Theater of The Absurd
Theater of The Absurd
Theater of The Absurd
A literary movement in drama popular throughout European countries from the 1940s to approximately 1989
Absurdist playwrights adhered to the theories of French-algerian philosopher Albert camus, in particular his essay
the myth of sisuphus, published in 1942.
In this essay, camus introduces his philosophy of the absurd, in which he agrues that man’s quest for meaning and
truth is a futile andeavor. He compares man’s struggle to understand the world and the meaning of life to
Sisyphus,a famous figure in Greek mythology condemned to an axistence of rolling a heavy stone up a mountain
only to watch it roll to the bottom.
Critics believe that theater of the absurd arose as a movement from the doubts and fears surrounding world war II
and what many people saw as the degeneration of traditional moral and political values.
The movement flourished in France, Germany and England, as well as in Scandinavian countries.
Several of the founding works of the movement include jean genet’s the maid (1947), augene lonesco’s The bald
soprano (1950), Arthur adamov’s Ping pong (1955) and Samuel beckett’s waiting for godot (1953). Backett’s death
in 1989 is said to mark the close of the movement’s popularity
Plays categorized in this mobement typically represent human existance as nonsensical and often chaotic
The Theatre of the Absurd is a term coined by Critic Martin Esslin in his essay
“Theatre of the Absurd.” The term is used for the work of a number of playwrights, mostly
written in the 1950s and 1960s, which were written by a number of primarily European
playwrights in the late 1950s. Their work simply expressed the thought of human
existence that has no meaning or purpose. If a trouble comes, some logic is given on a
matter, it simply makes the situation worse and further leads to silence.
Then, morality plays of the Middle Ages can also be called a precursor of the Theatre
of the Absurd dealing with common man’s struggle with allegorical and existential
problems. During Elizabethan period, dramatists like John Webster, Cyril Tourneur,
Jakob Biederman and Calderon pictured the world as mythological archetype.
World War II finally brought the Theater of Absurd to life because the chaotic
atmosphere during that time was compelling them to think about their absurd existence.
1. Questions of Existence
Absurd plays raise some basic questions of existence like- why we are alive why we
have to die and why there is injustice and suffering.
1. Distrust in Language
By illogical speeches and meaningless plots, they wish to establish a feeling of freedom
to make their own worlds. Dr. Culik says,
“Rationalist thought, like language, only deals with the superficial aspects of
things, Nonsense, on the other hand, opens up a glimpse of the infinite.”
1. Re-establishment of man’s communion with Universe
They attempt to restore the importance of myth and rituals in the life of man and make
them aware of the ultimate realities of their life.
Absurdists force us to look at our abstract values of life like love and family. Thus, we
may hope to accept the absurdity of life and try to find values in a world devoid of them.
Absurdists have no time, place and character in their plays as they feel that there is no
past or future, only the repetition of the present
Complex characters cannot go with this theater because ultimately they have to deal
with incomprehensive universe. Characters in Pinter’s plays are trapped in an enclosed
space menaced by some force and that force is incomprehensible to them. For example,
In The Room, Rose, the main character is menaced by Riley where the real source of
menace remains a mystery.
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The absurdists form their characters in interdependent pairs, often either two males or a
male and a female. Beckett scholars term it as “pseudo couple” They may be outwardly
equal or have a begrudging interdependence (like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting
for Godot). Here, one active character may dominate the other passive characters in the
play and the relationship of characters also shift dramatically.
Plot
Language
Technique
The first large major production of an absurdist play was Jean Genet’s The Maids in
1947. Ionesco’s The Bald Soprana was first performed in 1950, and Samuel
Beckett’s Waiting for Gadot is probably the best known of all absurdist plays and it was
premiered in January 1953. Waiting for Godot is the most controversial absurdist play.
Rest of the Absurdist plays are:
Sl. No. Theatre of the Absurd Authors Theatre of the Absurd Plays
Eugene lonesco
2. Rhinoceros, The Bald Soprano and Other Plays,
How to Get Rid of It
Conclusion
Thus, The Absurd Theatre is not a positive play as it never tries to prove that man can
still live in the futile world. It only demonstrates the absurdity and illogicality of the world
in which we live but does not provide any solution to the problem. By these play, man is
again and again reminded that his existence in the world is in fact absurd and
meaningless. The countdown of The Absurd Theatre began in the mid-1960s. Although
it shocked the audiences when it first appeared, many of its characteristic features were
transferred in mainstream theatre when the Theater of Absurd ended. Those
techniques are now commonly being used in modern theatre.
