Introduction

This unit is designed to explore the concept of tragedy. It takes a cue from

Aristotle‘s theory of tragedy with a view of evaluating its tenets. In doing this, the

concept of drama is explained in order to establish a foundation for discussing tragedy.

Consequently, you are required to go through the concept, types, characteristics, and

structure of tragedy with a view of exploring its principles for writing same.

Tragedy

The word drama means different things to different people. To many, there is nothing

serious about it but just a way of recreation. However, drama has over the years remained

a potent tool for achieving different things in different societies of the world especially in

the areas of religion, education, economy, politics and culture.

Generally, drama is an art form that tells stories through speech and actions of the

characters in the story. It is a form of literature which differs remarkably from the other

forms because, it has to be performed before an audience. This implies that drama occurs

when people (referred to as actors) consciously do on stage before an audience what

others do unconsciously in everyday life.

On the other hand, drama could be seen as a mode of fictional representation through

dialogue and performance. It is the imitation of an action. It contains a conflict of

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characters, particularly the ones who perform in front of an audience on the stage. It is

also a type of a play written for the theatre, television, radio and film. The person who

writes drama for the stage directions is known as a ―dramatist‖ or ―playwright‖. The

genres of drama include: tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, melodrama and dance drama.

Furthermore, tragedy means different things to different people. It is a genre of drama

that treats in a serious and dignified style the sorrowful or terrible events encountered or

caused by a heroic individual. By extension the term may be applied to other literary

works as well.

Although the word tragedy is often used loosely to describe any sort of disaster or

misfortune, it more precisely refers to a work of art that probes with high seriousness

questions concerning the role of man in the universe. The Greeks of Attica, the ancient

state whose chief city was Athens, first used the word in the 5th century BCE to describe

a specific kind of play, which was presented at festivals in Greece. Sponsored by the local

governments, these plays were attended by the entire community, a small admission fee

being provided by the state for those who could not afford it themselves. The atmosphere

surrounding the performances was more like that of a religious ceremony than

entertainment.

There were altars to the gods, with priests in attendance, and the subjects of the tragedies

were the misfortunes of the heroes of legend, religious myth, and history. Most of the

material was derived from the works of Homer and was common knowledge in the Greek

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communities. So powerful were the achievements of the three greatest Greek dramatists

—Aeschylus (525–456 BCE), Sophocles (c. 496–406 BCE), and Euripides (c.

480–406 BCE)—that the word they first used for their plays survived and came to

describe a literary genre that, in spite of many transformations and lapses, has proved its

viability through many centuries.

Aristotle’s Theory of Tragedy

Tragedy is a serious play, usually depicting the downfall of the protagonist. The earliest

definition of tragedy was handed down to us by Aristotle, a classical Greek philosopher

in his Poetics: Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of

a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the

several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of

narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions (2–3).

Aristotle gave this as a descriptive definition, based on the dramas of his age, mostly on

Sophocles‘ Oedipus Rex, a tragedy he admired, but later ages often regarded this

definition as a prescriptive doctrine, so it is important to understand its parts for a fuller

comprehension of the development of dramatic arts as well.

1. Aristotle, first of all, describes drama as a mimetic art, which takes its subject

from life. However, he – in other parts of the Poetics – contrasts it with history

claiming that history describes the facts, relating how events happened, while

drama describes the possibility, how things could happen.

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2. Furthermore, Aristotle emphasises that the subject matter of a tragedy is serious,

that is fitting the genre. To use a later writer‘s, Horace‘s term, tragedies should

have decorum – appropriate style, character, form and action.

3. Aristotle also talks about certain fixed parts of the play, which we distinguish

under the following terms:

Hubris: The hero‘s/heroine‘s arrogance, or pride with which they violate the gods, or

moral rules. This antagonism leads to the major conflict the protagonist has to face in the

course of the tragedy.

Hamartia: The Greek word means ‗error‘ but was often mistranslated as ‗tragic flaw‘.

Aristotle, however, meant by it not a character weakness, but a mistaken, misplaced deed,

a misjudgement, the hero commits and

later falls victim to.

Anagnorisis: That crucial point or turning point of the drama where the hero recognises

his/her previous misjudgement. This is often the climax of the play, followed by the

reversal of the hero‘s fortune (peripeteia).

Peripeteia: The sudden reversal of the hero‘s fortune, in the case of a tragedy his

downfall.

Catharsis: The most debated of Aristotle‘s terms. It describes the ‗purification‘ or

‗purgation‘ of our souls at the end of a tragic performance through the pity we feel for

the lost hero and the terror the horrifying events raised in us. Fear is also felt by the

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audience who cannot fathom what will happen to common men if the gods could so drag

the tragic heroes down from their Olympian heights.

