Studying a comedy

Abstract

THE main kind of comic plays Shakespeare wrote are called romantic comedies. The two examples we discuss here are Twelfth Night and Much Ado About Nothing, but what we say would also apply to Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Nght’s Dream and As You Like It. They are all lighthearted plays even though they can contain darker elements, but Shakespeare also wrote some rather more disturbing comedies, often referred to as ‘dark’ or ‘problem’ comedies, and we consider these briefly later in this chapter. At the end of his career, after he had written the great tragedies, Shakespeare wrote four further comic plays which are conventionally referred to as ‘romances’, and this chapter concludes with a short discussion of two of these, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.