Introduction: Comedy and its Afterlives

Abstract

This introduction is concerned with the intellectual and cultural construction of comedy from the classical period to the present, with particular emphasis on comic afterlives. By afterlives, we mean the successive re-creation of its many forms, incarnations, inspirations and adaptations, pasts and futures. The introduction lays out the theory and critical history of comedy and its afterlives; it critically engages with the variety of comic forms, and it explains the rationale for the selection of essays in, and aims of, this Special Issue. Among the topics introduced here and covered in the issue are: the fortunes of the Spanish Golden Age theatrical comedy in English translation in the seventeenth century; the influence that classical and early modern theories of comedy had on the comedies of Ben Jonson and in turn his impact on Restoration comedy; the theatrical conditions of the Comédie-Française and Molière; the comedy of the German Enlightenment; the comedy of the Irish Revival; the meta-theatrical comedy of Luigi Pirandello; and queer elements in contemporary Arab comedy.