Comedy

Aristophanes wrote comedy in the same city and the same decades as the tragedians, and his plays are the wildest on the shelf: Socrates in a basket, birds building a city in the sky, the dead poets arguing in Hades, the women of Greece on a sex strike. Nothing in later comedy is as free. The Clouds mocked Socrates twenty-four years before Athens killed him, and Plato has Socrates mention it at his trial.

Shakespeare’s comedies are the form’s second summit and a different thing: mistaken identities, forests, disguised heroines, and a marriage at the end. The Tempest, his last, is on more lists than any of the others, and it is comedy only in the sense that nobody dies. Molière, the century after, wrote the comedy of character, in which one man’s vice, hypocrisy or miserliness or hypochondria, organises the whole play.

The novel took comedy over as it took everything: Austen is the comic novelist of manners, Fielding of the road, Sterne of the digression. Rabelais and Erasmus are Renaissance comedy in prose, and Dante called his poem a comedy because it ends well. The shelf is the most approachable on the site and the least assigned, which says something about the programs.