Early Modern Tragicomedy (Studies in Renaissance Literature)

Early Modern Tragicomedy

Edited by Subha Mukherji and Raphael Lyne

Studies in Renaissance Literature Volume 22

EARLY MODERN TRAGICOMEDY

Studies in Renaissance Literature ISSN 1465–6310 General Editors David Colclough Raphael Lyne Sean Keilen

Studies in Renaissance Literature offers investigations of topics in English literature focussed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; its scope extends from early Tudor writing, including works reflecting medieval concerns, to the Restoration period. Studies exploring the interplay between the literature of the English Renaissance and its cultural history are particularly welcomed. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to the editors, or to the publisher, at the addresses given below; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Dr David Colclough, School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS Dr Raphael Lyne, New Hall, Cambridge, CB3 0DF Dr Sean Keilen, English Department, University of Pennsylvania, Fisher-Bennett Hall, 3340 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104–6273, USA Boydell & Brewer Limited, PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk, IP12 3DF Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this volume

EARLY MODERN TRAGICOMEDY

Edited by Subha Mukherji Raphael Lyne

D. S. BREWER

© Contributors 2007 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2007 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 978–1–84384–130–2

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Typeset by Pru Harrison, Hacheston, Suffolk

Printed in Great Britain by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

CONTENTS Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

Introduction Raphael Lyne and Subha Mukherji

1

1.

Aristotle and Tragicomedy Sarah Dewar-Watson

2.

The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini’s Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601 Matthew Treherne

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Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia Dell’arte Robert Henke

43

3.

15

4.

The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain Geraint Evans

5.

Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France Nicholas Hammond

76

In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England Ros King

84

6.

59

7.

Taking Pericles Seriously Suzanne Gossett

8.

‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’ Gordon McMullan

115

Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope

133

9.

101

10.

Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger’s The Renegado Michael Neill

11.

Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages Lucy Munro

13.

‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy Deana Rankin

Index

154 175

193 209

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In April 2005 the editors of this book organised a conference on ‘Tragicomedy: Renaissance to Restoration’ at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Most of the essays in this book bear some resemblance to papers presented there, and it was as a result of that conference that we recognised the need for a book such as this. The other speakers at the conference deserve many thanks for making it such a stimulating event: Julia Briggs, Marguérite Corporaal, Kevin de Ornellas, Elizabeth Drayson, Kate Flaherty, Valerie Forman, Verna Foster, Vikki Forsyth, Paul Gleed, Robin Kirkpatrick, Simon Palfrey, Kevin Quarmby, Alvin Snider, Ben Spiller, Helen Wilcox, Rebecca Yearling. We are grateful to those who came to listen, especially Rebecca Beale, Tania Demetriou, and Douglas Paine, who were generous with their time and their help. The conference would not have happened without the encouragement provided by Pippa Berry at an early stage. The financial support of the Judith E. Wilson Fund in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge, and the help of many people at Fitzwilliam College, are gratefully acknowledged. Since the conference, the contributors to this collection have shown stamina and patience, and an impressive ability to work to sudden and impossible deadlines. We are grateful to David Colclough and Sean Keilen (as series editors), Caroline Palmer (at Boydell & Brewer) and an anonymous reader for their parts in helping the book come to fruition.

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CONTRIBUTORS Sarah Dewar-Watson is a post-doctoral research fellow at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge. She has published articles on Shakespeare and Dryden and is currently working on a book which examines the reception of Greek tragedy in early modern England. Geraint Evans has taught at the Universities of Nottingham, London and Cambridge, as well as Tsinghua University, Beijing. He works mainly on early modern Spanish literature, particularly theatre. His research areas include gender, nation and religion, and he is currently working on concepts of Iberian nationality in the early modern period and in modern representations of the past. Suzanne Gossett is Professor of English at Loyola University, Chicago and a General Editor of Arden Early Modern Drama. She has edited many early modern works, including Pericles for Arden Three, Eastward Ho! for the Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson, A Fair Quarrel for the Collected Middleton, and Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Her recent articles include ‘Editing Collaborated Drama’, Shakespeare Survey 2006 and ‘ “Tell Thy Story”: Mary Zimmerman’s Pericles’, Shakespeare Quarterly 2006. Nicholas Hammond is University Reader in early modern French theatre and thought at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He is the author of several books and articles relating to seventeenth-century France. Robert Henke is an Associate Professor of Drama and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St Louis. He is the author of Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays (Delaware, 1997), and Performance and Literature in the Commedia dell’Arte (Cambridge, 2002). The recipient of fellowships from Villa I Tatti, Fulbright, and NEH, he is now working on a book-length study of representations of poverty in Italian early modern drama. Jonathan Hope is Reader in Literary Linguistics and Head of the Department of English Studies at Strathclyde University, Glasgow. His Shakespeare’s Grammar was published by The Arden Shakespeare in 2003, and Shakespeare viii

Contributors and Language will appear from the same publisher in late 2007. He is a member of the Scottish Institute for Northern Renaissance Studies (SINRS). Ros King is Professor of English Studies at the University of Southampton. A musician, theatre director and dramaturg, her books include The Works of Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (Manchester, 2001), Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot, 2005) and the revised edition of The Comedy of Errors for the New Cambridge Shakespeare series (Cambridge, 2004). Raphael Lyne is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of New Hall. He is the author of Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567–1632 (Oxford, 2001) and Shakespeare’s Late Work (Oxford, 2007). Gordon McMullan is Reader in English at King’s College London and a general editor of Arden Early Modern Drama. The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher (University of Massachusetts Press) was published in 1994 and his Arden edition of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s Henry VIII in 2000. He has edited or co-edited three collections of essays, including, most recently, Reading the Medieval in Early Modern England (co-edited with David Matthews), forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. His monograph, Shakespeare and the Idea of Late Writing, will be published, again by Cambridge, in 2007. Subha Mukherji is Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. Her publications include Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge, 2006) and several articles on English Renaissance drama. She is currently working on the poetics of doubt in early modern literature. Her other (related) interests include law, epistemology, the place – and representations – of the heart and its passions in the Renaissance, and John Ford. Lucy Munro is a lecturer in English at Keele University. Her publications include Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge, 2005), an edition of Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer (London, 2006), and various essays on early modern drama. She is a contributing editor to the RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and to forthcoming major editions of the works of Richard Brome and James Shirley. Michael Neill is Professor of English at the University of Auckland: the author of Issues of Death (1996) and Putting History to the Question (2000), he has edited Anthony and Cleopatra and Othello for the Oxford Shakespeare. ix

Contributors Deana Rankin is Fellow in English at Girton College, University of Cambridge. She is author of Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenthcentury Ireland (Cambridge, 2005) as well as a number of articles on drama, history-writing, republicanism and Irish writing in the early modern period. Formerly a theatre manager, she maintains close links with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s education programme. Matthew Treherne is a lecturer in Italian at the University of Leeds. He is the author of articles on medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, co-editor of Dante’s ‘Commedia’: Theology as Poetry (forthcoming, University of Notre Dame Press), and is working on a monograph entitled Dante and the Liturgical Imagination. Michael Witmore is Associate Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University and Organizer of the Pittsburgh Consortium for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. He is the author of Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford, 2001) and Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance (forthcoming with Cornell, 2007). He is currently completing a study of Shakespeare’s ‘dramaturgical monism’ and the anti-Cartesian philosophical tradition entitled Shakespearean Metaphysics.