The Italian writer Battista Guarini defined tragicomedy theater as having most of the elements of
tragedy, for example, a certain gravity of diction, the representation of important public events and
the awakening of compassion, but never bringing the action to the conclusion of tragedy, and
including, in a prudent manner, comic elements such as characters, laughter and jokes.
Danger, reversal and a happy ending were fundamental to this type of tragicomedy theater. Despite
its affront to the strict neoclassicism of the time, which forbade the mixing of genres, tragicomedy
flourished, especially in England, whose writers largely ignored neoclassicism.
Characteristics of Tragicomedy Theater
Nineteenth-century Romantic writers encouraged Shakespeare’s use of tragicomedy in the belief
that his plays faithfully reflected the nature of tragicomedy, and used him as a model for their plays.
The dramas of Georg Büchner, Victor Hugo and Christian Dietrich Grabbe reflect his influence. With
the advent of realism later in the 19th century, tragicomedy underwent another revision.
In the theater of tragicomedy, the two elements of the intermission are comic and highlight the ironic
counterpoints inherent in the play, making the tragedy seem even more devastating. Plays such as
Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (1881) and The Wild Duck (1884) reflect this technique. Ibsen’s work
establishes that tragicomedy is a more meaningful and serious entertainment than tragedy.
In dealing with persons engaged in normal affairs, the comic dramatists tended to depict the
individual in terms of some single but overriding personal trait or habit. They adopted a method
based on the physiological concept of the four humours, or bodily fluids (blood, phlegm, choler,
melancholy), and the belief that an equal proportion of these constituted health, while an excess
or deficiency of any one of them brought disease. Since the humours governed temperament, an
irregular distribution of them was considered to result not only in bodily sickness but also in
derangements of personality and behaviour, as well. The resultant comedy of humours is
distinctly English, as Dryden notes, and particularly identified with the comedies of Ben Jonson.
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The role of wit
Humour is native to humankind. Folly need only be observed and imitated by the comic
dramatist to give rise to laughter. Observers as early as Quintilian, however, have pointed out
that, though folly is laughable in itself, such jests may be improved if the writer adds something
of his own—namely, wit. A form of repartee, wit implies both a mental agility and a linguistic
grace that is very much a product of conscious art. Quintilian describes wit at some length in
his Institutio oratoria; it partakes of urbanity, a certain tincture of learning, charm, saltiness, or
sharpness, and polish and elegance. In the preface (1671) to An Evening’s Love, Dryden
distinguishes between the comic talents of Jonson, on the one hand, and of Shakespeare and his
contemporary John Fletcher, on the other, by virtue of their excelling respectively in humour
and in wit. Jonson’s talent lay in his ability “to make men appear pleasantly ridiculous on the
stage,” while Shakespeare and Fletcher excelled in wit, or “the sharpness of conceit,” as seen in
their repartee. The distinction is noted as well in Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay, where a
comparison is made between the character of Morose in Jonson’s play Epicoene, who is
characterized by his humour (namely, his inability to abide any noise but the sound of his own
voice), and Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who, according to Dryden, represents a miscellany of
humours and is singular in saying things that are unexpected by the audience.
The distinctions that Hazlitt arrives at, then, in his essay “On Wit and Humour” are very much in
the classic tradition of comic criticism:
Humour is the describing the ludicrous as it is in itself; wit is the exposing it, by comparing or
contrasting it with something else. Humour is, as it were, the growth of nature and accident; wit is the
product of art and fancy.
The distinctions persist into the most sophisticated treatments of the subject. Sigmund Freud,
for example, in Wit and its Relation to the Unconscious (1905), said that wit is made, but
humour is found. Laughter, according to Freud, is aroused at actions that appear immoderate
and inappropriate, at excessive expenditures of energy: it expresses a pleasurable sense of the
superiority felt on such occasions.
