Comedia
The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre
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1996
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© The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre 1996, originally published by Oxford University Press 1996. (Hide copyright information)
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Comedia, in the Golden Age of Spanish drama a secular play, whether serious or comic, as distinct from the religious and devotional
auto sacramental. There were two main categories—the
machine play (
comedia de tramoyas,
de apariencia, or, more expressively,
de ruido) and the
comedy of wit (
comedia de ingenio), which depended on intrigue rather than spectacle. The cloak-and-sword play (
comedia de capa y espada) was a subdivision of this latter, the characters introducing the necessary complications into the plot by disguising themselves in the cloak and fighting the resultant duels with the sword. Spanish 19th-century dramatists were very much attracted to this type of play, and the name then came to mean any romantic costume play with a strong love interest and some sword-play.
In the foreword to his
Propalladia, published in 1517,
Torres Naharro distinguishes further between realistic comedy (
a noticia) and the purely imaginative (
a fantasía). The comedy of character (
a figurón), in which
Moreto y Cabaña excelled, is concerned with universal rather than individual characteristics.
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