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INTRODUCTION It is a pastorall Tragic-comedie, which the people seeing when it was plaid, having ever had a singuler guift in defining, concluded to be a play of contry hired Shepheards, in gray cloakes, with curtaild dogs in strings, sometimes laughing together, and sometimes killing one another: And misling whitsun ales, creame, wasiel & morris-dances, began to be angry. In their error I would not have you fall, least you incurre their censure. [. . .] A tragie-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie: which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kinde of trouble as no life be questiond, so that a God is as lawfull in this as in a tragedie, and meane people as in a comedie. This much I hope will serve to justifie my Poeme, and make you understand it, to teach you more for nothing, I do not know that I am in conscience bound.1

This is how John Fletcher summarises the characteristics of tragicomedy for the readership of The Faithful Shepherdess (first performed 1608–09, printed c.1609). Its theatrical audience had not been won over by its version of the latest trends in Italian pastoral drama, so this is an attempt to answer their objections. As a brief rejoinder to some basic incomprehensions about what a tragicomedy might have in it, it serves its function, but as the most famous contemporary statement explicitly about this emerging genre on the English stage, it is partial and misleading. For there is nothing here that can keep track of, for example, the variety and sharp edges of The Winter’s Tale (where characters do indeed die), and nothing that can testify to the fraught, jagged tone of Measure for Measure or Troilus and Cressida. This mismatch between theory and practice lies behind this book: it is part of a persistent problem relating to tragicomedy, which is that its characteristics have indeed proved difficult to anatomise, especially in relation to examples in practice. In the chapters that follow many perspectives are explored, but the material often remains elusive – as if a counter-example, or a shift of emphasis, even a minute decision on the part of an actor, could unravel the best-laid critical plans. Accordingly, this book aims to be systematic in some ways, and to reflect expanding diversity in others. Broadly it divides into two sections, which to 1

John Fletcher, The Faithful Shepherdess, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in Fredson Bowers (gen. ed.), The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, 10 vols (Cambridge, 1976), III, pp. 483–612 (497).

1

Introduction some extent reflects the perspective of a particular set of implied readers: namely, readers of Shakespearean tragicomedy, and of other Jacobean and Caroline writers, Fletcher included, who have got far enough to realise that tragicomedy is not a simple thing, but who are not so sure of the contexts within which its lack of simplicity is situated. It is hoped, however, that the essays that have resulted from this initial brief prove to be useful to far more readers than these. This volume includes, for example, a rare chance to compare and contrast key ideas from England, France, Italy, Spain, and the classical world. The first group of chapters, which covers these various literatures, aims to explore crucial European contexts for the development of tragicomedy. They impinge on Shakespeare and his contemporaries to varying degrees, and they feed into one another, but they also offer up a series of related, connected problems and opportunities offered by tragicomedies in rather different theatrical environments at different times within the period covered by this volume. Sarah Dewar-Watson’s chapter goes back to the source of much Renaissance anxiety about tragicomedy. Aristotle’s Poetics, especially when revived and reinterpreted by Italian scholars, seems to set out rules of generic decorum that preclude a mixed genre. By rereading Aristotle, and particularly by reassessing the generic model offered by Homer’s Odyssey (and how that is described in the Poetics), Dewar-Watson establishes that many of the characteristics of tragicomedy as written in the Renaissance are anticipated by ‘happy-ending tragedy’ in Athens. The burden of classical theory, and how vernacular experiments can be reconciled with it, is central to Matthew Treherne’s chapter. Its main topic is the work of Giambattista Guarini, whose play Il Pastor Fido (written 1581, first printed 1589) sparks new interest in tragicomedy, not least because of the theoretical debate which follows its first performances and publication. As Treherne shows, Guarini’s play was as important for the discussions it caused as for its own literary impact. The central themes of the debate – decorum, emotional effect, and verisimilitude – are vital throughout the history of thinking about tragicomedy, and Guarini’s innovations in assessing how (for example) tragicomedy may have a claim to sufficient decorum, and to special levels of verisimilitude, are of great importance. Robert Henke’s chapter is also based in Italy, but rather than pursuing tragicomedy in the elite circles where Guarini’s play was discussed, it looks to the more popular tradition of commedia dell’arte. Those interested in Shakespeare will find here remarkable new connections between The Tempest and characters and situations from the commedia dell’arte – for example, the old mago (magician) who pays undue attention to the sexual lives of those around him. The chapter also makes a larger contribution to the collection by recognising the various forms and social levels in which aspects of tragicomedy, as it came to thrive in England, circulated in Europe. The other two chapters in this first section move away from the more established paths of tragicomedy between Italy and England, and fill in two closely 2

Introduction related but in some ways parallel manifestations of tragicomedy. Geraint Evans looks at the place of tragicomedy within the popular dramatic tradition of sixteenth-century Spain, and especially at the work of Lope de Vega. His central metaphor of the ‘minotaur’ genre captures the typical anxieties aroused by the notion of a mixed mode, but in practice Spanish tragicomedy proves an effective and energetic form. Although it is not possible to trace much direct influence between Lope and Shakespeare or Fletcher, Spanish theatrical culture shares some key characteristics with that of early modern England, namely, a mixed audience with a highly varied repertoire to match. The same cannot quite be said of the French scene described by Nicholas Hammond. The playfully hybrid world of Corneille’s early drama precedes, indeed induces, the zenith of French generic strictness and divergence in the tragedy of Racine and the comedy of Molière, but the controversy resulting from Corneille’s mixing of genres demonstrates the difference between France and England or Spain. In France theoretical condemnation could govern practice and popular acclaim. Ironically therefore, as Hammond polemically shows, we may ‘have tragicomedy to thank’ for Racine as well as Molière – for provoking realisations about the nature of genre that bear fruit in the achievements of the next generation. French uses of the genre and the generic label are shown to be symptomatic of the fluidity of the genre itself; a fluidity that was both the strength and the weakness of the form, a quality that enabled experiment and dynamic adaptation as well as its easy transposition into other forms, leading, in a sense, to a formal extinction. And at the root of this function is what Hammond identifies as ‘irregularity’ – that property which drew innovation as well as criticism, in France as, more familiarly to us, in England. One of the most curious features of this ‘irregularity’ in French drama, Hammond argues, is the way in which it became the form for sharp representations of same-sex love or desire, often implemented through the device of cross-dressing. What is the connection between this distinctive content and the tragicomic genre? Perhaps same-sex desire is a kind of transgression that can most easily, and needs must, be contained by a form that brings things right at the end while allowing for complication in the middle – so that cross-dressing becomes the dramatically unreal, yet affectively real, vehicle for a desire that is aroused but then dissolved with the desired man or woman turning out to be of the opposite sex after all. In that sense, it might be the equivalent of the desire that Evans talks about in the context of Spain: love between two people of irreconcilably different classes, which needs at once to triumph, to satisfy the need to believe that ‘love conquers all’, and to turn out to be ‘false’, and thereby reconcilable to society after all, and to the belief in the essential superiority of ‘noble blood’, for the lower-class character turns out after all to be high-born. This is a phenomenon that Evans calls a deceitful solution. Like the false incest in Beaumont and Fletcher, the false poison of Shakespeare’s Cornelius, and the illusory social transgressions of love in Lope’s plays, the homosexual 3

