canery. In France, the Feast of Fools was introduced in
cathedral liturgies between Christmas and the Octave of
the Epiphany (January 13) and gave an opportunity to the
lower clergy to poke fun at their superiors with a parody
sermon (sermon joyeux), an ass led into the church to add
its bray to the responses, and other farcical proceedings.
Secular farces, of which some 150 examples (each about
500 lines of octosyllabic verse) survive, evolved from
these origins in France. Although there were doubtless
many comic performances of some kind in the 14th and
15th centuries, they were apparently not considered worth
preserving and documentation is therefore scarce. Under
the auspices of the CHAMBERS OF RHETORICmedieval farce
persisted well into the 16th century in the Netherlands;
several such farces, known as esbattements, in a collection
from this period made in Haarlem are representative of the
genre. Furthermore, as with TRAGEDY, comedy was not in
the medieval view conceived of as a dramatic production.
The statement by Vincent of Beauvais (c. 1190–c. 1264) in
the Speculum maius, that a comedy is a poem which begins
in misfortune and concludes happily, is the same general
conception echoed by Dante in explaining the purpose of
the Divine Comedy (Epistle to Cangrande). Chaucer’s one
use of the word, at the end of Troilus and Criseyde
(V 1788), reflects a similar understanding.
The revival of theatrical comedy in the Renaissance
can be traced to the production in Ferrara in 1486 by
Duke Ercole d’Este of PLAUTUS’s Menaechmi. ARIOSTO, who
was taken to this performance by his father, subsequently
supervised theatricals at the Este court and took Roman
comedy as his model, first in La cassaria (1508). The COM-
MEDIA ERUDITAwas soon well established in Italy and with
the rise of the COMMEDIA DELL’ARTEa rich and varied the-
atrical tradition emerged, with fruitful interaction be-
tween the two types of comedy. Productions in Latin or
translations or adaptations of Plautus and Terence were
common elsewhere as well in the early 16th century. In
England HENRY VIIIordered two performances of Plautus
in 1526 as part of an entertainment for the French ambas-
sador, and the boys of St. Paul’s School acted Terence’s
Phormio before Cardinal Wolsey. In France RONSARDtrans-
lated Aristophanes’ Plutus and Étienne JODELLEis credited
with the first French comedy, Eugène (1552). Jacques
GRÉVIN, Jean de LA TAILLE, Rémy BELLEAU, and Jean-
Antoine de BAÏFalso adapted Plautus and Terence directly
or were influenced by them via Italian works. Other early
translators or adapters include Jean Meschinot (c. 1420–
91), Octavien Saint-Gelais (1468–1502), and Charles Esti-
enne (1504–64). Most French comedy before Molière was
written in octosyllabic verse, but the prose comedies of La
Taille, Pierre de LARIVEY, and Adrien TOURNÈBEare notable
exceptions.
In Spain, Bartolomé de TORRES NAHARRO distin-
guished (in Propalladia, 1517) two types of play: the co-
media a noticia (comedy of wit, emphasizing plot and
intrigue) and the comedia de apariencia (or de tramoya or
de ruido), the comedy of spectacle depending on stage ma-
chinery, scene changes, etc. The former type flourished in
the voluminous work of Lope de VEGA, whose thoroughly
anti-classical recommendations in Arte nuevo de hacer co-
medias (c. 1607) include mixing comic and tragic el-
ements and ignoring the unities.
In England the earliest important works are Nicholas
UDALL’s classical academic comedy Ralph Roister Doister
(written c. 1553), Gammer Gurton’s Needle (performed
1566), and George Gascoigne’s Supposes (performed
1566), the first surviving prose comedy, which Gascoigne
adapted from Ariosto’s I suppositi. All three were first pro-
duced in an academic setting: in a London school, at
Christ’s College, Cambridge, and at Gray’s Inn, respec-
tively. Otherwise the works of SHAKESPEAREand Ben JON-
SON, written for the public theater or court performance,
overshadow other English comedies. It has been noted
that Shakespeare wrote every type of comedy—Plautine,
romantic, pastoral, farce and the “dark” comedies—except
satirical. This gap was filled by Jonson, whose plays are
perhaps the best illustrations of the most common Re-
naissance view of comedy: a strong emphasis on its refor-
matory function in mercilessly exposing and ridiculing
the vices and follies of man. Not only did Jonson observe
the rules of classical construction, but he also developed a
theoretical framework for his satire in the early comedies
of humors and went on to write two of the comic master-
pieces of the English theater, Volpone (performed 1606;
printed 1607) and The Alchemist (performed 1610;
printed 1612).Comes, Juan Bautista (1568–1643) Spanish composer
Comes began his musical education at the cathedral of Va-
lencia where he was a chorister and a pupil of Gines Pérez.
In 1605 he was appointed choirmaster at the cathedral of
Lérida and in 1613 he became the choirmaster of Valencia
cathedral. In 1619 he entered the service of Philip III in
Madrid, returning to Valencia after 10 years when he re-
sumed his post as choirmaster. The most notable of
Comes’s surviving compositions, which amount to around
250 pieces, are his villancicos, sacred songs based on sec-
ular polychoral arrangements.Commandino, Federico (1509–1575) Italian humanist
and mathematician
Born into a noble family at Urbino, Commandino, after
studying philosophy and medicine at Padua university, re-
turned to his native land as tutor and physician at the
court of the duke of Urbino. More importantly, Com-
mandino began to collect and to translate into Latin the
major surviving texts of Greek MATHEMATICS. Beginning in
1558 with an edition of Archimedes, Commandino went
on to issue Latin translations of the Conics of Apollonius
(1566), the Elements of Euclid (1572), and the Pneumatics11112 2 CCoommeess,, JJuuaann BBaauuttiissttaa