Tragicomedy

David L. Hirst

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781032217024
• eBook ISBN: 9781000579291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this brief study, originally published in 1984, David Hirst examines the meaning of the term 'tragicomedy' by elucidating the most important theories of the genre and by analysing those plays which represent its most vital and influential expression. He draws a distinction between tragicomedies and conceived as a careful fusion of contrasted dramatic elements and as a mixed genre which seeks to exploit a volatile combination of theatrical extremes.

In the first part he compares neo-classical romance and satire. The plays of Shakespeare, Fletcher and Corneille, seen in the context of the literary theory of Guarini, are contrasted with Marlowe and the writers of revenge tragedy. The second part examines the conflict of Romanticism and realism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century theatre. Shaw, Chekhov and the Absurdists are viewed in relation to the key theories of tragicomedy expounded by Brecht, Artaud and Pirandello. The study concludes with a consideration of certain significant contemporary plays – by Edward Bond, Peter Nichols and Peter Barnes – in the context of the historical development of the genre.

PART I The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: neo-classical romance and satire

1Introduction

Mercury. 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. Is that what you’d like? . ..

But I was forgetting – stupid of me – of course,

Being a god, I know quite well what you’d like.

I know exactly what’s in your minds. Very well.

I’ll meet you half way, and make it a tragicomedy.

(Plautus, Amphitryo)

Giambattista Guarini’s essay, Compendio della Poesia Tragicomica published in 1601, was the first and remains the most substantial analysis of the tragicomic form. Written in late Renaissance Italy, it represents a justification of that mixed genre which was brought to its height at the turn of the sixteenth century. It has, on the one hand, the thoroughness and the significance of Aristotle’s justification of tragedy in the Poetics and, on the other, the detailed examination of the implications of comedy we find in Meredith’s celebrated essay On Comedy or Bergson’s Laughter. Moreover, the Compendio delia Poesia Tragicomica is closely related to Guarini’s drama Il Pastor Fido which triumphantly reveals the author’s theories in practice. Key works of the neo-classical school, the essay and the play both point back to the origins of drama in fifth-century BC Athens while foreshadowing the tragicomedy of the early Jacobean period in England and the mid-seventeenth century in France. Both of Guarini’s influential writings were pioneer works; thanks to him tragicomedy established itself as a valid new genre. But just as his own theories came out of his practice – not vice versa – so future playwrights were to explore and extend this dramatic form as well as the implications of his critique.

Guarini’s Compendio – so termed because it is an amalgamation of two related studies – is concerned to counter the two basic Renaissance arguments against tragicomedy: that it is a mixed form combining tragedy and comedy; and that it lacks unity of action as it grafts one subject on another. He defends the mixed form, making analogies with the hermaphrodite and with the alloy, bronze, before employing the example of the doctor who employs a substance extracted from the venom of the snake itself as an antidote for snake bite. The point is that this substance has been tempered: only what is beneficial has been utilized. This, he goes on to argue, is what the writer of tragicomedy should do: take what he needs from the contrasted genres of tragedy and comedy. From the former he takes ‘noble characters not noble actions, a story which is credible but not historically true, heightened yet tempered effects, delight not sorrow, the danger not the death’, and from the latter ‘laughter which is not dissolute, modest pleasures, a feigned crisis, an unexpected happy ending and – above all – the comic plotting’ (Compendio, p. 231). This requires a fuller explanation. From tragedy Guarini takes public figures but private actions. It is clear from his distinction earlier in the essay between the tragic hero – ‘la persona grande’ – and the proper subjects of comedy – ‘persona e negozio privato’ (i.e. the ordinary man and his affairs) – that he is demanding a fusion of the fundamental and contrasted bases of the two genres. He requires a believable but not a true story: again tragedy traditionally dealt with epic heroes, comedy with invented characters or (as in the case of Aristophanes) with contemporaries. Guarini wishes the emotions to be heightened, but tempered (the key word, as in the analogy with snake bite, is ‘rintuzzati’). The audience is to experience the aesthetic pleasure of participating without the full emotional consequences brought about by a tragic catharsis. This is achieved by threatening the characters with danger but not allowing any of them actually to die. The first four characteristics he takes from comedy are relatively straightforward: laughter that is not bawdy (while it is in the plays of Aristophanes or Plautus), less emotionally demanding drama, apparent threats to the characters, and a surprise dénouement. What is more complex – and, as he says here, most important, an issue to which he returns in detail later – is the ‘ordine comico’. This is the detailed comic plotting: the development and working out of intrigues which, in their intricacy, are the province of comedy and not of tragedy.

