Elegiac comedy

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Elegiac comedy

Elegiac comedy was a genre

Genre

A genre is a loose set of criteria for a category of composition; the term is often used to categorize literature and speech, but is also used for any other Art#Art forms or utterance....
of medieval Latin

Medieval Latin

Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration....
literature

Latin literature

Latin literature, the body of literature in the Latin language, remains an enduring legacy of the culture of ancient Rome of ancient Rome. The Romans produced many works of poetry, comedy, tragedy, satire, history, and rhetoric, drawing heavily on the traditions of other cultures and particularly on the more matured Greek literature....
or drama

Medieval theatre

Medieval theatre refers to the theatre of Europe between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance. The term refers to a variety of genres because the time period covers approximately a thousand years of the art form and an entire continent....
popular in the twelfth century. About twenty such works survive, all of them produced in west central France

France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
, roughly the Loire Valley

Loire Valley

Loire Valley is known as the Garden of France and the Cradle of the French Language. It is also noteworthy for the quality of its architectural heritage, in its historic towns such as Amboise, Angers, Blois, Chinon, Nantes, Orl?ans, Saumur, and Tours, but in particular for its world-famous castles, such as the Ch?teaux d'Ch?teau d'Am...
. Though commonly identified in manuscript

Manuscript

A manuscript is any document that is written by hand, as opposed to being printed or reproduced in some other way. The term may also be used for information that is hand-recorded in other ways than writing, for example inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard material or scratched as with a knife point in plaster or with a stylus on a wa...
s as comoedia, modern scholars often reject their status as comedy

Comedy

Comedy as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse generally intended to amuse, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western culture origins are found in Ancient Greece....
. Unlike Classical comedy, they were written in elegiac couplet

Elegiac couplet

Elegiac couplets are a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than those of epic poetry. The ancient Romans frequently used elegiac couplets in love poetry, as in Ovid's Amores....
s. Denying their true comedic nature, Edmond Faral

Edmond Faral

Edmond Faral was a French medievalist. He became in 1924 Professor of Latin literature at the Coll?ge de France.He wrote his dissertation on the jongleurs, and E....
called them Latin fabliaux, after the later Old French
Old French

Old French was the Romance languages dialect continuum spoken in territories which span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300....
fabliaux, and Ian Thompson
Ian Thompson

Ian Reginald Thompson in Birkenhead, Merseyside is an England Athletics , who gained success in marathon running....
labelled them Latin comic tales.

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Encyclopedia

Elegiac comedy was a genre
Genre

A genre is a loose set of criteria for a category of composition; the term is often used to categorize literature and speech, but is also used for any other Art#Art forms or utterance....
of medieval Latin
Medieval Latin

Medieval Latin was the form of Latin used in the Middle Ages, primarily as a medium of scholarly exchange and as the liturgical language of the medieval Roman Catholic Church, but also as a language of science, literature, law, and administration....
literature
Latin literature

Latin literature, the body of literature in the Latin language, remains an enduring legacy of the culture of ancient Rome of ancient Rome. The Romans produced many works of poetry, comedy, tragedy, satire, history, and rhetoric, drawing heavily on the traditions of other cultures and particularly on the more matured Greek literature....
or drama
Medieval theatre

Medieval theatre refers to the theatre of Europe between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Renaissance. The term refers to a variety of genres because the time period covers approximately a thousand years of the art form and an entire continent....
popular in the twelfth century. About twenty such works survive, all of them produced in west central France
France

France , officially the French Republic , is a country whose Metropolitan France is located in Western Europe and that also comprises various Overseas departments and territories of France....
, roughly the Loire Valley
Loire Valley

Loire Valley is known as the Garden of France and the Cradle of the French Language. It is also noteworthy for the quality of its architectural heritage, in its historic towns such as Amboise, Angers, Blois, Chinon, Nantes, Orl?ans, Saumur, and Tours, but in particular for its world-famous castles, such as the Ch?teaux d'Ch?teau d'Am...
. Though commonly identified in manuscript
Manuscript

