Drama in which the main characters are ordinary people.
This form of tragedy contrasts with Classical tragedy, in which the main characters are of royal or aristocratic rank. An early domestic tragedy, A Warning for Faire Women (1599), deals with the murder of a merchant by his wife. The form became popular in the mid-18th century and reached its maturity in the 19th-century bourgeois tragedies of Henrik Ibsen . Gerhart Hauptmann , Eugene O'Neill , and Arthur Miller wrote important 20th-century domestic tragedies.