Trilogy

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A trilogy is a connected group of three works - plays, novels, musical compositions or, more loosely, anything. The earliest examples were those Greek tragedies performed on a single day of the Dionysia religious festival for which they were written. Trilogy has since been expanded to groups of three works,usually written, in any language or culture.

  • Examples of trilogies include the Wesker trilogy, three plays by Arnold Wesker with common characters and themes (Chicken Soup with Barley (1958), Roots (1959), and I'm Talking about Jerusalem (1960)); the Canadian author Robertson Davies published three trilogies of novels (leaving a fourth incomplete), The Salterton, Deptford andCornish trilogies. In film, Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colors trilogy and Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy are examples thazt may be well known.
The equivalent name for a group of four related works is a tetralogy. Examples: Shakespeare's two historical tetralogies, Henry VI, parts 1, 2 and 3 and Richard III; and Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V; Wagner's Ring cycle (Der Ring des Nibelungen, containing the operas Das Rheingold (Rhinegold), Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods)); (these three tetralogies have all at one time or another been named 'trilogies', sometimes with one title or another omitted); novels include Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy.