SOURCE: Aikin, Judith P. “The Comedies of Andreas Gryphius and the Two Traditions of European Comedy.” Germanic Review 63, no. 3 (summer 1988): 114-20.

In the following essay, Aikin considers Gryphius's comedic oeuvre in terms of two varieties of comedies: the satirical, laugh-arousing play that features lower-class buffoonery; and the romantic type that follows the behaviors, ordeals, and hopes of respectable persons of any social class and ends happily.

When Albrecht Christian Rotth, in the chapter titled “Von der neuen Comödie / wie sie bey uns Deutschen gebräuchlich ist” in his Vollständige Deutsche Poesie (1688), writes about contemporary practices in the creation of comic drama, he clearly refers to two kinds of comedy, one that ridicules the foibles of low-life characters in order to arouse laughter, and another that treats the virtuous deeds, troubles, and happy outcomes in the lives of admirable persons of any social class, but often from...