English Literature / Unit 7 ENL 0602 short lesson, about 20 seconds
The Kinds of Play: Comedy, History, Tragedy, Romance
Captions available
The idea
The First Folio sorted the plays into comedies, histories and tragedies. Critics later grouped the last plays, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as romances, a term first used in eighteen seventy-seven. The comedies end in marriage, the tragedies in death.
In practice
Comedies, histories, tragedies, romances.
Where people slip
The romances are a later critics' category.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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