The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy

Verna A. Foster

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351885348
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria para la literatura comparada

Focusing on European tragicomedy from the early modern period to the theatre of the absurd, Verna Foster here argues for the independence of tragicomedy as a genre that perceives and communicates human experience differently from the various forms of tragedy, comedy, and the drame (serious drama that is neither comic nor tragic). Foster posits that, in the sense of the dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable new genre, tragicomedy has emerged only twice in the history of drama. She argues that tragicomedy first emerged and was controversial in the Renaissance; and that it has in modern times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic genres. In the first section of the book, the author analyzes the name 'tragicomedy' and the genre's problems of identity; then goes on to explore early modern tragicomedies by Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Massinger. A transitional chapter addresses cognate genres. The final section of the book focuses on modern tragicomedies by Ibsen, Chekhov, Synge, O'Casey, Williams, Ionesco, Beckett and Pinter. By exploring dramaturgical similarities between early modern and modern tragicomedies, Foster demonstrates the persistence of tragicomedy's generic markers and provides a more precise conceptual framework for the genre than has so far been available.

Chapter 1
The Name of Tragicomedy: Problems of Identity

The tragicomic is the basic pattern of human experience. It fits both the individual's experience of life's daily ups and downs and the human community's broader perception of its own existence. As Susanne Langer has put it, "Society is continuous though its members, even the strongest and fairest, live out their lives and die; and even while each individual fulfills the tragic pattern, it participates also in the comic continuity."¹ Tragicomic patterns inform human beings' perception of their environment and their most central religious beliefs: the death and rebirth of the year, the dismemberment and resurrection of Dionysus. They are of the essence of Christianity, an insight recognized explicitly in medieval and Renaissance drama. The fall and redemption of humankind, the death and resurrection of Christ and thus of each individual, are patterns underlying almost all of medieval drama and much of Renaissance drama, especially tragicomedy. Paul Hernadi has suggested that tragicomedy is the most comprehensive genre because its mood is a "complex Urphä nomen from which simpler responses to life or drama must be distilled."² Not surprisingly, tragicomedy is constantly merging with one or another of the "simpler" genres (comedy, tragedy, melodrama, farce, and so on) that may be "distilled" from it but that also construct and comprise tragicomedy's own identity as a genre. Tragicomedy is, therefore, exceptionally difficult to define.

The history of tragicomedy would seem to be coterminous with that of drama itself. In the Greek drama the tragicomic manifests itself in Euripides' ironic tragedies with happy endings (for example, Alcestis and Ion), in the satyr plays that concluded tragic performances, and, indeed, in the only complete tragic trilogy extant. The tragedy of the Agamemnon is finally subsumed in the tragicomic conclusion of the Oresteia. In Roman drama Terence incorporates danger into his comic plots. Medieval and Renaissance playwrights (in England and Spain) incorrigibly mingle the tragic and the comic in a rich variety of ways. Eighteenth-century comedies require their audiences to weep, and nineteenth-century melodramas play overtly on laughter and tears. Most major dramatists of the twentieth century have written plays carefully contrived to evoke complex emotional and intellectual responses in their audiences. In a loose sense, many plays may be regarded as tragicomic. But it is possible to distinguish certain plays in which the mix of tragic and comic is so equally balanced and the resulting integration of diverse emotional responses so profound or so profoundly disturbing as to constitute a special mode of perception and experience distinguishable from "purer" or "simpler" forms of tragedy and comedy, and also from the drame (serious drama that is neither tragic nor comic). These plays are tragicomedies, and the best of them are among the most fascinating works of dramatic art.

Tragicomedy proper can boast antecedents in Euripidean, lerentian, and medieval drama and cognates in such kinds as sentimental comedy, drame, melodrama, savage farce, and so on. But in the sense of the dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable and theoretically significant new genre, tragicomedy has developed only twice in the history of drama. Controversial in the Renaissance, tragicomedy has in modern times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic kinds. Because tragedy and comedy themselves are so various and hard to define, tragicomedy, which can incorporate the tragic and the comic, the melodramatic and the farcical, the romantic and the satiric in a variety of combinations, is an especially slippery genre. Some critics have denied either its existence or its worth as a separate genre; others have asserted that modern tragicomedy has nothing to do with its Renaissance counterpart; yet others have used the term tragicomedy so loosely as to render it virtually meaningless. It is my purpose in this book to assert the independence of tragicomedy as a genre that perceives and communicates experience differently from the various forms of tragedy and comedy, to indicate affective and dramaturgical similarities between Renaissance and modern tragicomedies, and so to approach a definition of the genre that transcends its formulations in any particular period.

First it is necessary to distinguish tragicomedy from other plays in which serious and comic elements coexist. King Lear at one end of the spectrum is obviously not a tragicomedy, nor at the other end is The Comedy of Errors, though the latter at least entertains the possibility of death, while the former incorporates the modally tragicomic at its most painful in Lear's scenes with the Fool on the heath and at its most wonderful in his reconciliation with Cordelia. Nor, though distinctions are becoming harder to make, are The Revenger's Tragedy and Twelfth Night tragicomedies, for in the one the savagely comic is subordinated to a tragic vision of life, and in the other the tragic implications serve to deepen and make more exquisite the comedy.³ Plays that stand between rather than embrace the tragic and the comic, to adopt Karl Guthke's useful distinction, are also not tragicomedies.⁴ The Conscious Lovers has nothing tragic about it, and if it produces "a Joy too exquisite for Laughter,"⁵ not much (in its main plot) that is comic either. Similarly, A Doll House contains neither a tragic nor a comic view of life and cannot, therefore, be tragicomic; it is a drame. A tragicomedy is a play in which the tragic and the comic both exist but are formally and emotionally dependent on one another, each modifying and determining the nature of the other so as to produce a mixed, tragicomic response in the audience. This kind of organic relationship between the tragic and the comic in form and in the feeling it produces has been posited, with varying emphases, by most of the major theorists of tragicomedy from Guarini to Dürrenmatt and Ionesco.

