Twentieth-century readings of comedy

The previous chapter looked at some of the ideas about comedy held by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. Before turning to the comedies themselves I now want to look at some key ideas concerning comedy which have been held in the twentieth century. I want to provide a map of some of our own assumptions about comedy which have been inherited from the recent past, and to examine the extent to which twentieth-century expectations of comedy have differed from those of the Elizabethans.