Baudelaire on the grotesque
The view that laughter comes from superiority is referred to as a commonplace by Baudelaire,
who states it in his essay “On the Essence of Laughter” (1855). Laughter, says Baudelaire, is a
consequence of the human notion of one’s own superiority. It is a token both of
an infinite misery, in relation to the absolute being of whom humans have an inkling, and of
infinite grandeur, in relation to the beasts, and results from the perpetual collision of these two
infinities. The crucial part of Baudelaire’s essay, however, turns on his distinction between the
comic and the grotesque. The comic, he says, is an imitation mixed with a certain creative
faculty, and the grotesque is a creation mixed with a certain imitative faculty—imitative of
elements found in nature. Each gives rise to laughter expressive of an idea of superiority—in the
comic, the superiority of man over man and, in the grotesque, the superiority of man over
nature. The laughter caused by the grotesque has about it something more profound
and primitive, something much closer to the innocent life, than has the laughter caused by the
comic in human behaviour. In France the great master of the grotesque was the 16th-century
author François Rabelais, while some of the plays of Molière in the next century best expressed
the comic.
Bergson’s and Meredith’s theories
It is the business of laughter to repress any tendency on the part of the individual to separate
himself from society. The comic character would, if left to his own devices, break away from logic
(and thus relieve himself from the strain of thinking); give over the effort to adapt and readapt
himself to society (and thus slacken in the attention that is due to life); and abandon
social convention (and thus relieve himself from the strain of living).
The essay “On the Idea of Comedy and the Uses of the Comic Spirit” (1877), by Bergson’s English
contemporary George Meredith, is a celebration of the civilizing power of the comic spirit. The
mind, he affirms, directs the laughter of comedy, and civilization is founded in common sense,
which equips one to hear the comic spirit when it laughs folly out of countenance and to
participate in its fellowship.
Both Bergson’s and Meredith’s essays have been criticized for focussing so exclusively on
comedy as a socially corrective force and for limiting the scope of laughter to its derisive power.
The charge is more damaging to Meredith’s essay than it is to Bergson’s. Whatever the
limitations of the latter, it nonetheless explores the implications of its own thesis with the
utmost thoroughness, and the result is a rigorous analysis of comic causes and effects for which
any student of the subject must be grateful. It is with farce that Bergson’s remarks on comedy
have the greatest connection and on which they seem chiefly to have been founded. It is no
accident that most of his examples are drawn from Molière, in whose work the farcical element
is strong, and from the farces of Bergson’s own contemporary Eugène-Marin Labiche. The
laughter of comedy is not always derisive, however, as some of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies
prove; and there are plays, such as Shakespeare’s last ones, which are well within an established
tradition of comedy but in which laughter hardly sounds at all. These suggest regions of comedy
on which Bergson’s analysis of the genre sheds hardly any light at all.
The comic as a failure of self-knowledge
Aristotle said that comedy deals with the ridiculous, and Plato, in the Philebus, defined the
ridiculous as a failure of self-knowledge; such a failure is there shown to be laughable in private
individuals (the personages of comedy) but terrible in persons who wield power (the personages
of tragedy). In comedy, the failure is often mirrored in a character’s efforts to live up to an ideal
of self that may be perfectly worthy but the wrong ideal for that particular
character. Shakespearean comedy is rich in examples: the King of Navarre and his courtiers,
who must be made to realize that nature meant them to be lovers, not academicians, in Love’s
Labour’s Lost; Beatrice and Benedick, who must be made to know that nature meant them for
each other, not for the single life, in Much Ado About Nothing; Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night,
who is brought to see that it is not Lady Olivia whom he loves but the disguised Viola, and Lady
Olivia herself, who, when the right man comes along, decides that she will not dedicate herself to
seven years of mourning for a dead brother, after all; and Angelo in Measure for Measure,
whose image of himself collapses when his lust for Isabella makes it clear that he is not
the ascetic type. The movement of all these plays follows a familiar comic pattern, wherein
characters are brought from a condition of affected folly amounting to self-delusion to a plain
recognition of who they are and what they want. For the five years or so after he wrote Measure
for Measure, in 1603–04, Shakespeare seems to have addressed himself exclusively to tragedy,
and each play in the sequence of masterpieces he produced during this period—Othello, King
Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus—turns in some measure on a failure of
self-knowledge. This is notably so in the case of Lear, which is the tragedy of a man who (in the
words of one of his daughters) “hath ever but slenderly known himself” and whose fault (as the
Fool suggests) is to have grown old before he grew wise.