Introduction desire of French drama seems to point to a tendency inherent to tragicomedy, a fluidity akin to desire, or the genre itself, manifest in the delicate indeterminacy of, say, the pastoral scene in Cymbeline where the two brothers mourn over the ‘fairest lily’ that the cross-dressed Imogen/Fidele (now supposedly dead) was to them. Its potential for conformism or radicalism can vary significantly according to treatment; it can be as ‘safe’ or as ‘risky’ as a playwright or an acting ensemble or an audience decides. Despite crucial differences in the different national and cultural contexts, the formal propensities of tragicomedy seem to straddle France, Spain and England, producing distinct alchemies with the specific circumstances of production and reception. Indeed, the connections may be spread even wider: the implications of Hammond’s argument are echoed in a different context later in the volume, where Ros King connects the mixed genre of early modern England with the untroubled reception of ‘Evita B’, the cross-dressed persona of the politically radical comedian Pieter-Dirk Uys, in a politically troubled South Africa, so much so that Mandela was allowed to listen to ‘her’ radio show in prison. It did not strike the authorities that this would ‘sustain’ political prisoners. The doublethink that cross-dressing elicits and allows, in life and in art, is analogous to – and sometimes actually expressive of – the simultaneous real/unreal operation of tragicomedy. The second set of essays centres on, or radiates outwards from, the tragicomic drama of Shakespeare and his theatrical successors. It does not, however, spend an inordinate amount of time explicitly outlining the generic problems caused by the range of plays from the period that could be called tragicomic. Modern editors and critics of these plays have already illuminated many specific problems. The essays in this collection aim to illuminate the chronological fringes of the period, and also to consider from fresh angles certain key issues of taxonomy. In doing so they naturally build on critical works in which other paths through the theory and practice of tragicomedy have been taken. Verna Foster’s book The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy takes on an ambitious frame of reference that reaches to the present day.2 Marvin T. Herrick’s Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England covers some of the same territory as this book and is a very good introduction to some of the key issues.3 Frank Ristine’s older English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History still has much to offer the scholar, tracing the history of the genre from c.1560 until c.1700, but also including a helpful list of all English tragicomedies.4 Collections of essays edited by Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, and also by Nancy Klein Maguire, fill out a sense of the political potential of tragicomedy, a theme this volume briefly broaches, but 2 3 4

Verna A. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy (Aldershot, 2004). Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England (Urbana, 1955). Frank H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History (New York, 1910).

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Introduction does not significantly explore.5 Finally, the later end of the seventeenth century, which is only obliquely approached in this volume, is the subject of Nancy Klein Maguire’s Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660– 1671.6 This book does not replace any of these; rather it aims to offer most of its readers a more substantial grounding in the European tradition, alongside some adventurous possibilities as to how future criticism might reflect Shakespeare, Fletcher, and beyond. The essays by Ros King and Suzanne Gossett look in different ways at what came before Shakespeare. King looks back into earlier Elizabethan drama, with two very different main examples (Richard Edwards’ Damon and Pythias (1564), and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus) but a consistent and vital central thesis, that the presence of a mixed mode in English drama is widespread and long pre-dates the first adaptations of Guarini. This is only to be expected, given the combination of forms and genres characteristic of the mystery plays and other popular English traditions, but King’s chapter makes it clear that tragicomedy has the greatest potential not so much when it perverts the mood of comedy or resolves the problems of tragedy, as when it is ‘consistently mixed up’, as in Cymbeline. Thus the theatrically risky scene where Imogen wakes up next to the body of the headless Cloten, takes it to be her husband’s corpse, smears herself in stage blood and grieves in anguished poetry, embodies precisely that blend of humour and horror, pathos and danger, which allows for double-affect, for playful possibilities of simultaneous but disparate, even conflicting, impacts – giggles and shudders, embarrassment and poignancy, alienation and sympathy. Peter Hall, she claims, in erasing such organically mixed moments in his 1957 production of Cymbeline, committed theatrical suicide and generic escapism. This argument suggests the inclusiveness and paradoxical realism of tragicomedy, an idea that we shall observe emerging from several strands of argument in this volume. Suzanne Gossett takes a much closer-range look at one particular prehistory – the origins of the phase of Shakespearean tragicomedy initiated in Pericles and continued in Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest (and in his collaborations with Fletcher too). She does so by emphasising what Beaumont and Fletcher learned from the innovative work of George Wilkins, author of the first two acts of Pericles and quite possibly the initiator of more of it. The

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Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, eds, The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London, 1991), and Nancy Klein Maguire, ed., Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York, 1987). See also Zachary Lesser, ‘Mixed Government and Mixed Marriage in A King and No King: Sir Henry Neville Reads Beaumont and Fletcher’, ELH 69 (2004), 947–78, and Nicholas F. Radel, ‘Homoeroticism, Discursive Change, and Politics: Reading “Revolution” in Seventeenth-Century English Tragicomedy’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 9 (1997), 162–78. Nancy Klein Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge, 1993).

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Introduction result of this is a fresh look at the dynamic exchanges that may well have spurred developments in the English version of tragicomedy. Two essays look even more directly at the late Shakespearean tragic canon. The essays by Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, and Gordon McMullan, aim to address the issues of taxonomy head on, but by strikingly different means. Hope and Witmore bring the analytical characteristics of discourseanalysis software to bear on generic classification in Shakespeare. To readers new to this approach to literary texts, the technique involved – statistical analysis of numerous basic features of language – may seem counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, the process suggests that there are stylistic fingerprints of comedy, tragedy, and history, and that ‘tragicomedy’ (especially the late plays) is an intense hybrid of the first two. This offers the possibility, perhaps in future developments of discourse-analysis software, of more concrete and refined stylistic distinctions between genres. It also brings a recognition of how quantitative analysis of linguistic features can be a tool of literary interpretation; how reading Shakespeare by the numbers can speak to such objects of conventionally literary enquiry as asides and reported action, tone and atmosphere. Indeed, it illuminates the whole question of what – in terms of dramatic strategy – constitutes generic groups. In a series of startling findings and polemical claims, this study makes the now-familiar effect of ‘tragicomedy’ seem wondrous in new ways. Gordon McMullan’s essay approaches the question of defining periods or phases or kinds of writing from a sceptical direction. He undermines the idea that calling the Shakespearean sequence from Pericles to The Tempest ‘the late plays’ evades the problems of terms such as ‘romance’ and ‘tragicomedy’. The idea of lateness in literary careers turns out to be a narrow imposition with repeating characteristics. However, the point of McMullan’s chapter is not only to question the boundaries critics draw in Shakespeare’s career. It also reveals that there is a telling affinity between tragicomedy and lateness. Tragicomedies can be seen as, and can indeed represent themselves as, sophisticated and urbane innovations. They are late in the sense that they acknowledge that tragedy and comedy preceded them, but they also open and inaugurate possibilities, rather than closing them off. The final group of essays in the collection does not attempt to account for the whole of the post-Shakespearean tradition any more than the previous essays attempted to account for all tragicomic possibilities within Shakespeare. Michael Neill’s essay takes one case – Massinger’s The Renegado (written 1624, first printed 1630) – and argues that its tragicomic structure connects with central patterns of thought in contemporary theology. The idea emerges that one aspect of this and other tragicomedies of the period may be their affinity with Protestantism, wherein salvation follows suffering but in an inscrutable way. This essay recognises the importance of providence in all tragicomedy, whether Protestant or not, and introduces the possibility that it is a particularly pointed form in which to explore what providence is and how it works. 6

