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
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First published 2007
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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
28
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.
vii
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.
x
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).
4
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
5
6
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).
5
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
7
8
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.
7
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.
9
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).
14
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).
16
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.
17
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.
18
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).
19
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.
20
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
Â
´ 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 <_tw kaÀ outov
prÃv tœv kwm¥d8av). Yet here he appears to
›
qualify or even contradict this earlier remark by suggesting that the Odyssey
offers, in structural terms at least, a paradigm of comedy. It important to
remember that Aristotle has strong reservations about the kind of happyending tragedy to which he refers, since in an adjacent passage, he makes clear
his preference for unhappy endings (1453a12–15). But Renaissance critics
24
For a useful survey of the available evidence, see Dana F. Sutton, The Greek Satyr Play
(Meisenheim am Glan, 1980).
21
Sarah Dewar-Watson
tended to gloss over this, and the mere fact that Aristotle acknowledges the
existence of happy-ending tragedy seems to have been taken as a kind of
endorsement of it. Perhaps critics misconstrued the passage because of its
proximity to another section in which Aristotle acclaims Euripides as ‘the
most tragic poet’ and defends him precisely against the criticism that he makes
his tragedies end in disaster (1453a29–30). Clearly, Aristotle’s approval is
directed towards Euripides’ more conventional tragedies, such as the Bacchae,
rather than the generically more complex plays which have already been
mentioned: he appears not to recognise the Euripides so celebrated in early
modern and indeed in contemporary criticism as an avant-garde
experimentalist intent on deconstructing the form. Alternatively, critics may
have assumed that Aristotle’s praise of Euripides was somehow transferable to
a wider, or altogether different, group of plays than that which Aristotle originally had in mind. It may be that critics paid increasingly little attention to the
detail of the passage, and failed to recall that Aristotle’s approving comment
about Euripides is quite separate from what he has to say about the Odyssey. It
should be noted that, in the Poetics, Aristotle does not explicitly recognise any
particular connection between Euripides and Homer, as did later critics who
elided the two separate passages, perhaps assuming that the Cyclops was
evidence of strong common ground.
The passage on the Odyssey interacts with another important passage in the
Poetics, namely Aristotle’s discussion of catharsis, which follows on from this
(1449b27–8).25 This intratextual link is implied by Aristotle’s reference to ‘the
pleasure proper to tragedy’ which he mentions again in his discussion of
catharsis. It is here, in the notion of tragic pleasure, that the point of collision
between Aristotle and Donatus-Evanthius occurs. From this idea, commentators could identify a conflict between the structural goal of tragedy – the
unhappy ending – and its teleological goal, identified by Aristotle as pleasure.
This new emphasis on pleasure gradually assumed a greater priority in the way
that tragedy was theorised, and one effect of this was to draw tragedy and tragicomedy into a much closer relationship than had previously been recognised.
Cinthio is one of several critics who pick up on the idea that the Odyssey
exemplifies some of the features typically ascribed to romance or tragicomedy.
He writes:
. . . from this can be seen how greatly they are deceived who have said that the
Iliad gives us the form of tragedy and the Odyssey that of comedy, since both
furnish an example of tragedy, the first of a tragedy ending unhappily, and the
25
A full consideration of tragic pleasure and catharsis lies beyond the scope of this essay, but
among recent studies, see Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Princeton,
1992); A.D. Nuttall, Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure? (Oxford, 1996; rev. edn, 2001) and
Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics (London, 2000).
22
Aristotle and Tragicomedy
second of one ending happily. Critics fell into this error because they were of the
opinion that there cannot be a tragedy which ends happily.26
. . . laonde si vede quanto si siano ingannati coloro che hanno detto che la Iliade
ci dà la forma della tragedia e l’Odissea quella della comedia, dandoci insieme
amendue l’esempio della tragedia: quella della tragedia del fine infelice: questa di
quella del felice. Ma incorsero costoro in simile errore, perché furono d’opinione
che non si potesse far tragedia che finisse in allegrezza.27
Cinthio’s interest in this topic is of particular significance because he is one of
the most well-known Italian critics and writers outside Italy. Shakespeare, for
example, used Cinthio as a source for Othello and Measure for Measure, and
the fact that these are arguably two of Shakespeare’s most generically complex
works invites the speculative thought that, besides reading the Hecatommithi
and the Epitia, he also knew something about Cinthio’s dramatic theory.28 It is
unlikely that Shakespeare read even parts of the Discorsi, although we cannot
rule that out. But Cinthio addresses theoretical issues in several of the
prologues to his plays, and this provides a possible conduit through which
Shakespeare could have encountered some of Cinthio’s main critical ideas.29
But even if Shakespeare was not exposed to any of these explicit theoretical
pronouncements, he was certainly influenced by Cinthio as a practitioner of
tragedia di lieto fin, as we know from Measure for Measure. And here Shakespeare registers an important (if indirect) debt to Aristotelian theory and
Renaissance critical accounts of the Odyssey.
In spite of this interest in the Odyssey as a tragicomic model, attention to the
poem itself seems to have remained fairly modest. This is partly because the
majority of critics – like Cinthio – who concerned themselves with these questions were primarily interested in drama, rather than epic. Furthermore, attitudes to Homer remained quite ambivalent throughout the period, especially
in England. Although Homer was revered by reputation, this was not matched
by any real fondness for the poems themselves, an attitude which may have
had something to do with the perceived harshness of Homeric Greek.30
In spite of his assiduous efforts as a translator, Chapman had only limited
success in promoting the Homeric cause. Instead, some of the most innovative
work focused on the Euripidean satyr play, the Cyclops. The action of the play
26
27
28
29
30
Gilbert, p. 259.
Crocetti, p. 189.
For individual source studies, see E.A.J. Honigmann, ‘Othello, Chappuys and Cinthio’, Notes
and Queries, 13 (1966), 136–7 and F.E. Budds, ‘Material for a Study of the Sources of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure’, Revue de Littérature comparée 11 (1931), 711–36.
On Shakespeare’s possible knowledge of Cinthio’s criticism, see Caroline Patey, ‘Beyond Aristotle: Giraldi Cinzio and Shakespeare’, in Italy and the English Renaissance, ed. Sergio Rossi
and Dianella Savoia (Milan, 1989), pp. 167–85.
Chapman refers to this prejudice in a commentary passage on Iliad I (1611). See Chapman’s
Homer: The Iliad, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Princeton, 1957; repr., 2000), p. 42.
23
Sarah Dewar-Watson
is loosely based on the Polyphemus episode in Odyssey Book 9 and this may
have promoted a sense that, if Homer had been a dramatist, this is the play he
would have produced. The Cyclops interested critics because of its juxtaposition of an heroic protagonist, of the kind normally identified with tragedy,
with comic grotesques. The discovery that this practice had been adopted by
Euripides, the playwright so highly commended by Aristotle, seemed to confer
new licence.
The Cyclops was translated in 1525 by Alessandro de’ Pazzi, who later
published a translation of the Poetics in 1536. De Pazzi’s translation in turn
influenced Cinthio’s satyr play, the Egle (1545). As this shows, the Poetics and
the Cyclops appeared in a similar sort of intellectual and creative frame of
reference in terms of their critical reception, although once again it would be
wrong to infer that there is any inevitable or necessary connection between
the two texts. Aristotle does not mention the Cyclops in the Poetics, and there
is no evidence that he especially approved of it. In spite of this, in some
circles, the Cyclops came to be to tragicomedy what the Oedipus Tyrannus was
to tragedy.
The Cyclops was known in England, although its reception outside Italy
was more modest. William Gager used the Cyclops as the basis for his play,
Ulysses Redux, first performed at Christ Church in 1591. On the title page of
the printed text, Gager styles his version a ‘Tragedia Nova’ and prefaces the
text with a letter Ad Criticum in which he cites Euripides’ Cyclops in defence
of his decision to style the play as a tragedy. On one level, Gager’s play must
be seen as a specialised and rather isolated response to the Cyclops, both
because of its ambitious theoretical claims, and the context of its original
performance as an academic drama. But this is not how Gager saw the play.
Townspeople regularly attended such performances, and Gager claims that it
is this section of the audience whom he had uppermost in his mind during its
composition:
Equidem ego hanc sive tragaediam, sive fabulam, sive narrationem historicam,
sive quicquid eam dici ius fasque est, non ad exquisitam artis poeticae tanquam
aurificis stateram, sed as popularis iudicii trutinam exigendam proposui, et
effudi potius quam scripsi. (A7r)
I myself intended this tragedy, or tale, or historical narrative, or whatever it is
right and proper to call it, to be evaluated not on the exquisite goldsmith’s scales
as it were of the poetic art, but on the balance of popular judgement, and I
poured it out rather than wrote it.31
It is paradoxical that, in the prefatory material, Gager explicitly shuns critical
context, and assumes a deliberate vagueness about what the play should be
31
William Gager, Ulysses Redux, quoted and translated by J.W. Binns, Intellectual Culture in
Elizabethan and Jacobean England: the Latin Writings of the Age (Leeds, 1990), p. 130.
24
Aristotle and Tragicomedy
designated. Yet the play is studiously observant of the contemporary theoretical concerns about which he professes to be so casual. It is a striking inversion
of the usual tactic: as we have seen, critics such as Cinthio were at pains to
demonstrate that tragicomedy was not a species of popular entertainment but
a genre which could lay claim to its own place in high classical tradition. It is
difficult to reconcile the play’s sophisticated theoretical basis with the author’s
claim that he has the aesthetic preferences of the groundlings rather than the
university scholars at heart (‘quaeque non tam doctissimis, quam imperitis
placeat’, A7r). If Gager did indeed conceive of his play as a ‘Tragoedia Nova’ –
in spite of the evasions we have just noted – we have to ask ourselves what this
might have meant for the unlearned members of the audience he declares
himself so anxious to please. On the other hand, Gager’s account of his poetic
aims may suggest that popular audiences were more highly attuned to issues of
genre than is often supposed.
Even so, Gager’s work is rather far removed from the popular drama of the
period. What, then, were the wider implications of these theoretical shifts for
dramatists working for the popular stage? The readership of Greek texts in
England was confined to a social and intellectual elite, and, in some ways, the
Odyssey remained at the very rearguard of the English literary Renaissance.
The first English translation of the Odyssey, by Chapman, was not published
until 1614–15, and on the face of it, the poem seems to have had very little
impact on the literature of the period.
Yet the presence of numerous themes which are common to the Odyssey
and English tragicomedy – sea voyages, kidnapping, piracy – invite us to think
again. Above all, we might think of the importance of recognition scenes in the
Odyssey (especially Books 19 and 23), a device which is exploited to such great
effect in Renaissance tragicomedy.32 These Odyssean motifs help to define the
distinctive texture of Shakespeare’s late plays; indeed it has been suggested
that, following critical interest in Euripides’ Cyclops and the popularity of
satyrs in contemporary masque, the figure of the satyr was influential in
Shakespeare’s construction of The Tempest.33 Similarly, too, sea ventures form
the basis of several works in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, such as The
Island Princess (c.1619), The Custom of the Country (c.1619) and The Sea
Voyage (1622).34 Critics typically account for the presence of these themes in
terms of the influence of Greek prose romance, which is, without doubt, an
important source.35 But, as this brief study has suggested, Renaissance critics
32
33
34
35
Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford, 1988) is the classic study. The statue
scene in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (V. 3) exemplifies the recognition scene at its most
imaginative.
See Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays
(Newark, 1997), ch. 5.
For further discussion, see Sarah Dewar-Watson, ‘Shakespeare’s Dramatic Odysseys: Pericles
and The Tempest’, Classical and Modern Literature 25 (2005), 23–40.
See, for example, Carol Gesner, Shakespeare and the Greek Romance: A Study of Origins
25
Sarah Dewar-Watson
identified a close relationship between the Odyssey and the emerging form of
tragicomedy, and we need to look further back into the literary genealogy of
these narratives, which derive ultimately from Homer.
This is not to suggest that the poems figure prominently as a direct source
for English tragicomedy. But the influence of Homer in translation has surely
been understated. The Odyssey was widely translated into Italian and other
vernaculars, including Lodovico Dolce’s L’Ulisse, tratto dell’Odissea d’Homero
(1573) and Giralomo Bacelli’s L’Odissea D’Homero tradotta in volgare
Fiorentino (1582). Besides these editions, there was the Latin text by
Spondanus, Homeri Quae Extant Omnia (1583), which Chapman himself
used.36 Reference books and dictionaries such as Natalis Comes’ Mythologiae
(1551) and Charles Estienne’s Dictionarium Historicum, Geographicum,
Poeticum (1596) provided information about mythological characters,
including those from Homer, in summary form.37 And if we widen our view of
the field still further, there are versions of the Cyclops legend in popular Latin
texts such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 14), and Virgil’s Aeneid (Book 3)
which may have helped to promote interest in some of the main narrative
episodes which appear in the Odyssey. Moreover, Homer was widely anthologised in commonplace books and florilegia, perhaps attesting to a greater willingness – or ability – to engage with the poetry in excerpted form than in the
context of an entire epic.38 The presence of such a diversity of sources suggests
that, in spite of the prohibitive linguistic challenges which a complete reading
of the Odyssey might present, there were many other ways in which its main
narrative contents would have been known. And given the centrality of the
poem in the Renaissance project of theorising tragicomedy, there is a need for
further work on the relationship between the Odyssey and the motifs which it
shares with the drama of the period.
