What are key elements that make an Elizabethan comedy?

Answer 1

Elizabethan comedies were actually rather far-ranging and demonstrated the creativity and inventiveness of the playwrights. The most common comedic forms were based on love stories, and had the usual romance characteristics of a couple who should be together but are prevented by some event. In the course of the play the obstacle is overcome and the couple ends up marrying. Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing is a good example as there are two couples, one (Hero and Claudio) who faces an obstacle from without in the person of Don John, and the other (Beatrice and Benedick) who face an obstacle from within in the shape of their own habitual cynicism. Shakespeare was not, however, afraid to subvert the form in his play Love's Labour's Lost, where a further obstacle arises at the last minute to prevent the couples from marrying. Berowne comments "Our wooing doth not end like an old play: Jack hath not Jill". The reverse is said in A Midsummer Night's Dream "Jack shall hae Jill, Nought shall go ill, the man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well."

Ben Jonson's plays show other aspects of Elizabethan comedy. In his play Every Man in his Humour, he makes use of characters who are funny because of peculiar and persistent character traits, the idea ofwhich is derived from the theory of the four humours. Shakespeare alludes to this in Hamlet: "the humourous man shall end his part in peace." Shakespeare also made use of "humourous men", such as Jaques in As You Like It or Malvolio in Twelfth Night.

Jonson's plays, much more than Shakespeare's, rely on the conventions of the Commedia dell'Arte which formed the basis of much European comedy, particularly Moliere and the French tradition. Trickery is an important element of such plays, and shows up strongly in Jonson's Volpone and The Alchemist (although these are strictly speaking Jacobean rather than Elizabethan).

Another element common in comedies is satire. Love's Labour's Lost is intensely satirical of academics. An excellent though late example is Beaumont and Fletcher's The Knight of the Burning Pestle in which a satire of chivalrous romance intrudes upon the conventional and trite love story in a way reminiscent of Pirandello or Brecht. In Thomas Dekker's play Poetaster he satirizes and caricatures Ben Jonson. Of course all satire is very topical and has an early best-before date.