Tragedy and Comedy

Some of the earliest traces of tragedy and comedy date back to Greek festivals honoring their gods. Among all the gods, Dionysus was honored with a festival called City Dionysia. This festival took place in Athens which was a preeminent core of theatrical performances at the time. The dithyramb, an ancient Greek hymn, was sung in honor of this god. In fact, tragedy and comedy almost originated as one. John Morreall of State University of New York wrote, “the great dramatists wrote both tragedies and comedies”(Morreall 3). While this statement is quite valid, there is far more to the origins of comedy and tragedy than what meets the eye. Comedy and tragedy, though once quite the same, eventually began to grow apart as the differences between them strengthened. As this culture developed and went through the Shakespearean Era, tragedy and comedy have evolved into what they are today.

Early Greek tragedies were made to be performed upfront of an audience in a theater and were never truly intended to be written in the forms of novels. In fact, the origins of comedy and tragedy can be traced back to the great three tragedians: Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. These great three composed some of the best plays of all time. Each generation re-invented the same myths from a different perspective and this sort of kept the myths alive because they seemed more valid. For example, Sophocles was a, “definitive innovator in the drama, he added a third actor—thereby tremendously increasing the dramatic possibilities of the medium—increased the size of the chorus, abandoned the trilogy of plays for the self-contained tragedy, and introduced scene painting”(Columbia E.E. 1). The Greeks divided their theatre into three genres: tragedies, comedi...

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...that deal with emotional disengagement and other social differences. In the end, these are both two quite different genres. The great three tragedians in the Greek culture, and later on Shakespeare, during the Elizabethan era, prove that comedy and tragedy grew apart and expanded dramatically over the centuries.

Works Cited

Morreall, John. Comedy, Tragedy, And Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1999. eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 21 Feb. 2014.

WALLACE, JENNIFER. "Tragedy And Laughter." Comparative Drama 47.2 (2013): 201-224. Academic Search Premier. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.

Morreall, John. "ComedyTragedyCharacteristics." ComedyTragedyCharacteristics. Albany State University of New York, 29 Jan. 2002. Web. 03 Mar. 2014.

"Sophocles." Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6Th Edition (2013): 1. Literary Reference Center. Web. 3 Mar. 2014.