Critical Analysis of "The Things Fall Apart"

Assignment 3 :- Dryden's view on Tragicomedy

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Name :- Gohil Devangiba A.

Roll No. :-16, Sem.-1^st

Paper No. : - 3 ( Literary Theory & Criticism )

Topic :- Dryden’s View On Tragicomedy

Submitted to Department of English

Dryden’s View On Tragicomedy

Definition of Tragicomedy:-

“Tragicomedy is a literary device used in fictional works. It contains both tragedy and comedy. Mostly, the characters in tragicomedy are exaggerated and sometimes there might be a happy ending after a series of unfortunate events. It is incorporated with jokes throughout the story just to lighten the tone.” 

Defended by Steele in England and Voltaire in France, mixture of tears with smile. The most historically substantial new genre to develop was the genre series or the drama, advocated by Diderot, Beaumarchais and Mercier, the “pathos” of tragedy and the “simple portrayals of life” of comedy. Mercier’s stabs to syndicate two different types of part of feature the emotional effect of tragedy with the subject matter of comedy to make the drama makes it clear that new genre is not to be confused with tragicomedy, which is less detached, more universal union of tragedy and comedy Beaumarchais and Mercier describe the drama as truthful dealing with conventional life, drama represented the true life of human being. A drama is a mirror of society, and delightfully combines tears and smiles.

Dryden is more liberal in his attitude towards the mingling of the tragic and the comic. In this respect he, “ ceases to be a classicist and goes over to the other camp”. He defends tragic-comedy on the following estates :

a)     Contrast when placed near, set off each other.

b)     Continued gravity depresses the spirit, a scene of mirth thrown in between refreshes. It has the same effect on us as music. In other words, comic scene produces relief , though Dryden does not explicitly say so.

c)     Mirth does not destroy compassion, i.e. the serious effect which tragedy aims at is not disturbed by mingling of tragic and comic.

d)    Just as the eye can pass from unpleasant object to a pleasant one, so also the soul can move from tragic to the comic. And it can do so much more swiftly.

e)     The English have perfected a new way of writing not known to the Ancient. If they had tragic-comedies, perhaps Aristotle would have revised his rules.

f)      It is all a question of progress of the change of taste. The ancients cannot be a model for all times and countries, “ What pleased the Greeks would not satisfy an English audience”. Had Aristotle seen the English place “he might have changed his mind”. The real test of excellence is not strict adherence to rules or conventions, but whether the aims of dramas have been achieved. They are achieved by the English drama.

If in this last respect the drama is obviously consonant to sentimental comedy, in the first two it looks forward to the plays of smile Augier and Dramas fills in the nineteenth century and ultimately to lessen, most of whose earlier prose plays are dramas, though in ‘The wild Duck’ he produced one of the earliest of modern tragicomedies. The defence of such genre as sentimental comedy and the drama indicates the increasing failure of critical obstruction between tragedy and comedy. The new genre of tragicomedy is also very difficult to understand and also identify and define.

The debate between tragedy and comedy curtail in the nineteenth century in the part because the neoclassical bidding that substance opposition to it lost their force and it part because its importance as the mixed genre was taken over by the drama, the romantic drama and later melodrama. Romantic drama satisfied the taste of audience for idealism, heroism, marvel and the supernatural, all of which had been features of tragicomedy during the seventeenth century.

Dryden’s best comedy is generally considered to be ‘Marriage a la Mode’. His others rely heavily on farcical situations and double entendre and, at times, inept licentiousness that makes comedies such as The Assignation and The Kind Keeper seem unnecessarily coarse even by the standards of his time. Marriage a la Mode combines in its two distinct plot lines the conversation of the romantic tragicomedy and the Restoration comedy of manners; a genre not fully established when Dryden produced his play. When in 1694 Dryden wrote his last play, Love Triumphant, he made it another tragicomedy.