Scholars in later times also insisted on the fact that a tragedy should contain the

Aristotelian unities, those of time (the play should not cover events longer than one day),

of space (the play should occur in one place), and of action (the play should have one

coherent, major plotline), but Aristotle himself only mentioned the unity of action in his

writing.

The Tragic Structure

Gustav Freytag, a 19th-century German critic analysed the structure of drama in the

following way: (1) introduction, (2) inciting moment, (3) rising action, (4) climax, (5)

falling action, (6) catastrophe. The climax is the apex of the pyramidal structure which

shows clearly how complication and emotional tension rise like one side of a pyramid

toward its apex. Once the climax is over, the descending side of the pyramid depicts the

decrease in tension and complication as the drama reaches its conclusion and denouement

(‗unknotting‘, ‗unwinding‘, the unravelling of the main dramatic complications at the

end of a play, the outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events).

The structure of the Freytag-pyramid is based on a typical five-act tragedy but is in fact

applicable to a large number of plays and also to many forms of fiction.

Types of Tragedy

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There are several types of tragedy in drama but for the purpose of this exercise, the

following are considered.

Revenge Tragedy (tragedy of blood): The plot of this type of tragedy is centred on the

tragic hero‘s attempts at taking revenge on the murderer of a close relative; in these plays

the hero tries to ‗right a wrong‘. The genre can be traced back to Antiquity, e.g. to the

Oresteia of Aeschylus, and the tragedies of Seneca. During the Renaissance period, there

were two distinct types of revenge tragedy in Europe; the Spanish-French tradition (Lope

de Vega, Calderón, Corneille) focusing on honour and the conflict between love and

duty; and the English revenge tragedy following the Senecan traditions of sensational,

melodramatic action and savage, often exaggerated bloodshed in the centre. Elizabethan

revenge tragedies usually feature a ghost, some delay, feigned or real madness of the

hero, and often a play-within-the-play; cf.: Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy; Shakespeare:

Hamlet; Webster: The Duchess of Malfi.

Domestic Tragedy: This is a play typically about middle-class or lower middleclass life,

concerned with the domestic sphere, the private, personal, intimate matters within the

family, between husband and wife (as opposed to the national– matters of a

nation/country, or universal–the whole of mankind). There are numerous examples in

Tudor and Jacobean drama, e.g. Shakespeare: Othello; Heywood: A Woman Killed with

Kindness, but also some in the 18th century, like Lillo: The London Merchant, and the

term may even be applied to the work of later dramatists as well.

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Heroic Tragedy: This type of tragedy was mostly popular during the English

Restoration. Heroic tragedy or tragicomedy usually employed bombastic language and

exotic settings to depict a noble heroic protagonist and their torment in choosing between

love and patriotic duties. A typical example is John Dryden‘s The Conquest of Granada.

COMEDY

This unit is designed to take you through yet another dramatic genre-comedy. It is a very

important type of drama and is used to achieve a lot of things including relief,

mobilization, sensitization on, entertaining, education and the like. Consequently, this

unit will take you through its emergence, the various types that make up comedy and the

devices used in putting together a comic dramatic work across to the audience. As a

student of drama, this knowledge is important in order to enable you write comedies and

even put them on stage as well.

Comedy

A comedy is any given work of drama in which the materials are selected and
managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us. Unlike tragedy which excites
our emotions of pity and fear, the characters in comedy together with their
discomfitures engage our delighted attention rather than our profound concern.
Disasters may occur within the drama which are rather minor but the action usually
turns out happily for the chief characters.

Comedy is the other major dramatic genre besides tragedy. It is a drama chiefly written to

amuse its audience, with characters mostly taken from everyday life, (as opposed to

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tragedy, where they are superior to us in character or social standing) and a plot usually

ending happily. In the Middle Ages, this term simply meant a story ending in happiness

(e.g. Dante‘s La Divina Commedia), and was seen as the complementary of tragedies, (in

a narrative tragedy the hero: ―from wealth [is] fallen to wretchedness,‖ while in a

narrative comedy climbs from wretchedness to wealth/happiness), the two making up the

wheel of fortune, a major symbol of human fate.

The Emergence of Comedy

The cradle of European comedy also attracted many audiences in the Mediterranean- in

the Athens of 5th century BC. There, the second day of the Dionysian celebrations was

traditionally devoted to five comedies. The only playwright competing was Aristophanes

(450-385 BC), with whom we connect the genre of Old Comedy. Old Comedies have

fantastical plots with often surreal turns combined with political and social satire of

contemporary figures. The New Comedy of Menander (340-290 BC), however, revolves

around love plots. The young lovers have to face trials and tribulations, often the

opposition of their parents and other senile or conservative members of society, but with

the help of their witty servants, they overcome the difficulties, and get united in the end.