Returning, then, to Aristotle, this essay has set out to show two things. First,
the importance in the period of intertextual approaches to the Poetics, which
we have seen in relation to the Odyssey, and Euripidean drama; and second,
that the Poetics had the surprising effect of destabilising, rather than consolidating, orthodox conceptions of genre. It is easy now to think of the Poetics as a
text which has generated some rather immoveable ideas about drama, and
36
37
38
(Lexington, 1970). F.D. Hoeniger, ‘The Function of Structure and Imagery in Shakespeare’s
Last Plays’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1954), comments on the role
of Greek prose romance in the mediation of Odyssean motifs in Shakespeare’s late plays, pp.
304–6.
For a bibliographical summary, see R.R. Bolgar, The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries
(Cambridge, 1954), pp. 516–17.
The importance of these editions is argued by John Pitcher, ‘Some Call Him Autolycus’, in In
Arden: Editing Shakespeare, ed. Ann Thompson and Gordon McMullan (London, 2003), pp.
252–68.
I am grateful to Tania Demetriou for drawing my attention to the prevalence of Homer in
texts of this kind.
26
Aristotle and Tragicomedy
tragedy, of course, above all. But we should remind ourselves that the text is
more flexible – indeed, more slippery – than that, and that what many Renaissance critics found when they read the Poetics differs in no small measure from
what we find today.
27
2
The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy:
Guarini’s Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy,
1586–1601
MATTHEW TREHERNE
A
S WAS SO often the case with debates over new literary works in
rsixteenth-century Italy, the dispute over Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido
(1581) engaged its participants in reflection on both the details of the text, and
broader literary theory. Criticism of the two most widely debated works of
narrative poetry of the period, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and
Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, for instance, had provoked discussion
of broader questions over the validity of their respective genres, their moral
utility, the role of pleasure in the reader’s experience, and the appropriateness
of their linguistic style.1 At stake in this criticism, and always made explicit,
were theoretical issues of considerable complexity, and about which agreement was often hard to reach: no easy distinction can be drawn between theoretical reflection and literary criticism as applied to individual texts in the
Cinquecento (indeed, it is unlikely that such a distinction can be drawn in any
context). Yet at the same time as literary theory was being transformed by the
the late fifteenth-century rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics, and its transmission, which gathered pace around the middle of the Cinquecento, literary
practice was challenging the categories and precepts which that text seemed to
offer. It was not only new works which presented problems. Dante’s
Commedia already constituted such a challenge.2 Its genre in particular was
problematic to Renaissance readers. Dante’s decision to describe his work as a
‘comedy’ seemed to sit awkwardly with accepted understandings of the term: it
1
2
See Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols
(Chicago, 1961), II, pp. 954–1073.
On Renaissance responses to Dante, see for instance Deborah Parker, Commentary and
Ideology: Dante in the Renaissance (Durham and London, 1993), and Simon Gilson, Dante and
Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, 2005).
28
The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy
mixed linguistic styles, where comedy was supposed to be in a low style; it was
not performed; it dealt with the actions of characters from a wide range of
social backgrounds.3 The solution adopted by many critics was to consider it
an epic. This tended to lead either to strained readings of the text, which
insisted that it fitted into Aristotelian categories, and ascribed beginning,
middle and end to its plot; or to the rejection of the text (at least as poetry: some
insisted that the Commedia was no poem at all, but a work of moral philosophy) because it did not fit those categories.4 The flourishing literary critical
culture of Renaissance Italy therefore frequently sat uneasily with much of the
vernacular tradition that same period inherited and developed.
By the end of the sixteenth century, when Guarini composed his Il pastor
fido, his conception of the new genre of tragicomedy needed to be articulated
against the backdrop of this Aristotelianism – which, as the range of responses
to Dante shows, was manifested in criticism in myriad ways. In naming his
work a ‘tragicommedia pastorale’, Guarini makes clear that it will transgress
any clear-cut barriers between tragedy and comedy, and will moreover be
identified in some way with the newly popular form of pastoral drama. How
did Guarini’s play reconcile the expectations attached to tragedy, comedy and
pastoral? How was it received in the context of the literary theory of the late
Cinquecento? And how did Guarini defend his own text against the charges
brought by its more hostile critics?
3
4
For a discussion of the ways in which Dante’s work challenged medieval genre categories, see
Zygmunt G. Baranski, ‘Dante Alighieri: experimentation and (self-)exegesis’, in The
Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, ed. A. Minnis and I. Johnson, 8 vols (Cambridge,
2005), II, pp. 561–82. The desire to categorise Dante’s poem persists: one recent edition and
translation of the text explains that ‘Dante uses the word “comedy” to denote poetry written in
a humble style in the vernacular, which ends happily’ (Dante, Inferno, trans. J.G. Nichols
(London, 2005), p. 167); in fact he uses the term in a way which would have been unsettling to
his medieval readers, and which implies a stylistic register which is all-encompassing.
In the debate over Il pastor fido, Jason Denores was to endorse the view that Dante’s poem was
a work of theology and of moral philosophy, not a poem (Apologia contra l’autor del verato di
Jason Denores di quanto ha egli ditto in un suo discorso delle tragicommedie e delle pastorali
(Padua, 1590), p. 358). An example of a wholesale condemnation of Dante’s text is Bellisario
Bulgarini’s Repliche alle risposte del Sig. Orazio Capponi sopra le prime cinque particelle delle sue
Considerazioni (Siena, 1585), which argues that Dante’s text mixes genres, does not imitate
action in the manner set out by Aristotle in the Poetics, and does not have unity of plot (p. 72).
This leads him to reiterate his view, expressed in a text published in 1583 (but dated 1576) that
Dante’s poem fails to meet the criteria of any specific genre, and is therefore no poem at all.
For a full account of Bulgarini’s views, see Weinberg, pp. 853–860.
29
Matthew Treherne
Il pastor fido: Tragicomedy and the Space of Pastoral5
The text of Il pastor fido was circulated in manuscript form and first performed
in 1581, being first published in 1589, and eventually printed in its final form
in 1602. Its pastoral setting links it to the increasing popularity of the pastoral
in the sixteenth century, which began with Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, a set of
pastoral poems framed within a prose narrative and first published in 1501.
Arcadia was written for, and makes frequent reference to, the Neapolitan
court; but it was in Ferrara that pastoral developed as a dramatic form.
Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio’s Egle, first performed in 1545, marked a key stage
in this development. Although the characters are not human shepherds, the
play establishes the theme of a central female character who wishes to avoid the
love of a male suitor in favour of the pleasures of hunting. The most popular
work of the 1570s, Torquato Tasso’s Aminta, also treats this theme, presenting
the relatively simple plot of the nymph, Silvia, who wishes to devote her life to
hunting, and who rejects Aminta’s advances. The famous words, ‘if it is
pleasing, it is permitted’ (‘s’ei piace, ei lice’ (681)) of the first chorus suggest
some of the hedonism of the play, although the play’s sensuality is played out
in the words spoken, rather than in any onstage action.6 There is no great
virtue made of the suffering undergone on the way to the play’s happy ending:
the play concludes with the thought that the turbulence of the drama may not
be fully compensated for by the fortunate outcome: ‘I do not know if the
bitterness which this man has felt serving, loving, weeping and despairing, can
be fully sweetened by any present sweetness.’7 Il pastor fido invites numerous
contrasts with Aminta. Most obviously, it was considerably longer, at 6862
lines compared with Tasso’s play’s 1996 – a fact which made it subject to
substantial cuts in its actual performance. The hedonism of Aminta is
tempered in Il pastor fido by a tension between moral authority and sensual
desire in the play. Crucially, as the following summary shows, the plot is
considerably more complex, drawing on both tragic and comic elements.
Montano, the chief priest of Arcadia, plans to marry his son Silvio to
Amarilli, with a view to fulfilling a prophecy and ending the sufferings of
Arcadia which had followed the betrayal of Aminta years before. There are
problems, however: Silvio is more interested in hunting than in love; and
5
6
7
For useful surveys of Renaissance pastoral drama, see for example Richard Andrews, ‘Theatre’,
in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 277–300 (especially
pp. 292–300); Marzia Pieri, La scena boschereccia nel rinascimento italiano (Padua, 1983).
Quotations from Aminta are taken from Torquato Tasso, Aminta. Il re Torrismondo. Il mondo
creato, ed. Bruno Basile (Rome, 1999). Throughout this essay, translations from Italian are my
own.
‘Non so se il molto amaro, / che provato ha costui servendo, amando, / piangendo e
disperando, / raddolcito puot’esser pienamente / d’alcun dolce presente’ (Act V, 141–45).
30
The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy
Amarilli is secretly loved by Mirtillo. To complicate matters further, Dorinda
loves Silvio. At the same time, the wicked Corisca wishes to seduce Mirtillo,
and rejects Satiro, an old man who has been in love with her; Satiro plots
revenge. Corisca gains the trust of Amarilli, and suggests that she free her from
the obligation to marry Silvio. Although Amarilli spurns Mirtillo’s advances,
she reveals in soliloquy that she is secretly in love with Mirtillo; this soliloquy is
overheard by Corisca. Corisca spins the lie to Amarilli that Silvio is in love with
Lisetta, a nymph, and that they will meet in a cave. This offers hope to Amarilli:
if she catches the couple together, she can escape marriage to Silvio. Corisca
then tells Mirtillo that Amarilli will be meeting a shepherd in the same cave;
seeing her, Mirtillo resolves to follow her, catch her with her lover, kill them
both, and then kill himself. But Satiro spies Mirtillo entering the cave, and
wrongly concludes that Mirtillo is going to meet Corisca there. He blocks the
cave with a rock, before going to fetch the priests. Amarilli is condemned to
death for debauched behaviour, and it seems that Corisca will triumph. Silvio,
meanwhile, wounds Dorinda in a hunting accident, and is spurred by pity to
love her. Mirtillo insists that he should die in place of Amarilli, until his father,
Carino arrives. A set of revelations follow: Amarilli’s innocence is demonstrated, and it emerges that Mirtillo’s father is in fact Montano, the priest.
With this latter revelation, it becomes clear that Mirtillo is, after all, the man
who should marry Amarilli; through their union the prophecy can be fulfilled.
Corisca is converted from her evil ways by the sight of the happiness of the two
lovers.
This plot summary demonstrates Guarini’s attempt to create a plot which is
single and whole, coming close to a tragic ending in the fourth act, yet
producing a comic ending by way of developments which are necessary, yet
surprising. The characters are from various ranks of society, ranging from the
noble lovers to Satiro. There are several comic moments, such as ‘il gioco de la
cieca’ in Act III – a sort of blind man’s buff, or perhaps blind nymph’s buff –
played by Amarilli and a chorus of nymphs, into which Mirtillo attempts to
intervene. There is occasional double entendre, as in Act II, scene 2, when
Dorinda responds to Silvio’s offer of two golden apples by offering him apples
of her own – in other words, her breasts. Such a plot summary also suggests the
sheer escapism of the genre: it takes its audience to a point at which they fear
for a tragic ending, before restoring order. In one sense, the pastoral setting
seems to be entirely in keeping with such escapism. It enables a projection out
of the courtly setting into an idealised Arcadia; with such projection came a
certain amount of liberation from the constraints of normal morality and
courtly decorum. The abundance of time for otiose reflection in Arcadia also
lends itself to graceful discourse, transposing an ideal of the courtly life into
this other setting. Such discourse takes the form of complex and Latinate
syntax, and a classicising register which often recalls Petrarch (as some of
Guarini’s critics would comment, such a register moves the speech of the shepherds of Il pastor fido far from that of real shepherds). And, whereas Tasso’s
31
Matthew Treherne
Aminta had concluded with the thought that a happy ending need not
compensate for any suffering encountered on the way, Il pastor fido ends with
the idea that true happiness is precisely that which comes after suffering, and
which is born out of virtue: ‘quello è vero gioire / che nasce da virtù dopo il
soffrire’ (1612–13). Where the conflict of Aminta had been played out between
two forms of pleasure-seeking – between Silvia’s love of hunting, and Aminta’s
love of Silvia – Il pastor fido sets its conflicts in the context of a broader tension
between the authority of the Arcadian society’s elders, and the desires of individuals within that society. That tension, and the micro-tensions within it, are
all resolved in the play’s ending. Arcadia becomes a place where not only are
individuals’ desires reconciled with each other, but those sensual desires are
themselves reconciled with moral authority.
