Dryden's view on tragic comedy

Dryden’s View on Tragic-Comedy:

The name of Tragic Comedy: 

       Defended by Steele in England and Voltaire in France, combination of tears with smiles. The most historically significant new genre to develop was the genre series or the drame, advocated by Diderot, Beaumarchais and Mercier. All three saw these genre as “between” or combining elements of tragedy and comedy according to Mercier, the “pathos” of tragedy and the “simple portrayals of life” of comedy. Mercier’s combination of two different kinds of feature part of the emotional effect of tragedy with the subject matter of comedy to produce the drama makes it clear that new genre is not to be confused with tragicomedy, which is less disconnected, more universal union of tragedy and comedy. Beaumarchais and Mercier define the drame as realistic dealing with ordinary life, and delightfully combine tears and smiles.

       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 Damas fils in the nineteenth century and ultimately to Ibsen, most of whose earlier prose plays are drama, though in ‘The wild Duck’ he produced one of the earliest of modern tragicomedies. The defense of such genre as sentimental comedy and the drama indicates the increasing failure of critical obstruction between tragedy and comedy. The new genre also make tragicomedy progressively difficult to identify and define.

       The debate over tragicomedy curtail in the nineteenth century in part because the neoclassical bidding that sustenance opposition to it lost their force and in 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 for idealism, heroism, marvel, and the supernatural, all of which had been features of tragicomedy during the seventeenth century. Melodrama entertained its audiences with the anxiety and complication of tragicomic plots. The DRAMa took over such prestige as tragicomedy had demented as the most complete kind of drama and that particularly well suited to modern audience.

       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. Coleridge commentary on the effects of intermingle laughter and tears in The Tempest, and Schelling observed that “the mingling of opposites, that is above all of the tragic and the comic itself, is the basic principle of modern drama”. Victor Hugo in his preface to Cromwell, the public declaration of French Romantic drama against neoclassical rules, argue that Shakespeare’s plays represent the ultimate aesthetic accomplishment of the modern Christian era: his drama exceptionally “with the same breath models the grotesque and the sublime the horrible and the silly tragedy and comedy”. The preface focuses on the grotesque a term that Hugo uses rather.   

       John Dryden’s present essay “An essay on dramatic poesy” gives an explicit account of neoclassical theory of art in general. He fortify the classical drama abide on the line of Aristotle saying it is a limitation of life, and reflects human nature clearly. He also discusses the three unities; rules that require a play take place in one place, during one day action or plot.

       The easy is written in the form of dialogue involve to four gentlemen: eugenius, critics, lisideius and nender. Nender seems to speak for Dryden himself. Eugenius takes the side of the modern English dramatist by criticizing the frailty of the classical playwright, who did not themselves observe the unity of place. But critics defended the ancient and pointed out that they draw the principle of dramatic art articulated by Aristotle and Horace. Critics opposed to rhyme in plays and argues that through the moderns exceed in science; the ancient age was the true age of poetry. Lesideius defends the French playwrights and storm the English trend to mix genres’. He defines a play as a just and lively image of human and the change of destiny to which it is subject for the delight and drill of mankind.

       Nender favors the moderns, regard the ancient, critical to firm rules of dramas and he favors rhyme if it is in proper place like in grand subject matter. Nender a spokesperson of Dryden argues that tragic comedy is the best form for a play; because it is the closet life in which emotions are heightened by both glee and sadness. He also finds subplots as an essential part to improve a play. He finds the French drama, with its single action.

       Nender favors the violation of the unities because it deeds to the variety of the English plays. The unities have a narrowing and breakdown effect on the French plays, which are often, abandon in to craziness from which the English plays are free. The violation of unities helps the English play Wright to present a mere, just and lively image of human nature.

       In his similarity of French and English drama, nender define the best proof of the Elizabeth playwrights. He acclaimed Shakespeare’s  ancient and moderns. Nender to the end for the authority of the Elizabeth with close examination of a play by Johnson which Nender believes a perfect confirmation that the English were capable of following classical rules. In this way, Dryden duty to the neoclassical tradition is displayed.

