Comedy was first introduced at the Dionysian Festivals in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries (b.c.). These festivals were celebrations in honor of Dionysus, the goddess of grape harvest and winemaking. These ancient dramatic festivals were where tragedy, comedy, and satyric drama are believed to be originated. These plays from Greece were translated by the Romans Plautus and Terrence around the third and second centuries (b.c.), and they based their own plays off of these translations. During the Renaissance, the plays of Plautus and, especially, of Terence were studied for the moral instruction that young men could find in them: lessons on the need to avoid the snares of harlots and the company of braggarts, to govern the deceitful trickery of servants, to behave in a seemly and modest fashion to parents. Commedia dell’arte (Italian: “comedy of the profession”) is an Italian theatrical form that flourished throughout Europe from the 16th through the 18th century, and it was performed in troupes. The improvisational spirit of the commedia troupes, in which the actor would invent words and comic business to meet the occasion of the play and the audience he faced, encouraged a spontaneity in the action that has affected the writing and playing of Western comedy ever since.
One of the original Dionysian theatres.
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