Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Aristotle and Tragicomedy
- 2 The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini's Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601
- 3 Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia Dell'arte
- 4 The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain
- 5 Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
- 6 In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
- 7 Taking Pericles Seriously
- 8 ‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
- 9 Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
- 10 Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger's The Renegado
- 11 Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
- 12 ‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
12 - ‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Aristotle and Tragicomedy
- 2 The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini's Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601
- 3 Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia Dell'arte
- 4 The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain
- 5 Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
- 6 In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
- 7 Taking Pericles Seriously
- 8 ‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
- 9 Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
- 10 Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger's The Renegado
- 11 Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
- 12 ‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
It's because the Irish have a special gift for tragicomedy, and lord knows you can never have too much tragicomedy. It's a truism that only an Irishman could make you laugh at three guys being held hostage in Beirut.
WHETHER or not you concur with the ‘truism’ outlined above, it certainly seems to have become commonplace to claim that tragicomedy and Ireland are thoroughly enmeshed. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, as the full title announces, is A Tragicomedy in Two Acts; many of Brian Friel's plays, not to mention recent international theatre hits such as Marie Jones's Stones in his Pockets or Martin McDonagh's The Beauty Queen of Leenane, have been described, in both critical study and newspaper review, as tragicomic; Verna Foster's recent study of the genre includes discussion of eight examples of modern tragicomedy, three of which – Playboy of the Western World, The Plough and the Stars, Waiting for Godot – are by Irish writers.
In what follows, I want to try to resist a very strong temptation: that of making a historical necessity of a modern critical commonplace, offering a national history of this particular genre, and tracing the links between Ireland and tragicomedy back to a seventeenth-century point of origin. Such a point could be plotted as being located somewhere at the intersection of the two small, productive, though very differently constituted, literary circles which formed around John Ogilby and his Dublin theatres: first the Werburgh Street Theatre, established with the approval of the Viceroy, Wentworth, in the 1630s; and second, the later Smock Alley Theatre, established at the Restoration when Charles II appointed Ogilby his official Master of the Irish Revels.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Early Modern Tragicomedy , pp. 193 - 208Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007