Abby on New Comedy

New Comedy (Abby Bischoff)

Roman dramatists Plautus and Terrence’s New Comedy stems off older Greek works and is the format of comedy that Shakespeare not only would have grown up with, but written as well. Stylistic traits of New Comedy include: youths in love, a male family figure who tends to oppose the aforementioned love, a reunion of some type, trickery, youthful rebellion, love triangles, marriage, mistaken identities, disguises, and sassy servants. New Comedy was an easy form to reproduce, or as our textbook says, was “recyclable” (p. 124). An interesting thing to note about New Comedies is that characters tended to be normal everyday people. Shakespeare slightly deviates from this trope by weaving marriage plots around characters of nobility. We will see this in The Taming of The Shrew, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. But Shakespeare doesn’t stop there. Another key difference in Shakespeare’s comedies is that the ladies tend to play bigger roles than more traditional female characters.