The plots of Shakespeare’s last plays (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest) all
contain a potential tragedy but one that is resolved by nontragic means. They contain, as well, an
element of romance of the kind purveyed from Greek New Comedy through the plays of the
ancient Roman comic dramatists Plautus and Terence. Children lost at birth are miraculously
restored, years later, to their parents, thereby providing occasion for a recognition scene that
functions as the denouement of the plot. Characters find themselves—they come to know
themselves—in all manner of ways by the ends of these plays. Tragic errors have been made,
tragic losses have been suffered, tragic passions—envy, jealousy, wrath—have seemed to rage
unchecked, but the miracle that these plays celebrate lies in the discovery that the errors can be
forgiven, the losses restored, and the passions mastered by the godly spirit of reason. The near
tragedies experienced by the characters result in the ultimate health and enlightenment of the
soul. What is learned is of a profound simplicity: the need for patience under adversity, the need
to repent of one’s sins, the need to forgive the sins of others. In comedy of this high
and sublime sort, patience, repentance, and forgiveness are opposed to the viciously circular
pattern of crime, which begets vengeance, which begets more crime. Comedy of this sort deals in
regeneration and rebirth. There is always about it something of the religious, as humankind is
absolved of its guilt and reconciled one to another and to whatever powers that be.
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In New Comedy, which began to prevail about 336 BCE, the Aristophanic depiction of public
personages and events was replaced by a representation of the private affairs (usually amorous)
of imaginary men and women. New Comedy is known only from the fragments that have
survived of the plays of Menander (c. 342–c. 292 BCE) and from plays written in imitation of the
form by the Romans Plautus (c. 254–184 BCE) and Terence (195 or 185–159 BCE). A number of
the stock comic characters survived from Old Comedy into New: an old man, a young man, an
old woman, a young woman, a learned doctor or pedant, a cook, a parasite, a swaggering soldier,
a comic slave. New Comedy, on the other hand, exhibits a degree of plot articulation never
achieved in the Old. The action of New Comedy is usually about plotting; a clever servant, for
example, devises ingenious intrigues in order that his young master may win the girl of his
choice. There is satire in New Comedy: on a miser who loses his gold from being overcareful of it
(the Aulularia of Plautus); on a father who tries so hard to win the girl from his son that he falls
into a trap set for him by his wife (Plautus’s Casina); and on an overstern father whose son turns
out worse than the product of an indulgent parent (in the Adelphi of Terence). But the satiric
quality of these plays is bland by comparison with the trenchant ridicule of Old Comedy. The
emphasis in New Comic plotting is on the conduct of a love intrigue; the love element per se is
often of the slightest, the girl whom the hero wishes to possess sometimes being no more than an
offstage presence or, if onstage, mute.
New Comedy provided the model for European comedy through the 18th century. During the
Renaissance, the plays of Plautus and, especially, of Terence were studied for
the moral instruction that young men could find in them: lessons on the need to avoid the snares
of harlots and the company of braggarts, to govern the deceitful trickery of servants, to behave in
a seemly and modest fashion to parents. Classical comedy was brought up to date in the plays of
the “Christian Terence,” imitations by schoolmasters of the comedies of the Roman dramatist.
They added a contemporary flavour to the life portrayed and displayed a somewhat less
indulgent attitude to youthful indiscretions than did the Roman comedy. New Comedy provided
the basic conventions of plot and characterization for the commedia erudita—comedy
performed from written texts—of 16th-century Italy, as in the plays of Niccolò
Machiavelli and Ludovico Ariosto. Similarly, the stock characters that persisted from Old
Comedy into New were taken over into the improvisational commedia dell’arte, becoming such
standard masked characters as Pantalone, the Dottore, the vainglorious Capitano, the young
lovers, and the servants, or zanni.
Rise of realistic comedy in 17th-century England
The early part of the 17th century in England saw the rise of a realistic mode of comedy based on
a satiric observation of contemporary manners and mores. It was masterminded by Ben Jonson,
and its purpose was didactic. Comedy, said Jonson in Every Man Out of his Humour (1599),
quoting the definition that during the Renaissance was attributed to Cicero, is an imitation of
life, a glass of custom, an image of truth. Comedy holds the mirror up to nature and reflects
things as they are, to the end that society may recognize the extent of its shortcomings and the
folly of its ways and set about its improvement. Jonson’s greatest plays—
Volpone (1606), Epicoene (1609), The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair (1614)—offer a richly
detailed contemporary account of the follies and vices that are always with us. The setting (apart
from Volpone) is Jonson’s own London, and the characters are the ingenious or the devious or
the grotesque products of the human wish to get ahead in the world. The conduct of a Jonsonian
comic plot is in the hands of a clever manipulator who is out to make reality conform to his own
desires. Sometimes he succeeds, as in the case of the clever young gentleman who gains his
uncle’s inheritance in Epicœne or the one who gains the rich Puritan widow for his wife
in Bartholomew Fair. In Volpone and The Alchemist, the schemes eventually fail, but this is the
fault of the manipulators, who will never stop when they are ahead, and not at all due to any
insight on the part of the victims. The victims are almost embarrassingly eager to be victimized.
