Introduction shakespeare and the Law of Genre

Mongrel Tragi-comedy

Plautus32 may have coined the term ‘tragicomoedia’ to denote a play in which gods and mortals, masters and slaves, reverse the roles traditionally assigned to them, but this social inversion has indeed caused a great deal of controversy throughout the ages. In the Renaissance and thereafter, tragicomedy was mainly comic, although Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy almost always included some comic or grotesque elements. It is the synthesis of these two generic modes, or strands, that is of interest, as comedy overthrows the tyranny of the tragic while tragedy destroys the comic. It is my contention that tragedy is installed along the margins of every comedy, regardless of sub-genre, and that tragicomedy is a loose definition capable of encapsulating the absurdity of much comic drama where laughter is the only response left for individuals faced with an empty and meaningless existence.

Working from the assumption that there exists no formal definition of this generic ‘mongrel’ from the classical age, it appears that Aristotle used something like the Renaissance meaning of the term (serious action with a happy ending) in mind when, in the Poetics,33 he discusses tragedy with a dual ending.

Tragicomedy was the most popular dramatic genre of the early seventeenth century, and one possible reason for this popularity is the genre’s emphasis on hybridity, and hence its daring propensity for subversion. While critics have often sought to resolve the paradoxes of tragicomedy, the politics of the genre can only be fully understood if we engage with, rather than attempt to synthesise, its stubbornly mixed nature. It is inherently political, foregrounding the tension of opposing and uneasily reconciled forces brought into the servile flattery of an absolutist court or the constitutionalist subversions of absolutism within the City of London. One could therefore suggest that its formal structure encodes important aspects of early Stuart

England’s national, sexual, racial, religious and political hybridity.34 Claims of form at the expense of substance heralded a fascinating new idiom that enabled dramatists to explore the frontiers of known sexual reality. One of the prime achievements of tragicomedy is the serious treatment of the darker potentialities of sexuality in a comic framework. Thus, illicit or problematic sex drives imply some broader dislocation in the social moral order. In certain tragicomic scenes, sexual malaise indicates the protagonist’s temporary alienation from the spiritual universe, but the ingenuity of tragicomic conventions ensures that both audience and haracters are generically protected from theatrically exciting and psychologically compelling explorations of sexual dilemmas that skirt the boundary of the tragic. The special province of tragicomedy is the exploration of the anxieties and fantasies that exist between desire and fulfilment, between sexuality and sex. By its defining dramatic requirements, tragicomedy connects sex with both death and laughter, effectively providing an aesthetic bridge between the ontological turmoil of tragedy and the concupiscence of comedy. According to the genre’s chief Renaissance theorist, Giambattista Guarini,35 there is a combination of the “comic order” (in the development of the plot towards a happy ending) and the laughter of comedy with “the danger but not the death” of tragedy. Following Guarini, in his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess (1609) John Fletcher wrote that a tragicomedy “wants deaths, which is enough to make it no comedie” and that its characters can range from “a God” to “meane people” who are generically the source of laughter. Sex and death are presented as alternatives to one another with the consequences of the sex-death symbiosis generating representations of sexuality that are morbid, warped, and often disturbing. Sexual desire is therefore presented as sudden and unavoidable madness, a sickness, a harbinger of death, but clues are still provided for the audience to anticipate a happy ending of sorts. Such generic markers are conventionally cryptic asides or indications of the presence of a controlling ch racter. This provides a safe perspective from which to observe as well as to participate in the sexual fears and anxieties of the characters. From within the onfines of the ‘comic order’ however, sexuality leads not only towards the possibility of death but also to ridiculous behaviour which further shields the audience from the sufferings of characters by portraying various forms of insatiable desire and indulgence which arouse satiric laughter. This helps to create a complex portrait of sexual obsession as both horrifying and absurd. This generically determined mix of tragedy and comedy may be designed to provoke both pity and laughter but the ‘happy’ endings often fail to subsume entirely the guilt and misery which have preceded them. Technical rather than emotional difficulties have been altered and as these overtly artful resolutions do not adequately compensate for the elaboration of sexual difficulties, the discomfort at the end of tragicomedy often translates as aesthetic dissatisfaction. This emotional and aesthetic discomfort is intrinsic to the endings of tragicomedy as painful consequences are always short-circuited. The serious is often undercut by an incongruity, a falling short of an agreed upon standard of seriousness. These ludicrous, obviously absurd, incongruous, exaggerated or eccentric conclusions may not always be comic, but nonetheless, they display one of the main generic markers of comedy.