Introduction The Christian narrative had already been presented as a drama in the mixed mode, as on the title page of Nicholas Grimald’s Christus Redivivus (1543).7 God’s workings were often seen as tragicomic in the providentialist literature of the period, and in sermons, most famously by Donne who calls the Book of Job ‘a Tragique Comedy, lamentable beginnings comfortably ended’.8 Neill’s essay intimates the concept that provides the literary complement to this more familiar idea – the theological affiliations of genre itself. But it is important to observe the difference between Guarini’s mingled mode and Grimald’s, or Dante’s for that matter: Grimald thinks that the story of the Passion is essentially a happy ending story – ‘comoedia tragica, sacra et nova’. Dante similarly calls his theological poem a ‘commedia’. Guarini’s third kind of drama, on the other hand, is not ‘a tragic comedy’ (or a certain sort of comedy), but ‘tragicomedy’. Does a play like Massinger’s follow in the theological tradition, or does it show signs of a different variety of mixing? The final two essays – by Lucy Munro and Deana Rankin – relate to tragicomedy in Ireland and exchanges between the theatres of Dublin and London. In addition to offering new insights into how certain tragicomedies of the period were incorporated into theatrical repertoires and received by different audiences, these essays both consider how tragicomedies change when they change contexts – how this form crosses borders. Indeed, Rankin proposes an organic link between geography and genre, arguing that Irish tragicomedy takes birth ‘inter-nationally’ and identifying in it a ‘poetics of between-ness’. For Munro, Dublin tragicomedy responds to a variety of English influences, including the predictable (Fletcher), and the less predictable (the popular tragicomic Saints’ lives of the Red Bull theatre). Both Rankin and Munro recognise how the complex tone of tragicomedy, and experimentation with that tone, enable political comment of a subtle and elusive kind. They also both quote and discuss the postscript to Henry Burnell’s Landgartha. This is the least celebrated, but by no means the least suggestive, of four iconic statements about tragicomedy that pertain to or arise from these early modern works, and which are all discussed more than once in this book. Although they are all quoted elsewhere in the volume, they are worth quoting here too. Burnell’s postscript focuses on the demeanour of tragicomic endings: Some (but not of best judgements) were offended at the Conclusion of this Play, in regard Landgartha took not then, what she was perswaded to by so many, the Kings kind night-imbraces. To which kind of people (that know not what they say) I answer (omitting all other reasons:) that a Tragie-Comedy sho’d neither end Comically or Tragically, but betwixt both: which Decorum I did my best to

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Nicholas Grimald, Christus Redivivus, comoedia tragica sacra et nova (Cologne, 1543). The Sermons of John Donne, ed. E.M. Simpson and G.R. Potter, 10 vols (Berkeley, 1953–62), IX, 132.

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Introduction observe, not to goe against Art, to please the ever-amorous. To the rest of bablers, I despise any answer.9

This is as simple, and as problematic, as Fletcher’s characterisation of the plot-matter of tragicomedy quoted above. Whereas the Faithful Shepherdess preface leads to factual objections, the problem with Burnell’s definition is the deceptive simplicity of ‘betwixt’. It is difficult to argue for a simple spectrum between comedy and tragedy, so the placing of tragicomedy at some mid-point begs more questions than it answers. Of course, the relationship with comedy and tragedy is very often at issue in the works discussed in this book, both theoretical and literary. The great challenge is to set up a definition of tragicomedy that can efficiently accommodate two very different phenomena: plays where tragedy and comedy combine in the form of one thing followed by the other (as in Pericles), or a hybrid, deliberately indeterminate form which gives us both things at the same time (Measure for Measure). This issue features centrally in Geraint Evans’s chapter: he takes from Ricardo de Turia an analogy from chemistry to assess whether tragicomedy is a ‘combination’ (compuesto) or a ‘mixture’ (mixto) – whether (as in the former case) the elements cohabit but are not transformed, or whether two things become one truly new entity. Neill, on the other hand, posits the idea of tragicomedy as ‘an inherently dialectical form’, lending itself ideally to the dynamics of late Jacobean and early Caroline theatre where plays were in conversation with each other – the intertextually allusive Renegado being an example. But there is scope to identify tragedy and comedy being in dialogue within a single artefact, pointing to the integral relation between the law of genre and the structures of experience. Another highly influential definition of tragicomedy proves similarly elusive despite its simplicity. In the early stages of Plautus’ Amphitryo the God Mercury addresses the audience about the play in progress: argumentum huius eloquar tragoediae. quid? contraxistis frontem, quia tragoediam dixi futuram hanc? deus sum, commutavero. eandem hanc, si voltis, faciam ex tragoedia comoedia ut sit omnibus isdem vorsibus. utrum sit an non voltis? sed ego stultior, quasi nesciam vos velle, qui divos siem. teneo quid animi vostri super hac re siet: faciam ut commixta sit: tragicomoedia. nam me perpetuo facere ut sit comoedia, reges quo veniant et di, non par arbitror.

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Henry Burnell, Landgartha: A Tragie-Comedy, as it was presented in the new Theater in Dublin, with good applause, being an Ancient story (Dublin, 1641), f. Kv.

8

Introduction quid igitur? quoniam hic servos quoque partes habet, faciam sit, proinde ut dixi, tragicomoedia. (51–63)10 I will set out the plot of this tragedy. What? Did you pull a face, because I said it was going to be a tragedy? I am a God, so I’ll change it, if you want. I shall make a comedy out of this tragedy, with all the same verses. Is that want you want or not? But that’s a bit silly of me – as if I didn’t know what you want, being a God. I know what’s on your minds. I’ll make it mixed: a tragicomedy! I don’t think it would be appropriate to make it a consistent comedy, when there are kings and gods in it. What do you think? Since a slave also has a part in the play, I’ll make it a tragicomedy, like I just said.

This is even more reductive than Fletcher in its emphasis on plot as the source of defining characteristics of dramatic modes. Mercury bases his distinction purely on what sort of characters a play contains – not even on what happens to them. Of course, the whole speech is comic and one aspect of its comedy is the God’s unsubtle and insouciant wielding of power – although his actual power seems minimal, his overconfidence perhaps paralleling the Landgartha postscript in thinking that plays can judge their reception absolutely from within. Nevetheless, the presence of the term in a classical work was a source of controversy, which extended even to the ways in which it was quoted. Hammond alerts us to the peculiar discrepancy in French dramatic culture between the exploitation and the conspicuous omission of the lines in the Prologue to Amphitryon where Plautus not only discusses the genre but actually uses the term ‘tragicomedy’, a coinage Dewar-Watson comments on. In fact it emerges that it is mainly the traditionalists who allude or refer to Plautus, usually to trivialise Plautus’ use of the generic word. D’Aubignac, for instance, declares the term ‘dead in the cradle’. What is striking about all these three statements about tragicomedy is that, despite their prominence, they are far too simple to contain even a few of the possibilities of the mode. Although these are only scraps of evidence, they suggest crucially how tragicomedy, though much discussed, is not easily contained by theory. Before the introduction of some of the key themes that run across the essays in this collection, it is worth mentioning one more iconic representation of tragedy that is addressed in more than one essay below. A figure representing tragicomedy stands at the top of the triumphant architecture of the title page of Ben Jonson’s Workes (1616). Tragedy and Comedy are there too, the two main supporting pillars of the page. This book presents completely different interpretations of this image. Sarah Dewar-Watson sees it as a ‘satirical comment on the recent inversion of the classical generic hierarchy’: by placing tragicomedy at the top, Jonson’s book indicates ironically that modern taste

10

Plautus, Amphitryo, in the Loeb Plautus, ed. Paul Nixon, 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1916), I, pp. 1–122, lines 51–63. The translation is our own.