Each has his ruling passion—his humour—and it serves to set him more or less mechanically in
the path that he will undeviatingly pursue, to his own discomfiture.
At the beginning of the 18th century, there was a blending of the tragic and comic genres that, in
one form or another, had been attempted throughout the preceding century. The vogue
of tragicomedy may be said to have been launched in England with the publication of John
Fletcher’s Faithfull Shepheardesse (c. 1608), an imitation of the Pastor fido, by the Italian
poet Battista Guarini. In his Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry (1601), Guarini had argued the
distinct nature of the genre, maintaining it to be a third poetic kind, different from either the
comic or the tragic. Tragicomedy, he wrote, takes from tragedy its great persons but not its great
action, its movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of them, its pleasure but not its
sadness, its danger but not its death, and from comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive,
modest amusement, feigned difficulty, and happy reversal. Fletcher adapted this statement in
the address “To the Reader” that prefaces The Faithfull Shepheardesse.
The form quickly established itself on the English stage, and, through the force of such examples
as Beaumont and Fletcher’s Phylaster (1610) and A King and No King (1611) and a long
sequence of Fletcher’s unaided tragicomedies, it prevailed during the 20 years before the closing
of the theatres in 1642. The taste for tragicomedy continued unabated at the Restoration, and its
influence was so pervasive that during the closing decades of the century the form began to be
seen in plays that were not, at least by authorial designation, tragicomedies. Its effect on tragedy
can be seen not only in the tendency, always present on the English stage, to mix scenes of mirth
with more solemn matters but also in the practice of providing tragedy with a double ending (a
fortunate one for the virtuous, an unfortunate one for the vicious), as in Dryden’s Aureng-
Zebe (1675) or Congreve’s Mourning Bride (1697). The general lines separating the tragic and
comic genres began to break down, and that which is high, serious, and capable of
arousing pathos could exist in the same play with what is low, ridiculous, and capable of
arousing derision. The next step in the process came when Sir Richard Steele, bent on reforming
comedy for didactic purposes, produced The Conscious Lovers (1722) and provided the English
stage with an occasion when the audience at a comedy could derive its chief pleasure not from
laughing but from weeping. It wept in the delight of seeing virtue rewarded and young love come
to flower after parental opposition had been overcome. Comedy of the sort inaugurated by The
Conscious Lovers continued to represent the affairs of private life, as comedy had always done,
but with a seriousness hitherto unknown; and the traditionally low personages of comedy now
had a capacity for feeling that bestowed on them a dignity previously reserved for the personages
of tragedy.
This trend in comedy was part of a wave of egalitarianism that swept through 18th-century
political and social thought. It was matched by a corresponding trend in tragedy, which
increasingly selected its subjects from the affairs of private men and women in ordinary life,
rather than from the doings of the great. The German dramatist Gotthold Lessing wrote that the
misfortunes of those whose circumstances most resemble those of the audience must naturally
penetrate most deeply into its heart, and his own Minna von Barnhelm (1767) is an example of
the new serious comedy. The capacity to feel, to sympathize with, and to be affected by the plight
of a fellow human being without regard for rank in the world’s esteem became the measure of
one’s humanity. It was a bond that united the fraternity of humankind in an aesthetic revolution
that preceded the political revolutions of the 18th century. In literature, this had the effect of
hastening the movement toward a more realistic representation of reality, whereby the familiar
events of common life are treated “seriously and problematically” (in the phrase of the
critic Erich Auerbach, who traced the process in his book Mimesis [1946]). The results may be
seen in novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747–48) and in
middle-class tragedies such as George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731) in England; in
the comédie larmoyante (“tearful comedy”) in France; in Carlo Goldoni’s efforts to reform
the commedia dell’arte and replace it with a more naturalistic comedy in the Italian theatre; and
in the English sentimental comedy, exemplified in its full-blown state by plays such as Hugh
Kelly’s False Delicacy (1768) and Richard Cumberland’s West Indian (1771). Concerning the
sentimental comedy, it must be noted that it is only in the matter of appropriating for
the bourgeoisie a seriousness of tone and a dignity of representational style previously
considered the exclusive property of the nobility that the form can be said to stand in any
significant relationship to the development of a more realistic mimetic mode than the traditional
tragic and comic ones. The plots of sentimental comedy are as contrived as anything
in Plautus and Terence (which with their fondness for foundling heroes who turn out to be long-
lost sons of rich merchants, they often resemble); and with their delicate feelings and genteel
moral atmosphere, comedies of this sort seem as affected in matters of sentiment as Restoration
comedy seems in matters of wit.
