Comedies and tragedies can each be divided into three types.
The common definitions of a comedy as a play that makes you laugh and a tragedy as a play that makes you cry -- and perhaps where everyone dies -- are incomplete. From the time of Aristotle on, philosophers have been attempting to define exactly what comedy and tragedy are and how they can be subdivided. In the theater, a few principles of these two themes are accepted.
Comedy
Comedies have happy endings.
Strictly speaking, comedy does not have to be funny. By its classical definition, a comedy is a play in which the main character is sympathetic, meaning that the audience likes him, and in which he gets a happy ending. This character does not need to be a particularly good person. Indeed, comic heroes are generally average at best on the moral scale. He only has to be likeable. The characters in a comedy also tend to be ordinary people rather than nobility or royalty.
Types of Comedy
Comedies come in three types: farce, romantic comedy and satire. Farces are fast-paced, rather absurd stories of mistaken identities, bizarre coincidences and slapstick humor, commonly involving disguises and sets with lots of doors. Romantic comedies are stories of a couple in love who belong together but have something keeping them apart. They commonly follow the basic plot, "Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back." Satires are usually populated by amoral or foolish people who spend their time playing tricks on and victimizing one another.
Tragedy
Shakespeare's "King Lear" is an Aristotelian tragedy.
Tragedy is the opposite of comedy. Instead of an average person getting a happy ending, an extraordinary person falls from grace. The classical definition of tragedy is Aristotle's: A good person has a fatal flaw, makes an error due to that flaw, and suffers for it, eventually gaining a greater understanding than he started with. In a tragedy, the audience feels fear, pity and eventually the catharsis of these emotions. This catharsis is why people go to see tragedies.
Types of Tragedies
Shakespear's "Hamlet" is an Aristotelian tragedy and a revenge tragedy.
Along with Aristotelian tragedy, two other types exist: Hegelian tragedy and revenge tragedy. The philosopher Friedrich Hegel believed that a tragedy is when two forces of good must oppose each other and one must destroy the other. The classic example is "Antigone," by Sophocles, in which both Antigone and Creon are in the right but they cannot both win. Revenge tragedies are stories in which a good person has been wronged and cannot rely upon the law to avenge him, so he must seek revenge himself. This kind of tragedy originated in ancient Greece and remains a popular theme for Hollywood today.
