Tragedy vs. comedy

THE ULTIMATE DEATH MATCH!

Okay. Not so much. But really, it's no contest. I don't think anyone would dispute that Shakespeare's tragedies are superior to his comedies (for some reason, whenever people talk about this, histories are only mentioned as a footnote, despite the fact he wrote ten of them, and you always get the one person who says about The Tempest or whatever, "but isn't that a romance?" and then you get a long discussion... that's not a bad thing, mind you, said discussions can be quite entertaining...). Of course, now that I've made such a sweeping generalization, someone's probably gonna argue that the comedies are, in fact, better than the tragedies. I'd love to see that. I'd love even more if someone would advance the notion that actually Shakespeare was best at writing history, since that's even more of a left-field position. My opinion, though, is that Shakespeare was pretty darn good at everything, but he was simply better at tragedy than the others.

However, there is a certain general bias that somehow tragedy constitutes High Art while comedy is just fodder for the masses or something. I wonder whether Shakespeare is somewhat responsible for this. I mean, look at his best-known plays. Hamlet. King Lear. Macbeth. Othello. Romeo and Juliet. The only comedy which has that degree of word-of-mouth recognition is A Midsummer Night's Dream. Could Shakespeare's status as the Best Playwright combined with the fact that the first plays of his people think of are tragedies lead to tragedy having an undue place at the pinnacle of Western storytelling? Or does it go back to the Greeks, or earlier?

Perhaps tomorrow I shall write about WHY I don't think tragedy is necessarily better than comedy. Stay tuned...