DRAMATIC GENRES AS TO THEIR CONTENTS
1. COMEDY OF MANNERS (NRAVI)
- a term designates realistic, often satirical comedy
- was first developed in the new comedy of the Ancient Greek playwright Menander
- is a complex and sophisticated sign of behaviour in fashionable circles of society – it mocks the behaviour of the upper class
- appearances count more than true moral character
- its plot revolves around intrigues of lust, greed, cynicism and forbidden love affair or other scandalous matter
- tends to reward its cleverly characters rather than punish their immorality
- the humour is elegant, witty and ironic
- written by sophisticated authors for members of their own social class
- concerned with social custom of certain characters to meet social standards
- most known writers: William Congreve, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Oscar Wilde, and Noel Coward
- also worth of mentioning is the French playwright Molière and The School for Wives (1662), The Misanthrope (1666) and
his most famous Tartuffe (1664)
2. COMEDY OF INTRIGUE (ZAPLET)
- also called comedy of situation
- the phrase is sometimes used also to refer merely to an incident
- in the hands of a master such as Molière, the comedy of intrigue often shades into a comedy of manners
- a comic form in which complicated conspiracies and deception dominate the plot
- the background is less important than ridiculous and incompatible situations
- complex plots and subplots are based on disgust, plots within plots, mistaken identities, unexpected meetings and close calls
with doses of farcical humour - jokes or gags
- example is Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors in 1592 - about twin brothers who have twins as servants (approaches farce)
3. COMEDY OF MORALS (NAUK, ETIKA)
- a type of critical comedy that skewers religious hypocrisy
- a term applied to comedy that uses ridicule to correct abuses, from now on a form of dramatic satire
- satire means that it humours about a particular subject (politics, religion and art) that it isn't always funny – it is ironic and
sarcastic
- it is aiming at the moral state of a people or a special class of people
- Moliere’s Tartuffe (1664) is often considered a comedy of morals
4. COMEDY OF IDEAS (NAMIŠLJENA VREDNOST)
- a dramatic genre that combines comedy with political, philosophical, and controversial attitudes
- arises precisely from the self-consciousness of society
- the whole life of society revolves around some third thing, for which no suitable name has yet been invented
- it can be defined as the "ideational" - life according to the idea
- a human being who has fallen away from God into sin is ludicrous and terrible—in the highest sense comical
- he is possessed by the passion for things, living by the laws of the material world, in the interests of wealth, career, profit
- characters need no names, they are served by initials, separated from concrete names such as ideas are separated from
concrete persons
- ideas have destroyed the people who defended them, but through the tragedy of the generations, they have revealed a comic
nature
- Irish dramatist George Bernard Shaw wrote a number of such plays: Arms and the Man (1894), Devil's Disciple (1897), Man
and Superman (1903), Pygmalion (1913), and St. Joan (1923).
Tjaša Slaček, 27.10.2009