NOVEL; ROMANCE.
The Drama is fiction presented not in the words of the author, but solely through the action and speech of the imagined characters. This type is commonly classified as comedy and tragedy; formerly comedy was distin guished as dealing with unimportant person ages and with the complications of common life, tragedy as dealing with great personages and lofty and fateful themes, but in modern times the usual distinction is based on the pre vailingly •happy ending of comedy and the hero's defeat (and, usually, death) character istic of the end of tragedy. In the period when tragedy normally confined itself to characters of rank or importance, an exceptional type was often distinguished as bourgeois tragedy, or tragedy of common life. Comedy may be con veniently classified as comedy of manners, romantic comedy, and farce. The comedy of manners satirizes familiar types of contempo rary life; examples are the chief plays of Ben Jonson, in the Elizabethan Age, and of Bernard Shaw in the present. As this sort of comedy is akin to the novel, romantic comedy is akin to the romance, dealing with the less familiar side of experience, and treating it sympathet ically rather than satirically. Shakespeare re mains the chief exemplar of romantic comedy; it does not flourish in modern times. Farce is comedy based on amusing action, in which plausibility of plot and emphasis on character are frankly abandoned. (Farce is sometimes distinguished as clow comedy,l' comedy based on the delineation of character as Thigh comedy"). Besides these principal types, vari ous mixed or indeterminate forms must be noted. Tragi-comedy— a term chiefly used in the 17th century — is drama dealing with dignified persons and serious events, but reach ing a solution instead of a catastrophe; Shake speare's and 'A Winter's Tale' are examples (though the former was classified as a tragedy, the latter as a comedy, in the folio edition of his plays). To these late
Shakespeare plays of blended character the term "'Romance is also applied. Modern usage tends to call the blended type simply ca play' or a "'drama° (French drame); this class may also include plays which end with death or disaster (like Rostand's 'Cyrano de Bergerac> and Ibsen's
which for one or another reason the dramatist does not wish to call tragedies. The Melodrama (originally meaning music-drama) is a term somewhat loosely applied to what might be called the serious farce,— a drama dependent on incident rather than character, and appealing not to the comic sense but to the sentiments. The Masque (or Mask) is an early form, occasionally re vived in the present time, in which music and pageantry are used to embellish the dramatic art, and in which the characters are usually symbolic or allegorical; the chief English ex ample is Milton's
In addition to the definitely established types of prose literature, there remain certain kinds imperfectly definable, of which one might note the fantasy or prose-poem,— a form of compo sition seeking the effects of poetry while keep ing to the medium of prose. In English litera ture the chief examples are certain reveries of De Quincey, such as that called