Types of Tragedies

Types of Tragedies

1. Senecan Tragedy

   • Named after the Roman poet Seneca who wrote senecan trgedies such as hercules,Oedipus and six others, his tragedies were recited rather than staged but became a model for English playwrights entailing the five-act structure, a complex plot and an elevated style of dialogue.

2. Revenge tragedy

   • A popular genre in the Elizabethan Age. They were greatly influenced by Senecan tragedies. usually involve murder, revenge, mutilation and ghosts. plays of this genre often use false or real madness in its characters and may contain plays within the play

3. Domestic tragedy

   • In line with a changing social system where the middle class gained increasing importance and power, tragedies from the eighteenth century onward shifted their focus to protagonists from the middle or lower classes and were written in prose. The protagonist typically suffers a domestic disaster which is intended to arouse empathy rather than pity and fear in the audience.
     • Modern tragedies such as Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman (1949) follow largely the new conventions set forth by the domestic tragedy (common conflict, common characters, prose) and a number of contemporary plays have exchanged the tragic hero for an anti-hero

4. Tragicomedy

   • Tragicomedies, as the name suggests, intermingle conventions concerning plot, character and subject matter derived from both tragedy and comedy. Thus, characters of both high and low social rank can be mixed