She laughed until she became weak as a baby, for the idiotic comedy which they two had playedat the expense of the British Treasurywas beyond any other means of expression.

We will leave Dawson and Froissart to sort out the responsibility for the whole comedy.

That lunch was the one scene in the comedy upon which he dwelt in telling the story to me.

There were eight or nine musical comedy young ladies; a couple of young soldiers, one of whom he knew slightly, who had arrived as escorts to two of the young ladies; Prince Edward of Lenemaur; a youthful peer, who by various misdemeanours had placed himself outside the pale of any save the most Bohemian society, and several other men whose faces were unfamiliar.

The only hint at any serious conversation came from the musical comedy star who sat at Norgate's left.

In 1862, he began a series of satirical and philosophical dramas with Kjaerlighedens Komedie, "Love's Comedy," which was succeeded by two masterpieces of a similar kind, Brand, in 1866, and Peer Gynt, in 1867.

A comedy, a comedy! WEN.

A comedy, a comedy! WEN.

Theobald observes in his edition of "Beaumont and Fletcher," that this ballad is mentioned again in "The Knight of the Burning Pestle," and likewise in a comedy by John Tatham, 1660, called "The Rump, or Mirrour of the Times," wherein a Frenchman is introduced at the bonfires made for the burning of the Rump, and catching hold of Priscilla, will oblige her to dance, and orders the music to play Fortune my foe.

"This comedy (as Langbaine improperly calls it) has been a great part of it revived by Mrs Behn, under the title of 'The Town Fop, or Sir Timothy Tawdry.'" [330] These were among the articles of extravagance in which the youth of the times used to indulge themselves.

This first wholly English comedy is full of fun and coarse humor, and is wonderfully true to the life it represents.

The classic drama also drew a sharp line between tragedy and comedy, all fun being rigorously excluded from serious representations.

Moreover, since the world is always laughing and always crying at the same moment, tragedy and comedy were presented side by side, as they are in life itself.

And Robert Greene (1558?-1592) plays the chief part in the early development of romantic comedy, and gives us some excellent scenes of English country life in plays like Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay.

The thirty years between our first regular English plays and Shakespeare's first comedy witnessed a development of the drama which astonishes us both by its rapidity and variety.

Other types of the early drama are less clearly defined, but we may sum them up under a few general heads: (1) The Domestic Drama began with crude home scenes introduced into the Miracles and developed in a score of different ways, from the coarse humor of Gammer Gurton's Needle to the Comedy of Manners of Jonson and the later dramatists.

(2) The so-called Court Comedy is the opposite of the former in that it represented a different kind of life and was intended for a different audience.

(3) Romantic Comedy and Romantic Tragedy suggest the most artistic and finished types of the drama, which were experimented upon by Peele, Greene, and Marlowe, and were brought to perfection in The Merchant of Venice, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest.

And where you listed to be low, and free, Mirth turn'd the whole house into Comedy; So piercing (where you pleas'd) hitting a fault, That humours from your pen issued all salt.

Ladies can't say Though Stephen miscarri'd that so did the play: Judgement could ne're to this opinion leane That Lowen, Tailor, ere could grace thy Scene: 'Tis richly good unacted, and to me Thy very Farse appears a Comedy.

The tragic drama of the Romans is far less known to us than the comic: on the whole the same features, which have been noticed in the case of comedy, are presented by tragedy also.

yet it is probable that a tragedy of Ennius gave a far less imperfect image of the original of Euripides than a comedy of Plautus gave of the original of Menander.

It experienced neither the artificial furtherance, by which the school and the stage prematurely forced the growth of Roman poetry, nor the artificial restraint, to which Roman comedy in particular was subjected by the stern and narrow-minded censorship of the stage.

Improbabilities are admissible in light comedy, and still more in farce, which would wreck the fortunes of a drama purporting to present a sober and faithful picture of real life.

Monsieur Jourdain, in Moliere's comedy, makes, I suspect, a very great mistake, when he tells his master: "If that means prose, I've been talking prose all my life.