The tragicomic plot involves the theme of succession perhaps, Dryden’s most frequent dramatic theme after love and honor. The tragicomedy characteristics are all present the unusual setting.

Though the term tragicomedy was no longer much bicker about romantic critics such as Coleridge and F.W.J Schelling appreciate plays that mixed the tragic and the comic. John Dryden’s present essay “An essay on dramatic poesy” he gives important account of neoclassical theory of art in general. He says that the classical drama stand on the line of Aristotle saying it is a limitation of life, and imitates human nature clearly. He also converses the three unities; rules that necessitate a play take place in one place, during one day action or plot.

The essay is in the form of dialogue contain to four gentlemen: eugenius, critics, lisideius and neader. Neader seems to speak for Dryden himself. Eugenius takes the side of the modern English dramatist by assessing the fragility of the classical playwright, who did not themselves perceive the unity of place. But crites protected the ancients and piercing out that they draw the principle of dramatic art expressed by Aristotle and Horace. Crites contrasting to rhyme in plays and contends that through the moderns beat in science; the ancient age of poetry was the accurate age of poetry. Lesideius defends the French playwrights and squall the English trend to mix genres’. He defines a play as a just and lively image of human and the change of purpose to which it is subject for the pleasure and tool of mankind.

Neander favors the moderns; respect the ancient, critical to stable rules of dramas and he favors rhyme if it is in proper place like in impressive subject substance. Neander a spokesperson of Dryden argues that tragic comedy is the best form of for a play; because it is the closet life in which sentiments are discriminating by both delight and sorrow. He also finds subplots as an important part to expand a play. He finds the French dramas, with its single action.

Dryden affection against the critics, who attack the use of rhyme both in tragedy and comedy since nobody speaks in rhyme in real life, he provisions the usage of blank verse in drama and says that the use of rhyme is solemn play is suitable than the blank verse.

Dryden’s comparison of the English and the French drama in the “Essay of Dramatic Poesy” with his view of tragicomedy:

  Lesideius claims that French drama is choice to English drama, based on the defect of library production since Shakespeare’s time: “we have been so long together bad Englishmen, that we had Lesideius commended the improvement of the French theatre under Richelieu and Corneille, and rejoice the close byalty to the classical break of comedy and tragedy. For Lesideius “no theatre in the world has anything so absurd as the English tragicomedy… in two hours and half, we run through all the fits of bedlam”. The preparation of French drama in history, its acquaintances “truth with probable fiction”, makes it an advanced accomplishment than the English neader signifies Dryden’s own view, which favors the modern and the English, but does not depress ancients. He respects lisideius arguments that the French “contrive their plots more regularly” but he favors English drama for their more living and complex abilities. He criticizes the French stage, nothing that “those beauties of the French poesy are such as will raise faultlessness developed where it is, but are not adequate to give it where it is not: they are indeed the beauties of a state, but of a man.”

A soaring literacy character of the seventeenth century, John Dryden is naturally calculates among British restoration rather than among renaissance writers. His contour and affecting work however continued to develop. Literacy progressions begun in the renaissance appropriate. For example, he subsidized both to the preparation and the theory of neoclassical drama, and he interpreted both endure and Greek writers into English.

Even before he entered king’s college, Cambridge, at the age of 19, Dryden started his literacy career with publication of an ELEGY. When he became the British poet he was very famous in England and also famed under king Charles 2, his admiration of the king’s most hated foe. Successfully he also published a work in carnival of Charles second return to England in 1660, Astraea Redox. Astraea was the roman goddess of justice who had lived on earth during the golden age.

“An essay on dramatic poesy” in it he established his theorist’s views about drama and deliberated in that setting the thinking of other European theorists about drama and its relation to such subjects as the modern or of the French theatre.

Dryden’s cynical and caustic physique of mind regularly seems in prose writing and his poetry. Dryden’s view on tragic comedy clearly brings out his liberal classicism and his greatness, shrewdness and penetration as a critic.

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