Oliver Goldsmith, in his “A Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy” (1773),
noted the extent to which the comedy in the England of his day had departed from its traditional
purpose, the excitation of laughter by exhibiting the follies of the lower part of humankind. He
questioned whether an exhibition of its follies would not be preferable to a detail of
its calamities. In sentimental comedy, Goldsmith continued, the virtues of private life were
exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the distresses rather than the faults of humankind
generated interest in the piece. Characters in these plays were almost always good; if they had
faults, the spectator was expected not only to pardon but to applaud them, in consideration of
the goodness of their hearts. Thus, according to Goldsmith, folly was commended instead of
being ridiculed. Goldsmith concluded by labeling sentimental comedy a “species of bastard
tragedy,” “a kind of mulish production,” a designation that ironically brings to mind Guarini’s
comparison of tragicomedy in its uniqueness (a product of comedy and tragedy but different
from either) to the mule (the offspring of the horse and the ass but itself neither one nor the
other). The production of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan’s Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777) briefly reintroduced comic gaiety to
the English stage; by the end of the decade, Sheridan’s dramatic burlesque, The Critic (first
performed 1779), had appeared, with its parody of contemporary dramatic fashions, the
sentimental included. But this virtually concluded Sheridan’s career as a dramatist. Goldsmith
had died in 1774, and the sentimental play was to continue to govern the English comic stage for
over a century to come.
The comic outside the theatre
The great comic voices of the 18th century in England were not those in the theatre. No
dramatic satire of the period can exhibit anything comparable to the furious ridicule of human
triviality and viciousness that Jonathan Swift provided in Gulliver’s Travels (1726). His Modest
Proposal (1729) is a masterpiece of comic incongruity, with its suave blend of rational
deliberation and savage conclusion. The comic artistry of Alexander Pope is equally impressive.
Pope expressed his genius in the invective of his satiric portraits and in the range of moral and
imaginative vision that was capable, at one end of his poetic scale, of conducting that most
elegant of drawing-room epics, The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), to its
sublimely inane conclusion and, at the other, of invoking from the scene that closes The
Dunciad (1728), an apocalyptic judgment telling what will happen when the vulgarizers of the
word have carried the day.
When the voice of comedy did sound on the 18th-century English stage with anything
approaching its full critical and satiric resonance, the officials soon silenced it. John
Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728) combined hilarity with a satiric fierceness worthy of Swift (who
may have suggested the original idea for it). The officials tolerated its spectacularly successful
run, but no license from the lord chamberlain could be secured for Gay’s sequel, Polly, which
was not staged until 1777. The Licensing Act of 1737 ended the theatrical career of Henry
Fielding, whose comedies had come under constant fire from the authorities for their satire on
the government. Fielding’s comic talents were perforce directed to the novel, the form in which
he parodied the sentiment and the morality of Richardson’s Pamela—in
his Shamela and Joseph Andrews (1742)—as brilliantly as he had earlier burlesqued the rant
of heroic tragedy in Tom Thumb (1730).
Comedy of the sort that ridicules the follies and vices of society to the end of laughing them out
of countenance entered the English novel with Fielding. His statement in Joseph
Andrews concerning the function of satire is squarely in the Neoclassic tradition of comedy as a
corrective of manners and mores: the satirist holds
the glass to thousands in their closets, that they may contemplate their deformity, and endeavour to
reduce it, and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame.
Fielding’s scenes of contemporary life display the same power of social criticism as that which
distinguishes the engravings of his great fellow artist William Hogarth, whose Marriage à la
Mode (1745) depicts the vacuity and the casual wantonness of the fashionable world that
Fielding treats of in the final books of Tom Jones. Hogarth’s other series, such as A Rake’s
Progress (1735) and A Harlot’s Progress (1732), also make a didactic point about the wages of
sin, using realistic details heightened with grotesquerie to expose human frailty and
its sinister consequences. The grotesque is a recurrent feature of the satiric tradition in England,
where comedy serves social criticism. Artists such as Hogarth and Thomas Rowlandson worked
in the tradition of Jonson and the Restoration dramatists in the preceding century.
