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Tragicomedy, a term properly used to describe a dramatic genre that flourished for about 50 years toward the end of the 16th century and into the first half of the 17th. The first dramatist to write plays so-called was an Italian, Giambattista Giraldi, who developed a kind of play that was derived from Renaissance notions of Greek tragedy but was injected with romantic situations and given a happy ending. An early English example is The Scottish Historie of James the fourth by Robert Greene, an older contemporary of William Shakespeare and one of the dramatists who, because of their academic background, were known as the University Wits. Drawing on native English dramatic tradition, Greene handled the dramatic unities of place and time far more freely than Italian playwrights would have done; similarly, Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale and Two Noble Kinsmen (the latter in collaboration with John Fletcher) wrote plays that are not Italianate but come within the scope of what Ben Jonson, their contemporary playwright and critic, called “mongrel tragic-comedy.”
An extension and distinctive subtype of tragicomedy is known as the pastoral, in which the romantic tragicomic situation is extended to include an Arcadian setting. This too was pioneered by an Italian, Battista Guanim, in Ii pastor fido (“The Faithful Shepherd”) written in the late 16th century. Guarini was imitated in England by John Fletcher, especially in The Faithful Shepherdesse. It is notable that, although tragicomedy enjoyed aristocratic favour, it never attained great popularity in the public theatres; The Faithful Shepherdesse, for example, was given a hostile reception on presentation at the public Globe Theatre in 1608 or 1609 but was warmly received at court in a scenically elaborate revival of 1634. The preface to Fletcher’s play contains a definition of the tragicomic genre: “A tragiecomedic is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some near it [i.
., death], which is inough to make it no comedic which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be questiond; so that a God is as lawful: in this as in a tragedie, and mean people, as in a comedic.”
The last English plays in direct line of descent from II pastor fido were John Dryden’s Rival Ladies (1664) and Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen (1667).
In France the pioneer and leading exponent of tragicomedy was Alexandre Hardy, whose plays are usually derided on grounds of poor style. Yet Hardy was an actor at the Hotel de Bourgogne, Paris’ one public theatre at the start of the 17th century, and his insistence on tight plotting and his instinct for theatrical surprise and suspense opened up paths along which the development of French tragedy could go, untramelled by reliance either on imitation of the rhetorical style of the Latin dramatist Seneca, whose plays were written for private recitation rather than for performance in the theatre, or on misunderstood ideas of the nature of Greek tragedy.
The brief vogue for tragicomedy was largely the result of its own obvious appeal to those interested at that time in the development of song, dance, and spectacle in conjunction with dramatic narrative; it lent itself to reinforcement by all three. In Italy the emphasis on song led to the emergence of what is now called opera; in France the preference given to dance opened the way for what was later known as ballet; in England words, song, dance, and spectacle resulted in the immensely elaborate quasi-dramatic spectacle of the Stuart masque.
The term tragicomedy has been less strictly applied to any play in which a seemingly tragic sequence of events has an unexpected happy outcome or at least ends without the final tragic fall of some person, order, or way of life. it is also occasionally used of some mid- 20th-century drama, especially that associated with the Theatre of the Absurd in which the effect is akin to that of a sour or bitter comedy.
