Half a Kingdom for a Horse: Ibsenite Tragicomedy

Half a Kingdom for a Horse: Ibsenite Tragicomedyl BERNARD F. DUKORE IN THE LATE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, Sir Philip Sidney deprecatingly called tragicomedy mongrel' In the early twentieth century, F.H.. Ristine noted the "critical opprobrium that would stamp it as a bastard form beneath serious consideration.'" At fust glance, the difference between mongrel and bastard does not seem much, but in a way it is, since illegitimacy may be legitimized more easily than impurity purified. If the gods are not yet ready to stand up for bastards, at least contemporary critics, half a century after Ristine, have stood up for the bastard genre, tragicomedy, and- recognizing it as perhaps the dominant genre of modern drama-have given it de facto legitimacy. When tragicomedy was still a mongrel- from the Renaissance until the late nineteenth century-it usually meant an alternation and/ or combination of dramatic elements associated with the two major genres: a serious action, as in tragedy, with a happy conclusion, as in comedy; a mixture of high-born characters, appropriate to tragedy, with humble folk, appropriate to comedy, who perhaps met in a concluding scene. As a modern bastard, however, tragicomedy's bloodstream contains a more organic mixture of its parents' different genes. In modern drama, where generic distinctions infrequently derive from social classes, one fmds from the start what Bernard Shaw calls "a chemical combination which made the spectator laugh with one side of his mouth and cry with the other." Shaw identifies the start: "Ibsen was the fust great dramatic chemist."· Few critics of modern tragicomedy would seriously quarrel with Shaw that pride of place goes to Ibsen, but this is virtually all they 217 218 BERNARD F. DUKORE would not quarrel with. In 1910, Ristine maintained that "there has been relatively little criticism of any sort on the subject of tragicomedy and less unanimity of opinion as to what constituted the same.'" Although the bibliography on tragicomedy has expanded since then, both of Ristine's statements still hold' The assertion that rew critics agree on what constitutes tragicomedy should surprise no one. Even with tragedy, opinions differ on the universal validity of the ohservations of major theorists, Aristotle and Hegel included. Nevertheless, many works share important characteristics that should be identifiable. Let me therefore try to locate some common generic ground, however small the plot, in the hope that at least it will reveal characteristics of a few plays. As long as one recognizes that borderline cases inevitably exist, since every play is to some degree sui generis, one can steer between dogmatism and fuzziness . Where is the common ground? The intelligent layman would probably agree with Byron's statement in Don Juan: "All tragedies are finished by a death,/ All comedies are ended by a marriage." Although we know that all tragedies and comedies do not end in these ways, enough of them do to make the distinction valid. This layman might also observe that the development of tragedies is a movement toward bad fortune or unhappiness; of comedies, a movement toward good fortune or happiness. He might add that tragedies provide a few shocks, comedies a few laughs. And enough tragedies and comedies conform to these distinctions to validate them as well. Such characteristics-chiefly, a play's development and outcomeform the common ground of tragedy and comedy. Characteristics based on development and outcome, I propose, identify modern tragicomedy . Its common ground seems to be: first, the play initially establishes a basic affinity to one of the major genres, tragedy or comedy; then, its development erodes the exclusive characteristics of that genre with which it initially associates itself; and fmally, its conclusion denies the exclusiveness of the type of conclusion associated with the tragic or comic genre. In brief: modern tragicomedy presents an initial affinity to tragedy or comedy, then a development and outcome which erode and deny what is exclusively tragic or comic. If a tragicomedy associates itself with tragedy at the start, or if its end seems to resemble that of tragedy, then the play's conclusion contains none of the affmnation, redemption, or catharsis (however one defmes the term) characteristic of tragedy. Unlike tragedy, the play demonstrates neither stature nor...