Genre Studies Unit-IV Tragi-comedy

 

Tragi-comedy

Distinguishing Features

            Tragi-Comedy is half tragedy and half comedy, mingled harmoniously together. It is distinct from Tragedy that contains comic relief and from comedy that has a potentially tragic background.

            Tragi-comedy stands on a different footing altogether. It is a complete tragedy up to a certain point, and a complete comedy thereafter. The complication sets forth a tragic theme, the Denouement turns it into comedy. To put it in another way, the Rising Action (growth of the plot) is tragedy, the falling action (its downward course) is comedy. The climax separates the one from the other. Examples- Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline”, “Winter’s tale” and “The Tempest”.

 

Origin

            Tragi- Comedy was unknown to Greeks, whose Unity of Action definitely forbade a mixture of the tragic and the comic. Platus, the latin comic dramatist, arose in the reign of James I under Italian and Spanish influences. Beaumont anfd Fletcher’s “A King and No King” established it on the English stage, and Shakespeare handled the form magnificently towards the end of his career. Tragi- Comic elements was indispensable to the Sentimental comedy of the 18^th century and the serious play of modern times.

 

Arguments

            Tragi-Comedy was always opposed by “those who judge by principles rather than perception.”

            Milton condemned it in the preface to Samson Agonistes “to vindicate tragedy from the small esteem, or rather infamy, which in the account of many it undergoes at this day, with common interludes;”

            Addison later called it “one of the most monstrous inventions that ever entered into a poet’s thoughts.”

            There is the strongest argument of all on behalf of Tragi-Comedy- the fact that Shakespeare and other dramatists created in that form some of the greatest masterpieces of English Literature.