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23-964: Tunbridge Walks, or the Yeoman of Kent is a 1703 comedy play by the English writer Thomas Baker . It starred the droll actor William Pinkethman in a leading role. It was part of a growing trend of British plays set in spa towns . The play features the folk song King John and the Bishop . It was revived numerous times during the eighteenth century at Drury Lane, Covent Garden and Haymarket. The original Drury Lane cast included John Mills as Loveworth, Robert Wilks as Reynard, Benjamin Johnson as Woodcock, William Pinkethman as Squib, William Bullock as Maiden, Jane Rogers as Belinda, Susanna Verbruggen as Hillaria, Mary Powell as Mrs Goodfellow, Henrietta Moore as Penelope and Jane Lucas as Lucy. This article on

46-688: A "Society of Youth" and a "Society of the Old", but this dichotomy is seldom described as an entirely satisfactory explanation. A later view characterizes the essential agon of comedy as a struggle between a powerless youth and the societal conventions that pose obstacles to its hopes; in this sense, the youth is understood to be constrained by its lack of social authority, and is left with little choice but to take recourse to ruses that engender dramatic consequences. Poetics (Aristotle) Aristotle 's Poetics ( Ancient Greek : Περὶ ποιητικῆς Peri poietikês ; Latin : De Poetica ; c. 335  BCE )

69-542: A "sudden glory." Modern investigators have paid much attention to the origin both of laughter and of smiling, as well as the development of the "play instinct" and its emotional expression. Much comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations , but there are many recognized genres of comedy. Satire and political satire use ironic comedy used to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from

92-508: A particular part of society (usually upper class society) and uses humor to parody or satirize the behavior and mannerisms of its members. Romantic comedy is a popular genre that depicts burgeoning romance in humorous terms, and focuses on the foibles of those who are falling in love. The word "comedy" is derived from the Classical Greek κωμῳδία , which is a compound either of κῶμος (revel) or κώμη (village) and ᾠδή (singing): it

115-459: A play is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Comedy play The phenomena connected with laughter and that which provokes it have been carefully investigated by psychologists. The predominating characteristics are incongruity or contrast in the object, and shock or emotional seizure on the part of the subject. It has also been held that the feeling of superiority is an essential factor: thus Thomas Hobbes speaks of laughter as

138-418: A plot whose logic binds up the constituent elements by necessity and probability. In this sense, he concluded, such poetry was more philosophical than history was in so far as it approximates to a knowledge of universals . Aristotle distinguishes between the genres of "poetry" in three ways: Having examined briefly the field of "poetry" in general, Aristotle proceeds to his definition of tragedy: Tragedy

161-622: A quasi-dramatic art, given its definition in Ch. 23)—survives. The lost second part addressed comedy . Some scholars speculate that the Tractatus coislinianus summarises the contents of the lost second book. The table of contents page of the Poetics found in Modern Library's Basic Works of Aristotle (2001) identifies five basic parts within it. Aristotle also draws a famous distinction between

184-566: Is a representation of a serious, complete action which has magnitude, in embellished speech, with each of its elements [used] separately in the [various] parts [of the play] and [represented] by people acting and not by narration , accomplishing by means of pity and terror the catharsis of such emotions. By "embellished speech", I mean that which has rhythm and melody, i.e. song. By "with its elements separately", I mean that some [parts of it] are accomplished only by means of spoken verses, and others again by means of song. He then identifies

207-638: Is possible that κῶμος itself is derived from κώμη , and originally meant a village revel. The adjective "comic" (Greek κωμικός), which strictly means that which relates to comedy is, in modern usage, generally confined to the sense of "laughter-provoking". The word came into modern usage through the Latin comoedia and Italian commedia and has, over time, passed through various shades of meaning. In ancient Greece , comedy seems to have originated in songs or recitations apropos of fertility festivals or gatherings, or also in making fun at other people or stereotypes. In

230-399: Is the earliest surviving work of Greek dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory . In this text, Aristotle offers an account of ποιητική , which refers to poetry, and more literally, "the poetic art," deriving from the term for "poet; author; maker," ποιητής . Aristotle divides the art of poetry into verse drama ( comedy , tragedy , and

253-456: The Poetics , Aristotle states that comedy originated in phallic rituals and festivals of mirth. It is basically an imitation of "the ridiculous, which is a species of the ugly". However, Aristotle taught that comedy is a good thing. It brings forth happiness, which for Aristotle is the ideal state, the final goal in any activity. He does believe that we humans feel pleasure oftentimes by doing