9

Introduction has lost touch with permanent values. Gordon McMullan, on the other hand, sees the triumphal design as an indication that tragicomedy is ‘both later than and superior to the two foundational sisters of which she is an advanced synthesis, the contemporary summation of generic possibilities’. On the side of Dewar-Watson, it is pertinent that Jonson’s typical demeanour towards modern innovation is negative. On the side of McMullan, there is no sign in the figure of Tragicomedy that we should view it satirically. Perhaps some middle ground lies in the observation that Jonson may well have taken a practical view of monuments, recognising that the more important parts of the monument are those that do the supporting, rather than the thing supported. For the purpose of this volume, it remains suggestive that two scholars, with justification, take opposite views on another significant attempt to represent tragicomedy. Tragicomedies are among the most effective works of the period in any number of spheres – how they engage with political events, how they move their audiences, how they consider the nature of theatre, and so on – but tragicomedy, an extracted set of uniform characteristics, is remarkably hard to pin down. The scope of this book is essentially the period between two landmarks of early modern English criticism: Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy (written c.1580, printed 1595) and John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668). As has been said, there has been no attempt at exhaustively covering the range of significant plays in between – rather the point has been to illuminate the European context, and to suggest new ways of dealing with more familiar material. The issues that arise from a comparison between Sidney and Dryden are, to a large extent, those that emerge from the essays in this book. Sidney takes a negative view of this emerging kind of drama, as he seeks to regulate, in an Aristotelian manner, as well as to praise and defend his chosen art: But besides these grosse absurdities, howe all their Playes bee neither right Tragedies, nor right Comedies, mingling Kinges and Clownes, not because the matter so carrieth it, but thrust in the Clowne by head and shoulders to play a part in majesticall matters, with neither decencie nor discretion: so as neither the admiration and Commiseration, nor the the right sportfulnesse is by their mongrell Tragicomedie obtained. I know Apuleius did somewhat so, but that is a thing recounted with space of time, not represented in one moment: and I knowe the Auncients have one or two examples of Tragicomedies, as Plautus hath Amphitrio. But if we marke them well, wee shall finde that they never or verie daintily matche horne Pipes and Funeralls. So falleth it out, that having indeed no right Comedie in that Comicall part of our Tragidie, wee have nothing but scurrilitie unwoorthie of anie chaste eares, or some extreame shewe of doltishnesse, indeede fit to lift up a loude laughter and nothing else: where the whole tract of a Comedie should bee full of delight, as the Tragidie should bee still maintained in a well raised admiration.11 11

Sir Philip Sidney, An Apologie for Poetrie (London, 1595), ff. K2r–K2v.

10

Introduction One of the key moments here is Sidney’s small concession to tragicomedy: the best writers mostly ‘never’ do it, but can get away with it ‘verie daintily’. Without the requisite daintiness there is a huge risk of ‘doltishnesse’. This suggests that while tragicomedy is in many respects indecorous, it also associates with sophistication: the enigma is that under certain circumstances it might seem like the height of delicacy, but without the right talent and context it can only be boorish. For Sidney this is a poignant reflection: he presents English writing as only capable of limited achievements. Dryden returns to the same themes in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie. He also is concerned with the examples set by classical and other precedents, and with the possible positive qualities of tragicomedy. His use of different voices in conversation enables some more adventurous opinions to be voiced. Neander is thought to be the speaker who most resembles Dryden’s own position, and he does indeed speak up for contemporary practice against the claims of the classics, the French, and earlier English writers. As Neander tackles Lisideius, the proponent of Racine and Corneille, he defends tragicomedy: As for their new way of mingling mirth with serious Plot I do not with Lisideius condemn the thing, though I cannot approve their manner of doing it. He tells us we cannot so speedily recollect ourselves after a scene of great passion and concernment as to pass to another of mirth and humour, and to enjoy it with any relish. But why should he imagine the soul of man more heavy than his senses? Does not the eye pass from an unpleasant object to a pleasant in a much shorter time then is required to this? And does not the unpleasantness of the first commend the beauty of the latter? The old Rule of logic might have convinced him, that contraries when placed near, set off each other. A continued gravity keeps the spirit too much bent. We must refresh it sometimes, as we bait upon a journey, that we may go on with greater ease. A scene of mirth mixed with Tragedy has the same effect upon us which our music has betwixt the acts, and that we find a relief to us from the best plots and language of the stage, if the discourses have been long. I must therefore have stronger arguments ere I am convinced, that compassion and mirth in the same subject destroy each other, and in the meantime cannot but conclude, to the honour of our nation, that we have invented, increased, and perfected a more pleasant way of writing for the stage then was ever known to the Ancients or Moderns of any Nation, which is tragicomedy.12

This is, in effect, an argument that the daintiness wished for by Sidney is present in the lively senses and ‘pleasant’ attitudes of Restoration England. Daringly Neander talks of an ‘old Rule’ and speaks against ‘continued gravity’, promoting the idea that the modern world needs, and has earned, a more sophisticated form of drama than is offered by ancient models of tragedy and comedy. The dialogic structure of the Essay means that this position, however 12

Keith Walker, ed., John Dryden (Oxford, 1987), pp. 70–130 (103).

11

Introduction boldly set out, is questionable. Indeed, the climactic tone of the last sentence is not quite rewarded by its final word, ‘tragicomedy’ – even its most committed sponsors might not easily accept Neander’s claim that it exceeds all others. So between Sidney and Dryden there is a large change in tone around the subject: the works of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and others are crucial in making the change possible. But the anxiety of Sidney is not completely assuaged in the Essay of Dramatick Poesie, and the same tensions are still simmering. One central tension is between the classical inheritance and the independent vernacular. Several of the essays in this collection encounter it. It lies behind the essays of Hammond (in France the burden of classical example was felt even more keenly) and Dewar-Watson (who looks at how some of this burden resulted from misunderstanding, or at least creative interpretation). Treherne states that ‘the flourishing literary critical culture of Renaissance Italy sat uneasily with the vernacular tradition that same period inherited and developed’. Henke’s essay goes further into exploring Italian traditions that have been rather neglected in favour of Guarini. This relates to another tension in the history of tragicomedy, between different cultural levels, as between the courtly elite circles where Guarini’s play was performed, and the more popular stages of the commedia dell’arte. In England, for example, the first impact of Guarini was felt on court and university stages; as has been seen in the example of Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, the transition to the public stage was not easy. Gossett’s essay reconstructs how tragicomic themes might have passed around the public stages in the early seventeenth century, depicting a very different, practice-driven theatrical culture from that which is suggested by the theoretical debates of France or Italy. The Spanish environment described by Evans, as has been said, bears the closest resemblance to the English. Nevertheless, as Evans’s essay shows, the Spanish dramatic scene was no less possessed by debates about regularity and decorum than the French culture described by Hammond. Despite its closeness at times to rarefied discussions of the nature of dramatic representation, tragicomedy, as described in the essays that follow, emerges as a form in which adventurous thoughts can be fostered. We have noted Hammond demonstrating how comic conventions such as crossdressing can be transformed into sharper reflections on same-sex desire. Munro also explores the unorthodox forms of love that can result from cross-dressing, and how in different plays the frissons of sexual danger, and the revelations of true identities, can occur at very different times. In Shirley’s Rosania (1640), for example, the audience experiences cross-dressing in progress, whereas in Fletcher’s Philaster it is only revealed in retrospect. These variations and inflections, too, contribute to the experimental potential of the genre. The same applies to the idea of providence. This has already been mentioned, in relation to Neill’s essay, as a serious theological idea that tragicomedies work over, and it is also at issue in Evans’s essay, and Treherne’s. But it does not reign unquestioned. Treherne notes, for instance, a difference 12

