What is bourgeois or domestic tragedy with example?
Answers
Domestic tragedy, drama in which the tragic protagonists are ordinary middle-class or lower-class individuals, in contrast to classical and Neoclassical tragedy, in which the protagonists are of kingly or aristocratic rank and their downfall is an affair of state as well as a personal matter.
The earliest known examples of domestic tragedy are three anonymous late Elizabethan dramas: Arden of Feversham (c. 1591), the story of the murder of Mr. Arden by his wife and her lover and their subsequent execution; A Warning for Faire Women (1599), which deals with the murder of a merchant by his wife; and A Yorkshire Tragedy (c. 1606), in which a father destroys his family. To these may be added Thomas Heywood’s less sensational but no less tragic A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse(1607). Domestic tragedy did not take hold, however, until reintroduced in the 18th century by George Lillo with The London Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell (1731). The popularity of this sordid drama of an apprentice who murders his uncle-guardian influenced domestic tragedy in France and Germany, where the dramatist and critic G.E. Lessing, in his Hamburgische Dramaturgie (1767–69), paved the way for its critical acceptance.