Athenian Old Comedy had been a political celebration, Roman comedy a festive entertainment. The achievement of the Italians in the early sixteenth century was to reintroduce the methods as well as the spirit of Roman comedy to modern Europe, though in reviving them they inevitably changed them, making of comedy more of an intellectual game and setting the dramatist to range as best he could between open-minded observation and technical virtuosity. But by modifying as well as retrieving an art-form from the past, Ariosto's generation prepared the way for both Molière and Shakespeare.

The renaissance of New Comedy in Italy spread across a century. It was heralded by the recovery of twelve new texts of Plautus in 1429 and of Donatus's commentary on Terence in 1433 – so that scholars could now read nearly twice as many Roman comedies as before and had a better means of appreciating their structure.