Types of Tragedy
A serious drama in which there is a downfall of the primary character.
Tragedy
A play that is light in tone, is concerned with issues that point out the excesses and folly of human behavior, has a happy ending, and is designed to amuse.
Comedy
A comedy that deals with ordinary people in familiar situations.
Domestic Comedy
The hero or heroine is an extraordinary person—a king, a queen, a general, a nobleman or noblewoman—in other words, a person of stature.
Traditional Tragedy
A type of comedy or comic business that relies on exaggerated or ludicrous physical activity for its humor.
Slapstick
Form of comic drama satirizing social conventions that became popular in seventeenth-century France and the English Restoration, and which emphasized a cultivated or sophisticated atmosphere and witty dialogue.
Comedy of Manners
A serious but basically optimistic drama written in verse or elevated prose, with noble or heroic characters in extreme situations or unusual adventures.
Heroic Drama
A subclass of comedy with emphasis on exaggerated plot complications and with few or no intellectual pretensions.
Farce
A comedy in which the humor is based on intellectual and verbal aspects of comedy rather than physical comedy or comedy of character. A drama whose emphasis is on the clash of ideas, as exemplified in the plays of George Bernard Shaw.
Comedy of Ideas
A drama dealing with problems—particularly family problems—of middle- and lower-class characters.
Domestic Drama
A ludicrous, comic imitation of a dramatic form, play, piece of literature, or other popular entertainment. Also relies on knockabout physical humor, as well as gross.
Burlesque
During the Renaissance, a play having tragic themes and noble characters but a happy ending; today, a play in which serious and comic elements are integrated. Many plays of this type present a comic or ironic treatment of a serious theme.
Tragicomedy
Dramatic form made popular in the nineteenth century that emphasized action and spectacular effects and also used music to underscore the action; it had stock characters, usually with clearly defined villains and heroes.
Melodrama
Comic form, using irony and exaggeration, to attack and expose folly and vice.
Satire
Twentieth century plays expressing the dramatists’ sense of absurdity and futility of human existence through the dramatic techniques they employ.
Theater of the Absurd