ABSTRACT
The tragic hero wrestles with his destiny; and even when he does not in the end lose his life, his predicament must bring home to the audience, by means of threatened catastrophe, the implications of this fateful struggle. In the nineteenth century a new form of comedy, owing much to the theories of Diderot and Lessing a century earlier, and based, as those theories had been, on an increased awareness of the social and political interests of a middle-class audience, was to bring about a move away from the generalized ‘types’ of neoclassical comedy, in favour of individuals with a well-established social identity. The end of a comic drama according to this most traditional formula is essentially escapist in character; and however strongly the play may have seemed to be attached to social reality, the playwright helps people to pretend for a brief moment that reality has ceased to exist.
