Comedy

The French playwright Molière described his comedies as a “public mirror,” in which an audience may recognize its own flaws in a pleasing way. In our class, we will read some of the greatest comedies (and tragicomedies) in the Western tradition, along with theoretical texts about the nature of laughter and the distinct features of comedy in distinction to other dramatic texts.

Plays by Aristophanes, Terence, Shakespeare, Behn, Calderón, Molière, Johnson, Kleist, Wilde, Ionesco, Camoletti, Ayckbourn, Reza; Critical readings by Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian, Sidney, Dryden, Fielding, Baudelaire, Kierkegaard, Freud, Frye.