New Comedy

The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre | 1996 | 700+ words | Copyright

New Comedy, term used to describe the last period of ancient Greek comic drama, which in the later 4th and 3rd centuries BC developed from the transitional Middle Comedy. It later became the model and the quarry for Roman comedy, and so influenced later European comic dramatists, particularly Molière. Its finest exponent was Menander, who was immensely popular in antiquity but little more than a name in modern European literature until some of his work was discovered among papyri from Egypt. New comedy was pure comedy of manners. It used stock characters and conventional turns of plot; but these are treated, by Menander in particular, with a delicacy of feeling and observation which make a drama of great charm. The chorus survives from the earlier type of comedy, but has nothing to do with the plot.

Cite this article
Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography.

MLA
Chicago
APA

PHYLLIS HARTNOLL and PETER FOUND. "New Comedy." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 1996. Encyclopedia.com. 30 May. 2012 <http://www.encyclopedia.com>.

PHYLLIS HARTNOLL and PETER FOUND. "New Comedy." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 1996. Encyclopedia.com. (May 30, 2012). http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O79-NewComedy.html

PHYLLIS HARTNOLL and PETER FOUND. "New Comedy." The Concise Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 1996. Retrieved May 30, 2012 from Encyclopedia.com: http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1O79-NewComedy.html

Learn more about citation styles