The genre can probably be best defined by two Shakespearean quotations, as New

Comedies had a great impact on the Elizabethan playwright‘s romantic comedies, too.

Although ―the course of true love never did run smooth‖, as Lysander says in A

Midsummer Night’s Dream (134), after misunderstandings, plotting and counterplotting,

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finally, ―Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill,‖ (461-62) the comedy ends in weddings

and general reconciliation.

Menander‘s comedies were reinvented by two Roman authors around the 2 nd century BC,

by Plautus (254-184 BC) and Terence (195-159 BC) who, in turn, influenced both the

commedia dell‘arte of the Middle-Ages (an Italian form of comedy whose plot mainly

centred around love and intrigue, with often farcical dialogues, and which was a popular

type of market place entertainment until the 15 th century) and the Renaissance plays of

Shakespeare and Lope de Vega, not only in their plots, but mostly in the usage of stock

characters. Stock characters are stereotyped figures characterised mostly by their roles

and not by their inner qualities. Such stock characters include the senex – the old miser,

the miles gloriosus – the braggart soldier, the witty servant, etc, whom we can also find in

Shakespearean tragedies (Polonius in Hamlet), or histories (Falstaff in Henry IV, 1-2), or

comedies (Touchstone in As You Like It).

Unlike tragedy, comedy must end happily. The protagonist must win otherwise the

audience would feel guilty or ashamed for having laughed at the central character. The

audience should be made to understand that, what they are seeing is not to be taken

seriously and that, they are not to identify too strongly with either the characters or the

situation unless it is a matter of laughing with instead of at the character.

Types of Comedy

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• Romantic Comedy: This is a comedy whose humour lies in the complications the

hero and heroine face in their love for each other. Often, the course of this love

does not run smoothly but overcomes all difficulties to end in a happy union. It is

based on Greek New Comedy and Roman commedia erudita, a composite genre

which centres mostly on the vicissitudes of young lovers, who get happily united

in the end. The best examples for this genre are to be found in Shakespeare‘s

oeuvre, e.g. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and As You Like It.

• Comedy of Humours: A form of drama typical at the end of the 16 th and the

beginning of the 17th century; based on the Medieval and Renaissance belief that

people‘s actions are governed by their dominant bodily humour (blood, phlegm,

bile or black bile), its characters are ruled by a particular passion or trait. The first

and most significant playwright of the genre was Ben Jonson, especially in his

Every Man in His Humour and Every Man Out of His Humour.

• Satirical Comedy: A form of comedy whose main purpose is to expose the vices

and shortcomings of society and of people representing that society; it is often

very close to farce or the comedy of manners. The earliest examples are the works

of Aristophanes, especially his Clouds, Birds, Frogs. In English literature, Ben

Jonson‘s Volpone or Sheridan‘s School for Scandal are good examples. In

European literature, the greatest master of the genre is undoubtedly Molière.

• Comedy of Manners: It is also known as ‗Restoration Comedy‘ or ‗Artificial

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Comedy‘; the prevailing kind of drama in the second half of the 17 th century,

before the advent of the so-called sentimental comedy in the early 18th century.

This type of comedy explores the incongruities or rather abnormalities that arise

from adherence to an accepted code of behaviour at the expense of normal desires

and responses. It depicts a stylish society, mainly the middle and upper classes. Its

focus is on elegance, with characters of fashion and rank, but also would-be

nobles, ambitious social climbers, fops, country bumpkins, and so on. Its topics are

social intrigue, mainly marital and sexual, and also adultery and cuckoldry. The

most important playwrights in the Restoration period are William Congreve and

William Wycherley; but some of Shakespeare‘s plays (e.g. Love’s Labour’s Lost,

or Much Ado About Nothing) can also be considered examples of this genre, as are

the plays of Molière, Sheridan, and Oscar Wilde.

• Sentimental Comedy: It is known as ‗Drama of Sensibility‘ and was the dominant

comic genre after Restoration Comedy which provided popular entertainment for

the middle classes in the 18th century. It appeared as a reaction against the immoral

and licentious comedy of manners, which emphasised vices and faults of people;

sentimental comedy focused on the virtues of private life, with simple and

honourable characters. Some typical examples can be found in the works of Oliver

Goldsmith and Robert Steele. However, on the whole, the genre did not prove to

be as enduring as its predecessors, and it is not often performed any more.

• Farce: This is a type of low comedy, which undertakes to arouse laughter by jokes

and by boisterous or exaggerated or clownish physical activities. It is a form of

laughter (and not smiles); it uses larger-than-life physical action, character and

absurd situation, with improbable events, a complex plot, with events rapidly

succeeding one another, pushing character and dialogue into the background. The

origins of the genre are not clear, but farcical elements can be found already in the

plays of Aristophanes and Plautus. In English literature, even parts of

Shakespeare‘s Comedy of Errors, or The Taming of the Shrew, together with the

Falstaff plays (1-2 Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor) can be classified as

farce.

