Analysis of The Poetics - Chapter 5

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Comedy represents men worse than those in life. These men are not bad or vicious but they are bad in the sense, ludicrous is a form of badness. Ludicrous is a form of badness but it is not cruel. Similarly these characters represent foolishness and insanity but they are not painful. The roots of the tragedy and it’s history is not unknown but the history of the origin and transformation of the comedy is obscure. The reason is that comedy was not taken seriously in the beginning and while being performed on the stage, most of its role play was left to the volunteers.
The epic and the tragedy are similar to each other in the sense that both are exalted in nature and present significant events but they are also different in many ways. The epic is in the form of narration while tragedy is a dramatic form. The other difference is on the basis of their length. The time period of a tragedy must be within the single revolution of a sun or just exceeding slightly whereas in case of an epic, there is no such restriction. This is the reason that the size of the epics are extremely large. The tragedy is a greater literary form as compared to epic, The reason is that the tragedy consists of all the elements of epic and also songs and spectacles. Thus it can be said that tragedy has all the qualities of an epic but an epic does not have all the qualities of a tragedy.

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