From tragedy to tragicomedy

 Can a tragedy have a happy ending?

It’s a philosophical question, and ancient philosophers and critics wrestled with it, at least those who wondered what Euripides was doing.

It’s hard to miss the happy ending in Alcestis. People also noticed that the play was so loaded with irony it almost was satiric, and satires are not tragedies.

I’m reading the Greek tragedies in 2024, and the classic tragedies are behind us. We’re coming up on a string of four — Alcestis, Iphigeneia at Tauris, Ion and Helen — that the ancient critics had trouble classifying. Alcestis is almost a satire, and Helen is almost a comedy.

Professor H.D.F. Kitto, my guide to the tragedies, said that all the ancient dramas, with their gods and heroes, involved things that aren’t real. But tragedy seems real, while tragicomedy is another step away from reality.

For example, the next play in line, Alcestis, begins with the premiss that a wife will take the place of a husband who is fated to die. Within that wildly unrealistic premiss, everything makes sense. But we know from the start that we’re in a world of make believe.

In Kitto’s account, tragedy is to tragicomedy what fiction is to science fiction or fantasy.

In classic tragedy, the play is built around a tragic conception, a mythos — an account of the “terms and conditions of human life,” as Kitto puts it.

Euripides famously worked out his idea of the human tragedy at the expense of his plots and characterizations. Sometimes, his scenes were interrupted by long philosophical discourses.

In the tragicomedies, the tragic conception is gone, so there’s no need for philosophical interruptions. As Kitto says, the door was wide open for elegant plots and neat characterizations.

The aesthetic of tragicomedy was simply different. A good play was not one that carried a profound moral sense. It was one where all the elements of the dramatic arts — plot, dialog, poetry — were good.

It was art for art’s sake.

• Source: H.D.F. Kitto, Greek Tragedy; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1954. The chapter “New Tragedy: Euripides’ Tragi-Comedies” is on pp. 327-47.