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New Comedy
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From: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms
Date: 20040101
Author:CHRISTOPHER BALDICK
New Comedy,
the name given to the kind of comedy that superseded the Old Comedy of Aristophanes in Athens from the late 4th century BCE, providing the basis for later Roman comedy and eventually for the comic theatre of Molière and Shakespeare. Preceded by a phase of ‘middle comedy’ (of which almost nothing has survived), New Comedy abandoned topical satire in favour of fictional plots based on contemporary life: these portrayed the tribulations of young lovers caught up among stock characters such as the miserly father and the boastful soldier. The chorus was ...Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.
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