The stock plot line of comedy is the complication of relationships through mischances and mistakes. What begins as a relatively simple situation (or several situations) is steadily made more entangled until denouement seems impossible. Simple physical mistakes can be funny, but are somewhat limited in their scope for humour. What adds to the comedy is the emotions experienced, the disappointments, the misplaced feelings, the misunderstandings caused by the distortion of understanding stemming from excessive feeling overriding reason. These features are focused through characters and their individual behaviour emerges as mildly funny or grotesquely caricatured or anywhere in between. Greed, ambition and vanity may be the principal target, or indeed any of the many failings of humanity, but the subject most commonly focused in comedy is love and its various stages, permutations and guises.

With good reason Alexander Leggatt called his study of Shakespeare's contribution to the genre Shakespeare's Comedy of Love, for, from The Comedy of Errors (1588?) to Twelfth Night (1599?), love and its multiple misperceptions is the driving impulse of all his comic pieces. Robert Burton alludes to Plato calling love ‘the great Devil, for its vehemency, and sovereignty over all other passions’ and defining it as ‘an appetite’. To Francis Bacon love is ‘the child of folly’. In an echo of Bottom's comment that ‘reason and love keep little company together nowadays’ (3.1.138– 9), he comments, ‘Whosoever esteemth too much of amorous affection quitteth both riches and wisdom’. That puts love into the category of a dangerous emotion, liable to excess and therefore potentially sinful.