Introduction between Tasso’s Aminta (written c.1573, first printed 1580) and Guarini’s Pastor fido on this vital territory: the former ends with the idea that happy endings may not justify the means, whereas Guarini celebrates the fact that happiness results from suffering – his play is more providential. Tragicomedies explore the boundaries of what kinds and degrees of providentialism can be accepted by audiences and readers – and, as King’s essay makes clear, mixedness of tone often most fully reveals itself in performance, and indeed the consequences of that mixedness can depend more than usually on how something is acted: how a particular line is said, or what unscripted gestures accompany it. Despite these there is a persistent emphasis on verisimilitude – a key Guarinian term – as a keynote characteristic of tragicomedy across disparate, even in some ways contrasting, contexts. As Treherne notes, the basis of Guarini’s polemical claim for tragicomedy against tragedy and comedy is its potential to represent the world more fully and truly. In an almost paradoxical analogy with the Italian scene, as Geraint Evans points out, Lope de Vega’s defiance of the artifice of theory in early modern Spain, where there was relatively little theorising about tragicomedy and much practice in the form of dramatic writing and performance, is itself connected to the argument for tragicomedy as a genre that accommodates all of life. Indeed, Ricardo de Turia, one of the very few apologists for the genre in Spain, and a rare example of a theoretical defender of drama, echoes Guarini in justifying tragicomedy’s allegedly monstrous mingling as a full, active reflection in art of life’s mixedness. It is a fertile paradox that the image of the hermaphrodite should be used by Turia to capture his idea of a true mixture, an embrace that is never followed by separation and reversion to individual selves. This use of hermaphroditism as a creative and affirmative metaphor for the genre provokes a connection with Hammond’s argument about an almost intuitive connection between mixed mode and cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France. The use of mimesis – the representation of reality – as a principle to justify tragicomedy is of central importance. Not only is it addressed here, as for example by Ros King in the context of Cymbeline, but earlier Shakespeare criticism has also recognised the link between generic mixedness realism. Samuel Johnson, looking back to Shakespeare with a combination of admiration and perplexity not unlike Dryden’s, commented: Shakespeare’s plays are not in the rigorous or critical sense either tragedies or comedies, but compositions of a distinct kind; exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the

13

Introduction frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without design.13

Johnson does not use the word ‘tragicomedy’, but the closeness of his description of Shakespeare to Dryden’s view of tragicomedy is suggestive. But it also overlaps with W.B. Yeats’s observation that Shakespeare was ‘always a writer of tragicomedy’, for both Johnson and Yeats are noting that Shakespeare does not write tragedy or comedy in the strict and limited classical sense.14 In one case, the result is seen as a hybrid genre, in the other, ‘the real state of sublunary nature’. In fact, tragicomedy can very often be associated with a more realistic turn. For example, it could be that element in Bertram or Isabella that will not entirely yield to comedy; it could be that unspoken part of Leontes that lives on after the tragic crisis of The Winter’s Tale; or it could be that subjectivity in Imogen which resists, again and again, a complete assimilation into the architectonic end of the genre, and challenges the tragicomic habit of dicing with danger; it could even simply be Hermione’s wrinkles. Tragicomedies often rely on characters’ unwillingness or inability to compromise themselves entirely in the face of genre, or on a play’s own inscription of the cost of tragicomic plotting. Thus the affinity between tragicomedy and realism is considerable. This idea must, of course, contend with the manifest fact that tragicomedies are often the most contrived and ironic of plays. But this is typical of the form: the bodies of theory and criticism about tragedy and comedy are not simple, of course, but they are not so fundamentally paradoxical as that about tragicomedy. Raphael Lyne Subha Mukherji

13 14

Samuel Johnson, ‘Preface to Shakespeare’ (1765), in Donald Green, ed., Samuel Johnson: The Major Works including Rasselas (Oxford, 2000), pp. 419–55 (423). W.B. Yeats, ‘The Tragic Theatre’, in Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), pp. 238–45 (240).

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1 Aristotle and Tragicomedy SARAH DEWAR-WATSON

A

RISTOTLE is, to modern thinking, a most unlikely champion of tragircomedy: for us, he is the tragic theorist par excellence. There are very few discussions of tragedy, even today, which do not register some debt to Aristotelian theory, and the Poetics has provided us with a set of terms and concepts which have become something of a fixture in our critical vocabulary. Here we might think of the ‘Aristotelian Unities’ – an idea which is not straightforwardly Aristotelian at all, but was first formulated in the terms that are now familiar to us by the Italian critic Lodovico Castelvetro (c.1505–71).1 Yet however secure our modern understanding of the Poetics might seem, it is only the most recent stage in a critical evolution in which many different cultural and aesthetic imperatives have been mapped onto it. In the sixteenth century the reception of the Poetics entered into a particularly active phase. During the period, it was not only Aristotle’s formulations of tragedy which generated great critical excitement: commentators were also interested in what the text might imply about other forms of drama, such as tragicomedy. Of course, this reading of the Poetics did not develop in isolation. Many of Aristotle’s Italian critics, in particular, maintained a strong sense of the relationship between theory and practice and were keen to identify classical texts which might endorse this kind of reading of the Poetics.2 Chief among these were the plays of Euripides – particularly his satyr play, the Cyclops – and Homer’s Odyssey, texts which were recognised as generically marginal or hybrid. For critics such as Pigna and Lenzoni, the Odyssey could be seen to exemplify many of the features typically ascribed to romance or

1

2

See Lodovico Castelvetro, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizza et sposta (Vienna, 1570), and for an account of the text, see Bernard Weinberg, ‘Castelvetro’s Theory of Poetics’, in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed. R.S. Crane (Chicago, 1952), pp. 349–71. For a full account of the Italian critical reception of the Poetics, see Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Chicago, 1961, repr. 1974).

15

Sarah Dewar-Watson tragicomedy, such as the inclusion of characters of different status, a complex plot, and a double ending.3 This identification of the Odyssey as a model for contemporary drama allowed critics to claim not only that there was a classical precedent for mixed genre, but that tragicomedy was, in some sense, one of the oldest – and therefore the most prestigious – literary genres of all. As an important corollary of this theoretical shift, epic itself came to appear a more heterogeneous form than had previously been thought to be the case.4 First of all, why the need for a defence of tragicomedy? Tragicomedy was, of course, enormously popular with sixteenth-century audiences, but even some of the most successful playwrights and theorists are quite sheepish about their association with the genre. One such exponent of tragicomedy, Giraldi Cinthio, writes in On the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies (1543): . . . I have composed some [plays] with happy conclusions . . . merely as a concession to the spectators and to make the plays appear more pleasing on the stage, and that I may be in conformity with the custom of our times.5 . . . n’abbiam composta alcuna a questa imagine . . . solo per servire agli spettatori, e farle riuscire piú grate in iscena, e conformarmi piú con l’uso dei nostri tempi.6

