page_title: Comedy
section_title: Commedia dell'arte and Shakespearean, Elizabethan comedy
hierarchical_section_title: Comedy / History / Western history of comedy / Commedia dell'arte and Shakespearean, Elizabethan comedy
context_page_description: In a modern sense, comedy is a genre of fiction that refers to any discourse or work generally intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter, especially in theatre, television, film, stand-up comedy, books or any other medium of entertainment. The origins of the term are found in Ancient Greece. In the Athenian democracy, the public opinion of voters was influenced by the political satire performed by the comic poets at the theaters. The theatrical genre of Greek comedy can be described as a dramatic performance which pits two groups or societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. Northrop Frye depicted these two opposing sides as a "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old." A revised view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a relatively powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to his hopes. In this struggle, the youth is understood to be constrained by his lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse in ruses which engender very dramatic irony which provokes laughter.
context_section_description: "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.
  The Punch and Judy show has roots in the 16th-century Italian commedia dell'arte. The figure of Punch derives from the Neapolitan stock character of Pulcinella. The figure who later became Mr. Punch made his first recorded appearance in England in 1662. Punch and Judy are performed in the spirit of outrageous comedy — often provoking shocked laughter — and are dominated by the anarchic clowning of Mr. Punch. Appearing at a significant period in British history, professor Glyn Edwards states: "[Pulcinella] went down particularly well with Restoration British audiences, fun-starved after years of Puritanism. We soon changed Punch's name, transformed him from a marionette to a hand puppet, and he became, really, a spirit of Britain — a subversive maverick who defies authority, a kind of puppet equivalent to our political cartoons."
caption: Title page of the first quarto of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream (1600)
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "2653", "Image ImageLength": "3973", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image ImageDescription": "STC 22302, title page", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2008:04:04 13:23:02", "Image Artist": "Shakespeare, William", "Image Copyright": "image (c) Folger Shakespeare Library", "Image ExifOffset": "306", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "371", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "556"}