Editing Tragicomedy (section)

== In theatre ==
===Classical precedent===

There is no concise formal definition of tragicomedy from the [[classical antiquity|classical]] age.  It appears that the Greek philosopher [[Aristotle]] had something like the Renaissance meaning of the term (that is, a serious action with a happy ending) in mind when, in ''[[Poetics (Aristotle)|Poetics]]'', he discusses tragedy with a dual ending.<ref>Poetics: XIII, End of 2nd paragraph, Trans: Bywater, Ingram, 1920</ref>  In this respect, a number of [[Ancient Greek theatre|Greek]] and [[theatre of ancient Rome|Roman plays]], for instance ''[[Alcestis (play)|Alcestis]]'', may be called tragicomedies, though without any definite attributes outside of plot.  The word itself originates with the Roman comic playwright [[Plautus]], who coined the term (''tragicomoedia'' in Latin) somewhat facetiously in the prologue to his play ''[[Amphitryon (Plautus play)|Amphitryon]]''.  The character Mercury, sensing the indecorum of the inclusion of both kings and gods alongside servants in a comedy, declares that the play had better be a "tragicomoedia":<ref>{{cite book|last=Foster|first=Verna A.|title=The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy|year=2004|publisher=Ashgate|location=Aldershot, UK|isbn=0-7546-3567-8|pages=16}}</ref>{{cquote|I will make it a mixture: let it be a tragicomedy. I don't think it would be appropriate to make it consistently a comedy, when there are kings and gods in it. What do you think? Since a slave also has a part in the play, I'll make it a tragicomedy...{{emdash}}{{small|[[Plautus]], ''[[Amphitryon]]''}}<ref>{{cite book|author=Plautus|others=Eds. Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne|title=''"Amphitryon." Qtd. in Introduction to'' Early Modern Tragicomedy|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Gbzzzpd6oCUC|year=2007|publisher=DS Brewer|location=Suffolk, UK|isbn=978-1-84384-130-2|pages=8–9}}</ref>}}

===Renaissance revivals===
====Italy====
Two figures helped to elevate tragicomedy to the status of a regular genre, by which is meant one with its own set of rigid rules. First was [[Giovanni Battista Giraldi|Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio]], a dramatist working in the mid-sixteenth century who developed a treatise on drama modeled on Roman comedies and tragedies as opposed to early Greek-based treatises that became the model for Italian dramatists at the time. He argued for a version of tragicomedy where a tragic story was told with a happy or comic ending (''tragedia a lieto fine),'' which he thought were better suited for staged performances as opposed to tragedies with unhappy endings which he thought were better when read.<ref>Schironi, F. (2016). [https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/schironi/wp-content/uploads/sites/259/2016/10/28_Ancient-Drama-in-Renaissance-Italy.pdf The Reception of Ancient Drama in Renaissance Italy]. In 1316154068 967100427 B. V. Smit (Ed.), ''A handbook to the reception of Greek drama'' (1st ed., pp. 135-136). Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley Blackwell.</ref> Even more important was [[Giovanni Battista Guarini]]. Guarini's ''[[Il Pastor Fido]]'', published in 1590, provoked a fierce critical debate in which Guarini's spirited defense of generic innovation eventually carried the day.  Guarini's tragicomedy offered modulated action that never drifted too far either to comedy or tragedy, mannered characters, and a pastoral setting.  All three became staples of continental tragicomedy for a century and more.

====England====
{{Original research|section|date=August 2020}}
In England, where practice ran ahead of theory, the situation was quite different.  In the sixteenth century, "tragicomedy" meant the native sort of romantic play that violated the unities of time, place, and action, that glibly mixed high- and low-born characters, and that presented fantastic actions.  These were the features [[Philip Sidney]] deplored in his complaint against the "mungrell Tragy-comedie" of the 1580s, and of which Shakespeare's [[Polonius]] offers famous testimony: "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individuable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men." Some aspects of this romantic impulse remain even in the work of more sophisticated playwrights: [[Shakespeare]]'s last plays, which may well be called tragicomedies, have often been called [[Shakespeare's late romances|romances]].

By the early Stuart period, some English playwrights had absorbed the lessons of the Guarini controversy. [[John Fletcher (playwright)|John Fletcher]]'s ''The Faithful Shepherdess'', an adaptation of Guarini's play, was produced in 1608.  In the printed edition, Fletcher offered a definition of the term, stating that: "A tragi-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie."  Fletcher's definition focuses primarily on events: a play's genre is determined by whether or not people die in it, and in a secondary way on how close the action comes to a death.  But, as Eugene Waith showed, the tragicomedy Fletcher developed in the next decade also had unifying stylistic features: sudden and unexpected revelations, outré plots, distant locales, and a persistent focus on elaborate, artificial rhetoric.

