ABSTRACT
The tragicomic is the basic pattern of human experience. It fits both the individual's experience of life's daily ups and downs and the human community's broader perception of its own existence. As Susanne Langer has put it, "Society is continuous though its members, even the strongest and fairest, live out their lives and die; and even while each individual fulfills the tragic pattern, it participates also in the comic continuity."1 Tragicomic patterns inform human beings' perception of their environment and their most central religious beliefs: the death and rebirth of the year, the dismemberment and resurrection of Dionysus. They are of the essence of Christianity, an insight recognized explicitly in medieval and Renaissance drama. The fall and redemption of humankind, the death and resurrection of Christ and thus of each individual, are patterns underlying almost all of medieval drama and much of Renaissance drama, especially tragicomedy. Paul Hernadi has suggested that tragicomedy is the most comprehensive genre because its mood is a "complex Urpha nomen from which simpler responses to life or drama must be distilled."2 Not surprisingly, tragicomedy is constantly merging with one or another of the "simpler" genres (comedy, tragedy, melodrama, farce, and so on) that may be "distilled" from it but that also construct and comprise tragicomedy's own identity as a genre. Tragicomedy is, therefore, exceptionally difficult to define.
