• The Texts: The Riverside Shakespeare | Shakespeare Navigators
• Grading: Grade for the quarter will be 3.2 or final essay grade, whichever is higher, minus .1 for each unexcused absence.
• Survey of the group's current state of knowledge.
• Objectives: Laughter; Definition (see Shakespeare's Comedies and the Critics)
• A Survey of Shakespeare's Comedies. (See the Chronological List of Shakespeare's Plays.)

Warming Up: Theoretical Articles:
Each student should choose one of the following and report back on Wednesday or Friday. The report should last no more than seven minutes. It should begin with a quick summary of major points. It should emphasize one or two ideas which you found persuasive, and which you believe would be useful in a discussion of Shakespeare's comedy. For each of the ideas which you emphasize you should provide a specific example, preferably from a play by Shakespeare.

1. Shakespeare on Comedy, etc.
2. Prologue to Ben Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (1598)
3. Molière's Preface to Tartuffe. -- 1669
4. "Concerning Humour in Comedy" (1695). This is a letter by William Congreve, author of The Way of the World, to John Dennis, a playwright and critic.
5. from "On the Essence of Laughter, and, in General, on the Comic in the Plastic Arts" (1855) by Charles Baudelaire.
6. from "Laughter" [1900], by Henri Bergson
7. C.L. Barber, "The Saturnalian Pattern in Shakespeare's Comedy," The Sewanee Review, Vol. LIX, No. 4 (Autumn, 1951), pp. 593-611. Reprinted in Robert W. Corrigan, Comedy: Meaning and Form (San Francisco: Chandler, 1965), 363-377.
8. "The Comic Rhythm" (PDF) from Susanne Langer's Feeling and Form [1953]
9. "The Meanings of Comedy" (1956) (PDF) by Wylie Sypher, as reprinted in Comedy: Meaning and Form, ed. Robert W. Corrigan, San Francisco (Chandler Publishing, 1965), pp. 18-60.
10. "Comic Fictional Modes" from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) (PDF)
11. "The Mythos of Spring: Comedy" from Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) (PDF)
12. "Toward a Theory of Comedy" (1963) (PDF) by Ruth Nevo.
13. "Farce" [1964], by Eric Bentley.