But it would be wrong to see the pastoral space of Il pastor fido – or indeed
of pastoral literature in the Renaissance as a whole – as wholly escapist. Arcadia
inevitably evokes notions of Eden; yet even the most harmonious and escapist
representation of Arcadia has an audience of fallen humans. And indeed a
sense of exile permeates much of the pastoral literature of the Italian Renaissance. The narrator of Sannazaro’s Arcadia (published at the very start of the
Cinquecento – ambiguously named ‘Sincero’ – is himself a character caught
between the two worlds.8 He reveals his identity in a brief allusion to homesickness, in a moment when the shepherds are particularly satisfied with their
pastoral lot (p. 106). The text ends with his reference to the sheer impossibility
of communicating Arcadian life in the court: the music of Arcadia sounds false
in the palaces of the city (p. 239). Arcadian happiness can only ever be
glimpsed from the outside: it is not a happiness which can be shared. The
ambiguous status of the audience is clear, moreover, from the beginning of the
book, in which the audience is addressed as though they were a part of the
pastoral setting; yet such an address is presented in highly erudite terms: the
author talks of playing ‘the humble flute of Corydon’ (‘la umile fistula di
Coridone’, p. 55), but at the very instant of affirming the humility of his
discourse he uses the highly Latinate term ‘fistula’ and makes a Virgilian reference. Even at the moment when the audience is invited to feel part of the
simpler, harmonious world of Arcadia, it is reminded that it is a courtly audience and therefore estranged from that world. Indeed, the last two chapters of
the text describe the narrator’s rejection of the pastoral in favour of city life.9
In the case of Il pastor fido, this sense of estrangement is integrated into the
relationship between text and audience in a slightly different, but equally
powerful way. The action of the play is located in a postlapsarian age, in
which an act of transgression (caused by the temptation of a woman) must be
atoned by sacrifices until it is purged by the willing self-sacrifice of a good
8
9
I use Francesco Erspamer’s edition of the text (Milan, 1990).
On Sannazaro’s Arcadia, and its ambivalent attitude towards the pastoral life, see William J.
Kennedy, Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral (Hanover and London, 1983), pp. 96–148.
32
The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy
shepherd. The happy resolution of the play represents the return to the
blissful state before Arcadian sin. Other elements in the play invite us to draw
a link between the plot and providential history: not least Mirtillo’s story,
which has him rescued as a baby and saved by intervention from being ritually sacrificed. If the play offers this overview of providential history, then the
audience must find itself doubly estranged from its action: first, by virtue of
the distancing effect of its Arcadian setting, and then by the resolution of its
plot into a time beyond their earthly lives. This is not necessarily a negative
estrangement: the happy ending of the play implies the destination of the
virtuous soul in the restoration of union with God. But to describe Il pastor
fido as ‘escapism’ is not enough, and the happy resolution of the tragicomic
plot is perhaps more ambiguous when performed for an audience than it
might seem.
It is worth noting at this stage a further effect of the relationship between
the pastoral and the tragicomic plot. The emphasis in the pastoral on the
leisurely rejection of courtly life might sit uneasily with the need for unity of
plot. Perhaps the clearest example of this is the pastoral interlude of Canto
VII of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581), the epic poem
narrating the first Crusade, in which the character Erminia regains her
strength under the care of a group of shepherds. In many ways this episode
represents an ambiguous presence in the poem. The pastoral is at the same
time a place of escape, and a focus of critique: the pastoral life has been willingly chosen as a release from courtly life, and from the demands of acquisition and war (8–13). Yet the Gerusalemme liberata places both poetic and
moral importance on the military progress of the crusaders. That military
progress provides the dominant narrative shape of the poem – a shape which
Tasso conceives according to the precepts of Aristotle’s Poetics, as having
unity, and beginning, middle and end: precepts which are also evident in the
plot of Il pastor fido. And that progress is also the dominant moral scheme of
the poem. Spatial progress to Jerusalem is also progress towards the Holy
Sepulchre; and it is God himself, at the very opening of the poem, who
condemns the stasis of the armies in favour of the forward motion of military
advance. Yet in Canto VII, Tasso presents the shepherds as possessing
wisdom: following one shepherd’s critique of military values, the authorial
voice describes him as ‘that wise man’ (‘quel saggio’). The choice of a pastoral
life is a choice to leave the beginning, middle and end of Tasso’s plot. Indeed,
in Tasso’s heavily religious rewriting of the Gerusalemme liberata, the
Gerusalemme conquistata (1593), this episode is eliminated, as part of Tasso’s
general drive to remove distractions from his poem.
In many ways, the pastoral setting enables Guarini to develop key aspects of
his tragicomedy. Its distance from a real setting enables him to represent comic
as well as noble action; he can represent various levels of society without
worrying about compromising verisimilitude. By allying his tragicomedy with
the fashionable genre of pastoral drama, he also taps into the popularity of
33
Matthew Treherne
pastoral, ensuring performances of the play in prestigious settings.10 But in
making his play a ‘tragicommedia pastorale’, with a complex plot moving
towards a clear conclusion, he does alter some of the expectations which his
audience might have had of the pastoral. As we shall see, bringing the pastoral,
tragic and comic together in one play was to prove controversial, and would
lead to multiple criticisms by more conservative members of Guarini’s audience, who rejected what they saw as the unsatisfactory hybridity of this new
genre.
Critical Resistance to Tragicomedy
The circulation and early performances of Il pastor fido quickly led to a dispute
over its worth – a dispute which touched upon issues central to Renaissance
literary theory. The debate can be summarised in three related questions. First
of all, was it possible to mix the comic and tragic genres or (to use the contemporary term) ‘species’ of literature? In other words, was a ‘tragicomedy’ simply
an imperfect and unwarranted mixture of the two, or was it a third species,
perfect in its own right? This problem was further complicated by the ambiguous status of the pastoral, a relatively new type of drama which had never
been clearly defined in criticism. Second: what was the moral purpose of literature: should it teach by example, or might it have some other way of improving
the morals of its readers and viewers? The third question, which was never far
from the other two, concerned the way in which Aristotle’s Poetics ought to be
understood. Did this work set out rules for all literature, for all time, or did the
ideas it contained need to be adapted for a different age? None of the major
participants in the debate rejected the authority of Aristotle; the issue was
rather how that authority should be used.
The major texts produced in opposition to the notion of tragicomedy were
Jason Denores’s Discorso,11 and Apologia contra l’autor del Verrato (1590);
Faustino Summo’s Discorsi poetici (1600);12 and Giovanni Pietro Malacreta’s
Considerationi (1600).13 Guarini’s intervention in defence of Il pastor fido is
largely constituted by the two texts entitled Verrato (1588 and 1593),
published anonymously, most of the contents of which appear later in the
10
11
12
13
For a meticulous discussion and analysis of one such performance, see Lisa Sampson, ‘The
Mantuan Performance of Guarini’s Il pastor fido and Representations of Courtly Identity’,
Modern Language Review 98: 1 (2003), 65–83.
Discorso di Jason Denores intorno a que’ principi, cause, ed accrescimenti che la commedia, la
tragedia ed il poema eroico ricevono dalla filosofia morale e civile e da’ Governatori delle
Reppubbliche [1586], printed in Guarini, Opere (Verona, 1737), pp. 151–206.
Discorsi poetici ne’ quali si discorreno le piu principali questioni di poesia, e si dichiarano molti
luoghi dubbi e difficili intorno all’arte del poetare (Padua, 1600).
Considerationi di Giovanni Pietro Malacreta sopra il Pastor Fido tragicomedia pastorale del
molto illustre Sig. Cavalier Battista Guarini (Vicenza, 1600).
34
The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy
Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1601).14 He was by no means alone in
defending the work: texts broadly supportive of Guarini’s position and Il
pastor fido included Paolo Beni’s Risposta alle considerationi del Malacreta
(1600),15 and Orlando Pescetti’s Difesa del Pastor fido (1601).16
The opening gambit in this dispute was Denores’s first Discorso, which
claims in the first instance not to be concerned with tragicomedy, but to be a
study of the ways in which tragedy, comedy, and heroic poetry derive from
moral and civil philosophy. He is keen to emphasise that he has no desire to
attack any author or text in particular; but his entire argument leads to the
dismissal of the notion of ‘tragicommedia pastorale’, and it was perfectly clear
to Guarini who Denores had in mind. As Guarini points out in the first
Verrato, ‘in all of poetic art [. . .] you will find no more than one pastoral tragicomedy’: his own.17
Denores’s argument stems from a interpretation of the Poetics in which the
forms of poetry were determined by philosophers, ‘in order to generate good
behaviour [buoni costumi] in their republics, and to bring them to happiness’.18 This public function was solely didactic, in the sense that the viewers
would imitate the great actions they saw depicted. It was with this aim in mind
that three types of poetry were developed, always in the service of the republic,
and each with a distinctive purpose. The heroic poem set out the example of a
legitimate prince, to show citizens how such a prince would labour for the
good of his subjects; tragedy, by contrast, was intended to make citizens afraid
of tyranny; and comedy was developed in order to dispose them well towards
popular life (p. 155). Aristotle’s concern was solely with the civic utility of
poetry: he only wrote of those forms of poetry which ‘by either receiving his
rules and principles, or by not receiving them, could lead respectively to good
or bad habits and customs in the souls of citizens’.19 It is for this reason that the
pastoral was of no interest to Aristotle, for the habits of shepherds and of
country folk, their songs, their love affairs, could in no way teach urban
dwellers to live well; and it is for this reason that pastoral drama remained
worthless in the current age (pp. 199–200).
14
15
16
17
18
19
The Verrato texts appear in Guarini, Opere. The most recent edition of the Compendio, from
which I cite in this essay, appears in Il pastor fido e il Compendio della poesia tragicomica, ed.
Gioachino Brognoligo (Bari, 1914).
Risposta alle considerazioni o dubbi dell’Eccellentissimo Signor Dottor Malacreta sopra il Pastor
Fido, con altre varie dubitationi tanto contra detti dubbi e considerazioni, quanto contra l’istesso
Pastor Fido (Padua, 1600).
Orlando Pescetti, Difesa del pastor fido tragicommedia pastorale del molto Illustre signor Cavalier Battista Guarini da quanto gli è stato scritto contro da gli Eccellentissimi signori Faustin
Summo, e Giovanni Pietro Malacreta (Verona, 1601).
‘in tutta l’arte poetica [. . .] non troverete più d’una tragicommedia pastorale’ (p. 305).
‘per generar buoni costumi nelle loro reppubbliche, e per inviarle alla felicità’ (p. 154).
‘che ricevendoli [his rules and principles], o non ricevendoli, potevano generar; o buoni; o
cattivi costumi negli animi de’ cittadini’ (p. 199).
35
Matthew Treherne
Having established the respective civic roles of tragedy, comedy and epic
poetry, Denores turns to the question of tragicomedy – a question to which he
has been building throughout his treatise. Given his belief in the civic utility of
poetry, and in the clearly demarcated roles of the different genres of poetry, it
is unsurprising to find that he dismisses the very notion of the genre. Comedy
and tragedy are fundamentally incompatible entities, both in terms of the type
of action they depict, the reversal of fortune they show, and the type of character they involve.20 The only way in which tragicomedy could exist would be
to have a plot which was double, ‘one depicting private individuals, which
must finish in happiness; and the other, representing the actions of illustrious
persons, which must finish in adverse circumstances’.21 But such a double plot,
lacking the Aristotelian virtue of unity, would be unsatisfactory.
The belief that Aristotle’s categorisation set out universal precepts was also
the basis for Faustino Summo’s arguments against tragicomedy in general, and
Il pastor fido in particular, in his Discorsi poetici. Aristotle was ‘a most diligent
investigator of the possible species of poetry’, who ‘would have provided some
indication’ of the possibility of the tragicomic.22 That tragicomedy might be
permissible under an Aristotelian scheme is therefore a priori an ‘assurda
opinione’ (p. 82), for the Poetics presents universal and immutable principles.
