges of a welter of mistaken identities in The Comedy of Errors). While these plays pursue love wholeheartedly, they are equally energetic in negating death. Like their carnivalesque antecedents marked by burlesque funerals and resurrections, they invoke the end of life only to avoid it, undo it, distance it, laugh it off. Only the most minor characters in them actually die. Quite a few, like Hero in Much Ado About Nothing, are believed to be dead, only to reappear in due course among the living in a triumph of 'evitability' and wish-fulfilment. The same bent to reshape reality can be seen in the many controller-figures who haunt these comedies, working their transformations through magic, like Friar Bacon (Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, John of Bordeaux) and Oberon (A Midsummer Night's Dream), or through their own ingenuity like Petruccio (The Taming of A Shrew/The Shrew). The frequent disguisers and deceivers belong with this group in that they manipulate others through their superior knowledge. Their stratagems, indispensable for the dramatic structure, generate both complications and resolutions. While such manipulators are typically male, like the hero of Mucedorus and the suitors in Fair Em, Shakespeare fostered his own tradition of women who control events in their plays--sometimes aided by disguise in the manner of Portia in The Merchant of Venice or Rosalind in As You Like It, sometimes relying on sheer force of wit and wisdom, as do the ladies in Love's Labour's Lost and the wives in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Not all his comedies work this way, and in a few, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Twelfth Night, male disguise confers on the heroine only knowledge, without the power to alter events. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's 'women on top' speciality has its own relevance to the comic mode, which rejoices, like the seasonal festivals that animate it, in temporarily placing servants over masters and women over men, dislocating the hierarchies sanctioned by its society only to reassert them at the play's end.

Another decided preference is for the plural. Plotting is typically multiple, including frames and inductions as well as subsidiary actions, and tone often varies accordingly. Refined love-longings are set off by the more physical preoccupations of servants and clowns, intent like the slaves of Roman comedy on getting dinner and avoiding danger. The resulting suggestion of alternative realities was most fully developed by Shakespeare in his repeated comic device of contrasting worlds: court and forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, Venice and Belmont in The Merchant of Venice. The point is not to choose fluidity and anarchy over strict social and hierarchical codes, or the law of love over the law of property, but to include both, adjusting one to the other in a new, productive balance. Comic inclusiveness thus reinforces 'evitability', achieving a broader view that sees around the impasse. In encouraging alternative meanings, it also underlies the verbal