Comedy

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Comedy's earliest fully developed form, the Old Comedy of fifth century Athens best represented by Aristophanes, used the stage for direct political and social satire, mocking named living politicians, philosophers and fellow playwrights in front of an audience that recognized the targets. By the time of Menander a century later, Athenian comedy had shifted decisively toward what is now called New Comedy: private, domestic plots built around young lovers kept apart by a stern father, a case of mistaken identity or a social gap, and reunited by the final scene, with a wedding or reconciliation closing the action rather than a political point being scored. That New Comedy template, love thwarted and then restored, passed through Roman comic playwrights and remained recognizable more than two thousand years later in the structure of a romantic comedy.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

William Shakespeare's romantic comedies, plays including Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It and Twelfth Night, follow the same basic shape New Comedy had established two thousand years earlier: young couples separated by disguise, deception, family opposition or simple misunderstanding, reunited in a closing scene of marriage that restores social order rather than overturning it. Shakespeare added his own recurring devices to that inherited structure, most distinctively cross-dressed heroines whose disguise drives the plot's confusions, and a pastoral or otherwise displaced setting, a forest or an island, where ordinary social rules are suspended long enough for the comedy's misunderstandings to be worked out before the characters return to normal life changed.