If Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and Othello are the four great tragedies, then what are the great comedies if any?

your life is a comedy of errors

Surprised Dante's Inferno isn't mentioned when people talk about great comedies, its literally in the title,
Divina Commedia

Well the divine comedy is technically a comedy because it has a happy ending but that's where it stops. i think he means works with comedic value. So it does kinda count but its kind of a mispresentation saying that divina comedia is a comedy in the sense OP implies

Not that user, but I've read that people used to laugh at Shylock's soliloquy back then. It seems kind of hard to believe though.

Wtf. I love Elizabethan-Jacobean times now.

Moliere has good comedies

Anchorman
Freddy Got Fingered
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life
Dr. Strangelove

As You Like It
Twelfth Night
A Midsummer Night's Dream

This is a shakespeare thread, stupid.

>As You Like It
not
>Tempest
baka

first post great post--comedies are superior

As You Like It will teach you about women and relationships. Rosalind is best and Cleopatra and Cressida follow her lead in certain instances. All three of them but Rosalind in the most famous moment teach man that woman will pull out all the stops when she needs to, but no matter what she does even if she scorns you to the extreme, she likes you (in a relationship). Seriously, read Act IV Scene I and tell me that shit isn't key to withstanding the best type of woman, and thus is key to a healthy relationship, and thus is key to life. Woman: "The Wiser the Waywarder." Cf. Taming of the Shrew and Ovid's Art of Love. Also Cf. Cressida when she's not gonna show how much she loves Troilus: "Things won are done. Joy's soul lies in the doing. That she beloved knows naught that knows not this: Men price the thing ungained more than it is." (Troilus 1.2.265-267). Or Cleopatra's words when her handmaiden advises her to cross her man in nothing: "Thou teachest like a fool, the way to lose him" (Ant 1.3.10).

Twelfth Night and Merchant of Venice are sadder but still great and have amazing instances of advice for men (and women I guess) to be themselves: e.g. Monsieur Le Bon in 1.2 of MoV and Olivia's advice to Viola to be herself (5.1.145-146). Music is also very key in both of these plays.

Midsummer is great because of Bottom and fate and everything being okay.

Eh, the only comedy that can stand with the great tragedies is As You Like It. Despite all the amazing mimesis of relationships, the comedies all seem almost frivolous in matter - they lack the visceral human scrutiny the great tragedies have.

You do know that not every part of a comedy has to be funny/happy, right? Did you think that Malvolio's explosion at the end of Twelfth Night was supposed to be funny, too?

Savage