Tragicomedy

List of contents

Series Preface
List of Illustrations
Chapter One: Birth 1585-1640
Chapter Two: Dying and Death 1660-1900
Chapter 3: Beckett and Pinter. Two Tragicomedians

Notes
References
Index

About the author

BREAN HAMMOND is Professor of English at the University of Nottingham, UK.SIMON SHEPHERD is Professor of Theatre and Deputy Principal (Academic) at the Central School of Speech and Drama, UK.

Summary

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.

Product details

• Authors: Brean Hammond, Hammond Brean
• Assisted by: Simon Shepherd (Editor), Simon Shepherd (Editor of the series)
• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 31.08.2021
• EAN: 9781350144316
• ISBN: 978-1-350-14431-6
• No. of pages: 200
• Series: Forms of Drama
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; English, LITERARY CRITICISM / Drama, PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / General, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / General, Theatre Studies, Literary studies: c 1500 to c 1800, Literary studies: c 1600 to c 1800, Literary studies: plays & playwrights, Shakespeare Studies & Criticism, Literary studies: plays and playwrights, Relating to Shakespeare / Shakespearean