Comparing Tragedy and Comedy—Which is Better?
When reading Shakespeare’s Othello at the same time as Much Ado About Nothing, readers should notice that each play deals with very similar ideas and somewhat similar storylines: pride, detailing how rumor, deceit, and gullibility play upon it; jealousy, what creates it and what it leads to; reputation, how it is created, abused, lost, and re-established; and others. However, though the plays share similar themes, since each play tells a different story with different characters, each is, nonetheless, unique in its presentation of these themes. One element that makes them easily distinguishable from each other: their dramatic genre. Othello is a tragedy, while Much Ado is a comedy. Because of this, each uses its thematic elements differently. Consider:
A dramatic comedy is best defined as a “literary work that aims primarily to provoke laughter . . . striv[ing] to entertain chiefly through [the] criticism and ridicule of man’s customs and institutions.”
A dramatic tragedy is best seen as a “form of drama that depicts the suffering of a heroic individual who is often overcome by the obstacles he is struggling to remove. . . . [most often] by a character flaw [in the protagonist]”1
Thus, while both deal with the flaws of humans and society, the primary difference is that in a comedy the audience is meant to laugh at these flaws as the protagonist learns from them, while in a tragedy the audience is meant to learn from and sympathize with the protagonist who, all too often, either fails to learn from his own flaws and mistakes or learns too late.
Thus while you read each play take careful notes on the themes discussed above, on the main characters (their flaws, their motives, their actions—good or bad), and on the way the plots unfold.
1 Both definitions are taken from The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th Edition.