Shakespeare's Comic and Tragic Structures

The idea

The comedies and tragedies follow recognizable shapes. A comedy opens on a social obstacle, a harsh law, a parent's refusal or a disguise, moves its lovers into a second world such as a forest or a strange country where identities blur, and returns them to the court resolved, ending in marriages: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night follow it. A tragedy opens on a great figure making a fatal choice or receiving a fatal knowledge, Lear's love test, the ghost's revelation, the witches' prophecy, rises through the consequences, turns at a crisis, and falls to deaths that restore an order the hero did not live to see. The romances take the tragic first half, loss, exile and apparent death, and turn it toward recognition and forgiveness, as The Tempest does. Knowing the shape tells you where a quoted passage sits and what it is likely doing: a scene of confusion in a forest is comic complication, a recognition of error near the end is tragic.