In principle, then, there is little reason to give credence to the notion of
tragicomedy; and in the twelfth of his Discorsi, Summo develops his critique
with detailed reference to Il pastor fido. He attacks any notion that tragicomedy
might successfully combine tragedy and comedy. Guarini’s plot, Summo
argues, can in no way be said to be tragic. Mirtillo is not a tragic figure, nor is
his action tragic: for the story of someone killing themselves for love is an
everyday story, whereas a tragedy requires the action of a great man, who falls
into misfortune through a small failing of character (p. 87). Nor can it be
comic: for Summo refuses to see anything humorous in those elements which
he supposes ought to make the audience laugh. Moreover, Summo does not
see how, even if they had been funny, they could have been truly tragicomic,
since they would not be affected or tempered in any way by the tragic.23 In
pushing his logic in different directions, Summo wishes to show how Guarini’s
20
21
22
23
‘essendo in un certo modo la comedia contradittoria alla tragedia, ed avendo per soggetto
azion di permutazion di fortuna, e di persone contrarie, dovendo la favola dell’una terminar in
allegrezza, e la favola dell’altra terminar in infelicità’ (p. 200).
‘l’una delle persone private, che per sua natura deve finir in allegrezza; e l’altra delle persone
illustri, che per sua natura deve finir nell’avversa fortuna’ (p. 200).
‘Aristotile diligentissimo investigatore delle specie possibili della poesia n’avrebbe dato
qualche indizio’ (p. 83).
Discorsi, p. 88. Summo uses the term ‘ridicolo’ for ‘funny’: he is drawing on a notion which
was generally understood to refer to laughing at an object which is ‘mixed with some ugliness’
(I paraphrase Richard Andrews, who cites Gian Giorgio Trissino, Scripts and Scenarios: the
performance of comedy in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 208–16).
36
The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy
tragicomedy is devoid of both tragedy and comedy, and how the notion of
tragicomedy is meaningless.
Implicit in Summo’s discussion of individual moments in the plot is the
idea of character consistency and appropriateness. The attempt to mix tragic
and comic elements means that Guarini has had to introduce inappropriate
behaviour in some of his characters. One example, to which Summo spells out
his objections in laborious detail, is the conversation between Dorinda and
Silvio of Act II, scene 2. Silvio has lost his hound, Melampo; Dorinda, claiming
to have it, asks Silvio for a sign of his love in return for the dog. The humour in
this scene derives from Silvio’s inability to understand the innuendos used by
Dorinda, who wishes to preserve her modesty; and by the mismatch between
Silvio’s love for his hound (whom he addresses as a lover when he is found
again) and Dorinda’s love for Silvio. But when Summo comes to analyse the
scene, he finds Dorinda’s innuendos unacceptable. For instance, he criticises
the moment when Silvio offers Dorinda two golden apples in return for his
dog, and Dorinda responds: ‘I am not short of apples; I could give you some of
those which are perhaps the most flavoursome and beautiful, if you did not
scorn my gifts.’24 ‘Is this not a modest response from a maiden?’ asks Summo.
‘Is this not a fine way for a nymph to behave [. . .]? Who cannot realise that
with these words she signals to him that she wants to give him [. . .] the apples
of her breasts?’25
Giovanni Pietro Malacreta makes criticisms of the examples of character in
the play, without explicitly relating this to the question of genre. Whereas
Summo had focused on the appropriateness of comic behaviour in a maiden,
Malacreta’s objections focus largely on the moments in which the comic
elements in the plot demand that characters act in inconsistent ways. Thus
Silvio is criticised for being inconsistent for changing his mind about love.
Corisca’s repentance, which completes the happy ending of the play, is also
implausible: from being an immoral woman, ‘she becomes the best, most
chaste, most virtuous [. . .] that has ever been found’.26 In both of these cases,
although Malacreta does not make the point explicit, the inconsistency he
identifies can be directly associated with the avoidance of a tragic ending to the
play, in favour of the comic conclusion. Not only is Corisca’s conversion
improbable, but it also sets an immoral example: ‘there is nothing less tolerable for a poet to do, than to make a wicked person have a good and happy
ending’.27
24
25
26
27
‘A me poma non mancano; potrei / a te darne di quelle che son forse / più saporite e belle, se I
miei doni tu non avessi a schivo’ (418–21).
‘Non è questa una modesta risposta di una Vergine? Non questo un bel costume [. . .] di una
Ninfa? Chi non s’accorge tantosto che con quelle parole gli accenna di volergli donare [. . .] le
poma del suo seno?’ (p. 92).
‘diviene la miglior donna, la più casta, la più honesta [. . .] che mai si trovasse’ (p. 73).
‘non è cosa men tolerabile ne i poeti, che ‘l far, che persona scelerata sortisca buono, e felice
fine’ (p. 73).
37
Matthew Treherne
In addition to the problem of the mixing of tragic and comic, a recurrent
theme in the criticisms of Il pastor fido was the problematic nature of the link
between the tragicomic and the pastoral. Much debate centred on the title of
the play: ‘Pastor fido, tragicommedia pastorale’. As we saw, Denores’s belief in
the didactic importance of poetry for urban dwellers helps him to explain why
Aristotle did not discuss eclogues. Indeed, Denores goes on to argue, pastoral
drama with a happy ending could have the dangerous effect of encouraging
city-dwellers to leave the towns and move to the countryside: ‘if [the playwright] makes the pastoral plot with a turbulent beginning, and a prosperous
ending, this is a tacit invitation to men to leave the city, and to fall in love with
peasant life’.28 For Summo, on the other hand, the problem was one of style.
Given that a dominant association with the pastoral was with love lyrics,
performed outside of the demands of plot, it is unsurprising that Guarini’s
style is described as being ‘entirely lyric, and unsuitable for dramatic composition [. . .]. It is suitable only for singing of love to the sound of the cithara’.29
In an impressive display of pedantry, Malacreta went so far as to say that it
would have been better not to have described Mirtillo as a ‘pastor fido’, because
the phrase could only refer to the behaviour of a person in their dealings as a
shepherd, such as offering their wool for sale at an honest price. Nor did he like
the tautology of the title: obviously a play called ‘pastor fido’ was bound to be a
pastoral. More importantly, the language used by the characters is implausible
when spoken by shepherds. The characters of Il pastor fido speak in fine terms,
using, for example, phrases ‘more worthy of some Platonic philosopher, than
of a lowly shepherd’.30 Any effort by Guarini to confer eloquence upon his
characters is bound to be improbable.
Guarini’s Defence of Pastoral Tragicomedy
The multiple criticisms which emerged in the responses of Denores, Summo
and Malacreta reflect some of the ways in which Guarini’s play challenged the
assumptions of Renaissance Italians. Not all Guarini’s audience were as
shocked by the play as these three readers, of course: Guarini is able confidently to assert in the first Verrato that in criticising his play ‘you [Denores]
blame that which the world commends; despise that which it respects; mock
that which is dear to it’.31 But the criticisms provide a focus for Guarini’s
28
29
30
31
‘se egli costituisce la favola pastoral col principio turbolento, e col fine prospero, questo è un
tacito inviter gli uomini a lasciar le città, ed ad innamorarsi della vita contadinesca’ (Discorso,
p. 202).
‘Tutto lirico, e mal confaceuole a componimento rappresentativo [. . .] è atto solamente a
cantar amori al suon di cithera’ (p. 93).
‘degno più tosto di qualche Filosofo Platonico, che di basso pastore’ (p. 74).
‘Biasimate quello, che tutto ’l mondo commenda, sprezzate quel, ch’egli stima, schernite quell
che gli è caro’ (Primo Verrato, p. 307).
38
The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy
development of his theory of tragicomedy, and sharpen key points in relation
to the intellectual climate of the late Cinquecento.
The first step in achieving this is in refuting Denores’s mode of
Aristotelianism. Two points in particular are crucial to Guarini’s argument.
First is the belief that Aristotle did not set out rules of poetry for all time, but
rather attempted to bring together the best of the poetry of his time, those
works which were praised in his day.32 (This was why Aristotle had not
mentioned genres of poetry such as those exemplified by Dante’s Commedia,
or Ariosto’s Orlando furioso.) Secondly, Guarini sets out the need to distinguish between rules of nature, and secondary rules. There are basic rules of
poetry, which have the status of rules of nature, and which must always be
obeyed: ‘someone who does not imitate, who does not write in verse, who does
not speak with decorum, who does not give delight, who does not instruct, is a
bad poet, or is not a poet; and these things must be done in all species of
poetry’.33 Other rules, however, are secondary, and can be adapted. This
distinction enables Guarini to justify his development of a third genre.
The crucial point which needed to be argued was of the validity of the third
genre, which Denores had found monstrous. First, on the level of plot, a tragicomedy is not simply a yoking together of a whole tragedy with a whole
comedy, to such an extent that one could separate the two; it is to create a third
type of play, ‘perfect in its type’,34 which takes those aspects of tragedy and
comedy which can be combined without jeopardising verisimilitude, and
creating a single plot. The aim is to determine which elements in the two
genres are ‘repugnanti’ and which are ‘conformi’ (p. 225). Tragedy and
comedy in any case have much in common: for instance, a limited timescale, a
dramatised story, verisimilitude, recognition, and reversal (p. 225); although
there are differences, it is important to determine which differences are so
incompatible that it would be impossible to combine them. The major difference between them is in character, and the type of action: tragedy imitates
great personages, serious action, terror and commiseration; comedy, instead,
private affairs of private individuals, and laughter. However, Guarini insists
that there is no violation of the laws of nature or of the poetic arts in introducing into one plot characters who are great and not great. To make his point,
he draws on classical antecedents, but also on real life. ‘So maybe princes are
always in majesty? Don’t they ever deal with private affairs?’35 Based on real
life, there is no reason to suppose that there is something improbable about
32
33
34
35
‘erano in pregio a suo’ tempi’ (Primo Verrato, p. 234).
‘Chi non imita, chi non versifica, che non parla con decoro, chi non diletta, chi non giova, è
mal Poeta, o non è poeta, e questo si dee fare in tutte le spezie di poesia’ (Primo Verrato,
pp. 233–34).
‘perfetto in suo genere’ (Compendio, p. 224).
‘Stanno forse i prencipi sempre in maestà? Non trattano essi mai di cose private?’ (Compendio,
p. 226).
39
Matthew Treherne
mixing private actions with public personages. Only some elements are
incompatible: terror cannot coexist with laughter, so that must be excluded
from tragicomedy. The creator of tragicomedy therefore ‘from [tragedy] takes
the great characters, and not the action; the plot which is verisimilar, but not
true; affects moved, but measured; pleasure; danger, not death; from
[comedy] he takes measured laughter, the modest pleasantries, the false knot;
the happy reversal; and above all, the comic order’.36
Tragicomedy can be therefore seen as a legitimate genre insofar as it is
perfectly reasonable to bring together certain elements from tragedy and
comedy without offending the immutable laws of nature which can be gleaned
from Aristotle. In addition, Guarini is insistent on the moral function of tragicomedy. However, in distinction from Denores’s view of that function,
Guarini does not see it as straightforwardly didactic. He sets out the ‘instrumental’ and ‘architectonic’ ends of the genres, building up his discussion on
Aristotelian categories. Each genre has instrumental and architectonic aims.
Comedy’s instrumental end is the imitation of the actions of private men, who
with their failings move the viewers to smile. Guarini concedes that Aristotle
did not mention the architectonic end of comedy, but he is confident as to
what he would have said it was, had he dealt with the issue in the Poetics: to
purge melancholy (Compendio, p. 234). As for tragedy, its structural aim is to
imitate tragic actions; in its architectonic aim it recalls the soul from its
daydreaming and complacency, through the purgation of terror and compassion (p. 235). The term purgation has two senses: first, ‘the elimination of a
sentiment’; second, ‘purification and cleansing’. Compassion and terror are
not inherently bad things; they are indeed necessary for a good life. But nor are
they always good: for too much of either can cloud moral judgement. ‘These
things therefore need to be purged, that is, brought to a virtuous temperateness, and this is what tragedy does.’37
Guarini’s controversial view that Aristotle had written the Poetics, not as a
set of universal precepts, but as a distillation of the principles he found evident
in the best of the poetry of his time, also opens up the important observation
that audiences change, and that consequently the effect of theatre on the audience is bound to change too; the architectonic end of a play is inevitably
subject to adjustment by the playwright. The value of a play, therefore, is not
intrinsic to the work itself, but rather is found in its effect on the audience. And
in the modern age, neither tragedy nor comedy is able to fulfil its architectonic
purpose. Tragedy is unnecessary in the Christian age: ‘what need do we have of
36
37
‘Dall’una prende le persone grandi e non l’azione; la favola verisimile, ma non vera; gli affetti
mossi, ma rintuzzati; il diletto, non la mestizia; il pericolo, non la morte; dall’altra il riso non
dissoluto, le piacevolezze modeste, il nodo finto, il rivolgimento felice, e sopratutto l’ordine
comico’ (Compendio, p. 231).
‘Hanno dunque bisogno questi due affetti d’esser purgati, cioè ridotti a virtuoso
temperamento, e questo fa la tragedia’ (Compendio, p. 237).
