Alan Ayckbourn¿s "Season¿s Greetings" in the Comic Tradition

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Marburg (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: SE: "British Drama from the 1950s to the Present", language: English, abstract: This term paper deals with the placement of Alan Ayckbourn¿s Season¿s Greetings in the English comic tradition. Therefore, I will first put Ayckbourn¿s play within the historical context of the new drama, and subsequently define the term ¿comedy¿. Then, I will prove my thesis that Season¿s Greetings matches both conventionality and innovation with regard to comedy. In this way, I will also investigate in how far Season¿s Greetings as comedy contains both farcical and tragic elements, and suits other subgenres of comedy, too. Likewise, I will analyse how Ayckbourn makes use of the comic in Season¿s Greetings, and discuss if he continues the comic tradition with a new emphasis with regard to the assumption that he, like Shakespeare, writes plays for the spectator rather than the reader, among other things. In the conclusion, I will recap and reconsider the principal theses of my term paper and give my own diagnosis about Ayckbourn¿s drama. My thesis matters in so far that ¿the continuing life that [¿] comedies have [¿] justifies our study of the genre [¿]¿. Besides, English comedy has ¿the longest, most continuous generic tradition in Western literature¿, in which its tendency to the meta-theatrical achieves an awareness of the comic tradition onstage (cf. Leggatt 2). Anyway, it is meaningful that serious issues of everyday life are treated in a comic way.