COMEDY

COMEDY IN THE ACADEMY 21Empire and the degradation of the theatres, not to re-emerge until thefifteenth century. Generations of medieval grammarians did keepAristotle’s definitions alive alongside the texts of plays by Greek andRoman authors, and the distinction between comedy and tragedy wasupheld in commentaries and treatises by writers such as Diomedes,Evanthius, and Donatus. But while these authors continued to transmitHellenic ideas about comedy, they had little or no first-hand experienceof what they were writing about. As a result, the classical definition ofcomedy maintained in scholarship had little bearing on comedicpractice.In the medieval period, comedy, previously conceived solely asdrama, began to appear in both prose and verse as a distinguishablemode or tone rather than a technically rigid genre. As Paul G.Ruggierswrites, ‘the forms of tragedy and comedy inherited from classicalantiquity had no real impact upon the like modes of experience…in theMiddle Ages’, resulting in considerable diversity and discontinuityamongst comic forms (Ruggiers 1977:7; Shanzer, 2002:25). Amongstother things, there developed alternative prose types to which ‘wereattached the considerations of their serious and non-serious biases, andof the subject matter and vocabulary once reserved for the dramaticforms, but now applied inadvertently to the narrative fictions’ (Ruggiers1977:7). This is the ultimate source of the problems of definition andconfusion that inevitably arise in discussions of comedy—when‘comedy’ can describe at once a dramatic genre, a literary mode, orinstances of humour real or fictional. Both Boccaccio (1313–75) andChaucer (c. 1343–1400) were interested in the textures and possibilitiesof comedy and tragedy, yet neither was a dramatist. The clearestexample of the broadening of the term in the medieval period is the titleof Dante’s Divine Comedy (begun c. 1314), a poem that contains littlethat may be described as humorous. Structurally, however, Dante’spoem, like Greek and Roman comedy before it, moves out of ignoranceto understanding and towards a happy conclusion, or in terms of itstheological framework, from despair to eternal life. In a letter to hisfriend Can Grande, Dante further explains his choice of title byindicating that it is written in what he calls ‘an unstudied and low style’(Dante, 1984:31). Medieval mystery and morality plays similarlyincorporated comic elements in accordance with these principles,‘comedy’ representing a condition of ignorance prior to eventualsalvation. The Vice figure of the drama was often intentionallyhumorous, an inversion of the ideal qualities of humanity presented inthe didacticism of the principal narrative.