T C 357: Comedy, Ancient and Modern

Timeline of Comic Playwrights

• Aristophanes: c. 450BC - c. 385 BC: Greek (Clouds: 423, Birds: 414, Lysistrata: 411)
• Menander: c. 341BC - c. 290 BC: Greek (The Ill-Tempered Man: 317, The Girl from Samos: date unknown)
• Plautus: died 184BC: Roman (Double Bind, The Wild, Wild Women: dates unknown)
• Terence: died 159BC: Roman, born in North Africa (The Mother-in-Law: 165, The Brothers: 160)

(all dates hereafter AD)

• Hrotsvit: 10th century: German (Dulcitius, date unknown)
• Kyogen Plays: most first produced in the 14th and 15th centuries
• The Wakefield Shepherds' Play: 14th-15th centuries
• Commedia dell'Arte: 16th-18th centuries (The Three Cuckolds is a 1958 play by Leon Katz based on commedia dell'arte scenarios)
• William Shakespeare: 1564-1616: English (The Comedy of Errors: c. 1591, The Taming of the Shrew: date unknown)
• Molière: 1622-1673: French (Tartuffe: 1664 [our version 1669], The Bourgeois Gentleman: 1670)
• William Congreve: 1670-1729: English (The Way of the World: 1700)
• Susanna Centlivre:1669?-1723: English (A Bold Stroke for a Wife: 1718)
• Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais: 1732-1799: French (The Barber of Seville: 1775, The Marriage of Figaro: 1784)
• W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900): English (Pirates of Penzance: 1879)
• Oscar Wilde: 1854-1900: Irish, lived in England (The Importance of Being Earnest: 1895)
• George Bernard Shaw: 1856-1950: Irish, lived in England (Arms and the Man: 1894)
• Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), Lorenz Hart (1895-1943), and George Abbott (1887-1995): American (The Boys From Syracuse: 1938)
• Mary Chase: 1907-1981: American (Harvey: 1944)
• Eugène Ionesco: 1909-1994: Romanian, lived in France (The Bald Soprano: 1950)
• The Marx Brothers, Duck Soup: 1933
• Billy Wilder. Some Like it Hot: 1959