Domestic tragedy

A form of tragedy in which the protagonists are middle or
working class people whose downfall takes place within a family relationship.
The term underscores the contrast between these tragic characters and those in
Classical and Renaissance plays, men and women of royal blood, whose fate has
consequences for the community as a whole. Domestic tragedy made its fi rst
appearance on the Elizabethan stage in such plays as the anonymous Arden of
Feversham (1591), in which a wife and her lover murder the woman’s husband and
are caught and executed for the crime; and Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed
with Kindness (1603), in which the husband of an adulterous wife denies her access
to her children after he discovers her affair.
The form reemerged in the 18th century with the success of George Lillo’s
The London Merchant (1731), in which the murder of a merchant and the repen-
tance and execution of the murderer constitute the main action. The success of
Lillo’s play led to imitations in Germany, notably G. E. Lessing’s Miss Sara Sampson
(1755), the fi rst example in German drama of a tragedy focused on a middle
class family.
American drama in the 1940s saw a remarkable resurgence of middle class
family tragedy with Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Arthur
Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1948), and Eugene O’Neill’s most important play, A
Long Day’s Journey into Night (1940, produced, 1956).
From de Corpora - [Edward_Quinn]_A_Dictionary_of_Literary_And_Themat(BookFi)