Some of Fletcher's contemporaries, notably [[Philip Massinger]]<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Farajallah|first1=Hana Fathi|last2=Kitishat|first2=Amal Riyadh|date=2019-01-01|title=The Self and the Other in Philip Massinger's "The Renegado, the Gentleman of Venice": A Structural View|journal=Theory and Practice in Language Studies|volume=9|issue=1|pages=118|doi=10.17507/tpls.0901.17|issn=1799-2591|doi-access=free}}</ref> and [[James Shirley]],<ref>{{Citation|last=Dyson|first=Jessica|title=Caroline tragedy|date=2019-02-25|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.7765/9781526138262.00016|work=The genres of Renaissance tragedy|publisher=Manchester University Press|doi=10.7765/9781526138262.00016|isbn=978-1-5261-3826-2|s2cid=197955255|access-date=2020-10-27}}</ref> wrote popular tragicomedies. [[Richard Brome]] also essayed the form, but with less success. And many of their contemporary writers, ranging from [[John Ford (dramatist)|John Ford]] to [[Lodowick Carlell]] to Sir [[Aston Cockayne]], made attempts in the genre.

Tragicomedy remained fairly popular up to the closing of the theaters in 1642, and Fletcher's works were popular in the Restoration as well.  The old styles were cast aside as tastes changed in the eighteenth century; the "tragedy with a happy ending" eventually developed into [[melodrama]], in which form it still flourishes.

''Landgartha'' (1640) by [[Henry Burnell (author)|Henry Burnell]], the first play by an Irish playwright to be performed in an Irish theatre, was explicitly described by its author as a tragicomedy. Critical reaction to the play was universally hostile, partly it seems because the ending was neither happy nor unhappy. Burnell in his introduction to the printed edition of the play attacked his critics for their ignorance, pointing out that as they should know perfectly well, many plays are neither tragedy nor comedy, but "something between".

====Later developments====
Criticism that developed after the Renaissance stressed the thematic and formal aspects of tragicomedy, rather than plot. [[Gotthold Ephraim Lessing]] defined it as a mixture of emotions in which "seriousness stimulates laughter, and pain pleasure."<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Paulus|first=Jörg|title=Barbara Fischer / Thomas C. Fox, A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. 2005|journal=Arbitrium|volume=25|issue=2|issn=0723-2977}}</ref>  Tragicomedy's affinity with satire and "dark" comedy have suggested a tragicomic impulse in modern theatre with [[Luigi Pirandello]] who influenced many playwrights including Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard.<ref>{{Citation|last=Ben-Zvi|first=Linda|editor1-first=Christopher|editor1-last=Innes|editor2-first=F.J|editor2-last=Marker|title=Samuel Beckett's Media Plays|date=1998-01-31|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/9781442677319-021|work=Modernism in European Drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello, Beckett|place=Toronto|publisher=University of Toronto Press|doi=10.3138/9781442677319-021|isbn=978-1-4426-7731-9|access-date=2020-10-27}}</ref>  Also it can be seen in [[Theatre of the Absurd|absurdist]] drama. [[Friedrich Dürrenmatt]], the Swiss dramatist, suggested that tragicomedy was the inevitable genre for the twentieth century; he describes his play ''[[The Visit (play)|The Visit]]'' (1956) as a tragicomedy.  Tragicomedy is a common genre in post-[[World War II]] [[United Kingdom|British]] theatre, with authors as varied as [[Samuel Beckett]], [[Tom Stoppard]], [[John Arden]], [[Alan Ayckbourn]] and [[Harold Pinter]] writing in this genre. [[Vladimir Nabokov]]'s postmodern 1962 novel ''[[Pale Fire]]'' is a tragicomedy preoccupied with Elizabethan drama.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Canfield|first=J. Douglas|date=1984|title=The Ideology of Restoration Tragicomedy|url=http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2872933|journal=ELH|volume=51|issue=3|pages=447–464|doi=10.2307/2872933|jstor=2872933|issn=0013-8304|quote=The radically disorienting play of frames in a postmodern fiction like Pale Fire-another text, it is worth noting, preoccupied with Elizabethan drama.}}</ref>

=== Postmodern tragicomedy ===
American writers of the [[Metamodernism|metamodernist]] and [[postmodernist]] movements have made use of tragicomedy and/or [[gallows humor]]. A notable example of a [[Metamodernism|metamodernist]] tragicomedy is [[David Foster Wallace]]'s 1996 [[Masterpiece|magnum opus]], ''[[Infinite Jest]]''.  Wallace writes of comedic elements of living in a halfway house (i.e. "some people really do look like rodents"), a place steeped in human tragedy and suffering.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Goodman|first=Daniel Ross|date=2015-12-11|title=Infinite Wallace: Tragedy, Comedy, and Faith in the Life of David Foster Wallace|url=https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/12/16088/|access-date=2020-10-27|website=Public Discourse|language=en-US}}</ref>