In this study, first published in 1979, Professor Bradbrook adopts an historic approach to comedy as a social form, showing its beginnings in medieval drama, its development in various settings, the evolution of different 'kinds' or genres, and the Shakesperean synthesis. The critical comedy which emerged at the turn of the sixteenth century is associated with Ben Jonson, and he and Shakespeare are contrasted, whilst such figures round them as Lyly, Peele, Greene and Nashe in Elizabethan times, and Dekker, Heywood, Marston, Middleton, Day, Chapman and Fletcher from the Jacobean period, are related to each other.