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276-541: The Middle Ages was translated from a Greek manuscript dated to some time prior to the year 700. This manuscript, translated from Greek to Syriac, is independent of the currently-accepted 11th-century source designated Paris 1741 . The Syriac-language source used for the Arabic translations departed widely in vocabulary from the original Poetics and it initiated a misinterpretation of Aristotelian thought that continued through

299-687: The Poetics was accepted by the West , where it reflected the "prevailing notions of poetry" into the 16th century. Giorgio Valla 's 1498 Latin translation of Aristotle's text (the first to be published) was included with the 1508 Aldine printing of the Greek original as part of an anthology of Rhetores graeci . By the early decades of the sixteenth century, vernacular versions of Aristotle's Poetics appeared, culminating in Lodovico Castelvetro 's Italian editions of 1570 and 1576. Italian culture produced

322-515: The Poetics , four have been most prominent. These include the meanings of catharsis and hamartia , the Classical unities , and the question why Aristotle appears to contradict himself between chapters 13 and 14. Aristotle's work on aesthetics consists of the Poetics , Politics (Bk VIII), and Rhetoric . The Poetics was lost to the Western world for a long time. The text was restored to

345-543: The satyr play ), lyric poetry , and epic . The genres all share the function of mimesis , or imitation of life, but differ in three ways that Aristotle describes: The surviving book of Poetics is primarily concerned with drama; the analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although the text is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about [t]his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions." Of scholarly debates on

368-415: The "parts" of tragedy: He offers the earliest-surviving explanation for the origins of tragedy and comedy: Anyway, arising from an improvisatory beginning (both tragedy and comedy—tragedy from the leaders of the dithyramb , and comedy from the leaders of the phallic processions which even now continue as a custom in many of our cities)... The Arabic version of Aristotle's Poetics that influenced

391-490: The Middle Ages. The scholars who published significant commentaries on Aristotle's Poetics included Avicenna , Al-Farabi , and Averroes . Many of these interpretations sought to use Aristotelian theory to impose morality on the Arabic poetic tradition. In particular, Averroes added a moral dimension to the Poetics by interpreting tragedy as the art of praise and comedy as the art of blame. Averroes' interpretation of

414-488: The West in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance only through a Latin translation of an Arabic version written by Averroes . The accurate Greek - Latin translation made by William of Moerbeke in 1278 was virtually ignored. At some point during antiquity, the original text of the Poetics was divided in two, each "book" written on a separate roll of papyrus . Only the first part—that which focuses on tragedy and epic (as

437-406: The great Renaissance commentators on Aristotle's Poetics , and in the baroque period Emanuele Tesauro , with his Cannocchiale aristotelico , re-presented to the world of post- Galilean physics Aristotle's poetic theories as the sole key to approaching the human sciences . Recent scholarship has challenged whether Aristotle focuses on literary theory per se (given that not one poem exists in

460-473: The guardians of the state should avoid laughter, "for ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction." Plato says comedy should be tightly controlled if one wants to achieve the ideal state. Literary critic Northrop Frye described the comic genre as a drama that pits two societies against each other in an amusing agon or conflict. In The Anatomy of Criticism (1957) he depicted these two opposing sides as

483-628: The object of humor. Parody borrows the form of some popular genre, artwork , or text but uses certain ironic changes to critique that form from within (though not necessarily in a condemning way). Screwball comedy derives its humor largely from bizarre, surprising (and improbable) situations or characters. Black comedy is defined by dark humor that makes light of so-called dark or evil elements in human nature. Similarly scatological humor , sexual humor , and race humor create comedy by violating social conventions or taboos in comedic ways. A comedy of manners typically takes as its subject

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506-452: The tragic mode of poetry and the type of history-writing practiced among the Greeks. Whereas history deals with things that took place in the past, tragedy concerns itself with what might occur, or could be imagined to happen. History deals with particulars, whose relation to one another is marked by contingency, accident, or chance. Contrariwise, poetic narratives are determined objects, unified by

529-510: The wrong thing, but he does not necessarily believe that comedy and humor is the wrong thing. It is also not true for Aristotle that a comedy must involve sexual humor to qualify as a comedy. A comedy is about the fortunate arise of a sympathetic character. A happy ending is all that is required in his opinion. In contrast, Plato taught that comedy is a destruction to the self. He believed it produces an emotion that overrides rational self-control and learning. In The Republic , Plato says that

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