There is nothing all that new here. Aristotle makes a similar claim about audience predilection for happy endings in a key passage which will be considered shortly (Poetics, 1453a30–39).7 But as we can see from this, although Cinthio wrote a number of tragicomedies, such as the Altile (1543), the Antivalomeni (1549) and the Selene (1554), his comment acknowledges a deep ambivalence about the genre. Indeed, he avoids the term tragicommedia and prefers to use instead the variants tragedia di lieto fin (happy-ending tragedy) or tragedia mista (mixed tragedy), perhaps as a way of distinguishing his own plays from other dramatists working in a genre which enjoyed such mass appeal. But, as Cinthio recognises, in spite of this popularity – or perhaps partly because of it – tragicomedy lacked status. One of the central problems here was the absence of any recognised classical authority for the genre, and, without this, there was no context in which tragicomedy could be theorised. At a time when literary genres were undergoing a process of close critical scrutiny, the absence of an 3 4

5

6 7

For further discussion of Pigna, see Weinberg (1961), I, p. 445 and on Lenzoni, II, p. 824. This question has been explored in recent criticism by Colin Burrow, Epic Romance: Homer to Milton (Oxford, 1993). Burrow goes further than both Aristotle and Renaissance critics in identifying both the Odyssey and the Iliad as generically mixed and as precursors of romance. Translated in Allan H. Gilbert, Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (New York, 1962), p. 256. All translations from Cinthio are taken from this edition. Other translations are my own except where stated. Giraldi Cinthio, Scritti Critici, ed. Camillo Guerrieri Crocetti (Milan, 1973), p. 184. References to the Poetics are taken from Aristotelis De Arte Poetica Liber, ed. Rudolph Kassel (Oxford, 1965).

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Aristotle and Tragicomedy established theoretical context had adverse implications for the way in which tragicomedy was perceived.8 At issue here is the premise that tragicomedy is distastefully ‘native’ rather than classical, a charge which is at the heart of Sidney’s attack on mixed genre in the Defence of Poetry (written c.1580, first printed in 1595). In fact, the term tragicomoedia is not a neoclassical invention but originates in antiquity. It is first coined by Plautus in the Prologue to the Amphitryo (59–61): I will make it a mixture: let it be a tragicomedy. I don’t think it would do to make it entirely a comedy, when we have gods and kings here . . . faciam ut commixta sit: sit tragicomoedia. nam me perpetuo facere ut sit comoedia, reges quo veniant et di, non par arbitror.9

As this shows, the ideas of social hierarchy and the status of the dramatis personae are key to Plautus’ conception of genre; here he is thinking in much the same terms as Sidney when he condemns ‘mingling kings and clowns’.10 But more significantly, it is clear from this passage that the very term tragicomoedia begins life not as part of a highly developed programmatic statement about mixed genre, but as a joke. Jonson deftly acknowledges this on the frontispiece of his First Folio (1616). The engraving by William Hole shows the parvenu form of Tragicomoedia standing triumphant over the demoted figures of tragedy and comedy – a striking iconographical gesture, given that the volume does not include a single tragicomedy.11 The image is designed as a satirical comment on the recent inversion of the classical generic hierarchy as Jonson adopts a pose of apparent deference to contemporary aesthetic priorities. And since the values which the title page declares are hardly congruous with the contents of the volume as a whole, we must suspect a note of irony. The classical references of the title page serve not to validate tragicomedy’s claim to this kind of authority but rather to undermine it: by dressing the figure of Tragicomoedia in ancient robes, Jonson seeks to expose it as a modern fake. To some extent, Jonson is right: the idea that tragicomedy had its origins in classical antiquity – at least as a dramatic form in its own right – is a Renaissance critical concoction. How, then, did critics set about retrospectively 8 9 10 11

On Renaissance attitudes to genre, see Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind; Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley and London, 1973). The quotation is taken from the Loeb edition of the play, Plautus with an English translation, ed. Paul Nixon, 5 vols (Cambridge, Mass., 1916; repr. 1997), I. Philip Sidney, ‘The Defence of Poetry’, Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten (Oxford, 1973), pp. 114–15. Some time after the publication of the Folio, Jonson experimented with pastoral tragicomedy with The Sad Shepherd, but the play was left unfinished at his death.

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Sarah Dewar-Watson reconstructing a tradition in which contemporary tragicomedy could be situated? Here we need to remind ourselves of the theoretical territory which the Poetics entered following its rediscovery. The earliest reliable edition of the Poetics was Giorgio Valla’s Latin translation of the text in 1498, but it was with the publication of the Aldine editio princeps in 1508 that an authoritative version of the Greek text entered circulation.12 Prior to the re-emergence of Aristotle, throughout the Middle Ages, the commentary tradition of Donatus-Evanthius had prevailed, and this had tended to characterise tragedy and comedy as diametrically opposed to one another: But many things distinguish comedy from tragedy, especially the fact that comedy is concerned with the average fortunes of people, the onset of moderate risks, and actions with happy endings. But in tragedy, everything is the opposite: great people, immense terrors, and deathly endings. Furthermore, in comedy what is stormy at first becomes smooth at the end; in tragedy the action has the opposite pattern. Then too tragedy presents the kind of life that is to be avoided, whereas the life of comedy is one which we are drawn towards. Finally, in comedy, everything comes from fictional plots whereas in tragedy, we often look to the facts of history. inter tragoediam autem et comoediam cum multa tum inprimis hoc distat, quod in comoedia mediocres fortunae hominum, parui impetus periculorum laetique sunt exitus actionum, at in tragoedia omnia contra, ingentes personae, magni timores, exitus funesti habentur, et illic prima turbulenta, tranquilla ultima, in tragoedia contrario ordine res aguntur; tum quod in tragoedia fugienda vita, in comoedia capessanda exprimitur; postremo quod omnis comoedia de fictis est argumentis, tragoedia saepe de historia fide petitur.13

This critical tradition continued to exert considerable influence in the way that ideas about genre were formalised and circulated long after the rediscovery of the Poetics, and indeed we find Donatus-Evanthius still being paraphrased by Heywood as late as 1612: Tragedies and Comedies . . . differ thus: In Comedies, turbulenta prima, tranquilla ultima, In Tragedyes, tranquilla prima, turbulenta ultima, Comedies begin in trouble and end in peace, Tragedies begin in calmes and end in tempest.14

As this suggests, Aristotle did not supplant the earlier critical orthodoxy. As is well known, there was considerable resistance from critics (including Sidney) 12 13

14

Aristotelis Rhetoricum ad Theodecten; ejusdem Rhetorica ad Alexandrum; ejusdem Ars poetica, ed. Demetrius Ducas (Venice, 1508). Evanthius, ‘De Fabula: Excerpta De Comoedia’, IV.2 9–17, Aeli Donati Commentum Terenti, ed. P. Wessner, 3 vols (Stuttgart, 1966), I. On the Donatus-Evanthius tradition, see also Henry Ansgar Kelly, Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1993). Thomas Heywood, Apology for Actors, ed. Richard H. Perkinson (New York, 1941), f. F1v.

