James Armstrong, Playwright

The Italian Renaissance writer Ludovico Ariosto is most famous for his verse epic Orlando Furioso . However, he also wrote plays, including...

Classicists often refer to the philosophical and political plays of Aristophanes as "Old Comedy" to distinguish them from the more...

One of the most famed practitioners of  commedia erudita --or learned comedy--in Renaissance Italy was the statesman and political theorist ...

Publius Terentius Afer, better known as Terence, just couldn't catch a break. He was born in Carthage in northern Africa, but ended up b...

In a famous essay in 1772, the author Oliver Goldsmith tried to make a comparison between laughing and sentimental comedy. Borrowing th...

During the beginning of the eighteenth century, many playwrights in Britain tried to imitate the great comedies of the Restoration period , ...

One of the first playwrights in Italy to try to copy classical drama was Albertino Mussato, who wrote a Latin tragedy called Ecerinis aroun...

Hostility between the theatre and the Christian church during the waning days of the Roman Empire led to a break in the European tradition o...

A picture of Roman drama does not begin to emerge until the 3rd Century BCE. It was likely influenced, as all Roman culture was, by the Etr...