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28-525: Dioclesian ( The Prophetess: or, The History of Dioclesian ) is an English tragicomic semi-opera in five acts by Henry Purcell to a libretto by Thomas Betterton based on the play The Prophetess , by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger , which in turn was based very loosely on the life of the Emperor Diocletian . It was premiered in late May 1690 at the Queen's Theatre, Dorset Garden . The play

56-557: A Prologue written by John Dryden that was suppressed after only one performance; it was far too critical of King William's military campaign in Ireland. The story is ostensibly about the struggle for power in Ancient Rome , but actually about the universal struggle between love and duty. Delphia, a prophetess , foretells that Diocles, a footsoldier, will become emperor after he kills a "mighty boar " and marry Delphia's niece Drusilla, who

84-400: A century and more. In England, where practice ran ahead of theory, the situation was quite different. In the sixteenth century, "tragicomedy" meant the native sort of romantic play that violated the unities of time, place, and action, that glibly mixed high- and low-born characters, and that presented fantastic actions. These were the features Philip Sidney deplored in his complaint against

112-409: A comedy, when there are kings and gods in it. What do you think? Since a slave also has a part in the play, I'll make it a tragicomedy...— Plautus , Amphitryon Two figures helped to elevate tragicomedy to the status of a regular genre, by which is meant one with its own set of rigid rules. First was Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio , a dramatist working in the mid-sixteenth century who developed

140-415: A happy ending" eventually developed into melodrama , in which form it still flourishes. Landgartha (1640) by Henry Burnell , the first play by an Irish playwright to be performed in an Irish theatre, was explicitly described by its author as a tragicomedy. Critical reaction to the play was universally hostile, partly it seems because the ending was neither happy nor unhappy. Burnell in his introduction to

168-451: A lawsuit, aged 73. He was the father of the scholar Alessandro Guarini and of Anna Guarini , one of the famous virtuose singers of the Ferrara court, the three women of the concerto di donne . She was murdered by her husband in 1598, with the assistance of her brother Girolamo. His most notable work, Il pastor fido , had its first dramatic representation in honor of the nuptials of

196-689: A place steeped in human tragedy and suffering. Films including Life is Beautiful , Mary and Max , Parasite , Jojo Rabbit , The Banshees of Inisherin , Beau is Afraid , Robot Dreams , and Memoir of a Snail have been described as tragicomedies. Television series including Succession , Killing Eve , Breaking Bad , Better Call Saul , Fleabag , I May Destroy You , BoJack Horseman , South Park , Steven Universe Future , Moral Orel , Barry , Made for Love and The White Lotus have also been described as tragicomedies. Giovanni Battista Guarini Giovanni Battista Guarini (10 December 1538 – 7 October 1612)

224-447: A secondary way on how close the action comes to a death. But, as Eugene Waith showed, the tragicomedy Fletcher developed in the next decade also had unifying stylistic features: sudden and unexpected revelations, outré plots, distant locales, and a persistent focus on elaborate, artificial rhetoric. Some of Fletcher's contemporaries, notably Philip Massinger and James Shirley , wrote popular tragicomedies. Richard Brome also essayed

252-676: A tragicomic impulse in modern theatre with Luigi Pirandello who influenced many playwrights including Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard. Also it can be seen in absurdist drama. Friedrich Dürrenmatt , the Swiss dramatist, suggested that tragicomedy was the inevitable genre for the twentieth century; he describes his play The Visit (1956) as a tragicomedy. Tragicomedy is a common genre in post- World War II British theatre, with authors as varied as Samuel Beckett , Tom Stoppard , John Arden , Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter writing in this genre. Vladimir Nabokov 's postmodern 1962 novel Pale Fire

280-450: A treatise on drama modeled on Roman comedies and tragedies as opposed to early Greek-based treatises that became the model for Italian dramatists at the time. He argued for a version of tragicomedy where a tragic story was told with a happy or comic ending ( tragedia a lieto fine), which he thought were better suited for staged performances as opposed to tragedies with unhappy endings which he thought were better when read. Even more important

308-411: Is a tragicomedy preoccupied with Elizabethan drama. American writers of the metamodernist and postmodernist movements have made use of tragicomedy and/or gallows humor . A notable example of a metamodernist tragicomedy is David Foster Wallace 's 1996 magnum opus , Infinite Jest . Wallace writes of comedic elements of living in a halfway house (i.e. "some people really do look like rodents"),

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336-434: Is in love with him. Diocles takes the prophecy seriously, and starts slaughtering pigs. As it turns out, a soldier called Volutius Aper (Aper=boar) has murdered the old emperor, and Diocles kills Aper in revenge. As a reward for this action he is made co-emperor and renames himself Dioclesian. He ignores his promise to marry Drusilla, and courts his co-emperor's sister the princess Aurelia instead. This angers Delphia, who brings

364-522: The Duke of Savoy and Catalina Michaela of Austria in 1585 (published in 1590 in Venice; 20th rev. ed., 1602, Venice; Eng. trans. The Faithful Shepherd , 1647). This play, a pastoral tragicomedy about the loves and fates of shepherds and hunters, polished in style, was translated into many languages and became popular during the 17th century. It set the pattern for a code of refinement and gallantry that lasted until