       Dryden affliction against the critics, who attack the use of rhyme both in tragedy and comedy. Since nobody speaks in rhyme in real life, he supports the use of blank verse in drama and says that the use of rhyme is serious play is acceptable 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:

       Lisideius argues 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 not leisure to be good poets. The muses, who ever follow peace, went to plant in another country”. Lisideius acclaimed the reformation of the French theater under Richelieu and Corneille, and celebrate the close byalty to the classical break of comedy and tragedy. For lisideius “no theater 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 grounding of French drama in history, its associates “truth with probable  fiction”, makes it a higher achievement than the English Nender represents Dryden own view, which favor the modern and the English, but does not deject the ancient. He respects lisideius argument that the French “contrive their plots more regularly” but he favors English drama for their more animate and complicated qualities. He criticizes the French stage, nothing that “those beauties of the French poesy are such as will raise perfection higher where it is, but are not sufficient to give it where it is not: they are indeed the beauties of a state, but of a man.”

       A towering literacy figure of the 17th century, john Dryden is typically calculates among British restoration rather than among renaissance writers. His prolific and affecting work, however, continued to develop. Literacy course begun in the renaissance proper. For example, he contributed both to the practice and the theory of neoclassical drama, and he translated both remain and Greek writers into English.

       Even before he entered king’s college, Cambridge, at the age of 19, Dryden begun his literary career with the publication of an ELEGY. In a collection of verse commemorating the death of Henry, lord Hastings. After Dryden took his Cambridge B.A. in 1654, little is known of him until 1659, in that year, however, he contributed a feeble collection of verse to a co active endanger with EDMUND WALLER and Thomas Spratt. Dryden’s verses, “heroique stanzas to the glorious memory of Cromwell”, appeared with his colleague eulogies in three poems upon the death of his late highness Oliver lord protector of England. Though this work may well have been a clever venture by three young poets trying to make their way, Dryden’s contribution would become for him a persisting complexity.

       When he become the British poet famed under king Charles 2 , his praise of the king’s most hated enemy. Successfully he also published a work in celebration of Charles second return to England in 1660, Astrea Redux. Astrea was the roman goddess of justice who had lived on earth during the olden age. Thus the work’s title embraces a high tribute to the restored monarch.

        “An essay on dramatic poesy” in it he developed his theoretical views about drama and discussed in that context the thinking of other European theorists about drama and its relation to nature. The work takes the form of a discussion whose contribution represents various viewpoints on such subjects as the modern or of the English and the French theater. Dryden himself participates in the guise of nender. While estimating the work of the ancient, Dryden champions the work of moderns as superiors and thinks that, as compared with freer wheeling British dramatist, the French mistake observing Neo Aristotelian rules such as the UNITIES of time, place and action as the end rather than the means of dramatic performance. In that context, Dryden defends the cause of TRAGICOMEDY and finds in the English theater the fullest development of the neoclassical theatrical tradition. Dryden later confines a similar discourse on heroic poetry. The great English editor Dr.Samuel Johnson considered Dryden among the world’s greatest writers, one to whom English language, and the “correction” of the nation’s “sentiments” with respect to English poetry Johnson said that Dryden “found it brick and left it marble”.

       Dryden’s skeptical and ironical physique of mind regularly appears in his prose writings and his poetry. Dryden sharpened his satirical pen poem MACFLECKNOE, a work in which he excoriates the vapid critic and dull comic playwright, Thomas Shadwell, however he does exercise his talent for SATIRE to greater effect that in his political poem Absalom and architopal. The earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley cooper, had put political pressure on king Charles II to name his illegitimate, protestant son, the duke of Monmouth, heir to the throne perceiving a parallel between that circumstances and the biblical situation between king David and his rebellious son Absalom, who yielded to Mephistopheles encouragement to rebel against his father, Dryden exploits that likeness to wonderful satire effect.