40
The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy
purging terror and compassion with tragic sights, when we have the sacred
teachings of our religion, which teaches us to do this through the words of the
Gospels?’38 In truth Il pastor fido lends itself to this argument rather more
strongly than anything inherent in the tragicomic genre as described by
Guarini: the play’s broad scheme encompasses providential history, from the
fall through an act of sin to a redemptive act of sacrifice; if one imagined a
tragic ending to this plot, it would negate the Christological dynamic which is
strongly suggested in this scheme, whereas the happy ending we have involves
the full-scale redemption fitting to Christian doctrine.
But if tragedy is no longer an appropriate genre in the Christian age, nor
does comedy fulfil its role. Guarini dismisses the genre wholesale, arguing that
it ‘has come to such boredom and despisal that, if it is not accompanied by the
marvels [maraviglie] of the intramezzi [interludes with music and dancing],
there is no longer anybody today who can stand it’.39 Before he has even argued
these points about modern audiences, however, Guarini suggests that tragedy
and comedy were in any case likely to be second-rate genres: tragedy showing
‘the atrocity of chance, blood and death, which are horrible and inhuman
things to see’, and comedy making us ‘dissolve into laughter to such an extent
that we sin against modesty and the decorum of a well-mannered man’.40
Guarini’s own defence of the pastoral depends on the negation of the idea
that the term ‘pastorale’ should refer to the quality of the narrative. When he
named the play a ‘tragicommedia pastorale’, he did not intended the latter
term as a substantive, referring to a type of plot separate from tragicomedy,
but rather as an adjective qualifying the term ‘tragedy’; ‘the term “tragicomedy” shows us the quality of the narrative, and the term “pastoral” the
quality of the people which are represented in it’.41
Moreover, Guarini draws on the nobility of the figure of the shepherd to
justify his choice. Biblically, divine providence was made known to shepherds,
and so the pastoral is a mode of being which is capable of engendering human
greatness (Compendio, p. 271). He does not linger over the continuity between
the pastoral and the Christian – a continuity which the play itself emphasises,
with a plot which shows how the redemptive self-sacrifice of a good shepherd
can set right the wrongs of an original sin – but instead is concerned with the
critical notion of verisimilitude. He emphasises shepherds’ capacity for good,
38
39
40
41
‘che bisogno abbiamo noi oggidì di purgare il terrore e la commiserazione con le tragiche viste,
avendo i precetti santissimi della nostra religione, che ce l’insegna con la parola evangelica?’
(Compendio, p. 245).
‘La commedia è venuta in tanta noia e disprezzo, che, s’ella non s’accompagna con le
maraviglie degli “intramezzi”, non è più alcuno che sofferire oggi la possa’ (Compendio,
p. 245).
‘’l’atrocità de’ casi, il sangue e le morti, che sono viste orribili ed inumane’; ‘si dissoluti nel riso,
che pecchiamo contro la modestia e ‘l decoro d’uom costumato’ (Compendio, p. 233).
‘la voce “tragicommedia” ci dimostra la qualità della favola e la voce di “pastorale” quella delle
persone che in essa si rappresentano’ (Compendio, p. 274).
41
Matthew Treherne
and their importance to Christianity, not because he wishes to make his
readers read a Christian allegory into the plot, but because he wants to show
that his shepherds are true to life. As throughout, it is an Aristotelian value –
verisimilitude – which guides his argument.
The Compendio therefore presents a justification for tragicomedy as a single
plot, which aims to temper the emotions. More than a claim for the legitimacy
of this new genre, it is a statement of its superiority in comparison with the
genres of tragedy and comedy. Although much of the debate over Il pastor fido
focused on details of the text, Guarini’s defence of the poem is primarily
concerned with setting out the possibilities of a new genre. This required a
dismantling of the conservative Aristotelianism of Denores, although it should
be remembered that Guarini does not reject Aristotle, but rather redefines the
ways in which Aristotle’s Poetics should be read. In presenting tragicomedy as a
whole genre, complete in its own right, Guarini is insistent upon its dignity
within the principles set out by the authority of Aristotle. Finally, in freeing
tragicomedy from any expectations of didacticism, Guarini sets out a different
utility value for the genre. Tragicomedy may not have particular lessons to
teach, but in balancing the extremes of tragedy and comedy, it does ensure a
seemly moderation in the viewer. It is these conceptual developments, as well
as the success of Il pastor fido itself, which constitute the achievement of
Guarini’s notion of tragicomedy.
42
3
Transporting Tragicomedy:
Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of
the Commedia dell’Arte
ROBERT HENKE
E
ARLY MODERN tragicomedy was an international genre, originally
remanating from the particular alchemy of theory and practice that distinguished sixteenth-century Italian humanist drama, and in large part sustained
by the professional companies whose zenith in Italy closely corresponded to
Shakespeare’s lifetime. An international, Italian, perspective on tragicomedy,
which this essay aims to provide, can cast the dramaturgy, motifs, character
system, and emotional registers of English tragicomedy in a new light, especially in regard to Shakespeare, who among English early modern playwrights
has the most affinity with Italian dramatists if we consider genre systems and
theatrical structures, as opposed to merely individual plays. A continental
perspective italicises the peculiar historical use of pastoral in Renaissance
tragicomedy and the important role of the commedia dell’arte in transporting
tragicomedy, as well as comedy, across geo-linguistic frontiers. It is the
contention of this essay that the commedia dell’arte was just as important as
were famous Italian dramatists such as Guarini and Tasso in conveying ‘pastoral tragicomedy’ to Shakespeare. Whereas no line of linear influence can be
directly identified, this essay argues for the likelihood of a general, systemic
transmission based on two factors: (1) the fact that Shakespeare was aware of
the commedia dell’arte and (2) the striking similarity (with regard to
dramaturgy, generic configuration, and theatrical systems) of a group of
commedia pastoral tragicomedies with several of Shakespeare’s works.
Like other English dramatists of the period, Shakespeare was familiar with
the commedia dell’arte. Frequent uses of arte roles in early comedies and
Jacques’ iteration of several commedia maschere in his ‘Seven Ages of Man’
speech (As You Like It) demonstrate that he was cognisant of the most important form of professional theatre in continental Europe. He had several ways of
learning about the commedia dell’arte: through Italians living in London such
43
Robert Henke
as John Florio who owned several commedia della’arte scenarios,1 Englishmen
who had travelled to Italy, fellow actors such as Will Kemp who probably acted
with Italian professionals,2 or associates such as Thomas Nashe and Ben
Jonson who were clearly aware of this theatrical phenomenon. Probably as a
result of English ambassadors viewing the commedia dell’arte in France in
1571 and 1572, the professional actors came to England several times in the
1570s, most notably (for our purposes) in 1574 when they performed a
pastoral play in Reading before Queen Elizabeth.3 Except for one tantalising
reference to the well-known actor Drusiano Martinelli performing ‘within the
Cittie and the Liberties’ of London in 1578,4 the documents of the 1570s all
refer to court activity. Thomas Norton’s 1574 denunciation of female
performers may indicate a general disapproval of companies that included
actresses,5 and the actors appear to have found Spain and France more congenial sites of performance during the 1580s. There are several references to the
commedia dell’arte in the early 1590s, however, and they appear to indicate a
specifically technical interest in the professional theatre on the part of English
dramatists and actors just when Shakespeare was beginning his career:
Thomas Nashe’s 1590 account of a conversation he had with an Italian
Arlecchino,6 and the praise of Italian actors in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish
Tragedy for being ‘so sharp of wit / That in one hour’s meditation / They would
perform anything in action’.7 Most striking are the stage ‘platts’ found among
the papers of Edward Alleyn, and used between 1590 and 1592 by several
actors who would become part of the Lord Chamberlain’s men in 1594. These
‘platts’ or ‘plotts’ resemble commedia dell’arte scenarios in several respects,
and the plays themselves feature Pantalone and other commedia-like
characters.8
Although early English imports of continental tragicomedy, such as Samuel
Daniel’s 1605, The Queen’s Arcadia and John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
R.C. Simonini, Italian Scholarship in Renaissance England (Chapel Hill, 1952), p. 102. Like
Shakespeare, Florio was in the service of Southampton.
For a study of Will Kemp’s relationship to the commedia dell’arte, see Louis B. Wright, ‘Will
Kemp and the Commedia dell’Arte’, MLN 41 (1926), 516–20.
For early commedia dell’arte travel to England and other countries, see E.K. Chambers, The
Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford, 1923), II, pp. 261–65, and Kathleen Lea, Italian Popular
Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte, 1560–1620, with Special Reference to the English
Stage, 2 vols (Oxford, 1934), II, pp. 352–58.
Acts of the Privy Council of England, n.s., X, 1577–78, ed. John Roche Dasent (London, 1895),
p. 144 and Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, IV, p. 277.
Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, p. 354, who quotes Norton’s letter at length.
The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford, 1958), III, p. 342.
IV.i.164–66. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J.R. Mulryne (New York, 1970).
Andrew Grewar, ‘Shakespeare and the Actors of the Commedia dell’Arte’, in Studies in the
Commedia dell’Arte, eds. David J. George and Christopher J. Gossip (Cardiff, 1993), pp.
13–47. For facsimiles and transcriptions of the ‘platts’, see W.W. Greg, Dramatic Documents
from the Elizabethan Playhouses: Stage plots, Actors’ Parts, Prompt Books (Oxford, 1931).
44
Transporting Tragicomedy
(1608–09), followed the Italian practice of coupling the genre of tragicomedy
with the mode of pastoral, most English playwrights – including Fletcher
himself – did not sustain this particular conjunction that had served the Italians so well in the second half of the sixteenth century.9 The forest scenes of
Philaster are not essential but accidental; they do not bring the characters,
topoi, symbolically resonant places, characteristic plot modules, and
emotional registers of pastoral to bear on the generic problems of tragicomedy
as shaped by Beaumont and Fletcher, which (in Eugene Waith’s still important
study) stage a rhetorical and hypothetical engagement with illicit sexuality and
with ‘the danger not the death’.10 The tragicomedies of Marston, Middleton,
and Massinger do not engage pastoral in any serious way, even if Marston in
The Malcontent appears to have been partly influenced by Italian tragicomedy
as developed by court and academic poets, chief among whom was the late
sixteenth-century Ferraran courtier Giambattista Guarini.11
It is in the late romances or tragicomedies of Shakespeare – Cymbeline, The
Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – that pastoral in its most elastic sense is most
fully used among English dramatists as a generically transformative mode.12
Whereas Guarini and his famous play Il pastor fido did in fact directly influence the above-mentioned plays by Daniel, Fletcher, and perhaps Marston, the
traditional model of source and influence has limited use generally when
applied to Shakespeare’s work, and particularly when directed to his late plays.
The fame of Guarini’s Pastor fido and Torquato Tasso’s Aminta has led
literary-based critics to take them as the generic norm for early modern Italian
pastoral, but a fuller survey of the extant Italian texts, and an examination of
the full theatrical context that includes the professional companies, reveals
Tasso’s and Guarini’s plays to be unrepresentative of general Italian practice.
Most of the pastoral tragicomedies performed in venues ranging from the
court to the piazza by both amateur actors and professional companies differ
from the two canonical Italian works in several ways, embodying a fuller range
of action than characterises Tasso’s narratively based play, or lacking the heavy
Sophoclean substructure and theoretical apparatus of Guarini’s pastoral. And
as one might expect, the Arcadian plays performed by the commedia dell’arte
abound with the kinds of comic routines that draw them closer to Shakespeare’s late plays than to those of Guarini and Tasso, even as the professional
actors were still capable of the kinds of tragicomic, pathetic, and melodramatic
registers that Shakespeare’s late plays also possess. Examining the overall
9
10
11
12
For the distinction between genre and mode, see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge Mass., 1982).
Eugene Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, 1952).
For possible Guarinian connections to Marston’s The Malcontent, see G.K. Hunter, ‘Italian
Tragicomedy on the English Stage’, Renaissance Drama, n.s., 6 (1973), 123–48.
Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays
(Newark, 1997).
45
Robert Henke
system of Italian tragicomedy calibrated to an Arcadian register, especially
filtered through the professional vehicles that most likely provided Shakespeare his most direct contact with the genre, will demonstrate a range of
‘theatregrams’, or theatrical moving parts, that Shakespeare could have
deployed.13
Frank Kermode, after a careful and interesting survey of the possible influence of commedia pastoral plays on Shakespeare’s Tempest, ultimately
dismisses them as ‘jocose pantomime[s]’ that Shakespeare would not have
needed as inspiration for his serious play.14 Such a conclusion neither
acknowledges the many serious, modally tragicomic, moments in these plays
nor the ways in which the commedia dell’arte was highly literary and closely
connected to practical and theoretical developments in late sixteenth-century
Italian drama. Before we examine the tragicomic nature of the Arcadian arte
scenarios themselves, it is important to consider the general resonance and
function of Italian pastoral tragicomedy, of which the commedia dell’arte was
fully aware.
