The monograph examines the paths that drama takes from the era of “rebirth” in the medieval liturgy and folk festival to the most significant moments of genre shifts, forks, and dead ends. The material of the monograph is mainly genres that gravitate towards the comic register (comedy, farce, tragicomedy). Among the main topics: the typology of epic and dramatic genres in European literature of the classical period, built on the basis of the category of artistic time, the typology of classical European comedy, built on the basis of universal plot schematism, the genesis of liturgical drama, the plot invariant of the French medieval farce, the genre specificity of tragicomedy.