392-598: The classical age. It appears that the Greek philosopher Aristotle had something like the Renaissance meaning of the term (that is, a serious action with a happy ending) in mind when, in Poetics , he discusses tragedy with a dual ending. In this respect, a number of Greek and Roman plays , for instance Alcestis , may be called tragicomedies, though without any definite attributes outside of plot. The word itself originates with

420-418: The "mungrell Tragy-comedie" of the 1580s, and of which Shakespeare's Polonius offers famous testimony: "The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individuable, or poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are

448-618: The Duke led him to resign. After residing successively in Savoy , Mantua , Florence and Urbino , he returned to his native Ferrara. There he discharged one final public mission, that of congratulating Pope Paul V on his election (1605). In the late 1580s he was involved in a bitter polemic with Giason Denores , who objected in particular to Guarini's mixing of tragic and comic genres in his Pastor fido . He died in Venice , where he had been summoned to attend

476-535: The Roman comic playwright Plautus , who coined the term ( tragicomoedia in Latin) somewhat facetiously in the prologue to his play Amphitryon . The character Mercury, sensing the indecorum of the inclusion of both kings and gods alongside servants in a comedy, declares that the play had better be a "tragicomoedia": I will make it a mixture: let it be a tragicomedy. I don't think it would be appropriate to make it consistently

504-464: The form, but with less success. And many of their contemporary writers, ranging from John Ford to Lodowick Carlell to Sir Aston Cockayne , made attempts in the genre. Tragicomedy remained fairly popular up to the closing of the theaters in 1642, and Fletcher's works were popular in the Restoration as well. The old styles were cast aside as tastes changed in the eighteenth century; the "tragedy with

532-431: The late 18th century. No poet played a larger role in the flowering of the madrigal in the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras than Guarini. His poems were set more often by madrigal composers than the work of any other poet, even Tasso , who came in a close second; the prolific madrigal composer Philippe de Monte even named one of his collections Il pastor fido after Guarini's most famous work. His popularity

560-451: The only men." Some aspects of this romantic impulse remain even in the work of more sophisticated playwrights: Shakespeare 's last plays, which may well be called tragicomedies, have often been called romances . By the early Stuart period, some English playwrights had absorbed the lessons of the Guarini controversy. John Fletcher 's The Faithful Shepherdess , an adaptation of Guarini's play,

588-516: The printed edition of the play attacked his critics for their ignorance, pointing out that as they should know perfectly well, many plays are neither tragedy nor comedy, but "something between". Criticism that developed after the Renaissance stressed the thematic and formal aspects of tragicomedy, rather than plot. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing defined it as a mixture of emotions in which "seriousness stimulates laughter, and pain pleasure." Tragicomedy's affinity with satire and "dark" comedy have suggested

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616-486: The wedding ceremony to a stop by conjuring a storm and a monster. She then causes the princess to fall in love with Diocles' rival Maximinian, and the Persians to defeat the Roman army. Diocles realises the error of his ways, routs the invaders, cedes his half of the throne to Maximinian, and moves to Lombardy with Drusilla. Notes Sources Tragicomedy There is no concise formal definition of tragicomedy from

644-407: Was Giovanni Battista Guarini . Guarini's Il Pastor Fido , published in 1590, provoked a fierce critical debate in which Guarini's spirited defense of generic innovation eventually carried the day. Guarini's tragicomedy offered modulated action that never drifted too far either to comedy or tragedy, mannered characters, and a pastoral setting. All three became staples of continental tragicomedy for

672-498: Was an Italian poet, dramatist, and diplomat. Guarini was born in Ferrara . On the termination of his studies at the universities of Pisa , Padua and Ferrara , he was appointed professor of literature at Ferrara. Soon after his appointment, he published some sonnets which obtained for him great popularity as a poet. In 1567, he entered the service of Alfonso II d'Este , Duke of Ferrara . After about 20 years of service, differences with

700-529: Was due to his providing texts to composers which were rich with possibilities for word-painting and other easy translations of emotion into music. One of his poems, the erotic Tirsi morir volea , recounting the amorous encounter of a shepherd and a nymph, was set to music as a madrigal by more composers than any other pastoral poem of the era, including, among others, Andrea Gabrieli , Gioseppe Caimo , Carlo Gesualdo , Luca Marenzio , Benedetto Pallavicino , and Giaches de Wert . Another of Guarini's poems which

728-435: Was first produced in 1622. Choreography for the various dances was provided by Josias Priest , who worked with Purcell on several other semi-operas. Betterton reworked the play extensively, making room for a great deal of Purcell's music, notably in the 'monster' scene at the end of Act II and the final Masque about the victory of Love, which remained popular until well into the eighteenth century. The premier production had

756-431: Was produced in 1608. In the printed edition, Fletcher offered a definition of the term, stating that: "A tragi-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie." Fletcher's definition focuses primarily on events: a play's genre is determined by whether or not people die in it, and in

784-446: Was set by numerous madrigalists was Cor mio, deh non languire ("Dear heart, I prithee do not waste away"). In addition to his decisive influence on madrigal composers, he was the single largest influence on opera librettists up until the time of Metastasio in the 18th century. He therefore plays an important role in the history of music . While Guarini's work may be seen as lacking the deep feeling and sentiment of another poet at

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