Italian tragicomedy emerged from the general context of humanist Italian
theatre, for which Ferrara was particularly important from the late fifteenth
century because of the ruling Estense family’s keen interest in discovering,
editing, translating, performing, and adapting (to an Italian idiom and situation) classical drama. Beginning in the decade of the 1540s, editions, translations, and commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics sparked a wave of theoretical
inquiry that was more innovative than has generally been thought, especially
when general principles of Aristotle were conjured to justify, after the fact,
literary and theatrical practice.15 The great debate at the end of the century
between Guarini and Giason Denores on the legitimacy of a mixed genre such
as tragicomedy was a natural outgrowth of Italian humanist inquiry into the
nature and use of the ancient dramatic genres tragedy, comedy, and the
much-discussed satyr play, taken by Guarini and others to be a classical prototype for genera mista (even as Guarini emphasised tragicomedy as a new genre
for the Christian era, with Hellenic fate transformed into providence).
Whereas for Denores the genres of tragedy and comedy were like immutable
Platonic forms, each governing and even ontologically drawing on a different
theological-political order, for Guarini the different genres and their constituent elements (character, character system, plot, plot modules, place, topoi,
emotional register, intended effect on the audience) were plastic materials,
13
14
15
Louise George Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (New Haven, 1989). See Clubb for
a magisterial account of the full range of Italian pastoral drama in the second half of the
sixteenth century.
Frank Kermode, ed., William Shakespeare, The Tempest (1954; London and NewYork, 1958),
pp. lxvi–lxx.
See the articles of Daniel Javitch: ‘Self-Justifying Norms in the Genre Theories of Italian
Renaissance Drama’, Philological Quarterly 67 (1988), 195–218; and ‘Pioneer Genre Theory
and the Opening of the Humanist Canon’, Common Knowledge 3 (1994), 54–66.
46
Transporting Tragicomedy
capable of being detached, reconfigured, reversed, recalibrated, and transformed.
For Guarini, this magisterial power of generic transformation rested with
the supreme authority of the dramatist, and although Guarini was involved
with productions of his play, his perfectionism tended to delay production.16
Not under Guarini’s authority (and in fact in defiance of his explicit attacks on
the professional players), his Sophoclean pastoral tragicomedy was in fact
performed several times by the commedia dell’arte. But even more important
than their frequent performances of literary icons such as Il pastor fido and
Aminta was the fact that the commedia dell’arte – just like Shakespeare –
seemed to have perfectly understood the Guarinian principle that genres and
their elements were pliant creative materials rather than essential forms.
After the first two decades of organised professional activity in the 1540s
and the 1550s, when this initially all-male theatre appears to have in fact privileged comedy and physical farce, the advent of the actress in the 1560s immediately broadened the generic repertoire. Innamorate (‘lovers’) such as
Vincenza Armani and a certain ‘Flaminia’, who respectively led two troupes
that engaged in a lively theatrical rivalry in the summers of 1567 and 1568 in
Mantua, brought the high literary registers, musical skills, and familiarity with
fashionable genres such as pastoral into the mix of the commedia dell’arte, and
it was never the same afterwards. On 1 July 1567, Mantuan ducal secretary
Luigi Rogna reported that Flaminia’s troupe performed the tragedy of Dido
(probably that of Ludovico Dolce) ‘mutata in tragicommedia’ [changed into a
tragicomedy].17 The professional actors were therefore conversant with
courtly, academic, and humanist literature, but did not regard it as sacrosanct,
and genera mista were the natural result. Demonstrating again their opportunistic use of literature, the actors also dramatised a bloody narrative filched
from Ariosto that served up unadulterated tragedy, but generally the Orlando
Furioso, with its magicians, metamorphoses, hermits, enchanted fountains,
and amorous intrecci, was most readily repackaged for that strain of magical
pastoral that, this essay argues, links Shakespeare with Italian drama. The wave
of pastoral drama that swept through the courts of Ferrara and other northern
Italian cities, beginning with Giraldi Cinthio’s 1545 Egle and Agostino
Beccari’s 1551 Il sacrificio, frequently employed supernatural transformations,
in this regard both differing from Guarini and Tasso’s plays (both are
governed by a neoclassical concern for verisimilitude) and resembling those of
Shakespeare. And when, in fact, Vincenza Armani and Flaminia’s troupe
turned to pastoral proper in the various intermezzi that they performed,
16
17
See the introduction to Battista Guarini, Opere di Battista Guarini, ed. Marziano
Guglielminetti (Turin, 1971).
Alessandro D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, 2 vols (Turin, 1891), II, p. 449. All translations from Italian are my own.
47
Robert Henke
supernatural metamorphosis was the order of the day. So Rogna’s account for
5 July 1567:
Then yesterday, the two troupes performed competing intermezzi at the same
time. In Vincenza’s intermezzo Cupid appeared, who liberated Clori, a nymph
who had been turned into a tree. One could see Jove, who with a thunderbolt
from above ruined the tower of a giant, who had imprisoned several shepherds.
After the sacrifice was made, Cadmus sowed the dragon’s teeth, and saw them
grow into armed men who then battled each other. The intermezzo displayed
Jove’s responses, then Pallas Athena in her armour, and finally the city began to
be built.18
Almost from the very beginning of the commedia dell’arte, and only three
years after the first recorded Italian professional actress, the troupes are
performing ‘magical pastoral’: plays set in an Arcadian landscape in which
typically pastoral characters, such as nymphs, are transformed Ovidian style
into trees and freed by other supernatural powers. The actor-writer Adriano
Valerini, in a funeral oration written for Vincenza Armani a year after her
mysterious death by poison in 1569, confirmed the generic virtuosity that she
had demonstrated in the Mantua performances, and the fact that the
commedia dell’arte worked in the tripartite system of ‘tragical-pastoralcomical’ (as Polonius would put it) that would be the basis of so much early
modern tragicomedy.19 In the hands of sophisticated actresses such as Armani,
pastoral was affectively tragicomic, establishing new generic terrain by carefully calibrating a tertium quid of audience response: a sweet smile rather than
the raucous belly laugh of unadulterated comedy, the pathos elicited by false
death rather than the terror aroused by the irrevocable death of tragedy, a
register of melos and amorous sentiment poised halfway between the two
generic extremes.
Not only did the commedia dell’arte draw on courtly academic pastoral, as
the 1567–68 Mantua performances demonstrate, but the latter absorbed
theatregrams from the former. Luigi Pasqualigo, in his 1581 Gl’intricati,
imports three commedia-style parti ridicole into a magic Arcadian world
presided over by a maga, who terrifies the buffoons with unseen voices and
wields power with magic liquor and a book.20 Famous professional companies
such as the Gelosi and the Confidenti frequently performed at court, and
courtly academic playwrights like Pasqualigo would have had ample opportunities to enjoy commedia lazzi.
18
19
20
D’Ancona, Origini del teatro italiano, II, p. 451.
See Valerini’s account of Armani’s skill in tragedy, comedy, and pastoral in Oratione
d’Adriano Valerini Veronese, in morte della divina signora Vincenza Armani, Comica
Eccellentissima (Verona, 1570), printed in Ferruccio Marotti and Giovanno Romei, eds, La
Commedia dell’Arte e la società barocca: La professione del teatro (Rome, 1991), pp. 35–36.
Luigi Pasqualigo, Gl’intricati, pastorale (Venice, 1581).
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Transporting Tragicomedy
The printing, in Paris, of Bartolomeo Rossi’s 1584 La fiammella, which
mentions the performance of the play by various arte actors who were on a
French tournée, bespeaks the continued popularity of magical pastoral among
the professional actors, as does the publication of Flaminio Scala’s 1611 Il
teatro delle favole rappresentative, a collection of fifty scenarios that, despite
some literary embellishments and an eye to the reading public, was meant by
the then middle-aged Scala as a retrospective ‘encyclopedia’ or memory
theatre of the kinds of plays that Scala had performed with the Gelosi and the
Confidenti over past decades.21 The last ten scenarios in Scala’s collection are
all generically multiform in the capacious manner of Renaissance tragicomedy, with labels such as ‘pastorale’, ‘tragedia’, ‘opera mista’, ‘opera regia’,
and ‘opera eroica’, and they share strikingly similar dramaturgical features (as
well as a large Mediterranean reach in their cultural geography) with Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest: plays almost exactly
contemporary with the publication of Scala’s work.
The title of the forty-second scenario (or ‘giornata’ in Scala’s Boccaccian
frame) is called ‘Gli avvenimenti, comici, pastorali, e tragici, opera mista’
[Comic, Pastoral, and Tragic Events, a Mixed Work] and it thus bespeaks the
tripartite division of genre and place that structures The Winter’s Tale.22 All
three acts of Scala’s scenario are set in the general area of Sparta, but the first
act, regarding the ‘comic events’, is staged in the bourgeois setting of
Pantalone and Gratiano’s houses, where a felicitous romantic arrangement is
finally achieved; the second, pastoral, section is represented in the woods
outside of Sparta. There the children of Pantalone and Gratiano’s servants
explore the affective and tragicomic registers of the pastoral mode (just as it is
the children of Leontes and Polixenes who dominate the pastoral section in
The Winter’s Tale). The third, tragic, act is set back in Sparta but in the royal
court of Oreste, the King of Sparta, where the erotic passions and rivalries that
unfold with the Kings of Athens and Mycenae generate tragic bloodshed. If
Renaissance, like classical, drama, was socially coded, then Italian tragicomedy
required a certain mobility of rank: the Italian analogue to the social paradox
of the shepherdess-queen Perdita (and of the ‘gentlemen’ shepherds at the end
of the play) is the social elasticity of Pantalone and Gratiano, who in their
capacity as ambassadors to the Spartan king are ‘vestiti nobilmente’ [dressed
nobly] in the final, tragic, section of the play.
‘Rosalba incantrice, opera eroica’ (Day 44), combines salient aspects of The
Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. In the tragic antefatto of the play, recounted in
the ‘argomento’ (dramaturgically cognate with Prospero’s tragic story of
fratricidal usurpation to Miranda), enmity between two rival magicians who
21
22
Flaminio Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, ed. Ferruccio Marotti, 2 vols (1611; Milan,
1976).
Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, II, pp. 433–46.
49
Robert Henke
each rule different islands causes one (Artano) to murder the other (Arimaspo).
As in The Winter’s Tale, the tragic rift in the older generation is healed by an
amorous alliance between their children: in the final act of the play Almonia,
son of Arimaspo, marries the now ruling enchantress Rosalba, daughter of the
murdered Artano, with Arimaspo receiving Rosalba’s pardon. Pastoral scenes,
tropes, and elements figure in several of Scala’s ten genera mista: in ‘L’Alvida,
Opera regia’ (Day 43), a magician withdraws himself to the forest after a traumatic experience in the court and there detains the king of Egypt and the
sultan of Persia in order to ‘rimediar tutti i disordini’ [heal all disorder]. One
of the final scenarios, ‘L’albore incantato, pastorale’ (Day 49), is fully set in a
pastoral landscape, featuring an intreccio of frustrated lovers, an omnipotent
mago who manipulates his subjects with magical spells that transfix them or
transform them into trees and fountains, a savage man who serves the magician, tempting food that emits terrifying flames when one approaches it, false
deaths, plaintiff registers of amorous grief, and buffoonish characters who
attempt to steal things from the magician’s grotto.
This scenario in particular, which in the combination of the four-person
amorous circle and the omnipotent mago combines many elements of A
Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, points to a large group of
pastoral plays that scholars have known since the beginning of the twentieth
century. Drawing from five different manuscript collections, in 1913
Ferdinando Neri published five scenarios of ‘magical pastoral’ with very
striking similarities to The Tempest.23 Several of them come from a twovolume collection compiled by the Roman writer and amateur theatricalist
Basilio Locatelli, and are now housed in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome.24
The compilation was done between 1618 and 1622, several years after The
Tempest, but Locatelli claims in his introduction that he is merely recording
the kinds of plays that have long been performed, and indeed they resemble
the 1567 Mantuan pastorals, Pasqualigo’s court play, Rossi’s La fiammella, and
Scala’s one fully pastoral play. Neri also draws from a scenario collection
located in the Biblioteca Corsiniana in Rome, which date variously from the
first half of the seventeenth century but are memorial in the manner of the
Locatelli scenarios, and he includes one scenario from Naples. Kathleen Lea, in
Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte 1560–1620, also
published five commedia pastoral plays from the Locatelli and Corsini collections not printed by Neri.25
23
24
25
Ferdinando Neri, Scenari delle maschere in Arcadia (Castello, 1913).