It would be pointless to attempt a more formal definition of tragicomedy when the members of the genre are structurally so radically divergent. Definition in terms of audience response is more profitable but not without difficulties both for the reasons that I noted in the Introduction and also because tragicomedies in particular allow readers, including directors and thus audiences, a wide range of interpretative options, depending which emotional strand(s) they choose to focus on. The widely different stage treatments accorded to plays such as Measure for Measure (ranging from romantic comedy to tragic satire) and The Cherry Orchard (somber tragedy or farce) are instructive in this respect. And yet if tragicomedy is not continually to dissolve into something else, we need a sense of which plays are tragicomedies and of what makes them tragicomic. Since genre guides and shapes response, neither readers nor directors and audiences can understand a play unless they know which genre it belongs to. If, for example, we are not at least intuitively aware during the early acts of The Winter's Tale that the play is a tragicomedy, not a tragedy, our response to Leontes and the supposed death of Hermione will misinform our expectations for the rest of the play. (The Winter's Tale presents an especially interesting case study because Shakespeare, untypically, seems to deceive his audience about a central fact in the play.) Equally, a purely farcical reading of The Cherry Orchard trivializes the play and our response to it, while a "tragic" reading, more often the case until the last few decades, is likely to deaden the audience's response altogether. In fact, the dramaturgy of both these plays is skillfully designed to produce a mixed, tragicomic response. Readers (including directors) and audiences need to attend to the plays' tragicomic markers if they are to experience tragicomedies in the richest possible way.

Even though formal definition of tragicomedy is almost impossible and definition in terms of audience response quite fluid (especially given the variety of possible performances that any one dramatic text can generate), certain plays of the Renaissance and modern periods have often, and indeed in the last few decades generally, been regarded as tragicomedies. These include in the Renaissance self-styled tragicomedies such as Il Pastor Fido, The Malcontent, and many of Beaumont and Fletcher's and Massinger's plays, and also Shakespeare's "romances" and sometimes the "problem plays"; modern dramatists acknowledged by many critics to have written plays that are tragicomedies include, pre-eminently, Chekhov, Beckett, and Ionesco, but also Ibsen, Synge, O'Casey, Williams, and Pinter, among others. Both Alastair Fowler and Jean-Marie Schaeffer note the importance of "the evidence of examples" in genre study; Schaeffer comments, "The real definiens is always the text, the definiendum, always provisional, being the genre."⁶ While my aim in this book is to elucidate the family resemblances that establish the plays I am discussing as members of the same genre, and thus to provide a better understanding of what that genre is, two broad distinctions between Renaissance and modern tragicomedy should be made at the outset. In Renaissance tragicomedy the suffering or erring protagonists are usually potentially tragic figures in an ultimately comic universe -- Amarilli and Mirtillo (Il Pastor Fido), Malevole (The Malcontent), Duke Vincentio, Imogen, Leontes, Prospero, Arbaces (A King and No King), and Valerio and Evanthe (A Wife for a Month) fit this definition. In modern tragicomedy the individual is more often a comic figure in a universe probably tragic or at best uncertain — Hjalmar Ekdal, Mrs. Ranevsky and Gayev, Christy Mahon and Pegeen Mike, Juno, Mother Courage, Berenger (in The Killer or Rhinoceros), Vladimir and Estragon, and Davies (The Caretaker) exemplify this type of protagonist. The distinction has something to do with the social classes and situations typically presented in Renaissance and modern drama. Renaissance dramatists presented kings and nobles as the chief characters in their tragicomedies as in their tragedies. Such characters, when they suffer (as they generally do in rather sensational circumstances), tend to see themselves as tragic, and in the resonances of the often superb (if self-regarding) blank verse they are given to speak they carry along with them a tragic aura regardless of the comic elements surrounding them or inherent even in their behavior. It is easier to make middle- and lower-class characters such as are typically portrayed in modern drama appear comic rather than tragic if only because of the kind of language they can most usually be given. Significantly, the comic characters of modern tragicomedy tend to take on more tragic implications as their language becomes more "poetic" - in the "Irish" idiom of Synge's plays, for example, or the patterned language of Beckett and Pinter.

The difference in the kind of characters presented in Renaissance and modern tragicomedy, however, cuts deeper than ultimately impertinent questions of social class, having to do rather with two different conceptions of the individual's position in the universe. In Renaissance tragicomedy, whatever may be the case in tragedy, the individual's self-worth and the meaningfulness of his suffering are ultimately affirmed, thereby confirming his potentially tragic stature, according to Renaissance theory most decorously and universally represented by a protagonist of high rank. In modern tragicomedy, by contrast, the protagonist represents the common type of humanity, beset by doubts and fears that are not ultimately resolved, isolated even from those closest to him, uncertain of the meaning of his existence or of why he suffers; without a sense of meaning something, such a character cannot be tragic, though his situation often is.

Concomitant with this first broad distinction between Renaissance and modern tragicomedy is a second, having to do more precisely with the nature of the genre. A question that has a...