He tackles the subject of unity of action later in the essay when he compares tragicomedy to different types of tragedy. As against the tragedy with one plot and one outcome are two others: the mixed type with two issues and the tragedy with a happy ending. In the first category could be included Sophocles’ Electra, in the second Euripides’ Orestes. Cunningly, after suggesting that Aristotle considers and allows all three, albeit preferring the first, he goes on to argue the superiority of tragicomedy over both the cruder precursors of the mixed genre in that it has one basic intrigue, one denouement and a happy ending which involves all the characters. Earlier in the essay he casts doubt on the validity of Aristotle’s theory of catharsis by asking such pointed questions as: ‘How can we be purged of pity without at the same time being stripped of all humanity?’ and ‘How can it be that terrible events purge fear?’ (p. 235). These questions anticipate his own theory as to how tragicomedy should work. He draws an important distinction between the ‘technical’ (’strumentale’) and the ‘overall’ (’architettonico’) objectives of drama. Aristotle’s definition of tragedy – that its technical and overall ends are respectively the imitation of horrifying and pitiful events and the purgation of the pity and fear they arouse – is complemented by a parallel theory of Guarini’s on comedy. He suggests that its technical aim is the imitation of the actions of private men whose mistakes move us to laughter, while its overall objective is the purgation of melancholy in order to gladden our soul. This culminates in the complex but logical formulation that the aim of tragicomedy is therefore:

to imitate through the mise en scène a contrived action which combines all the tragic and comic elements which can believably and decorously coexist, regulated within the framework of a unified dramatic form whose aim is to purge with delight the sadness of the audience. In such a way that Imitation – the ‘technical’ objective – is a mixed one, because it represents a combination of tragic and comic elements. Whereas Purgation – the ‘overall’ objective – is a single one because it reduces this combination of elements to one basic concept: the liberation of the audience from melancholy.

(Compendio, p. 246)

Guarini was writing at a watershed in dramatic history. In attempting to justify his own theatrical work he was imposing a system, clarifying the inconsistencies in the writing of his immediate precursors, men like Giraldi Cinthio who in his plays and his theoretical writings – most notably the Discourse on Comedy and Tragedy published in 1556 – had envisaged a more complex relationship between these dramatic forms than that outlined by Aristotle. Taking Guarini’s thesis as a focal point, we may usefully glance back to the origins of drama and forward to the theatre of our own times in order to place his theory in the context of the development of this complex genre. Guarini’s pronounced criticism of Aristotle sought to elucidate some of the contradictions he felt were implicit in the Poetics. It is much easier to formulate a theory of tragedy than one of comedy (as the contrasted work of Aristotle, Bergson and Meredith in these fields reveals); it is even more difficult – particularly at this point in time – to pin down precisely the tragicomic form. Aristotle encountered difficulties when he was forced to deal with those plays which are not straightforwardly tragic. He is crystal clear and illuminating in his comments on Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex; but not every tragedy – even in fifth-century BC Athens – conforms to the ideal model which he praised here. Sophocles’ sequel Oedipus at Colonus is constructed in a wholly different way, dealing as it does with the hero’s enlightenment. This should alert us to consider the dramas – as Aristotle did not – within the context of the trilogy which formed the basis of each day’s entertainment during the Dionysia. Similarly The Eumenides, the final play in the sole extant trilogy, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, at the end converts vengeance to pity: a comic, or rather, tragicomic outcome.

If Sophocles’ Electra provided an example of what Guarini calls a ‘tragedy with a double outcome’ in that the wicked (Clytemnestra and Aegisthus) are punished while the good (Electra and Orestes) triumph, how much more difficult to classify is Euripides’ sequel, Orestes, in which the issue of justice, treated in the abstract by Aeschylus, is here brought down to a personal family level as Orestes and Electra set themselves against Menelaus, Helen and Hermione? Most problematic is the ending in which Apollo intervenes, announcing that Helen has been saved and that the opposing factions should make their peace and seal it with Orestes’ marriage to the woman whose life he has just threatened. It is precisely because Euripides challenged the traditional heroic values that he moved into the realm of satire and in so doing attacked the whole basis of tragedy, thus preparing the way for a mixed genre when drama was revived in the neo-classical period. Few of his plays are tragic in any Aristotelian sense, even The Trojan Women being wholly different in structure from the model outlined in the Poetics. If the more epic structure of The Phoenician Women is matched by the savage ironies of The Bacchae_y a play like Iphigenia in Tauris is nearer romance than tragedy. It averts a threatened death in the happy reconciliation of brother and sister and employs the tragic effects of reversal (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis) for purposes closer to comedy. It remains significant, however, that Euripides is begging questions within the firm framework of tragedy. Nowhere does he introduce characters from an alien genre nor employ devices – of plotting and intrigue – peculiar to comedy. Nor are his plays, indeed, funny; the ironies point up human frailty in contrasting the ideal with the real; they are not intended to provoke laughter.

