Tragedy is as old as human misery and comedy is its almost- but- not- quiteidentical twin, for laughter is as old as tears. It is suitable that Greek tragic performances were followed by satyr plays and Elizabethan dramas by a jig; laughter as an antidote to overwhelming sorrow or as a counterbalance reminding the audience that tragedy is a temporary interruption to or distraction from the need to laugh and mock at a world that was a joke. Viewed through the teachings of religion, most aspects of this mortal life were not to be taken seriously. Pride in your status, obsession with fine clothes, the struggle for power and vanity about your looks were all transient fripperies. All flesh was as insubstantial as grass, as a flower, cut down by death. The next life was the important one. This life was just a preparation for Heaven or Hell. The church promulgated the view that people are endlessly foolish, that folly leads to sin, that the wages of sin were death and that death was the portal to Hell if you died an unrepentant sinner. Tragedy portrayed how folly could lead to sin and disaster. Comedy too deals in the portrayal of folly, but presents it in such a way as invites laughter, exposes and eradicates folly (temporarily) and leads to a happy outcome. Comedy generally depicts folly of a type that shames and humiliates but does not kill. It may drive characters to the edge of madness, however. In The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night and certainly in Dream, mistaken perceptions spiral out of control until characters are near to frenzy, even madness, as they lose control of their lives and their grip on reality.

Tragedy has a set of terms used to define key aspects of how its story is structured dramatically. These were derived from Aristotle's series of lectures on Greek tragedy, The Poetics. The tragic hero/ heroine has a tragic flaw of personality (hamartia) that makes them blind to how their confidence in their control of their life and fortune is ill- founded.