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1.2. Binary Objectives
Not only has comedy been deemed inferior in terms of its material content, ather, its status as the putative antithesis of tragedy has frequently been described not in a relation of antithetical equivalents, but of dependent subordination. Working from ithin the series of oppositions: serious/light-hearted, profound/frivolous, eternal/transient, tragedy has been seen as the primary form which establishes the norms on which comedy is reliant. Walter Kerr advances this theory by describing as “a parasitical form, and no absolute” as it needs “a richer form to feed on being in essence a shadow”.47 The shadowy origins of comedy have further enhanced this mistrust of the comedic, as it developed out of the satyr plays of ancient Greece and the dream-like Komos so closely related to the Dionysiac frenzy of ancient estivity. Furthermore, the Aristotelian classification of comedy, at least in the material sense, hinges on the treatment of “deformity”, “the ridiculous”, “the ugly and distorted” which sets comedy in differential opposition to the putative concern of ‘art’, namely the aesthetic appropriation of the ‘beautiful’.
As an idiom that is concerned with continuity and survival, comedy is concerned with ‘living on’ sometimes happily ever after, but always unharmed. This has made for a particularly resilient literary form, capable of mutating along with changes in social and political conditions. Dependent on the presentation of imperfection comedy did however, during the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods, strive for a perfection of form. Not easily definable by structure alone or subject matter, early modern comedy can be identified through its celebration of the capacity to endure adversity, to turn turmoil and confusion into stability, even to take the ‘ugly and distorted’ and perceive an undiscovered ‘beauty’ therein. Attempting to locate itself in a perfect society, in some form of u-topia, comedy reaches out towards acceptance, integration and reconciliation. If such a world could exist, dramatic comedy would represent the highest of all poetic art forms. It would have the ability to triumph over the tragic, to overturn the tragic mutability of our bodies and celebrate a universe free from distortion and corruption. At the root of both tragedy and comedy, however, lies the same pretence: in comedy the pretence to wisdom which although farcical attempts to take the human to the limits of experience; in tragedy, the pretence to wisdom allows humans to go beyond what appears as the limits of existence and to painfully, and, nobly discover those limits. Between these two genres lies a hybrid which has been deemed ‘problematic’ by genre theorists as it reveals the very instability of generic classification that is at the root of the inventiveness of literature. Tragicomedy occurs because of a lack of agreement about values and behaviour, which therefore demands a more acute portrayal of life. Ambiguity and danger force the amusing to turn serious and the serious to dissolve in laughter, avoiding the idealism of tragedy and the lack of realistic immediacy associated with comedy.
The mixture of the comedic and the serious reveal that the separation of categories are not inherent in nature, rather it is human intellect which identifies similarities between individual texts and deploys aspects of the grouping to predict
other aspects of a social hierarchy within the group. Genres may have been defined through characterisation: kings and gods in tragedy, slaves and commoners in comedy, but it is within the very restrictions of this definition that ‘value’ is associated specifically with class affiliations. This interest in ‘value’ reveals to what
extent genre choices are social evaluations, which must be investigated philosophically if culture is to be described, not in neutral terms, but as an activity with political and moral objectives.
Genre theory, as limitation, as prohibitive construction, permits the invention of new idioms because it allows audiences to grasp the social significance of the confrontations between generic categories and the organisation of the classes themselves. Throughout this thesis, the problematic status of generic definition will be explored through an analysis of texts which question the very categories they have been placed in. The ‘tragicomic’ is therefore addressed primarily as a sub-genre of comedy but more significantly as a marker of the generic ambiguity which lies at the very heart of the aesthetic. The question as to why a hierarchy of genres exists, opens up a debate on the nature of hierarchy itself as an epistemological model. From such a perspective, the disclosure and reflection of the structuration of power, not only between generic categories in dramatic literature but also between gendered, corporeal bodies in early modern England, suggests the instability of all classification.
This scrutiny of boundaries explores the concept of the genreless text as impossible: any one text can belong to any number of genres, but no text can remain out-with the inclusivity of the generic. This means that it is in principle only ever possible to work with the category of genre as a hypothesis projected onto texts which never quite conform to an empirical definition, but which must be read as though a master list of genres existed.
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