Early British Comedy: A Critical Rethinking

This book is a collection of sixteen British comedies dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The works are chosen in chronological order and include a multitude of different versions of comedy, including broad humour, stark humour, heavy social satire, urban and class comedy of wit, and melodrama. The narrative joining the presentation of these works is both analytical–simply trying out a plausible account of what happens in the tale–and 'critical'–digging into the embedded assumptions of the play, and its role as a social action. Room is left, in each part of the analysis, for lateral discussion on issues contemporary to Elizabethan culture (like Shakespeare's comedies) or to the culture of our own time.