MSS 1211–12 in the Casanantense Library, Rome.
Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, pp. 555–67, 610–42. There are more extant scenarios, in
Locatelli, that if not fully Arcadian contain elements of the genre: ‘Le teste incantate’ (vol. 1,
number 8), ‘Fonte incantato’ (vol. 1, number 44), ‘Li incanti amorosi’ (vol. 2, number 20), and
‘Li ritratti’ (vol. 1, number 3).
50
Transporting Tragicomedy
Taken together, the general plot of these Arcadian plays has been deftly
summarised by Richard Andrews as follows:
An isolated island is ruled by a magician, whose power within his territory is
limitless. A range of characters find themselves on the island, against their will –
they include lovers and others from gentlemanly classes, and more ridiculous
figures from improvised comedy. By the end of their encounters with each other
and with the magician, reconciliations both sentimental and comic have been
achieved: these solutions may involve the magician himself, in relation to his past
life.26
The relevance of this plot to The Tempest, a play whose ‘sources’ are less identifiable than practically any other Shakespearean play, is obvious, although
Frank Kermode questions the connection because there is no one scenario that
exactly matches the plot of The Tempest and because the scenarios post-date
Shakespeare’s play. But the fact that the scenarios post-date The Tempest does
not exclude the possibility that this kind of play, with its constellations of
typical theatregrams and lazzi, was a deep source for The Tempest, as long as we
do not limit ourselves to the traditional literary notion of a source, and
remember that Locatelli as well as the Corsini editor state that they are merely
recording scenarios that have long been in existence. As Richard Andrews puts
it, ‘an accumulation of “analogues” can arguably take on the character of a
“source”, particularly in a theatrical culture where performance ideas were
constantly being transmitted orally and by direct experience from one practitioner to another’.27
In order to build the case, argued by Neri, Lea, and Andrews, that Shakespeare was influenced by the general system and form of Italian tragicomedy as
performed, in a pastoral mode, by the commedia dell’arte, I propose a more
detailed reading of the Arcadian scenarios than has been previously done.
Although The Tempest will provide the most affinities, it is also important,
when comparing Shakespeare’s work to the commedia dell’arte pastorals, to
consider A Midsummer Night’s Dream sub specie magical pastoral, and The
Winter’s Tale under the aspect of pastoral tragicomedy.28
26
27
28
Richard Andrews, ‘Shakespeare and Italian Comedy’, in Andrew Hadfield and Paul
Hammond, eds, Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe [Arden Critical Companions] (London,
2004), pp. 123–49. (For the above quote, see p. 131.) My arguments against Kermode are
indebted to those of Andrews.
Andrews, ‘Shakespeare and Italian Comedy’, p. 132.
It may be objected that A Midsummer Night’s Dream should be excluded from this grouping of
‘tragicomic magical pastoral’ on generic grounds (as a comedy and not a tragicomedy) and
The Winter’s Tale because of its (ultimately) insistent verisimilitude. The threat of death
imposed by the blocking parents and the deployment of the Romeo and Juliet theme in the
former play does however introduce tragicomic registers, and in The Winter’s Tale, the illusion
and the spectre of the supernatural is invoked by the oracle of Delphi, as well as in Paulina’s
apparently ‘magical’, Ovidian transformation of Hermione.
51
Robert Henke
Generally, the Italian magical pastoral scenarios combine the chief conceits
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, and we will begin by examining some affinities of the Arcadian scenarios with Shakespeare’s earlier
play.29 The arte plays stage a circle of frustrated lovers (A loves B, who loves C,
who loves D, who loves A), usually four as in Shakespeare, whose amorous
vicissitudes in the forest are governed by magical objects (usually either a
garland worn on the head or an apple that is consumed) that can instantaneously induce hate or love in the person beholding the bearer or consumer of
the object. Various erotic permutations are played out until the proper alignments are achieved, with the young innamorati finally realising that all of their
confusions – as well as their resolutions – have been caused by a higher power.
The connection to Dream appears particularly salient when the erotic confusion is caused by a combination of the magical object and sleep. In the Locatelli
scenario ‘La nave, comedia pastorale’,30 Silvio loves Clori but dons the magic
garland and falls asleep. Waking up to behold her he instantaneously despises
the object of his former affections. In the Arcadian scenarios, characters
frequently fall asleep in the forest, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in
‘Arcadia incantata’,31 sleep even becomes a comic lazzo, as Silvana fends off
four amorous characters by promising herself to the one who has the best sleep
(predictably, fleeing them all when they perform to her bidding).
To a greater extent than A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but in ways that are
still comparable, the Scala, Locatelli, Corsini, and Neapolitan pastoral
scenarios are modally tragicomic, achieving registers of pathos and melos
performed in commedia dell’arte pastorals as early as in Vincenza Armani’s
Mantuan performances. As in Shakespeare’s play, the commedia scenarios
feature dreams as psychologically significant vehicles of occult knowledge, as
when Tirsi in ‘Gli avvenimenti comici, pastorali, et tragici’ prays to the god
Sonno to see Fillide’s image in a dream, or when, in ‘Pantaloncino, comedia
pastorale’,32 Fausto falls in love with a nymph in a dream, and comes to the
‘Bow of Desire’ (‘L’arco del desiderio’ – the deep source of psychological revelation throughout the play) to find out who she might be. Whereas Shakespeare (in alignment with modern taste) treated the amorous pathos of
shepherds or exiles in the forest as a parodic, comic theme, in As You Like It, as
well as in Dream, pastoral love is taken more or less seriously in the commedia
29
30
31
32
For a fuller discussion of similarities and differences between Italian pastoral drama and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, see Richard Andrews, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Italian
Pastoral’, in the forthcoming Transnational and Transcultural Exchange in Early Modern
Drama: Theatre Crossing Borders, eds Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson (Aldershot, 2008).
Locatelli, II, number 26, and similar to Corsini, II, number 33. Printed in Neri, Scenari and
Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, pp. 658–62.
Neapolitan MSS II, number 3. Printed in Neri, Scenari, pp. 87–93 and in Lea, Italian Popular
Comedy, II, pp. 670–74.
Locatelli, II, number 50, printed in Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, pp. 631–42.
52
Transporting Tragicomedy
dell’arte scenarios, as it was in court and academic Italian pastoral drama.
(And it is worth noticing that when Shakespeare returns to the theme in The
Winter’s Tale he lends it a higher register, certainly when filtered through
Perdita’s perspective.) Oneirically generative sleep, madness inflected with
psychological depth, and the extended grief of lovers, are all amplified by the
serious role of music in the scenarios, including the explicit use of madrigals as
a formal channelling of pathos and grief.33
Whereas the arte scenarios, in their pathetic registers, may realise a tragicomic register to a greater extent than Dream, they match Shakespeare’s play
comically in one very specific theatregram: the preposterous love, induced by
the magic object, between a ridiculous character and one of higher station (in
Dream, Titania’s infatuation with Bottom ‘translated’ into an ass). In ‘Il gran
mago, comedia pastorale’,34 as in several other scenarios, the higher-class
innamorata Clori falls in love with the Gratiano-Dottore figure (one of the
central parti ridicole in the commedia dell’arte) when she beholds him after
donning the magic garland. In ‘Li tre satiri, favola pastorale’,35 Filli falls in love
with Burattino by virtue of a magic fountain with which the angry mago transforms the ridiculous arte character into a woman. As with Bottom’s transformation in Dream, the ridiculous characters are frequently changed into
animals (represented by masks noted in the props lists), usually when they
drink or eat a forbidden substance. (In ‘L’albore incantato’, Arlecchino is
transformed into a crane.) Although the metamorphoses of the parti ridicole
clearly carry a comic effect (and exploit the zoomorphic affinities of the arte
maschere), transformation in the Arcadian scenarios resonates with psychological effect, the line between animate and vegetable or inanimate being easily
crossed in the forest. In ‘L’albore incantato’, Clori, whose love for Corinto is
not reciprocated, ‘dice voler pianger tanto sin che ella si converte in fonte’
[says that she wants to cry to the point where she is transformed into a fountain].36 As in Dream, strange and unpredictable metamorphosis, in the
psychological as well as supernatural sense, governs the realm of love, and the
discourse of the scenarios poses an implicit connection between the supernatural metamorphoses transpiring in the forest and the changes of the heart.
Although Oberon’s commands to Puck, and Puck’s confusions, are the
nominal agents of erotic imbroglio in Dream, the characters experience their
33
34
35
36
In ‘Gli avvenimenti comici, pastorali, e tragici’, for example, Tirsi ‘canta le bellezze di Fillide
con alcuni madrigali’ [sings the beauties of Fillide with several madrigals]. See Scala, Il teatro
delle favole rappresentative, II, p. 440.
Locatelli, II, number 23 and Corsini, I, number 5, printed in Neri, Scenari, pp. 57–68, and Lea,
Italian Popular Comedy, II, pp. 648–57. The Corsini version contains several amplifications to
the Locatelli scenario.
Locatelli, II, number 28, printed in Neri, Scenari, pp. 77–86, and Lea, II, pp. 663–69, and
similar to Corsini, I, number 9.
Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, ed. Marotti, p. 509.
53
Robert Henke
vicissitudes as governed by an unseen, invisible power, whereas the agency of
power is all too clear in The Tempest. In the Arcadian scenarios, an omniscient
and apparently omnipotent magician holds sway over the spirits, savages, and
other native inhabitants of an island, where the infusion of dramatic lighting
effects in a rough maritime and forest landscape lend it a material resonance
very similar to that of Shakespeare’s island. ‘La nave’ lists the following
elements of scenic decor: ‘wood, grotto, tower, stone equipped with fire
rockets, fires, sea, ship, sky, clouds, ray of light or lightning, dolphin, lion,
fountain, swords for the moresca, wine, bread, magic staff and conjuring book
for the magician’.37 As with The Tempest, the mago’s omnipotent sway over his
immediate environment lends the plays a metatheatrical dimension: aided by
various ‘infernal’ spirits or by savage denizens of the island, he wields thunder,
lightening, and flames, and generally is a master of special, theatrical effects.
For example, in ‘L’albore incantato’, the magician Sabino commands
‘Selvatico’ to bring him the ‘acqua dell’oblio’ [water of forgetfulness], whereupon the magician ‘la fa spargere per tutta la scena; in quello si sentono
grandissimi strepiti; in quello sparisce la prospettiva di mezzo, e subito
comparisce e sorge una Cappa marattima’ [disperses it {the water} throughout
the set; in this part of the stage are heard loud cries; in that part the perspective
in the middle of the stage vanishes, and suddenly appears and rises a sailor’s
cloak].38 The mago indeed wields great power, dominating and harnessing that
particular combination of natural wildness and supernatural power (with
occult, supersensory awareness) that characterises the local inhabitants and
the genius loci of Prospero’s island (Caliban’s hypersensitivity to music may be
a vestige of this). In ‘Li tre satiri’, the mago is particularly proud of his power
over ‘savage nature’, boasting ‘del suo sapere, et valore et come l’inferno
l’ubbedisce, et che li spiriti in forma di selvaggi lo servano, et fanno cio che lui
li commanda’ [of his knowledge, and of his power and how hell obeys him,
and that the spirits in the form of savage men serve him and do what ever he
commands].39 The mago transfixes his subjects with immobilising spells; he
physically chastises them with invisible torments; he imprisons them inside
trees and rocks, or plainly transforms them into trees or fountains in Ovidian
style; he tempts the strangers with alluring water or succulent meals that
suddenly appear from nowhere, only to vanish suddenly or to change the
unsuspecting consumers into animals; and he haunts them with disembodied
strange voices. Metamorphosis, really the controlling engine of these magical
pastoral scenarios, dominates the theatrical present of these plays instead of
being referred to as both past trauma and future threat as it is in the initial
exchange between Prospero and Ariel. The mago’s great power pre- dictably
37
38
39
Neri, Scenari, p. 69.
Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, ed. Marotti, p. 510.
Neri, Scenari, p. 78.
54
Transporting Tragicomedy
elicits hostility both on the part of the native islanders and the shipwreck
victims; in ‘Il gran mago’, Pantalone and Gratiano plan to kill the magician,
and in ‘Li tre satiri’ Pantalone and Zanni have robbed the magician of his
magic book (as Caliban urges Stephano to do). No recourse to a post-colonial
context (altogether lacking in the Italian plays) is necessary to render the
Italian mago morally ambiguous; not only does he call on the powers of hell,
but his power is frequently revealed to be less than full, framed and trumped by
the powers of Jove and other pagan deities, and he occasionally relinquishes
his power at the end of the play.
