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The same Objections which are made to Tragi-Comedy, may in some Measure be applied to all Tragedies that have a double Plot in them; which are likewise more frequent upon the English Stage, than upon any other: For though the Grief of the Audience, in such Performances, be not changed into another Passion, as in Tragi-Comedies; it is diverted upon another Object, which weakens their Concern for the principal Action, and breaks the Tide of Sorrow, by throwing it into different Channels.
"The worst of it is that not only do they all know this, and tacitly agree that it must be so, but they enact complete tragi-comedies, allowing themselves to become betrothed, and then lying to God and man. Semenoff once said to me, 'the purer the woman, the filthier the man who possesses her, and he was right." "Is that true?" asked Lialia, in a strange tone. "Yes, most assuredly it is."
Euphrasia could, at any moment, by revealing her identity, have averted the greatest sufferings and dangers from Philaster, Arethusa, and herself, and the only motive for her keeping silence is represented to have been a feeling of maidenly shame at her position. Such strained and fantastic motives are too often made the pivot of the action in Beaumont and Fletcher's tragi-comedies.
The subject is taken from Milton's Paradise Lost, of which it must be acknowledged, it is a poor imitation. The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, in two parts, two Tragi-Comedies, acted at the theatre-royal, and printed 1678. These two plays are dedicated to the duke of York, and were received on the stage with great applause.
Shylock certainly remains a tragic figure, even to the end, and a play like Winter's Tale, in which the painful situation is prolonged for years, is only technically a comedy. Such dramas, indeed, were called, on many of the title-pages of the time, "tragi-comedies." The low comedy interlude, on the other hand, was broadly comic.
His comedy of Cupid's Strokes of Genius began a series of tragi-comedies which gradually deepened in passion and melody, till they culminated in two of the acknowledged masterpieces of the Danish stage, Svend Dyring's House and King René's Daughter . The genius of Hertz was diametrically opposed to that of Ibsen; in all Europe there were not two authors less alike.
It is when we come upon the singular little group of two or three plays not accurately definable at all but roughly describable as tragi-comedies, or more properly in two cases at least as tragedies docked of their natural end, curtailed of the due catastrophe it is then that we find for the swift sad bright lightnings of laughter from the lips of the sweet and bitter fool whose timeless disappearance from the stage of King Lear seems for once a sure sign of inexplicable weariness or forgetfulness on Shakespeare's part, so nauseous and so sorry a substitute as the fetid fun and rancid ribaldry of Pandarus and Thersites.
We read them now because of what we are accustomed to call their "human interest," because they show us the robust, ordinary, fleshly, and ideal side of pious mediæval Catholics; they appeal to us humorously and pathetically; they are tragi-comedies of the transcendental life.
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