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About Shakespeare

William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's life
Religion • Sexuality
Bibliography
Collaborations • Attribution
Criticism
Reputation • Influence
World Bibliography
Folger Shakespeare Library
Books on Shakespeare

Poems

Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespearean sonnet
Petrach vs. Shakespeare
"A Lover's Complaint"
"Venus and Adonis"
"The Rape of Lucrece"
"The Phoenix and the Turtle"

Chronology • Early texts
First Folio • Second Folio
False Folio • Style

Comedies

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Measure for Measure
The Comedy of Errors
Much Ado About Nothing
Love's Labour's Lost
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Merchant of Venice
As You Like It
The Taming of the Shrew
All's Well That Ends Well
Twelfth Night

Histories

King John • Richard II
Henry IV, Part 1 • Part 2
Henry V • Henry VI, Part 1
Henry VI, Part 2 • Part 3
Richard III • Henry VIII

Tragedies

Troilus and Cressida
Coriolanus • Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet''
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth • Hamlet
King Lear • Othello
Anthony and Cleopatra

Romances

Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Cymbeline • The Winter's Tale
The Tempest
The Two Noble Kinsmen

Rowe • Pope • Theobald
Johnson • Steevens • Malone
Chalmers

Contemporaries

Elizabeth I • James I
Richard Barnfield
Beaumont and Fletcher
Geo. Chapman • Henry Chettle
Robert Davenport
Tho. Dekker • Michael Drayton
Thomas Heywood • John Ford
Ben Jonson • Thomas Kyd
John Lyly • Gervase Markham
Christopher Marlowe
John Marston • Tho. Middleton
Anthony Munday • Tho. Nashe
George Peele • William Percy
Walter Raleigh • William Rowley
Cyril Tourneur • John Webster
Geo. Whetstone • Mary Wroth
Elizabethan miscellanies

In performance

Shakespeare's Globe
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Theatre companies
Film and TV adaptations
BBC Television Shakespeare

Miscellaneous

Shakespeare Apocrypha
Authorship question • History
Jubilee • Bardolatry
Shakespeare's Birthplace
Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare garden

This box: view · talk · edit

In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into 3 categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies. This article deals with the comedies.

Overview[]

"Comedy", in its Elizabethan usage, had a very different meaning from modern comedy. A Shakespearean comedy is one that has a happy ending, usually involving marriages between the unmarried characters, and a tone and style that is more light-hearted than Shakespeare's other plays. Patterns in the comedies include movement to a "green world",[1] both internal and external conflicts, and a tension between Apollonian and Dionysian values. Shakespearean comedies tend to also include:

  • A greater emphasis on situations than characters (this numbs the audience's connection to the characters, so that when characters experience misfortune, the audience still finds it laughable)
  • A struggle of young lovers to overcome difficulty, often presented by elders
  • Separation and re-unification
  • Deception among characters (especially mistaken identity)
  • A clever servant
  • Tension between characters, often within a family
  • Multiple, intertwining plots
  • Use of all styles of comedy (slapstick, puns, dry humor, earthy humor, witty banter, practical jokes)
  • Pastoral element (courtly people living an idealized, rural life), originally an element of Pastoral Romance, exploited by Shakespeare for his comic plots and often parodied therein for humorous effects
  • Happy Ending, though this is a given, since by definition, anything without a happy ending can't be a comedy

Several of Shakespeare's comedies, such as Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well, have an unusual tone with a difficult mix of humor and tragedy which has led them to be classified as problem plays. It is not clear whether the uneven nature of these dramas is due to an imperfect understanding of Elizabethan humor and society, a fault on Shakespeare's part, or a deliberate attempt by him to blend styles and subvert the audience's expectations. By the end of Shakespeare's life, he had written seventeen comedies.

List of comedies by Shakespeare[]

The plays are here according to the order in which they are given in the First Folio of 1623. Plays marked with an asterisk (*) are now commonly referred to as the 'romances'. Plays marked with two asterisks (**) are sometimes referred to as the 'problem plays'.

References[]

Notes[]

  1. Regan, Richard. "Shakespearean comedy". Retrieved on 11 January 2007.

External links[]

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This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia. (view article). (view authors).
This page uses content from Wikinfo . The original article was at Wikinfo:Shakespearean comedy.
The list of authors can be seen in the (view authors). page history. The text of this Wikinfo article is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license.
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