Tragicomedy

Brean Hammond, Simon Shepherd

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350144323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theatergeschichte & -kritik

This succinct authoritative book offers readers an overview of the origins, characteristics, and changing status of tragicomedy from the 17th century to the present. It explores the work of some of the key English and Irish playwrights associated with the form, the influence of Italian and Spanish theorist-playwrights and the importance of translations of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid. At the turn of the 17th century, English dramatists such as John Marston, John Fletcher, and William Shakespeare began experimenting with plays that mixed elements of tragedy and comedy, producing a blended mode that they themselves called 'tragicomedy'. This book begins by examining the sources of their inspiration and the theatrical achievement that they hoped to gain by confronting an audience with plays that defied the plot and character expectations of 'pure' comedy and tragedy. It goes on to show how, reacting to French models, John Dryden, Shakespeare 'improvers' and other English playwrights developed the form while sowing the seeds of its own vulnerability to parody and obsolescence in the eighteenth century.
Discussing nineteenth-century melodrama as in some respects a resurrection of tragicomedy, the final chapter concentrates on plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, and Beckett as examples of the form being revived to create theatrical modes that more adequately represent the perceived complexity of experience.

1

Tragicomedy’s Early Development

Aristotle’s Poetics and Its Legacy

The Poetics has its own inbuilt biases. When it began to be discussed systematically, in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century, some European scholars and dramatists would argue that, although the great philosopher had codified the nature of tragedy, implicitly distinguishing it from comedy, he had not necessarily said the last word. Was Aristotle justified, for example, in his low opinion of the associated theatre arts that realize a playscript in performance? ‘Spectacle … is the least artistic of all the parts, and has least to do with the art of poetry. The tragic effect is quite possible without a public performance and actors’ (2.6; Nevitt and Pollard 2019: 20–1). In nineteenth-century England, writers such as Coleridge, Lamb and Hazlitt would develop Aristotle’s hostility to spectacle into an intense animus against performance. Their thinking resulted from concentration on Shakespeare, where the staged versions available to them in performance were usually very different from those that they could read in the study. From the reading, they constructed Shakespeare as the unparalleled ‘genius’, whose drama had such imaginative reach and lyric power that it could only be compromised by stage actualization. To take Shakespeare out of a reader’s head is to subject his poetic masterpieces to tinsel and pasteboard travesty. Tragicomedies, on the other hand, imported aspects of court masques in the earliest phase of their English development, providing opportunities for music, dance and spectacular stage effects. Symbiosis of script and theatrical representation would become a vital aspect of their success.

Tragic plots, for Aristotle, were most effective when they demonstrated design and necessity rather than chance and coincidence (2.9). Tragicomic writers, on the other hand, would leave much to chance – indeed, they would celebrate its seemingly random effects, patterning plot coincidences in such a manner that they could appear to show the hand of Providence. For Aristotle, specific qualifications had to be met by any would-be tragic protagonist. Protagonists would need to be exceptional men, highly placed in society – because, if they were not, how could they be of interest to spectators? Whole communities, kingdoms indeed, should depend on their rise and fall. Humdrum lives, even going through extreme vicissitudes, were not of concern to audiences. Further, those socially exalted protagonists could not be evil. Evocation of pity is central to the objectives and effects of tragedy – and you can’t pity someone evil. A tragedy can’t show a bad man passing from misery to happiness, therefore. This is ‘the most untragic that can be; it has no one of the requisites of Tragedy; it does not appeal either to the human feeling in us, or to our pity, or to our fears’ (2.13; Nevitt and Pollard 2019: 24).

Tragicomedy was to do less than it might have – though not nothing – to weaken the hold of the aristocracy on dramatic form, but it had greater effect in undermining the Aristotelian prescription that the central figure had to be virtuous. Tragicomic practitioners, Shakespeare prominent amongst them, refused to swallow that prescription whole. Observing that, in life, wicked persons did often prosper, and more generally that individual human trajectories were subject to greater vicissitude and complication than is covered in an inevitable tragic fall, tragicomedians devised characters and plots that might do greater justice to such complexity. The idea that tragicomedies are ‘realistic’ does not stand up to much inspection if what is meant is that they devise more naturalistic conventions of staging than do tragedies or comedies. ‘Realistic’ is hardly a convincing descriptor for Shakespeare’s late-career romantic tragicomedies in which gods descend from the heavens. There is more promise in the suggestion that they seek greater ‘truth to’ the roller-coaster experience that living one’s life provides. It is this sense of life’s chiaroscuro that the Scots poet William Drummond tries to capture when he writes, in his treatise on death entitled A Cypresse Grove (1623): ‘Everie one commeth there [into this world] to act his part of this Tragicomedie called Life’ (Drummond 1623: 73).