A manuscript is any document that is written by hand, as opposed to being printed or reproduced in some other way. The term may also be used for information that is hand-recorded in other ways than writing, for example inscriptions that are chiselled upon a hard material or scratched as with a knife point in plaster or with a stylus on a wa...
s as comoedia, modern scholars often reject their status as comedy
Comedy

Comedy as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse generally intended to amuse, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western culture origins are found in Ancient Greece....
. Unlike Classical comedy, they were written in elegiac couplet
Elegiac couplet

Elegiac couplets are a poetic form used by Greek lyric poets for a variety of themes usually of smaller scale than those of epic poetry. The ancient Romans frequently used elegiac couplets in love poetry, as in Ovid's Amores....
s. Denying their true comedic nature, Edmond Faral
Edmond Faral

Edmond Faral was a French medievalist. He became in 1924 Professor of Latin literature at the Coll?ge de France.He wrote his dissertation on the jongleurs, and E....
called them Latin fabliaux, after the later Old French
Old French

Old French was the Romance languages dialect continuum spoken in territories which span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300....
fabliaux, and Ian Thompson
Ian Thompson

Ian Reginald Thompson in Birkenhead, Merseyside is an England Athletics , who gained success in marathon running....
labelled them Latin comic tales. Other scholars have invented terms like verse tales, rhymed monologues, epic comedies, and Horatian comedies to describe them. The Latin "comedies", the dramatic nature of which varies greatly, may have been the direct ancestors of the fabliaux but more likely merely share similarities. Other interpretations have concluded that they are primitive romances
Romance (genre)

As a literary genre of high culture, romance or chivalric romance refers to a style of heroic prose and Verse narrative that was particularly current in aristocratic literature of Middle Ages and Early Modern Europe, that narrated fantastic stories about the marvellous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight, often of super-human ab...
, student juvenilia
Juvenilia

Juvenilia is a term applied to literary, musical or artistic works produced by an author during his or her youth.The term was first recorded in 1622 in George Wither's poetry collection Ivvenilia....
, didactic poems, or merely collections of elegies on related themes.

They were typically lyric complaints
Lyric poetry

Lyric poetry refers to a usually short poem that expresses personal feelings, which may or may not be set to music. Aristotle, in Poetics , contrasted lyric poetry with drama and epic poetry....
only sometimes mixed with amorous content. Their Classical forebearers were Terence
Terence

Publius Terentius Afer , better known as Terence, was a playwright of the Roman Republic. His comedies were performed for the first time around 170–160 BC, and he died young probably in Greece or on his way back to Rome....
and, more especially, Ovid
Ovid

Publius Ovidius Naso was a Roman Empire poet known as Ovid to the English language-speaking world, who wrote about love, seduction, and Roman mythology transformation....
. His Ars amatoria
Ars Amatoria

file:Ovid Ars Amatoria 1644.jpgThe Ars amatoria is a poem in three books by the Roman poet Ovid. It claims to provide teaching in three areas of general preoccupation: how and where to find women in Rome, how to seduce them, and how to prevent others from stealing them....
, Amores
Amores

Amores is Ovid's first completed book, published in 16 BC in 5 volumes, though only three are extant. Amores was written in the Elegiac couplets....
, and Heroides
Heroides

The Heroides ' , or Epistulae Heroidum , are a collection of fifteen wiktionary:epistolary poems composed by Ovid in Latin elegiac couplets, and presented as though written by a selection of aggrieved heroines of Greek mythology and Roman mythology, in address to their heroic lovers who have in some way mistreated,...
were highly influential. Plautus
Plautus

Titus Maccius Plautus , commonly known as Plautus, was a Ancient Rome playwright. His comedy are among the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature....
, though less widely read in the Middle Ages, was also an influence, as were the Scholastic
Scholasticism

Scholasticism was the dominant form of theology and philosophy in the Western Europe in the Middle Ages, particularly in the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries....
debates concerning the nature of universals and other contemporary philosophical problems, with which the elegiac comedies often dealt, always humorously but no doubt sometimes to a serious end.

