Shakespeare's plays can be divided into several groups, these groups are: histories, tragedies, comedies and tragicomedies. Comedies were very popular, since they were often full of laughter and irony. This was much appreciated in Elizabethan times since death and misery lead the Elizabethan common man to seek for these ironic and satiric plays as a way of escaping reality.
What are the main elements that can be used to difference comedies and tragedies? I believe that comedies don't treat seriously key elements that belong to the tragedies. Things like love, for instance, are not given a serious tone, although love always prevails in comedies. Shakespeare's comedies often use puns, metaphors, and insults to provoke laughter. The action is often strained by artificiality, especially elaborate and contrived endings. Disguises and mistaken identities are very common in Shakespearean comedies, especially in the play Comedy of errors.
The plot is of most importance in Shakespeare's comedies.
English: Title page of the second quarto edition (...
List of titles of works based on Shakespearean phr...
English: Title page of the First Folio, by William...They are often very twisted, confusing, and extremely hard to follow. Shakespearean comedies also contain a wide variety of characters. Shakespeare generally introduces a character only to discard him later on; this character usually is not present in the balance of the play (Egeon in Comedy of errors appears only at the beginning and at the end of the play).
The characterization, incomplete as it is, should, be noticed, and contrasted with the mature procedure of William Shakespeare. It moves in certain stiff, traditional types, which hardly rise to a living, concrete individuality (the persons are more like puppets than complete men and women, an abstraction rather than a reality).The two Dromios are the ever-recurring clowns, with their merry pranks; Pinch is the old picture of the narrow-minded pedant, which is repeated by Shakespeare several times without essential variation. Adriana is the jealous woman, whose...