In the following essay, Foster relates The Wild Duck to modern tragic comedy.

Tragicomedy is an exceedingly slippery genre that can incorporate the tragic and the comic, the melodramatic and the farcical, the romantic and the satiric in a variety of combinations. It can boast antecedents in Euripidean, Terentian, and medieval drama and cognates in sentimental comedy, the drame (serious drama that is neither tragic nor comic), melodrama, savage farce, and so on. But the dramaturgical and emotional fusion of tragic and comic elements to create a distinguishable and theoretically significant new genre, tragicomedy, has developed only twice in the history of drama. Controversial in the Renaissance, tragicomedy has in modern times replaced tragedy itself as the most serious and moving of all dramatic kinds.

In the modern age it is almost impossible to write tragedy, especially within the realistic convention, which emphasizes ordinary human beings from...