A study of the early Tudor comedies
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"After centuries of theatrical entertainment that consisted of miracle plays, mysteries, folk plays, festival plays, interludes, pageants, moralities, banns, tilts, disguisings, entertainments, masks, and mummings, there appeared in England about 1513 the first comedy. There followed in the next four or five decades some thirty-seven comedies that have in common their time and place of origin, their authorship by amateurs, and certain other traits that mark them as early Tudor comedies. These plays, as a group, have not previously been the subject of a study that would attempt to determine the characteristics of early Tudor comedy. Scholars and critics have emphasized, first, that this was a drama of transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; second, the importance of these plays as preliminaries to the great age of drama to follow; or third, the literary and dramatic merit of a particular play from this group, treated mainly, however, in isolation from its fellows. In the study which follows early Tudor comedy will be treated as different from the English drama that preceded and followed it. Its distinguishing characteristics are not, of course, unrelated to the theatrical entertainment that preceded or followed these few decades; yet, taken in sum, early Tudor comedy is unlike medieval comedy and unlike later Elizabethan and Jacobean comedy. It has its own nature, which this study will attempt to define."--Introduction.
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