Types of drama: comedy, tragedy and tragicomedy

1Two faces

Theatres, drama clubs and festivals all over the world use the same symbol: two masks, one laughing and one crying. Actors in ancient Greece performed in masks, and these two faces stand for the two oldest types of play, comedy and tragedy. Knowing the type of a play tells the audience what to expect, and tells the actors how to play it.

In this lesson you will learn to recognise comedy, tragedy and the mixture of the two, tragicomedy, from what happens in a play and, above all, from how it ends.

Worked example: one story, three endings

Mugisha, an S1 student, is proud of being the fastest cyclist in his village. Every morning his family sends two cans of milk to the dairy cooperative's collection centre on the old family bicycle. One day his uncle's new bicycle is standing in the yard, and Mugisha takes it without asking, because he wants to arrive first. His grandmother calls out that its front brake is loose. He laughs: "I don't need brakes. I'm Mugisha!"

Here are three ways the story could continue.

Version A is a tragedy, version B a comedy and version C a tragicomedy. The rest of this lesson explains why.

2Comedy

A comedy is a play written to amuse the audience and make it laugh, and it ends happily. The word comes from the Greek kōmōidía, joining kômos, "a merry celebration", and ōidḗ, "a song". The ancient Greeks and Romans used the word for plays with happy endings.

• The characters are usually ordinary people with small faults: vanity, greed, laziness, boasting.
• The laughter comes from misunderstandings, mistaken identity, exaggeration, clever words and bad luck that turns out well.
• The problem is solved and the characters come together at the end, often with a celebration.
• A comedy often laughs at a behaviour so that the audience thinks about it.

Example: A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare. A farce is a kind of comedy built on wildly exaggerated situations and physical jokes, such as Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, in which two pairs of twins are mistaken for each other again and again.

3Tragedy

A tragedy is a serious play in which the main character suffers a terrible fall: from happiness to misery, from success to ruin, often ending in death. The word comes from the Greek tragōidía, "goat song". Nobody is sure why; one explanation is that a goat was the prize in early contests of choral song and dance.

• The main character is often admired: brave, gifted or powerful.
• The fall is caused by the character's own mistake or weakness, which the Greek philosopher Aristotle called hamartia. It is often translated as a tragic flaw; pride is a common one.
• The mood grows darker as the play goes on, and the ending is unhappy.
• The audience feels pity for the character and fear that the same could happen to them. Aristotle said that tragedy brings the audience catharsis, an emotional cleansing: people leave the theatre moved and thoughtful.

Examples: Oedipus Rex by the Greek playwright Sophocles; Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth by Shakespeare.

4Tragicomedy

A tragicomedy mixes the two. Either it is a serious play with comic moments that lighten the mood, or it is a serious story that comes close to disaster but ends happily. The Roman playwright Plautus invented the word, half as a joke, more than 2,000 years ago. Shakespeare's late play The Winter's Tale is often called a tragicomedy: it is full of jealousy, loss and grief, yet it ends in forgiveness and reunion.

5Comparing the three

6Back to Mugisha

• A is a tragedy: Mugisha's own flaw, his pride, causes his fall, and the ending is unhappy. Nothing in it is played for laughs.
• B is a comedy: mix-ups and mistaken ideas make the audience laugh, the "punishment" is light, and everyone ends up together.
• C is a tragicomedy: the loss is real and serious, the goat brings a comic moment, and honesty turns the ending into a happy one.

Practice