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Tragicomedy

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Tragicomedy
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Brean Hammond
Series edited by Mr Simon Shepherd
SeriesForms of Drama
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:200
Dimensions(mm): Height 198,Width 129
Category/GenreDrama
Literary studies - plays and playwrights
ISBN/Barcode 9781350144309
ClassificationsDewey:809.2523
Audience
Professional & Vocational
Illustrations 8 bw illus

Publishing Details

Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint Methuen Drama
NZ Release Date 7 October 2021
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

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.

Author Biography

Brean Hammond is Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of several books and dozens of articles on fields ranging from Renaissance theatre to modern and postmodern theatre. His best-known books are Professional Imaginative Writing (1997) and the Arden edition of Double Falsehood (2010).