Commedia erudita are Italian comedies written in the sixteenth century for scholars to enjoy. These plays copied the styles of ancient Roman playwrights Terence and Plautus. Audiences saw many dramatic elements, such as monologues, asides, overhearing, misunderstandings, mistaken identities, and disguises.
Commedia dell’arte was an early form of professional theatre that began in Italy and became popular across Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries. It was sometimes called “Italian comedy” in English and is also known as commedia alla maschera, commedia improvviso, and commedia dell’arte all’improvviso. Commedia uses masked characters that are standard types, recognized by their names, costumes, and roles in the plays.
Comic relief is when a funny character, scene, or clever conversation is added to a serious or dramatic story. This helps to reduce tension.
In English literature, the term “comedy of manners” (also called “anti-sentimental comedy”) refers to a type of realistic, satirical comedy that examines and critiques the behaviors and social rules of a very formal and artificial society. This genre uses humor to highlight the fashion, manners, and attitudes of different social classes, often through repeated character types, such as the boastful soldier from Ancient Greek plays, or the vain man and the reckless lover from English Restoration plays. The clever storyline of a comedy of manners (often involving a scandal) is less important than the social messages shown through the sharp and clever conversations of the characters.
The comedy of intrigue, also called the comedy of situations, is a type of comedy where the story and events are more important than how characters change. These plays use clever plans, secret schemes, and funny or exaggerated situations to move the plot forward. Characters are often not clearly described, and the story feels full of action and movement.
The comedy of humours is a type of play that focuses on characters who have strong, main traits or “humours” that shape their actions and decisions. This style of comedy can be seen in the works of the ancient Greek writer Aristophanes, but it became more popular in England during the late 1500s through the plays of Ben Jonson and George Chapman. In the middle of the 1600s, this style was mixed with another type of comedy called the comedy of manners in plays from the Restoration period.
Comédie larmoyante (French for “tearful comedy”) was a type of French drama from the 18th century. This sentimental comedy often ended with sad events being resolved through reconciliation and emotional scenes. Even when plays in this genre ended unhappily, they showed that the characters who suffered had achieved a “moral triumph.” Thomas Heywood’s play A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse (acted in 1603; printed in 1607) is considered an early example of this genre.
Colloquialism, also known as everyday language or general parlance, is the type of language used for informal communication. It is the most common way people speak in casual conversations and other informal situations. Colloquialism often includes expressive phrases, idioms, a focus on humans or human experiences, and a vocabulary that changes often.
Collaborative or collective poetry is a different and creative way for more than one person to write poetry together. The main goal of collaborative poetry is to create poems that include contributions from many different writers. In one common example, several authors may work together to form a single voice in the poem while still showing each person’s unique style.
A closet drama is a play meant to be read by one person, not performed on stage. The first known use of this term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was in 1813. In 1907, literary historian Henry A.