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Write a note on Tragi-comedy.

Tragic-comedy is the blend of tragedy and comedy. Generally it emphasises the happy ending.

It is a drama in which the moods and techniques of both tragedy and comedy are intermingled. It contains tragic and comic scenes side by side.

Certain episodes threaten the sad climax of a tragedy, the play actually ends happily like a comedy. The tragi-comedy tends, naturally, toward the ‘melodrama’. It permits the audience an indulgence in both tears and laughter. In the Elizabethan period the tragic-comedy was damned by the classical pursuits like Ben Jonson but produced freely by the more liberal romantic playwrights like Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher.

English drama borrowed from mediaeval drama the ideas of mixing tragedy and comedy in one play. But in the classical drama authors rigidly separated the tragic drama from the comic drama. Shakespeare was a master hand in blending tragedy and comedy in his plays and, as such, his plays revcal eternal truths about human nature and mind. The function of drama proper is to represent the life of man as it is. Shakespeare fully realised that man is composed of smiles and trars, and in the delineation of purely tragical side or the purely comical one is bound to be artificial. Drama as a mirror of human life and must blend both the sides tragic and comic, into an artistic whole. Shakespeare has done it and with tremedous success. In the famous tragedies of Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear we find immense comic relief to relieve the tragic strain.

This blending of tragic and comic elements in his plays, however, leaves no sense of discord or inconsistency in our mind. This is, in fact, the source of deepest humour, and Shakespeare’s humour and irony mainly consist in this fusion of tragic and comic elements. In such juxtaposition of the serious and the comic in Shakespeare’s plays, we experience the perpetual contrast between the laughable and the serious, which is at the root of the comedy of life, and is the secret of humour. In Henry IV we notice the heroic and the familar stand shoulder to shoulder. False stuff is a foil to the central figure Prince Henry, but in this juxtaposition of the serious and the comic in the constant transit from the weightiest matter of the state of the light humours of the London tavern – we never feel any discordant note, and it is the reflection of this of this antithesis which sets the two parts of Henry IV so high among the companions.

Shakespear’s dramas consist of a number of subsidiary plots (underplots) where as in the classical drama there is a unity of construction with a consummate art Shakespeare interweaves the threads of various elements in his plays, specially in his comedies. In ‘A Mid Summer Night’s Dream’ he had deftly intereweaved a plot within a plot. In the Merchant of Venice’ Shakespeare’s handling of the underplots is marvellous. Shakespeare has done a wonderful thing in it by bringing the varied elements into unity. In the ‘Mid Summer Night’s Dream’ Shakespeare brings together from the opposite extremes of society the grotesque craftsman and the lords and ladies of Athens, and from their even greater remoteness. Titania’ the little fairy and ‘Botton’, the boor, whose meeting has a symbolism, essential to the play.

In the ‘Merchant of Venice’, Shakespeare interweaves the threads of the double plot finally confronting Shylock with Portia.