The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy (review)

Abstract

Reviews371 1 To permit comparison with the RecordsofEarlyDrama: Walesvolume,seeEiIa Williamson and John J. McGavin,"Crossing the Border: the Provincial Records of South-East Scotland," in Sally-Beth McLean and Audrey Douglas, eds., REED in Review, Studies in Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 157-77 and Alan J. Fletcher, Drama and the PerformingArts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland: Sources andDocumentsfrom theEarliest Times until C.1642 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001). Verna A. Foster. The Name andNature ofTragicomedy. Studies in European Cultural Transition 18.Aldershot,UK:Ashgate, 2004. Pp. vi + 217. $99.95. Few critics today attempt to span different historical periods in a single study, or even career.VernaA. Foster's ambitious book TheName andNatureofTragicomedyaddresses both Renaissance and modern tragicomedyin a concentrated manner, while offering some reflections on tragicomedy or approximations to it in medieval drama, the Restoration, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . Such a study, surely reflecting wide personal experience apparently acquired through extensive playgoing as well as teaching and research, is in many ways a welcome addition in an age of intense specialization. Genre, as Alastair Fowler (drawing uponWittgenstein) has argued,proposes"familyresemblances" between members of its categories. Critics write both from and to specific interpretive communities; often a disagreementbetween two critics maybe largely traceable to the fact that they come from two different interpretive communities who each work from different sets of texts. Academic theatergoers (who certainlydon't make up the majorityofthose academics who write about drama) will likely see, within a relatively short time span, plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen, Synge, and Beckett, and they will therefore be interested in commonalities of dramaturgy and audience response between historically disparate works. Historicallybased critics who publish on drama, such as those associated with new historicism, have "habits of mind" that are more likely to perceive family resemblances between Shakespeare and Columbus than between Shakespeare and Beckett, and they will likely be suspicious of concepts, assertions, and generic categories that span historical periods. Foster proposes a structural and formal definition oftragicomedy as a genre (as opposed to a mode) that will illuminate family resemblances in playwrights from Fletcher to Pinter: "A tragicomedy is a play in which the tragic and the comic both exist but are formally and emotionally dependent on one another, each modifying and determiningthe nature ofthe other so as to produce a mixed, tragicomic response in the audience" (1 1). This is a useful working definition. In language that nicely accommodates twentieth-century tragicomedy, it develops 372Comparative Drama the central idea of Battista Guarini (late-sixteenth-century Ur-theorist oftragicomedy ): the new hybrid genre structurally integrates tragedy and comedy in a systematic way. Since almost all Western drama from Aeschylus to the present contains modally tragicomic moments and features (consider the nurse's account ofthe baby Orestes'scatological bodywhen she receives the false news of his death in The Libation Bearers, a play no one would confuse with comedy), this definition allows Foster some useful principles of exclusion, whereby she distinguishes tragicomedy propre from cousins such as the drame, Brechtian epic theater, and melodrama. This definition effectively structures the book's final two chapters on modern tragicomedy, the first devoted to realist plays such as The Cherry Orchard and The Playboy ofthe Western World, and the second to absurdist plays such as Waiting for Godot (on which she is particularly illuminating) and The Chairs. A keener distinction (crucial to Fowler's seminal book on genre theory) between nominal genre and adjectival mode, between tragicomedy and the tragicomic, tragedy and the tragic, and comedy and the comic, could have further held the center, which occasionallyveers out to the intergalactic space of the modally "tragicomic." The book occasionally encourages such dizzy capaciousness by questionable pronouncements on dramatic literary history, such as "the history of tragicomedy would seem to be coterminous with that ofdrama itself" (9). (Foster adduces the felicitous ending of The Oresteia and the existence of the satyr play as evidence for this big claim, but the happy ending of The Eumenides was not paradigmatic and the satyr play was a relatively late addition to the City Dionysia.) Most of the book's extended playreadings are engaging, but occasionally the rapid surveys ofperipheral material...