Tragicomedy

Origins and Development

The term was first applied to drama, rather whimsically, by Plautus (b. 254 BCE). Ancient drama was strictly divided into tragedy, which dealt with gods, and comedy, which dealt with mortals; but the story of Alcmene, a woman so virtuous that Jupiter could seduce her only by adopting the form of her husband Amphitryon, involved a crossover between gods and mortals, so in dealing with it, Plautus was almost required to invent a hybrid genre and called it tragicomoedia. After Jupiter, assisted by Mercury who also takes on the form of a low-born mortal, Sosia, has seduced Alcmene, the real Amphitryon returns home to a welcome that does not seem to him commensurate with his long absence on a noble military expedition. This focus on sexual infidelity and mistaken identity ensures that almost all treatments of the story, including Plautus's, remain essentially comic, but the presence of Jupiter, the exploration of serious themes (jealousy, exploitation, outraged innocence, and distress), and the fact that the play foreshadows the birth of Hercules, all contribute a heroic and philosophical tone as counterpoint to the silliness, innuendo, and imbroglio of the humorous episodes. The genre of tragicomedy came to be typified by the combination of the heroic with the trivial, the intense with the domestic, and the philosophical with the burlesque that characterized subsequent dramatizations of the same story, notably those by Molière (1668), Heinrich von Kleist (1807), and Jean Giraudoux (1929).

In the post-Renaissance world, tragicomedy was first defined and illustrated in Italy: Giovanni-Battista Guarini’s 1590 pastoral tragicomedy, Il Pastor Fido (The Faithful Shepherd), exemplified the genre. From defenses of that play emerged a theoretical position (summarized in Guarini’s Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry in 1601) that underscored debates on drama for over a century in Italy, France, and England. Tragicomedy depicted persons of high birth (often but not necessarily in an Arcadian pastoral context), engaged in private rather than state affairs. It explored passion and desire but avoided their more destructive aspects; it could depict danger but ended with resolution and celebration. Its humor should not be unruly or raunchy and should always be modest. A typical tragicomedy thus sounds and feels like a tragedy for most of its length, [Page 769]but its ending, like that of a comedy, achieves a feelgood resolution that should be neither artificial nor contrived.

This purist definition excludes some related but different phenomena. The moments of ribald comic relief that punctuate Shakespearean tragedies—Macbeth’s porter, Hamlet’s interaction with gravediggers—do not turn those works into tragicomedies. The Winter’s Tale is tragic during most of its first half, exploring destructive passion and depicting brutal death, while most of the action in Bohemia is clearly comic, involving romance, innuendo, and wit: Only the final sequence brings the play potentially into the area of tragicomedy, and even here, the convenient coupling of lower class characters (Paulina and Camillo) allows an intrusion from a baser comic world of coincidence and bawdry. This and similar plays are usually referred to as romances.

...