The novel, with its larger scope for varied characters, scenes, and incidents, rather than
the drama, afforded the 19th-century artist in comedy a literary form adequate to his role as
social critic. The spectacle of human society is regularly presented by the 19th-century novelist
in comedic terms, as in Vanity Fair (1848), by William Makepeace Thackeray and the Comédie
humaine (1842–55) of Honoré de Balzac, and with the novels of Jane Austen, Anthony
Trollope, Charles Dickens, and George Meredith.
20th-century tragicomedy
The best that the comic stage had to offer in the late 19th century lay in the domain of farce. The
masters of this form were French, but it flourished in England as well; what the farces of Eugène
Labiche and Georges Feydeau and the operettas of Jacques Offenbach were to the Parisian stage
the farces of W.S. Gilbert and the young Arthur Wing Pinero and the operettas that Gilbert wrote
in collaboration with Arthur Sullivan were to the London stage. As concerns comedy, the
situation in England improved at the end of the century, when Oscar Wilde and George Bernard
Shaw turned their talents to it. Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is farce raised to the
level of high comic burlesque. Shaw’s choice of the comic form was inevitable, given his
determination that the contemporary English stage should deal seriously and responsibly with
the issues that were of crucial importance to contemporary English life. Serious subjects could
not be resolved by means of the dramatic clichés of Victorian melodrama. Rather, the
prevailing stereotypes concerning the nature of honour, courage, wisdom, and virtue were to be
subjected to a hail of paradox, to the end of making evident their inner emptiness or the
contradictions they concealed.
Shaw dealt with what, in the preface to Major Barbara (1905), he called “the tragi-
comic irony of the conflict between real life and the romantic imagination,” and his use of the
word tragicomic is a sign of the times. The striking feature of modern art, according to the
German novelist Thomas Mann, was that it had ceased to recognize the categories of tragic and
comic or the dramatic classifications of tragedy and comedy but saw life as tragicomedy. The
sense that tragicomedy is the only adequate dramatic form for projecting the
unreconciled ironies of modern life mounted through the closing decades of the 19th
century. Ibsen had termed The Wild Duck (published 1884) a tragicomedy; it was an
appropriate designation for this bitter play about a young man blissfully ignorant of the lies on
which he and his family have built their happy life until an outsider who is committed to an ideal
of absolute truth exposes all their guilty secrets with disastrous results. The plays of the Russian
writer Anton Chekhov, with their touching and often quite humorous figures leading lives of
quiet desperation, reflect precisely that mixture of inarticulate joy and dull pain that is the
essence of the tragicomic view of life.
A dramatist such as August Strindberg produces a kind of tragicomedy peculiarly his own, one
that takes the form of bourgeois tragedy; it lacerates its principals until they become a parody of
themselves. Strindberg’s Dance of Death (1901), with its cruelty and pain dispensed
with robust pleasure by a fiercely battling husband and wife, is a significant model of
the grotesque in the modern theatre; it is reflected in such mid-20th-century examples of what
came to be called black comedy as Eugène Ionesco’s Victims of Duty (1953) and Edward
Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Almost equally influential as a turn-of-the-
century master of the grotesque is Frank Wedekind, whose Earth Spirit (1895) and its
sequel, Pandora’s Box (written 1892–1901), though both are termed tragedies by their author,
are as much burlesques of tragedy as The Dance of Death. Their grotesquerie consists chiefly in
their disturbing combination of innocence and depravity, of farce and horror, of passionate
fervour issuing in ludicrous incident that turns deadly. Wedekind’s celebration of primitive
sexuality and the varied ways in which it manifests itself in an oversophisticated civilization
distorts the tragic form to achieve its own grotesque beauty and power.
One great artist of the grotesque and of tragicomedy in the 20th century was the Italian Luigi
Pirandello. His drama is explicitly addressed to the contradictoriness of experience: appearances
collide and cancel out each other; the quest of the absolute issues in a mind-reeling
relativism; infinite spiritual yearnings are brought up hard against finite physical limits; rational
purpose is undermined by irrational impulse; and with the longing for permanence in the midst
of change comes the ironic awareness that changelessness means death. Stated thus, Pirandello’s
themes sound almost forbiddingly intellectual, but one of his aims was to convert intellect into
passion. Pirandello’s characters suffer from intellectual dilemmas that give rise to mental and
emotional distress of the most anguished kind, but their sufferings are placed in a satiric frame.
