ABSTRACT
Tragicomedy took on diverse forms in the late seventeenth century, virtually disappeared in the eighteenth, was replaced by various cognate forms such as the romantic drama, the drame, and melodrama in the nineteenth, and finally reemerged in the late nineteenth century with the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov. Few English plays, even of those written in the Restoration period, when the tragicomedy of an earlier era remained immensely popu1ar on the stage, are organic tragicomedies of the kind I have defined in the first chapter of this book. That is, few English plays written between 1660 and 1900 integrate tragic and comic experience in such a way that each modifies and determines the nature of the other to produce a complex tragicomic response in the audience. The plays I shall consider in this chapter for the most part illustrate instead some of the ways in which serious or quasi-tragic and comic elements can be combined without producing the kind of organic tragicomedy that exists in both the Renaissance and modern states of the genre.
