Constructing comedy: Shakespeare and Calderon

During the Renaissance in England and Spain, popular drama--in particular, romantic comedy--increased at an unprecedented rate. Early modern comedy--its thematic content, generic form, material production and cultural production--is determined by distinct socio-historical factors. Romantic comedy emerges in the theater as a place where cultural customs, values and mores--specifically relating to courtship and marriage--are challenged, resisted or affirmed. The comedies of Shakespeare and Calderon attest to the formal innovations in genre and the social negotiations of the Renaissance.;Chapter One examines the origins of the formal conventions of comedy. While the comedy of Aristophanes responds to the shifting status of the city-state, the emergence of sophistic learning, and the realities of war, in Roman Comedy marriage negotiations and generational conflicts predominate. The marriage-as-closure convention emerges as the choice literary device employed to gloss over social inequities and to control cultural anxieties.;Chapter Two discusses Shakespeare's early explorations and formal innovations in comedy. Plays as diverse as The Taming of the Shrew, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Twelfth Night demonstrate Shakespeare's interest in manipulating comic traditions while interrogating gender relations and roles. Shakespeare constructs his comedy in order to participate in the shifting social ideologies of love, sexuality, and marriage in Elizabethan England. Chapter Three studies five of Shakespeare's later comedies. In these, politics of gender are linked to more wide-ranging social stratifications determined by class, sexuality, ethnicity and questions of governance.;Chapter Four discusses Calderon's comedias de capa y espada and the function of dramatic comedy in Seventeenth Century Spain. Calderon constructs his comedy in direct response to the culture of crisis that exemplifies the rule of Phillip IV. The formal designs of Spanish capa y espada are contextualized by a consideration of gender and politics during the period (1628-42). Plays such as Mananas de Abril y Mayo, No Hay Burlas Con El Amor, and El Secreto a Voces demonstrate Calderon's acute awareness of the limits of convention both as a literary device and a social practice. The comedies of Shakespeare and Calderon demonstrate the flexibility of a genre that dramatizes the discourses of patriarchy and absolutism, and its various and complex cultural responses.