The incongruities that the characters are furiously seeking to reconcile attest to the comic aspect
of this drama, but there is nothing in it of the traditional movement of comedy, from a state
of illusion into the full light of reality. Pirandello’s characters dwell amid ambiguities and
equivocations that those who are wise in the tragicomic nature of life will accept without close
inquiry. The logic of comedy implies that illusions exist to be dispelled; once they are dispelled,
everyone will be better off. The logic of Pirandello’s tragicomedy demonstrates that illusions
make life bearable; to destroy them is to destroy the basis for any possible happiness.
The absurd
In their highly individual ways, both Samuel Beckett and Ionesco employed the forms of comedy
—from tragicomedy to farce—to convey the vision of an exhausted civilization and a chaotic
world. The very endurance of life amid the grotesque circumstances that obtain in Beckett’s
plays is at once a tribute to the human power of carrying on to the end and an ironic reflection
on the absurdity of doing so. Beckett’s plays close in an uneasy silence that is the more
disquieting because of the uncertainty as to just what it conceals: whether it
masks sinister forces ready to spring or is the expression of a universal indifference or issues out
of nothing at all.
Silence seldom reigns in the theatre of Ionesco, which rings with voices raised in a usually
mindless clamour. Some of Ionesco’s most telling comic effects come from his use
of dialogue overflowing with clichés and non sequiturs, which make it clear that the characters
do not have their minds on what they are saying and, indeed, do not have their minds on
anything at all. What they say is often at grotesque variance with what they do. Beneath
the moral platitudes lurks violence, which is never far from the surface in Ionesco’s plays, and
the violence tells what happens to societies in which words and deeds have become fatally
disjunct. Ionesco’s comic sense is evident as well in his depiction of human beings as automata,
their movements decreed by forces they have never questioned or sought to understand. There is
something undeniably farcical in Ionesco’s spectacles of human regimentation, of men and
women at the mercy of things (e.g., the stage full of chairs in The Chairs or the growing corpse
in Amédée); the comic quality in these plays is one that Bergson would have appreciated. But the
comic in Ionesco’s most serious work, as in so much of mid-20th-century theatre, has
ominous implications that give to it a distinctly grotesque aspect. In Ionesco’s Victims of
Duty and The Killer (1959), as in the works of his Swiss counterparts—Friedrich Dürrenmatt,
author of The Visit (performed 1956) and The Physicists (1962), and Max Frisch, author of The
Firebugs (1958)—the grotesquerie of the tragicomic vision delineates a world in which the
humane virtues are dying, and casual violence is the order of the day.
The radical reassessment of the human image that the 20th century witnessed is reflected in
the novel as well as in drama. Previous assumptions about the rational and divine aspects of
humans were increasingly called into question by the evidences of irrationality and sheer
animality. These are qualities of human nature that writers of previous ages (Swift, for example)
have always recognized, but hitherto they were typically viewed as dark possibilities that could
overtake humanity if the rule of reason did not prevail. Only in the mid-20th century did the
savage and the irrational come to be viewed as part of the normative condition of humanity
rather than as tragic aberrations from it. The savage and the irrational amount to grotesque
parodies of human possibility, ideally conceived. Thus it was that 20th-century novelists as well
as dramatists recognized the tragicomic nature of the modern human image and predicament,
and the principal mode of representing both was the grotesque. This took various forms: the
apocalyptic nightmare of tyranny and terror in Franz Kafka’s novels The Trial (1925) and The
Castle (1926); the tragic farce in terms of which the Austrian novelist Robert Musil described the
slow collapse of a society into anarchy and chaos, in The Man Without Qualities (1930–43); the
brilliant irony whereby Thomas Mann represented the hero as a confidence man in The
Confessions of Felix Krull (1954); and the grimly parodic account of Germany’s descent into
madness in Günter Grass’s novel The Tin Drum (1959). The English novel contains a rich vein of
the comic grotesque that extends at least back to Dickens and Thackeray and persisted in the
20th century in such varied novels as Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928), Angus
Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), and Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954). What these
novelists had in common is the often disturbing combination of hilarity and desperation. It had
its parallel in a number of American novels—such as John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Kurt
Vonnegut, Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969)—in which shrill farce is the medium for grim satire.
And the grotesque is a prominent feature of modern poetry, as in some of the work of W.H.
Auden.
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