Tragicomedy

This short 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 writers and the importance of translations of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid and later Chekhov's plays into English.

At the turn of the 17th century, English dramatists such as John Marston, Ben Jonson, 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 their plot and character expectations.

The second chapter follows the declining fortunes of the tragicomic mode after its post-Shakespearean heyday, considering why it ceased to provide the satisfactions that 18th-century audiences increasingly required, and enquiring whether melodrama supplied some of these in the early 19th century. It examines the role of Corneille's Le Cid and analyses John Dryden's 1672 play Marriage à la Mode.

The final chapter concentrates on two dramatists, Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, whose apprehension of experience is such as to challenge the adequacy of the traditional major forms (comedy and tragedy) to represent it. It considers too the effect of translations of Chekhov becoming part of the English theatrical repertoire in the 1930s. Whereas in historical terms tragicomedy had always been a religious form, in the 20th century it is revived to serve the needs of audiences who have lost their political, moral and religious bearings.