Comedy and tragedy are two totally opposite genres but both were very successful during the Elizabethan period. Several plays have been written to help people become educated in a general way and eliminate their emotions through laughter in comedy or crying in tragedy. Among the writers of tragic plays was Shakespeare with one of his most famous works The Tragic Tale of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. As for comedy, John Lyly takes up the myth of Endymion in his courtly comedy Endymion, the Man in the Moon. Starting from these two plays, the essay will examine the boundaries that allow us to define and distinguish between tragedy and comedy as well as their importance at the time. Tragedy and comedy are distinguished above all by the fact that one of these genres makes you cry and the other makes you laugh. The line between the two is not always easy to distinguish, as a play can be considered a comedy without being funny, simply because it has a happy ending. The issue here is to contrast these two genres to better draw the line between them. Comedy featured common characters and thus allowed people to laugh at their sorrows and ironic situations. Unlike comedy, tragedy had characters of high social standing as its protagonists. Characters in tragedy are usually trapped in a fate they cannot escape. Tragedy rarely gives a solution or in most cases it is death. In summary, comedy aims to make people laugh and demonstrate that happy endings are possible, often ending with weddings, while tragedy demonstrates that even very important people can find themselves in situations that go beyond their possibilities and that lead them to ruin. .Writing The Tragic Story of Hamlet, Prince of Den...... middle sheet...... of Vengeance. 315o A theory of Renaissance tragedy. pp. 292• Bolt, Sydney. (1985). Hamlet. Peguin Masterstudies.• Deats, Sara. (November 1975). The Knight's Disarmament: Comic Parody in Lyly's "Endymion" South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 40, no. 4. pp. 67-75• Houppert, Joseph W. (1975). John Lyly. Twayne Publishers, Boston.o Chapter 2. Nondramatic Fiction. I Eufue, the anatomy of the spirit. pp. 22-52o Chapter 7. Lyly's reputation and influence. I Lyly the stylist. pp. 147-150• Salto, J. Davies. (1968). Shakespeare: Hamlet: a casebook. London: Macmillan. LC Cavaliere.or LC Cavaliere. (1960) Hamlet and Death. pp. 151-155o Mack, Maynard. (1952). Hamlet's world. pp. 86-107• Lyly, J., Bevington, D. M. (1996). Endymion. Manchester: Manchester University Press.• Neufeld, M. Christine. Lyly's Chimerical Vision: Sorcery in Endymion.