The elegiac dramatists delight in "showing off" their Latin skills. The language of their "fools" can be deliberately outlandish, and their deft use of puns is frequently sexual in nature. Parody
Parody

A parody , in contemporary usage, is a work created to mock, comment on, or poke fun at an original work, its subject, or author, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation....
is another typical element of elegiac humour. Persons of low rank are often placed in positions unsuited to them. Their bumbling, as when a rustic attempts to speak philosophically or the commoner pretends he is a chivalrous gentleman, is portrayed for its satiric
Satire

Satire is often strictly defined as a literary genre; although, in practice, it is also found in the graphic arts and performing arts. In satire, human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, ideally with the intent to bring about improv...
effect. In the Middle Ages, satire was usually considered a breed of comedy.

The elegiac comedies bear limited dramatic features. Thompson denies their theatricality, saying that "no ancient drama would ever have been written in elegiacs." A similar opinion is that the comedies are rhetoric
Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of using language as a means to persuade. Along with logic and dialectic, rhetoric is one of the three ancient arts of discourse....
al exercises. Medieval poetic theory, however, did not regard comedy and elegy as mutually exclusive, nor identical. John of Garland wrote "all comedy is elegy, but the reverse is not true." Other arguments raised against the dramatic performance of the comedies is, in general, their large number of narrative segments as opposed to dialogue. Arnulf of Orléans, one of the elegiac writers, seems to have considered his work to have been made for the stage. These performances may have been narrated, mimed, or sung.

Some elegiac comedies were adapted into vernacular
Vernacular

Vernacular refers to the native language of a country or a locality. In general linguistics, it is used to describe local languages as opposed to Lingua franca, official standards or global languages....
language in the later Middle Ages, most notably Pamphilus, which as Venetian
Venetian language

Venetian or Venetan is a Romance languages spoken by over two million people, mostly in the Veneto region of Italy. The language is called v?neto in Venetian, veneto in Italian; the variant spoken in Venice is called venexi?n/venesi?n or veneziano, respectively....
and Old French
Old French

Old French was the Romance languages dialect continuum spoken in territories which span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from around 1000 to 1300....
versions.

List of elegiac comedies

Alda by William of Blois
Asinarius
Aulularia by Vitalis of Blois
Babio
Babio

Babio is a 12th century elegiac comedy consisting of 484 lines of elegiac distychs, probably composed in England. It imitates Roman comedy and is indebted to Ovid, Plautus and Terence....
Baucis et traso
De Afra et Milone
De clericis et rustico
De Lombardo et lumaca
De mercatore
De nuncio sagaci
De tribus puellis
De tribus puellis

De tribus puellis or The Three Girls is an anonymous medieval Latin poem, a narrative elegiac comedy written probably in France in the Middle Ages during the twelfth or early thirteenth century....
De tribus sociis
De vetula
De vetula

De vetula is a long thirteenth-century poem written in Latin. It is pseudopigraphy signed "Ovidius", and in its time was attributed to the classical Latin poet Ovid....
Geta by Vitalis of Blois
Lidia
Lidia

Lidia is a medieval Latin elegiac comedy from the late twelfth century. The "argument" at the beginning of the play refers to it as the Lidiades , which the manuscripts gloss as comedia de Lidia facta and which its English translator gives as Adventures of Lidia....
by Arnulf of Orléans
Miles gloriosus by Arnulf of Orléans
Milo by Matthew of Vendôme
Matthew of Vendôme

Matthew of Vend?me was a French poet of the twelfth century, writing in Latin language. He was a pupil of Bernard Silvestris, at Tours, as he himself writes....
Pamphilus de amore
Pamphilus, Gliscerium et Birria
Unibos
Ysengrimus
Ysengrimus

Ysengrimus is a Latin fabliau and mock epic, an anthropomorphism series of fables written in 1148 or 1149 by the poet Nivardus. Its chief character is Isengrin the Wolf, and it describes how his various schemes are overcome by the trickster figure Reynard the Fox....
by Nivardus