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Aristotle and Tragicomedy to ideas which began to emerge from the new commentary tradition. Instead of establishing a new orthodoxy, the Poetics promoted the diversification of different theoretical strands; these jostled alongside and often assimilated one another with surprising ease.15 In any case, it would be wrong to suggest that there is a rigid opposition between Aristotle and Donatus-Evanthius. Although the text of the Poetics was lost for many centuries, fragments of Aristotelian theory survived and mutated in other forms, and the work of Aristotle’s pupil, Theophrastus (c.370–c.285 BC), was an influential point of reference for the fourth-century grammarians. There is, then, a strong genealogical relationship between Donatus-Evanthius and Aristotle, although the two theoretical schools diverge from one another very considerably at an early stage of transmission.16 Although Aristotelian theory enjoyed some sort of currency, albeit in a travestied form, more or less continuously, the text of the Poetics, along with the texts of Greek tragedy, did not. This led to centuries of critics second-guessing what Aristotle might have said in the Poetics (as well as in the supposed lost second book of the Poetics on comedy), and also speculating what Greek drama – particularly Greek tragedy – might have been like.17 Critics were therefore thinking about Greek drama in a textual vacuum, and this inevitably gave rise to some fairly profound misconceptions about classical genres. This, in turn, did nothing to counter the false assumption that a hard, impermeable antithesis between tragedy and comedy was inherited from antiquity. As a consequence, there remained a steady commitment to the notion of turbulenta ultima, the unhappy ending, as one of the defining features of tragedy. In the first recorded reference to the Poetics in England, Roger Bacon attests to his reading of the Latin commentary on the text by Hermannus Alemannus, based on the work of the Arabic scholar Averroes.18 The manuscript from which Averroes was working was unreliable, and this meant that his commentary was flawed and misleading. He had little or no access to Greek dramatic texts, and therefore had barely any conception of what Greek tragedy might have been like. He resorts to offering analogies with Arabic literature in place of Greek, resulting in a highly distorted account of Aristotle, and of Attic tragedy itself. Meanwhile, Hermannus openly acknowledges his own limitations as a translator and admits that he was capable of translating only the commentary, leaving the text itself untouched. According to Bacon, texts such

15 16 17 18

On critical syncretism in the period, see Marvin T. Herrick, The Fusion of Horatian and Aristotelian Literary Criticism 1531–1555 (Urbana, 1946). See A. Philip McMahon, ‘Seven Questions on Aristotelian Definitions of Tragedy and Comedy’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 40 (1929), 97–198. On the lost second book of the Poetics, see Lane Cooper, An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy (Oxford, 1924). For a full reception history of the text in England, see Marvin T. Herrick, The Poetics of Aristotle in England (New Haven, 1930).

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Sarah Dewar-Watson as the Averroes-Alemannus commentary did more to impede understanding of Aristotle than to promote it: If I had the power over Aristotle’s works [sc. the medieval commentaries on them], I would have them all burned, since it is nothing but a waste of time to study them, as they are a source of misunderstanding and promote only ignorance . . . Si enim haberem potestatem super libros Aristotelis ego facerem omnes cremari, quia non est nisi temporis amissio studere in illis, et causa erroris et multiplicatio ignorantiæ . . .19

When Greek texts started coming into circulation, largely through the operation of the Aldine printing press from 1494, it was something of a revelation to discover that the drama was more nuanced and complex than tradition had come to assume.20 Plays such as the Ion and the Helen exhibit the kind of generic complexity which, even today, is regarded as the hallmark of Euripidean drama, although it is by no means confined to him.21 We might think of Sophocles’ Philoctetes, or even Aeschylus’ Eumenides as examples of happy-ending tragedy. There is of course a paradox here in that, on one level, Greek theatre sustained a very formal separation of genres: tragic and comic dramatists were involved in separate competitions, and we might expect that this would militate against any blurring of generic boundaries. At the close of the Symposium, Socrates argues that a tragic playwright could also write comedy, but Plato’s reporting of this claim shows that it is regarded as contentious.22 On the other hand, it is apparent that the two dramatic genres kept a very sharp eye on one another. Greek tragedy entertains its share of comic moments, as we see for example in the humorous depiction of the elderly Cadmus and Teiresias preparing to join in the Bacchic dance.23 We need only to think of Aristophanes’ fondness for parodying tragedy and his virtual obsession with Euripides – ideas which receive their most sustained expression in the Frogs and the Thesmophoriazusae – to realise that the genres stood in a close dialectic 19 20

21

22 23

Roger Bacon, Opera Quaedam Hactenus Inedita, ed. J.S. Brewer (London, 1859), p. 469. It should be added that Senecan drama, also coming into vogue at this time, conformed more straightforwardly to the turbulenta ultima model. Seneca’s tragedies were printed at Ferrara by Andrea Gallus about thirty years before the Aldine editions of Sophocles (1502) and Euripides (1503) respectively. On the reception of Senecan tragedy, see Bruce R. Smith, Ancient Scripts and Modern Experience on the English Stage, 1500–1700 (Princeton, 1988) and H.B. Charlton, The Senecan Tradition in Renaissance Tragedy (Manchester, 1946). Other plays which fall into this category include the Iphigeneia in Tauris, the Helen and the Ion. For further discussion, see Bernard Knox, ‘Euripidean Comedy’, in his collected essays, Word and Action: Essays on the Ancient Theater (Baltimore, Maryland and London, 1979), pp. 250–74. Plato, Symposium, ed. Kenneth Dover (Cambridge, 1980), 223d3–6. Euripides, Bacchae, ed. E.R. Dodds (Oxford, 1960), 170–214.

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Aristotle and Tragicomedy with one another. Evidence concerning the structure and content of satyr plays is more fragmentary, and we still do not fully understand how these might have fitted into the emotional and aesthetic experience of ancient theatre.24 But we do at least know that even when individual tragedies typically conformed to the turbulenta ultima model, the tetralogies of which they were originally part manifested a very different kind of structural progression overall. The rediscovery of the Poetics helped to expose the presence of some of this middle ground. Of particular significance for the tragicomic theorists were Aristotle’s comments on happy-ending tragedy and tragic pleasure. In a crucial passage, Aristotle suggests that the Odyssey is a model for happy-ending tragedy: Second is the kind of composition which is said by some to be the best, that is, one that has a double composition like the Odyssey, and which ends with opposite fortunes for good and bad characters. It is held to be the best, because of the weakness of the audience, since poets follow the audience, and write according to what pleases them. But this is not the pleasure proper to tragedy, but rather to comedy; for in comedy those who are complete enemies throughout the story, such as Orestes and Aegisthus, become friends at the end and leave the stage, and nobody is killed by anybody. ´ legom3nh \p tinôn /stin sstasiv,
diplén te t§n deut3ra d’
prwth sstasin cousa kaq+per
’Odsseia kaÀ teleutôsa /x /nant8av to®v  ´ diœ thn tôn qe+trwn belt8osi kaÀ ce8rosin. doke® dŒ einai prwth !sq3neian. ‹ !kolouqo©si gœr o5 poihtaÀ kat’ ec§n poio©ntev to®v qeata®v. 1stin dŒ oc a^th !pà trag¥d8av
don§ !llœ m*llon tév kwm¥d8av o4ke8a. /ke® Ë an gœr oi ’Or3sthv kaÀ A6gisqov, f8loi Ó 1cqistoi æsin /n t¢ mθ¥, oion › genmenoi /pÀ teleutév /x3rcontai, kaÀ !poqnïskei odeÀv p’ oÕdenv. (1453a30–39.)

This passage serves to complicate Aristotle’s earlier characterisation of the relationship between drama and epic. At 1448b38–1449a1, he claims that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are prototypes of tragedy: ‘The Margites stands in the same relation to comedy as the Iliad and the Odyssey do to tragedy’ (< gœr Marg8thv !n+logon 1cei, sper ’Iliœv kaÀ
’Odsseia prÃv tœv trag¥d8av