New Comedy and Old Comedy

Comedy, literary work that aspires mostly to provoke laughter. Unlike tragedy, which hunts for to engage deep forceful emotions and sympathies, comedy strives to amuse chiefly through condemnation and mock of man's culture and institutions. Although generally employed in quotation to the drama (drama, Western; Asian drama), in the Middle Ages comedy was affiliated with vernacular language and a joyous ending. Thus, the period was furthermore focused to such non-dramatic works as Dante's devout rhyme, The Divine Comedy. (Olson, 54-58)

 

Evolution of Comedy

Dramatic comedy increased out of the boisterous choruses and two-way chat of the fertility rites of the feasts of the Greek god Dionysus. What became renowned to theater historians as Old Comedy in ancient Greece was a sequence of roughly bound scenes (using a chorus and one-by-one characters) in which a specific placement was methodically exploited through farce, make-believe, satire, and parody, the sequence final view in a lyrical commemoration of unity. (Olson, 54-58)

Reaching its size in the glaringly scathing plays of Aristophanes, Old Comedy step-by-step fallen and was restored by a smaller diagram crucial and imaginative drama. In New Comedy, usually trained to have started in the mid-4th cent. B.C., the plays were more attentively literary, regularly loving in pitch, and decidedly smaller diagram satirical and critical. Menander was the bulk well famous journalist of New Comedy.

During the Middle Ages the Church strove to hold the happy and serious facets of the drama to a smallest, but comedian drama endured in medieval folk plays and carnivals, in the Italian commedia dell'arte, in deride liturgical dramas, and in the farcical components of miracle and ethics plays. (Olson, 54-58) With the advent of the Renaissance, a new and crucial drama emerged.

In England in the 16th cent. the custom of the interlude, evolved by John Heywood and other ones, merged with that of Latin classic comedy, finally generating the large Elizabethan comedy, which come to its largest pointer in the plays of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Shakespeare, whose comedies extended from the farcical to the tragicomic, was the expert of the loving comedy, where Jonson, whose drama was powerfully effected by academic tenets, composed caustic, wealthy satire. (Olson, 54-58)

In 17th-century France, the academic effect was blended with that of the commedia dell'arte in the drama of Molière, one of the utmost comic and satiric writers in the annals of the theater. This blend is furthermore present in the plays of the Italian Carlo Goldoni.

After a time bounds of suppression throughout the Puritan Revolution, the English comedian drama reemerged with the witty, often licentious, attentively artificial comedy of manners of Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve, and others. (Brown, 441-447) At the seal of the 17th cent., although, such stern answer had set in against the bawdiness and frivolity of the Restoration stage that English comedy descended into what has become renowned as sentimental comedy. This drama, which searched more to remind tears than laughing out high volume, had its equivalent in France in the comédie larmoyante.

In England throughout ...