Tragicomedy  

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"[Modern art] sees life as a tragicomedy, with the result that the grotesque is its most genuine style" --Thomas Mann in a review of The Secret Agent


"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..."--Amphitryon (3d century B.C.) by Plautus

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Tragicomedy refers to fictional works that blend aspects of the genres of tragedy and comedy. In English literature from Shakespeare's time to the nineteenth century, tragicomedy refers to a serious play with a happy ending.

Nowadays, it is called a comedy drama or dramady.

Contents

Tragicomedy in theatre

Classical precedent

Traditional western theatre was divided from its earliest days into comedy and tragedy, terms which primarily indicated whether the story had a happy ending. The term "drama" was used to describe all the action of a play. In the early 1800s, as theatrical writing became more subtle and plays were less likely to end with multiple deaths, the term "drama" began to be used to describe plays that were more sober, with "comedy" meaning plays that were funny rather than plays which ended happily. Since then, the terms have remained relatively subjective. Authors such as Anton Chekov and George Bernard Shaw famously blurred the line between comedy and drama.

There is no complete formal definition of tragicomedy from the classical age. It appears that Aristotle had something like the Renaissance meaning of the term (that is, a serious action with a happy ending) in mind when, in Poetics, he discusses tragedy with a dual ending. In this respect, a number of Greek and Roman plays, for instance Alcestis, may be called tragicomedies, though without any definite attributes outside of plot. The term itself originates with Plautus: the prologue to Amphitryon uses the term to justify the play's bringing gods into a predominantly bourgeois play.


Renaissance revival

Italy

Plautus's comment had an arguably excessive impact on Renaissance aesthetic theory, which had largely transformed Aristotle's comments on drama into a rigid theory. For "rule mongers" (the term is Giordano Bruno's), "mixed" works such as those mentioned above, more recent "romances" such as Orlando Furioso, and even The Odyssey were at best puzzles; at worst, mistakes. 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. Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio, in the mid-sixteenth century, both argued that the tragedy-with-comic-ending (tragedia de lieto fin) was most appropriate to modern times and produced his own examples of such plays. Even more important was Giovanni Battista Guarini. Guarini's Il Pastor Fido, published in 1590, provoked a fierce critical debate in which Guarini's spirited defense of generic innovation eventually carried the day. Guarini's tragicomedy offered modulated action that never drifted too far either to comedy or tragedy, mannered characters, and a pastoral setting. All three became staples of continental tragicomedy for a century and more.

England

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 Philip Sidney deplored in his complaint against the "mungrell Tragy-comedie" of the 1580s, and of which Shakespeare's Polonius offers famous testimony: "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men." Some aspects of this romantic impulse remain even in the work of more sophisticated playwrights: Shakespeare's last plays, which may well be called tragicomedies, have often been called romances.

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 and James Shirley, wrote successful and popular tragicomedies. Richard Brome also essayed the form, but with less success. And many of their contemporary writers, such as John Ford, 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 of course 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.

Many of Shakespeare's later plays such as Cymbeline, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale were tragicomedies.

Later developments

The more subtle criticism that developed after the Renaissance stressed the thematic and formal aspects of tragicomedy, rather than plot. Gotthold Lessing defined it as a mixture of emotions in which "seriousness stimulates laughter, and pain pleasure." Even more commonly, tragicomedy's affinity with satire and "dark" comedy have suggested a tragicomic impulse in modern absurdist drama. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the Swiss dramatist, suggested that tragicomedy was the inevitable genre for the twentieth century; he describes his play The Visit (1956) as a tragicomedy. Tragicomedy is a common genre in post-World War II British theatre, with authors as varied as Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, John Arden, Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter writing in this genre.

Tragicomedy is a common genre in post-World War II British theatre, with authors as varied as Samuel Beckett, Tom Stoppard, John Arden, Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter writing in this genre .

Film

Tragicomedy was a popular genre in British films of the early 1990s. An example of a dark comedy is Life Is Sweet, by British director Mike Leigh.

Early television

The advent of radio drama, cinema, and particularly television created greater pressure in marketing to clearly define a product as either comedy or drama. Though in live theatre the difference became less and less significant, in mass media, comedy and drama were clearly divided. Comedies, especially, were expected to maintain a consistently light tone and not challenge the viewer by introducing more serious content.

By the early 1960s, television companies commonly presented half-hour long "comedy" series, or one hour long "dramas." Half-hour series were mostly restricted to situation comedy or family comedy, and were usually aired with either a live or artificial laugh track. One hour dramas included genre series such as police and detective series, westerns, science fiction, and, later, serialized prime time soap operas. Programs today still overwhelmingly conform to these half-hour and one hour guidelines.

Beginning around 1969 in the US, there was a brief spate of half-hour shows that purposely alternated between comedy and drama and aired without a laugh track. At the time, these were known as "comedy-dramas." Perhaps the best known was Room 222. Later, the approach of these early shows influenced better-known series such as M*A*S*H, One Day at a Time, and Eight Is Enough (which featured hour-long episodes and a laugh track). These early experiments also influenced general TV comedy, and later series (especially family themed sitcoms) often included brief dramatic interludes and more serious subject matter.

Although elements of comedy were seen in the 1975 police drama The Sweeney the first UK show to be generally acknowledged as a comedy-drama was the series Minder, first launched in 1979 (Both shows produced by Euston Films for Thames Television, for ITV).

See also




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