Tragicomedy
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Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms. Most often seen in dramatic literature, the term can describe either a tragic play which contains enough comic elements to lighten the overall mood or a serious play with a happy ending.[1] Tragicomedy, as its name implies, invokes the intended response of both the tragedy and the comedy in the audience, the former being a genre based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis and the latter being a genre intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter.
In theatre
Classical precedent
There is no concise formal definition of tragicomedy from the
I will make it a mixture: let it be a tragicomedy. I don't think it would be appropriate to make it consistently a comedy, when there are kings and gods in it. What do you think? Since a slave also has a part in the play, I'll make it a tragicomedy...—Plautus, Amphitryon[4]
Renaissance revivals
Italy
Two figures helped to elevate tragicomedy to the status of a regular genre, by which is meant one with its own set of rigid rules. First was
England
This section possibly contains original research. (August 2020) |
In England, where practice ran ahead of theory, the situation was quite different. In the sixteenth century, "tragicomedy" meant the native sort of romantic play that violated the unities of time, place, and action, that glibly mixed high- and low-born characters, and that presented fantastic actions. These were the features
By the early Stuart period, some English playwrights had absorbed the lessons of the Guarini controversy. John Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess, an adaptation of Guarini's play, was produced in 1608. In the printed edition, Fletcher offered an interesting definition of the term, worth quoting at length: "A tragi-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie." Fletcher's definition focuses primarily on events: a play's genre is determined by whether or not people die in it, and in a secondary way on how close the action comes to a death. But, as Eugene Waith showed, the tragicomedy Fletcher developed in the next decade also had unifying stylistic features: sudden and unexpected revelations, outré plots, distant locales, and a persistent focus on elaborate, artificial rhetoric.
Some of Fletcher's contemporaries, notably Philip Massinger[6] and James Shirley,[7] wrote popular tragicomedies. Richard Brome also essayed the form, but with less success. And many of their contemporary writers, ranging from John Ford to Lodowick Carlell to Sir Aston Cockayne, made attempts in the genre.
Tragicomedy remained fairly popular up to the closing of the theaters in 1642, and Fletcher's works were popular in the Restoration as well. The old styles were cast aside as tastes changed in the eighteenth century; the "tragedy with a happy ending" eventually developed into melodrama, in which form it still flourishes.
Landgartha (1640) by Henry Burnell, the first play by an Irish playwright to be performed in an Irish theatre, was explicitly described by its author as a tragicomedy. Critical reaction to the play was universally hostile, partly it seems because the ending was neither happy nor unhappy. Burnell in his introduction to the printed edition of the play attacked his critics for their ignorance, pointing out that as they should know perfectly well, many plays are neither tragedy nor comedy, but "something between".
Later developments
Criticism that developed after the Renaissance stressed the thematic and formal aspects of tragicomedy, rather than plot.
Postmodern tragicomedy in the United States
American writers of the
See also
- Comedy drama
- Outrapo
- Shakespearean problem play
- Theatre of the Absurd
References
- ISBN 978-1-84384-130-2. Retrieved 26 January 2012.
- ^ Poetics: XIII, End of 2nd paragraph, Trans: Bywater, Ingram, 1920
- ISBN 0-7546-3567-8.
- ISBN 978-1-84384-130-2.
- ^ Schironi, F. (2016). The Reception of Ancient Drama in Renaissance Italy. In 1316154068 967100427 B. V. Smit (Ed.), A handbook to the reception of Greek drama (1st ed., pp. 135-136). Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell.
- ISSN 1799-2591.
- S2CID 197955255, retrieved 2020-10-27
- ISSN 0723-2977.
- ISBN 978-1-4426-7731-9, retrieved 2020-10-27
- JSTOR 2872933.
The radically disorienting play of frames in a postmodern fiction like Pale Fire-another text, it is worth noting, preoccupied with Elizabethan drama.
- ^ Goodman, Daniel Ross (2015-12-11). "Infinite Wallace: Tragedy, Comedy, and Faith in the Life of David Foster Wallace". Public Discourse. Retrieved 2020-10-27.
- ^ Pym, Olivia (2020-08-02). "The Best Tragicomedies To Watch In These Amusingly Dire Times". Esquire. Retrieved 2022-10-15.
- ^ "The Brilliant, Biting Social Satire of "The White Lotus"". The New Yorker. 2021-07-21. Retrieved 2022-10-15.