Tragicomedy
Definition: A type of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama which intermingled both the standard characters and subject matter and the standard plot- forms of tragedy and comedy. Thus, the important agents in tragicomedy included both people of high degree and people of low degree, even though, according to the reigning critical theory of that time, only upper-class characters were appropriate to tragedy, while members of the middle and lower classes were the proper subject solely of comedy. Also, tragicomedy represented a serious action which threatened a tragic disaster to the protagonist, yet, by an abrupt reversal of circumstance, turned out happily. As John Fletcher wrote in his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1610), tragicomedy "wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people. ... A god is as lawful in [tragicomedy] as in a tragedy, and mean people as in a comedy.
Definition: A type of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama which intermingled both the standard characters and subject matter and the standard plot- forms of tragedy and comedy. Thus, the important agents in tragicomedy included both people of high degree and people of low degree, even though, according to the reigning critical theory of that time, only upper-class characters were appropriate to tragedy, while members of the middle and lower classes were the proper subject solely of comedy. Also, tragicomedy represented a serious action which threatened a tragic disaster to the protagonist, yet, by an abrupt reversal of circumstance, turned out happily. As John Fletcher wrote in his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1610), tragicomedy "wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people. ... A god is as lawful in [tragicomedy] as in a tragedy, and mean people as in a comedy.
Example: “Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice” is by these criteria a tragicomedy, because it mingles people of the aristocracy with lower-class characters (such as the Jewish merchant Shylock and the clown Launcelot Gobbo), and also because the developing threat of death to Antonio is suddenly reversed at the end by Portia's ingenious casuistry in the trial scene. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher in Philaster, and numerous other plays on which they collaborated from about 1606 to 1613, inaugurated a mode of tragicomedy that employs a romantic and fast-moving plot of love, jealousy, treachery, intrigue, and disguises, and ends in a melodramatic reversal of fortune for the protagonists, who had hitherto seemed headed for a tragic catastrophe. Shakespeare wrote his late plays Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale, between 1609 and 1611, in this very popular mode of the tragicomic romance. The name "tragicomedy" is sometimes applied also to plays with double plots, one serious and the other comic.
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