After 1548, when the Italian classical scholar Francesco Robortelli had made a Latin version of the Poetics available, systematic study of that seminal text got under way. Giovanni Battisti Giraldi, commonly called Cinzio (anglicized as Cinthio) in his Discorso intorno al comporre delle comedie e delle tragedie (1554), translated into English in 1555, dwells on the question of happy-ending tragedies and, in that context, points out that the Roman comic dramatist Plautus had written just such a ‘mixed’ play, entitled Amphitruo (now usually referred to in its Greek form Amphitryon). The gods Jupiter and Mercury come down to earth, the former impersonating the Theban general Amphitryon and the latter his slave Sosia, with raunchily hilarious consequences when the general’s wife Alcmena gets in on the action. The play begins with a prologue in which Mercury addresses the audience:

What’s that? Are you disappointed

To find it’s a tragedy? Well, I can easily change it.

I’m a god, after all. I can easily make it a comedy,

And never alter a line … Very well.

I’ll meet you half-way, and make it a tragi-comedy. (Plautus 1977: 230)

Plautus seems to be having a joke at Aristotle’s expense here. Because there are gods, important mortals and a significant slave in the cast, the play cannot be a tragedy according to Aristotle. Aristotle prohibits the mingling of high- and low-caste people in what is properly termed a tragedy. Mercury outranks Aristotle, however, so, by divine fiat, he can simply declare the play a mongrel form to which he will give the label ‘tragicomedy’ – and hereby produces the first recorded example of the word.

Sidney and Guarini

English discussion of such matters begins with the first sustained work of literary criticism in that language, Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesy. Written around 1580, circulated in manuscript but not printed until 1595, Sidney criticizes contemporary dramatists for not observing Aristotle’s rules about time and place – even though ‘unity’ of place was not actually required by Aristotle but inferred by the Italian scholar Lodovico Castelvetro in the commentary to his 1570 translation of the Poetics, with which Sidney was probably familiar. Failure to observe the unities contributed, for Sidney, to an impression that English drama was in chaos. What he writes appears to be based on actual theatregoing:

… how all their plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies, mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders to play a part in majestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion, so as neither the admiration and commiseration nor the right sportfulness is by their mongrel tragicomedy obtained … I know the ancients have one or two examples of tragicomedies, as Plautus hath Amphitryo … having indeed no right comedy in that comical part of our tragedy, we have nothing but scurrility unworthy of any chaste ears, or some extreme show of doltishness. (Sidney 2004: 46–7)

We don’t know what plays Sidney may have seen, but Elizabethan drama provides many examples of serious plays being punctured by the appearance of the mischievous Vice figure familiar in medieval morality plays, and of comic asides occurring at otherwise poignant tragic moments. As Janette Dillon says, ‘comic matter is alive and well, kicking its way into every possible dramatic shape’ (Dillon 2002: 48). Dillon perceives a serious attempt made by such dramatists as George Peele and John Lyly, commencing in 1583–4, to respond to Sidney’s call for more tightly and responsibly structured comic drama. In the passage cited above, Sidney allows for the possibility that there could be ‘right comedy in that comical part of our tragedy’. This is a gauntlet thrown down to dramatists to devise responsible mixed forms, a challenge that the Italian dramatist Guarini was accepting virtually while Sidney was writing these words in the Defence. Il Pastor Fido (The Faithful Shepherd) had its first performance in 1585 and first saw print in 1590, but it was begun in the early 1580s and was many times revised. An account of the play is necessary to establish some elements foundational to the new form that will be adopted by later English practitioners.

Set in the imaginary pastoral landscape of Arcadia, the action takes place in the shadow of death, in a society polluted at source in ways not entirely dissimilar from that of Oedipus’ Thebes. In Arcadian history, the goddess Cinthia/Diana has cursed society with a plague because of Lucrina’s sexual treachery towards Amintas. Lucrina is to be sacrificed, but she and Amintas both commit suicide on the altar. An oracle interprets the goddess’s subsequent will: that a virgin should be sacrificed annually, and that any woman discovered in sexual dishonour should be executed. Sex and death are thus inextricably woven into the fabric of Arcadian society. This curse can only be lifted when a young couple of immortal descent are married. For this reason, Silvio the son of Montano, descended from Hercules, and Amarilli the daughter of Titiro, descended from Pan, have been espoused. But there is a problem. Silvio is homoerotically obsessed by hunting and is an enemy to love, just as is Adonis in Shakespeare’s later poem Venus and Adonis (1593–4). Amarilli thinks of him as a sexually immature boy. She herself is in love with Mirtillo, a poor foreigner recently arrived in Arcadia and working as a shepherd. We needn’t recount in detail the plot twists through which Silvio is married off to Dorinda, having discovered love when he has near-fatally wounded her with an arrow; while Amarilli’s rival, the wicked Corisca, fails in her attempts to compromise Amarilli’s honour and have her killed. When Corisca’s plans to set Amarilli up go awry and Mirtillo, rather than Corisca’s dupe Coridon, is discovered in a cave with Amarilli, the play’s ‘faithful shepherd’ is prepared to be sacrificed in Amarilli’s stead. Late in the final act, he is discovered to be Montano’s lost son, long presumed dead but found and raised by Carino. The blind prophet Tirenio is brought onstage to explain how the discovery of Mirtillo’s true identity fulfils the oracle’s demands and heals Arcadia (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 Engraving by Giuseppe Daniotto from Parnaso Italiano published in Venice in 1788. Action from Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, Act 3, Scene 3, depicting the characters of Amarilli, Corisca and Mirtillo. Photo by DEA PICTURE LIBRARY/Getty Images.

