Tragedy & Comedy

Greek Theatre – Tragedy & Comedy

As part of the festival called Dionysia which honoured the God Dionysus, tragedy, comedy & satyr play were the three genres to emerge from the theatre of ancient Greece.
Tragedy is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes in its audience an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in the viewing. From its obscure origins in the theatres of Athens 2,500 years ago, from which there survives only a fraction of the work of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, through its singular articulations in the works of Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Racine, and Schiller, to the more recent naturalistic tragedy of Strindberg, Beckett's modernist meditations on death, loss and suffering, and Müller's postmodernist reworking of the tragic canon, tragedy has remained an important site of cultural experimentation, negotiation, struggle, and change. A long line of philosophers—which includes Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Voltaire, Hume, Diderot, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud,Benjamin, Camus, Lacan, and Deleuze—have analysed, speculated upon, and criticised the tragic form. In the wake of Aristotle's Poetics (335 BCE), tragedy has been used to make genre distinctions, whether at the scale of poetry in general (where the tragic divides against epic and lyric) or at the scale of the drama (where tragedy is opposed to comedy). In the modern era, tragedy has also been defined against drama, melodrama, the tragicomic and epic theatre.
Comedy is a word Greeks and Romans confined to stage-plays with happy endings. In the middle Ages, the term expanded to include narrative poems with happy endings and a lighter tone. As time passed, the word came more and more to be associated with any sort of performance intended to cause laughter. Much comedy contains variations on the elements of surprise, incongruity, conflict, repetitiveness, and the effect of opposite expectations, but there are many recognized genres of comedy. Satire and political satire use ironic comedy used to portray persons or social institutions as ridiculous or corrupt, thus alienating their audience from the object of humour.