• Black Comedy: (translated from the French comédie noire) A form of drama

which displays cynicism and disillusionment, human beings without hope or

convictions, their lives controlled by fate or unknown and incomprehensible

powers; a genre popular in the second half of the 20 th century, when the absurd

predicament of mankind was increasingly in the focus of literature.

Comic Devices

There are basically six comic devices identified for developing a comic play. These

Include: exaggeration, automatism, character inconsistency, surprise, derision and

Incongruity.

Exaggeration: This is a comic device brought about as a result of the intensification or

enlargement of a particular characteristic or situation through overstatement. It simple

refers to creating humour through overstatements.

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Automatism: The word automatism is derived from automation. It implies one who

appears to be acting involuntary and without any intelligence. In drama however, it refers

to a visual or verbal joke that is repeated time after time and becoming funnier and

funnier.

Incongruity: A thing is incongruous when it is out of harmony. Incongruity is a very

Powerful or potent comic device. Most times, humour is created through showing

differing or opposing elements together.

Character Inconsistency: This device creates humour that results from a trait that does

not seem to fit with a character‘s personality.

Surprise: This device creates humour through the unexpected. It can take the form of

many or any of the aforementioned.

Derision: This makes fun of people or institutions for the purpose of social reform. It is

chiefly employed in the form of comedy known as satire. Writers often deride hypocrisy,

pomposity or ineptitude, thereby using derision to deflate egos or to cause discomfort and

reduce status.

In this unit, we have discussed comedy as a dramatic genre and have also traced its

origin, types and devices. This is done to enable you write and produce a comic dramatic

work efficiently.

INTRODUCTION:

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This unit, is designed to put you through the concept of tragicomedy and other dramatic

genres particularly melodrama and dance drama. This is predicated on the fact that the

knowledge of these will spur budding playwrights in developing scripts which will be

produced for the consumption of the society. It is therefore important that you familiarize

yourself with the techniques of these dramatic genres to be able to write quality scripts

for production.

Tragicomedy

The term was first used by Plautus, but the concept is even older, and has always been

used to refer to tragedies with a happy ending (also called ‗mixed tragedies‘). Later it

was also used for tragedies with comic subplots, and by the end of the 16 th century, the

two kinds became intermingled. Dramatists increasingly tended to use comic relief in

their tragedies and tragic aggravation in comedies, to enhance the desired effect.

According to Battista Guarini in his book, Compendium of Tragi-Comic Poetry,

―Tragicomedy takes from tragedy its great persons, but not its great actions, its

movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of them, its pleasure, but not its sadness,

its danger but not its death; from comedy it takes pleasure, but not sadness, its danger but

not its death; from comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive, modest amusement,

feigned difficulty and happy reversal‖.

Characteristics of Tragicomedy

From the definition of tragicomedy, it has the following characteristics:

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• It is made up of important characters of high and low degrees. (Upper class from

tragedy and lower class from comedy).

• It involves a serious action that threatens a tragic disaster to the protagonist but

ends happily.

• It has a romantic and fast-moving plot dealing with love, jealousy, treachery,

intrigue and disguise.

Tragic-comedy can be summed up to be a marriage of tragedy and comedy with each not

overshadowing the other.

Melodrama

Melodrama deals with a serious action. This serious action is however temporary and is

usually attributed to malicious designs of a wicked character. After destroying the villain

or the unsympathetic characters, it ends happily. A good versus bad or evil is what is

uppermost in melodrama. This means that, two opposing camps are always pitched. The

unsympathetic characters always set evil in motion whereas, the good characters are

always fighting to eliminate the evil set in motion by the unsympathetic characters. The

characters do not grow as in tragedy because their moral nature and identification is

established at the beginning of the play and remains constant throughout. The protagonist

is always admirable and innocent; the action normally dramatizes his entanglement in a

web of circumstances and his eventual rescue from death or ruin usually at the last

possible moment. A lot of suspense is usually aroused in the audience, as they are rather

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expectant of the punishment of evil and the triumph of virtue. The emotions around

include sympathy for the protagonist and hatred for the antagonist.

This makes melodrama to have a double ending and to relate both to tragedy because of

the serious action and to comedy because of the happy ending.

Dance Drama

Dance drama is a drama enacted through dance and its main objective is to tell or

interpret a story, theme or piece of music through movement of the body. Generally,

dance has emerged as a vital, diverse and challenging theatrical force in contemporary

Nigerian society. This is so because, it has encompassed a range of forms, including the

classical, modern and postmodern periods.

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