Vitally for the development of tragicomedy, Il Pastor Fido permits high-born semi-divine characters Silvio and Amarilli to inhabit the same dramatic world as the poverty-stricken foreigner Mirtillo, albeit Mirtillo is a foundling whose true identity is not established until the end. Before the decorum of social rank is restored, Mirtillo establishes an ‘outcast’ perspective. Here, we quote from the first English translation of the play published in 1602, attributed to John and Charles Dymock:

I know too well,

The lowlinesse of my poore humble starre,

My desteny’s to burne! not to delight

Was I brought forth

(1.2)

This outsider perspective allies Mirtillo with the play’s ‘Satyr’, a scarcely human figure who develops a rich misogynistic vein, articulating the critique, familiar in Italianate English drama of the period, that, with women, what you see is not necessarily what you get:

Their care, their pompe, and all their whole delight,

Is in the barke of a bepainted face …

O what a stinking thing it is, to see them take

A Pencill vp, and paint their bloudlesse cheeks …

(1.5)

The mythological dimensions and elements of classical tragedy are permitted to coexist, in Il Pastor Fido, with powerfully satirical speeches that have some social purchase. Although much of the play deals in ‘dark materials’ and the action proceeds against the ever-present threat of imminent death, Guarini takes out an insurance policy, so to speak, against the worst-case scenario coming to pass. Early in the play, Montano recalls, for Titiro’s benefit, the flood that took away his son, going on to tell Amarilli’s father of a dream he has recently had:

there rose me thought an aged man:

His head and beard dropping downe siluer teares,

Who gently raught to me with both his hands

A naked childe, saying, behold thy soone,

Take heed thou killst him not.

(1.4)

From out a plane tree, there issues ‘a subtill voyce / Which said, Arcadia shal be faire againe’.

Such reassurances cannot be lost on an audience that must, at whatever level of awareness, realize that the play is inoculated against its own worst outcomes. They must be aware that what they are watching is not a tragedy, even if the generic blueprint is unfamiliar to them. The blunders and accidents that they have witnessed Corisca making in her bloodthirsty attempt to have Amarilli taken while committing a sex crime and executed do not altogether suggest that Corisca is in charge of events or that something tragically inevitable, as Aristotle required of tragedy, is taking place. Consequences resulting from her inept villainy are avoidable and the audience must have some inkling that they will be avoided. Almost subliminally, audiences are presented with the possibility of the restoration of a lost heir, of the damage done to society by some initial act of pollution being cleansed by a future act of self-sacrifice such as the faithful shepherd Mirtillo offers. Unlike, say, Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello, who, when confronted with his villainy refuses to acknowledge it, the chief villainess in Il Pastor Fido is given an opportunity to acknowledge her wrongdoing and repent, as does Corisca here:

Ah me it is too true, this is the fruite

Thou from thy store of vanities must reape …

Who opens now mine eyes? Ah wretch, I see

My fault most foule that seem’d felicitie.

(5.9)

However much of Il Pastor Fido is spent in the shadow of the sacrificial knife, the redemption of society and not its ruin is the play’s objective: healing, not horror.

In 1602, Guarini attached to a new edition of Il Pastor Fido a defence of his play which had by then become controversial for destroying the clarity of Aristotle’s account of the pure dramatic forms of comedy and tragedy – even if that clarity only existed in the interpretations of the commentators. Surprisingly, his Compendio della Poesia Tragicomica was not translated into English and there is still no full translation available as far as I am aware, so it is worth summarizing his discussion. Tragicomedy is not composed of two parallel independent stories, insists Guarini. Together, properly combined, they give life to a new form. Low-born characters can be at the centre of events, he argues contrary to Aristotle, and it is important to represent human reality in all its shades. Guarini lists various elements that are components of his tragicomedy, almost providing a recipe for cooking one up: a noble character (not necessarily high-born), richness of action, both true and fantastical storylines, affections held at bay, entertainments such as hunting, danger without death, laughter and pleasure though moderate, and a happy ending.

One of Guarini’s main concerns is to find a dramatic form that strengthens the human spiri...