Re aphorism attributed by an online blog to Zach Helm in his screenplay for Stranger than Fiction (2006), voiced by the character Professor Jules Hilbert played by Dustin Hoffman: “Every tragedy ends in a death, and every comedy ends in a wedding.” Is the attribution valid and is it the earliest-known phrasing of the idea expressed?
Googling without the quotes eventually leads to “All tragedies are finish’d by a death, All comedies are ended by a marriage.”
From canto iii of Lord Byron’s poem Don Juan. Apparently the poem is satirical, which kind of makes sense, because—though the line has the ring of truth to it—it’s simply not true.
The quote is definitely older than 2006. In my view, it is semi-jocular - in the sense that it is not literally true (there are definitely comedies and tragedies to which this does not apply), but it is “directionally true” in the sense that it gives a fair indication of the characteristics of comedies and tragedies.
For centuries, a common distinction was, by the way, a different one, based on the social background of the characters: Comedies would feature commoners as protagonists, whereas a tragedy had to be staffed with royals and aristocrats. Definitely a rule that Shakespeare complied with, but it dates back to antiquity.
Doesn’t the rule apply to Shakespeare’s plays?
I started checking the list of his comedies here and after seeing that 3 of the first 4 don’t end in a wedding I gave up.
So, no.
I can’t think of any Shakespearean tragedies about commoners (you want to start from as high as possible, to make the fall as far as possible), but there are certainly comedies about nobles. The butts of jokes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream include the Duke of Athens and his betrothed and the King and Queen of Faerie, and even the four main human protagonists are all well-born. I don’t know if any of the main characters in A Merchant of Venice are precisely noble, but they’re all at least very rich and influential. And then there are the plays like The Tempest and Measure for Measure, which are difficult to classify but which end with marriages imminent and all main characters alive, and feature nobles.
16th-century audiences loved to see someone from the nobility getting his comeuppance. Shakespeare wrote plays for the masses - if he was writing today he would probably not be writing highbrow plays, more likely cutting edge drama or even soaps.
There are no absolute rules or canons in arts, and in general aphorisms should be taken with a grain of salt anyway. In Oedipus Rex, for example, the hero does not die at the end of the play, but for an ancient audience his staying alive is perceived as a worse punishment than death itself. We could probably say that a tragedy is supposed to end in a death or the equivalent of a death (or worse :D).
This answers my question as much as I could ask for—thank you!
Hold on, I’m almost certain that Byron didn’t invent it. It is from antiquity, IIRC, but I can’t remember where I could have read it. I think it may have been in one of Aristophanes’ introductions to a play. If not that, it sounds like one of Cicero’s bullshitisms.
Waiting with bated breath.
Aristotle wrote something similar in Poetics. He said that Athenian tragedy evolved from the dithyramb, a celebration celebrating Dionysus, while comedy derived from phallic dances.
I’ve seen the dramatic paradigm as: “Comedy: the low are brought high. Tragedy: the high are brought low.” As for the topic, I’m vastly amused by the opposite readings.
“…every comedy ends in a wedding.”
vs
“…All comedies are ended by a marriage.”
Does comedy result in marriage, or is a wedding when the fun ends?
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.
Mel Brooks
I think there are a couple of very relevant lines in Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, Act 2, Scene 9:
NERISSA:
The ancient saying is no heresy,
Hanging and wiving goes by destiny.
He couldn’t die in Oedipus Rex or Sophocles would have had nowhere to go in Oedipus at Colonus!
“It’s better to be Wasserman Positive than never to have loved at all.”
-traditional