Histories, for example, chronicle the exploits of the English royal family and tend to focus on the progress of society; they strike a balance between tragedy and comedy. Romances, meanwhile, usually involve love and are serious stories that end happily, while tragicomedies combine elements of both comedy and tragedy. World View. More From Reference. However, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the genre or of some plays, as they show elements of several categories. Literature scholars have identified several common characteristics for comedies as well as tragedies so that they can be identified correctly.
Shakespearean comedies can be defined as plays of Shakespearean plays that end with a union or marriage. Plots and characters of the play are rarely comic or laugh-out-loud funny. In addition, not everything that happens in them is happy or light-hearted.
Figure 1: A Scene from the Taming of the Shrew. Literature scholars have identified several common characteristics in Shakespearean comedies. And so on. Such changes to the endings of Shakespeare's tragedies were commonplace in eighteenth-century productions, at a time when the tragic vision of experience was considered far less acceptable and popular by the general public. Comedy and Tragedy as Visions of Experience. But the terms tragedy and comedy refer to more than simply the structure of a narrative especially the ending.
The terms also commonly refer to visions of experience which those structures present. And this matter is considerably more complex than simply the matter of the final plot twist.
Of the two, the comic vision is easier to explain, since, as we shall see, it corresponds to the way most of us think or like to think about life. Stated most simply, the comic vision celebrates the individual's participation in a community as the most important part of life. When the normal community is upset, the main characters in a comedy will normally have the initial urge to seek to restore that normality, to get back what they have lost.
Initially, they will be unsuccessful, and they will have to adapt to unfamiliar changes funny or otherwise. But in a comedy the main characters will have the ability to adjust, to learn, to come up with the resources necessary to meet the challenges they face. They may also have a great deal of luck. But one way and another, they persevere and the conflict is resolved happily with the reintegration of the characters into a shared community.
Often an important point in the comedy is the way in which the main characters have to learn some important things about life especially about themselves before being able to resolve the conflict this is particular true of the men in Shakespeare's comedies. This form of story, it will be clear, is an endorsement of the value in the communal life we share together and of the importance of adjusting our individual demands on life to suit community demands. In a sense, the comic confusion will often force the individual to encounter things he or she has taken for granted, and dealing with these may well test many different resources above all faith, flexibility, perseverance, and trust in other people.
But through a final acknowledgment earned or learned of the importance of human interrelationships, a social harmony will be restored commonly symbolized by a new betrothal, a reconciliation between parents, a family reunion, and so on , and a group celebration feast, dance, procession will endorse that new harmony.
Tragedy, by contrast, explores something much more complex: the individual's sense of his own desire to confront the world on his own terms, to get the world to answer to his conceptions of himself, if necessary at the expense of customary social bonds and even of his own life.
The tragic hero characteristically sets out to deal with a conflict by himself or at least entirely on his own terms, and as things start to get more complicated, generally the tragic figure will simply redouble his efforts, increasingly persuaded that he can deal with what is happening only on his own. In that sense, tragic heroes are passionately egocentric and unwilling to compromise their powerful sense of their own identity in the face of unwelcome facts.
They will not let themselves answer to any communal system of value; they answer only to themselves. Lear would sooner face the storm on the heath than compromise his sense of being horribly wronged by his daughters; Macbeth wills himself to more killings as the only means to resolve the psychological torment he feels; Othello sets himself up as the sole judge and executioner of Desdemona.
Tragic heroes always lose because the demands they make on life are excessive. Setting themselves up as the only authority for their actions and refusing to compromise or learn except too late , they inevitably help to create a situation where there is no way out other than to see the action through to its increasingly grim conclusion.
Hence, for most of us tragic heroes are often not particularly sympathetic characters not at least in the way that comic protagonists are. There is something passionately uncompromising about their obsessive egoism which will only accept life on their own terms--in a sense they are radically unsociable beings although they may occupy, and in Shakespeare almost always do occupy, important social positions. The intriguing question is the following: Why would anyone respond to life this way?
That question is very difficult to answer. The tragic response to life is not a rationally worked out position. For any rational person, the comic response to life, which requires compromise in the name of personal survival in the human community or which sees the whole question of personal identity in social terms , makes much more sense.
What does seem clear is that the tragic response to life emerges in some people from a deeply irrational but invincible conviction about themselves. Their sense of what they are, their integrity, is what they must answer to, and nothing the world presents is going to dissuade them from attending to this personal sense of worth. Hence, tragedy is, in a sense, a celebration if that is the right word of the most extreme forms of heroic individualism.
That may help to explain the common saying "Comedy is for those who think, tragedy for those who feel. One way of clarifying this is to think how we construct for ourselves a sense of who we are, of our identity. Most of us do that in terms of social relationships and social activities. These short lifespans were due to the limited medical knowledge. The very richest people were the lords and ladies — the nobility. The nobles were the ruling class, influencing what the monarch did, as well as owning large areas of land themselves.
The lower class worked as servants or as labourers on farms. Royalty was afforded more latitude, freedom and tolerance than were those of lower social standing. If one had a privileged position in England, he or she had more value. Everyone would go to church on a Sunday, or even more often.
0コメント