This succinct 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 theorist-playwrights and the importance of
translations of Pierre Corneille's Le Cid.
At the turn of the 17th century, English dramatists such as John
Marston, 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 the plot and character expectations of 'pure' comedy
and tragedy. It goes on to show how, reacting to French models, John
Dryden, Shakespeare 'improvers' and other English playwrights developed
the form while sowing the seeds of its own vulnerability to parody and
obsolescence in the eighteenth century.
Discussing nineteenth-century melodrama as in some respects a
resurrection of tragicomedy, the final chapter concentrates on plays by
Ibsen, Chekhov, and Beckett as examples of the form being revived to
create theatrical modes that more adequately represent the perceived
complexity of experience.