Comedy in both classical Greece and Rome was a dramatic form totally independent of tragedy. The plays of Aristophanes are bawdy, their stories inventions, their characters often taken from contemporary Athenian life. Polonius was later to remark, of the players in Hamlet: ’Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light’ (II. ii. 396–7). In employing characters from a different world – citizens and their slaves – Roman comedy had nothing in common with tragedy which, as exemplified in the plays of Seneca, handled the familiar Greek stories, adapting them to the tastes of Nero and his court. Plautus’ Amphitryo, frequently cited in the neo-classical period as the exception, represents no more than the exception which proves the rule. It is an exception only in that it mixes gods with noble characters and comic servants, but since the two gods behave entirely as the coarsest of mortals (which is the comic point) the play is remarkable only because it asks us to believe that Jupiter and Alcmene are having a passionate affair although she is nine months’ pregnant. A far more influential play – at least in determining the form of Il Pastor Fido – is Terence’s Andria which Guarini praised for the interdependence of separate strands of the plot, and which, though a pure comedy, was to provide him with the situation – equally productive in his drama of tragic and comic potential – in which the arbitrary decision of parents to marry off their children is averted by the revelation of the true parentage of another child.

It is important to define precisely what tragicomedy implies and this can be done not so much through a fixed definition as through an assessment of how a tradition has developed and to what extent the blueprint evolved by Guarini has been utilized and adapted by succeeding dramatists. While Guarini was working on Il Pastor Fido, Sir Philip Sidney had something very different to say about tragicomedy. In The Defence of Poesie (1583) he is heavily dismissive of drama as a whole, arguing:

But beside these gross absurdities, 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 Apuleius did somewhat so, but that is a thing recounted with space of time, not represented in one moment; and I know the ancients have one or two examples of tragicomedies, as Plautus hath Amphitryo. But if we mark them well we shall find that they never, or very daintily match hornpipes and funerals.

(p. 67)

When Sidney was writing this, Burbage’s theatre, the first professional English playhouse, had only been in existence for seven years. It is impossible to know quite what Sidney would have thought of the performances then at the beginning of the new century, if he had lived to see them, but his analysis of contemporary theatre was accurate. The very strengths which were to give the new dramatic movement such force – the ability to represent every facet of human activity and to utilize a wide variety of dramatic techniques – were inherent in the jumbled hotchpotch of theatrical effects which were already being clumsily thrown together in contemporary stage works.

We can see why Sidney was so harsh if we glance at a play like Thomas Preston’s Cambises which marks a fascinating transition between the medieval drama and the new theatre which was to flourish at the end of the century. It is described in the frontispiece as:

A lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth containing the life of Cambises, King of Persia from the beginning of his kingdom unto his death, his one good deed of execution, after that many wicked deeds and tyrannous murders committed by and through him, and last of all his odious death by gods justice appointed.

The play was obviously popular: Falstaff reproves Hal in King Henry IV, Part 1 with the words: ‘for I must speak in passion, and I will do it in King Cambises’ vein’ (II. iv. 381–2), while its structure (and title) are parodied in A Midsummer Night’s Dream whose play-within-a-play is called ‘A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisbe, very tragical mirth’ (V. i. 56–7). Cambises is an Interlude, taking features from the medieval Moralities and the Miracle tradition, but developing them into a political history play which attempts tragedy and also incorporates scenes of low-life comedy. Polonius would have had great difficulty in finding the right genre from among his ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’ (II. ii. 392–5) – itself a comment on the fatuousness of attempting to categorize English drama of this period. Cambises concerns a tyrannical monarch who after perpetrating several murders is himself killed in a riding accident. The transitional stage between Morality and Tudor history play is seen ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Part I The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Neo-Classical Romance and Satire
• Part II The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Modern Romanticism and Realism
• Select bibliography
• Index