The commedia mago is impetuous, petulant, petty, and inordinately fixated
on the sexual practices and erotic intrigues of his inhabitants, which he manipulates like a puppeteer. In ‘Il Gran mago’ he sees in the younger generation’s
‘mingling of the bloods’ an ‘evil that has befallen him’ because it will spell the
end of his rule. As in The Tempest, this is in fact true because the reconciliations between the families ensuing from the new unions will be concurrent
with the end of his dominion of the island. Protecting against the ‘mingling of
bloods’, he therefore casts spells against it, and is generally hostile to sexuality,
if at the end of the play finally submitting to the inevitable power of eros.
In the Arcadian scenarios, action is precipitated by the shipwreck of a group
of strangers (sometimes explicitly from Italy) on his island, and sometimes the
shipwreck is directly caused by the magician. The magician is aware that the
arrival of the strangers will somehow entail the end of his reign. The shipwreck
victims are frequently split into two groups (‘Li tre satiri’), or one member is
separated from the other and taken for dead. The reuniting of the separated
groups, potentially a serious theme, usually generates opportunities for comic
business on the order of the Stephano-Trinculo reunion in The Tempest. In
‘Arcadia incantata’, Coviello and Polchinella’s recognition scene is completely
filtered through comic routines: ‘si accorgono un con l’altro, fanno lazzi di
paure; infine, dopo lazzi di toccarsi, si chiariscono esser salvi’ [they recognise
each other, performing lazzi of fear, then lazzi of touching, and realise that
they have been saved].40 If such lazzi worked best between two actors, the
optimal number for improvisation, skilled actors could expand it to four, as in
this very play, when Tartaglia and the Dottore join in: ‘ogni uno lamenta la
perdita de compagni; dopo lazzi si accorgono l’un l’altro, fanno la scena de
spaventi in quattro; dopo lazzi chiariscono esser salvi’ [each lament the loss of
their companions, after lazzi they recognise each other; they play the scene of
fear in four, after these lazzi they recognise that they have been saved].41
Locatelli’s shorthand clearly reflects acting practice, coded in technical terms
such as ‘la scena de spaventi in quattro’; comparable is the three-person
recognition scene among the ridiculous characters in The Tempest. Oddly
40
41
Neri, Scenari, p. 88.
Neri, Scenari, p. 88.
55
Robert Henke
reminiscent of the gaberdine that first joins Caliban and Trinculo and then
creates, if through Stephano’s drunken lens, a fabulous sea monster that ‘vents
Trinculos’, is the ‘cappa magica’ of ‘L’albore incantata’, under which Timbri
hides. The verisimilar lazzo of Trinculo’s miraculous deliverance has its
magical analogue in ‘Li tre satiri’, when a whale belches out Burattino.42 Insistently scatological and material (more so than in Shakespeare) is the recognition of Burattino and Zanni in the same scenario: Zanni, who had been
imprisoned in a rock by the angry mago, is delivered from his imprisonment
when Burattino urinates upon the stone, Bakhtin’s ‘lower-body stratum’
trumping the arcane book-knowledge of the mago.
Hunger, thirst, and a general sense of material constraint more pervasively
affect the characters of this physically based theatre than they do in Shakespeare, although Gonzalo’s complaints against the physical hardships of
Prospero’s island deploy the same theatregram. The shipwrecked characters
are persistently, inexorably hungry. In ‘Il mago, pastorale’ (Corsini), hunger
even trumps love, as Selvaggio, ‘dicendosi morirsi di fame’ [saying that he is
going to die of hunger], rejects Filli’s love (‘lui parla di mangiare, lei di amore’
[he speaks of eating, she of love]).43 The theme of hunger has technical ramifications: usually the props lists include food (‘robbe da mangiare’ [things to
eat]) and the shipwrecked characters in ‘Il gran mago’ perform what might be
called ‘theatregrams of hunger’: ‘Pantalone, Gratiano, Burattino di A, fanno
azzi dicendo di essere affamati’ [Pantlone, Gratiano, and Burattino from
entrance A perform lazzi of hunger]. The religious temple, mistaken as an inn
by Zanni in ‘Li tre satiri’, is recast as a locus of material desire, as the famished
shipwreck victims directly beseech the pagan gods for food, or disguise themselves as the gods themselves (Stephano’s feigning to be a ‘god’ to Caliban in
The Tempest is a version of this) in order to receive from the gullible shepherds
the alimentary ‘sacrifice,’ or gifts of the pastoral harvest. In ‘Proteo, favola
pastorale,’44 Zanni’s child Zannolino (engendered, in Bakhtinian fashion,
from his previously sterile wife’s urine) leaps out of the cradle as the epitome
of hunger: ‘fa azzi che bastona il padre ordina che il sia dato da mangiare’
[performing lazzi of beating his father, he orders that he give him something to
eat].45
The physical hardships such as hunger and thirst dramatised in the
scenarios join the larger picture of ‘hard pastoral’ that both belies the potential
42
43
44
45
Burattino claims to have played tricks [burle] inside the whale, and boasts that he would have
made a nice meal of the whale’s organs if he had had the proper cooking utensils: ‘dice che se
haveva fuoco gli voleva frigere tutto il fegato’ [he says that if he had had a fire he would have
fried the whale’s liver].
Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, p. 611.
Locatelli, II, number 41; Corsini, I, number 45; and printed in Lea, Italian Popular comedy, II,
pp. 621–30.
Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, p. 623.
56
Transporting Tragicomedy
critique that the plays are merely escapist fantasy and links them to the rough
pastoral elements in The Winter’s Tale as well as in Cymbeline. The shipwreck
itself is usually represented less as a virtuosic feat of magic, as in The Tempest
(although it is occasionally rendered so), than a terrifying event that exposes
one to the danger of the wilds as well as to hunger. Recalling the young shepherd’s apprehensions in The Winter’s Tale, in ‘Le tre satiri’ the shipwrecked
Pantalone ‘ha paura che le fiere non se lo mangino’ [is afraid that the wild
beasts might devour him], as he looks out to the sea where the ships appear
and then disappear on the horizon.46 In ‘Il gran mago’, Zanni has come to the
island and raised his master’s children as a foster parent; in an interesting
return to his rural Bergamask roots – to the legend that before his urban
displacement to Venice he tilled the soil – he works as a peasant, with real pigs
and real land. Agricultural, pastoral festivities, whose telegraphically glimpsed
theatrical value in the scenarios can be imaginatively enhanced by considering
The Winter’s Tale’s sheep-shearing festival, frequently occur in the scenarios.47
In ‘Proteo’, Zanni plays a successful and legitimate version of Autolycus,
selling cheeses, hides, fleeces, and horns to the well-off Pantalone and other
characters.
The social discrepancy, implicit in the character system of the commedia
dell’arte, between the cultured innamorati and the parti ridicole, generates
social dramas and social fantasies similar to those of Shakespeare’s late plays.
The mago’s facetious transformation of the ridiculous character Polcinella into
the ‘King of Arcadia’ in ‘Arcadia incantata’, replete with crown, sceptre, and
magic book, momentarily realises the kinds of utopian fantasies indulged by
Stephano in The Tempest. If Stephano passes himself off as a god to Caliban, so
do the commedia dell’arte characters in ‘Le tre satiri’ and ‘Arcadia incantata,’
as they don costumes found in the temple and impersonate the pagan gods for
the credulous local inhabitants, who naively give them food. Or the ridiculous
characters, after having seized the magic book, command the local inhabitants
to bring them food, which then bursts out in flames as soon as they touch it
(‘Li tre satiri’).
Many of the Arcadian plays end with the shipwrecked characters recognising their children, whom they had thought dead, and with the confirmation
of amorous alignments between them. Often the magician is forced either to
recognise the limits of his own power (the pagan gods are acknowledged to be
superior), or to renounce his own power in favour of accepting his common
humanity, as at the end of ‘Pantaloncino’: ‘Mago dice non voler essercitar piu
quell’arte ma voler vivere insieme con loro, butta via la verga et il libro’ [The
magician, declaring that he no longer wishes to practise his art but wants to live
46
47
Neri, Scenari, p. 78.
See, for example, the popular dance led by Cavicchio in ‘Gli avvenimenti comici, pastorali, e
tragici’, and the pastoral festival in ‘Il gran mago’.
57
Robert Henke
with the others, throws away his magic staff and book].48 ‘Li tre satiri’ ends
with the shipwreck victims declaring that they will soon set sail for Venice.
The present essay cannot offer any conclusive proof that Shakespeare was
directly influenced by any one scenario or play. Nor is such proof likely to be
found. My purpose has been to provide a thick description of analogues between
the magical pastoral plays of Shakespeare and those performed by his professional counterparts in Italy, the most internationally established professional actors
in Europe and those with whom Shakespeare and associates such as Thomas
Nashe and John Florio had direct as well as indirect contact. If one hypothesises
that Shakespeare could have bifurcated, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The
Tempest, the two arte conceits of the circle of frustrated lovers and the omnipotent mago, a certain critical mass of analogues can, as Andrews argues, function
like a source. The analogues can be located on several different dramatic and
theatrical levels, which might be categorized as follows:
1. Dramatic content, both on a macro and micro scale
A. Obvious and striking plot affinities.
B. Comic lazzi.
2. Dramaturgy
A. Shakespeare’s interesting return to the unities in The Tempest compared
with the arte’s regular use of them, with retrospective antefatti similar to
Prospero’s initial tale to Miranda.
B. Playing different versions of the supernatural, from outright magic
(magic transformations, objects, unseen voices) to fraudulent magic practised (or desired) by the buffoons to a supernaturally resonant pagan temple
as a locus of the pagan gods.
C. Regular alternation (especially if one considers Dream along with The
Tempest) of ‘higher’, pathetic-affective registers with ‘low’ comic buffoonery,
with the consequent bathos, status inversions, and utopian fantasies implicit
in such a character system.
3. Genre
The pastoral mode, which provides a symbolically resonant place (replete
with a certain vocabulary of scenic decor) both establishes the matter and the
dramaturgical manner of the play, acting as a generic hinge between tragedy
and comedy on the levels of effect (and audience response), plot, and
character system.
A systemic and generic comparison of magical pastoral in the most famous
professional actors of the day and the exactly contemporary playwright with
the greatest historical legacy, such as has been attempted here, demonstrates a
transnational theatrical intertextuality that, in demonstrating Shakespeare’s
great affinity with Italian theatrical practice, is more important than the
positivistic identification of the ‘smoking gun’ of a single source.
48
Lea, Italian Popular Comedy, II, p. 635
58
4
The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain
GERAINT EVANS
T
RAGICOMEDY, notoriously difficult to define, is fundamental to early
modern Spanish theatre, and especially to the period of its greatest
success, which corresponds closely with the writing careers of the three
best-known playwrights: Lope de Vega (1562–1635), Tirso de Molina (real
name Gabriel Téllez, 1583–1648) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–81).
However, the often vague classification given on printed editions means little,
for the general term for plays was simply comedia, a term which did not
preclude tragic content, and a play could be referred to simultaneously as
comedia and tragicomedia.1 While this is comprehensible, there are also more
confusing references to the same play as both tragedia and tragicomedia.2 Even
if they are described simply as comedia, one reason for considering many plays
as tragicomedies is that they combine danger, laughter, grief and happy
endings, while juxtaposing high and low social orders with correspondingly
high and low linguistic styles to produce an artform which appealed to a wide
cross section of the public, but appalled prescriptive theorists of theatre. As
Melveena McKendrick points out, the failure to classify Lope de Vega’s
Fuenteovejuna as tragicomedy simply shows the inconsistency of seventeenthcentury classification.3
As in other countries, classicising critics objected to the crossing or
muddling of generic boundaries and what they saw as the pandering to
popular taste.4 Lope de Vega responded to his critics in the New Art of Writing
1
2
3
4
For a list of plays by Lope which were classified in printed versions as tragicomedia, see Edwin
S. Morby, ‘Some observations on Tragedia and tragicomedia in Lope’, Hispanic Review 11
(1943), 185–209, pp. 187–9.
For example, the following three plays by Lope: Adonis y Venus, El laberinto de Creta and El
duque de Viseo. See Morby, pp. 187, 188.
Melveena McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, 1490–1700 (Cambridge, 1989), p. 281, n. 14.
For a summary of critics, see Margarete Newels, Los géneros dramáticos en las poéticas del siglo
de oro (London, 1974), pp. 125–52.
59
Geraint Evans
Plays in This Age (Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, 1609).5 This was
a verse piece of 389 lines, read out at a literary academy, where the habitual
entertainment comprised contests of verse written on predetermined topics
and recited amid an atmosphere of festivity. While the emphasis was thus on
fun and wit rather than intellectual rigour, the New Art is nevertheless the most
widely quoted piece of drama theory from early modern Spain, displaying
Lope’s knowledge of the theatre, and as it was written by the writer who almost
single-handedly shaped the comedia into a form which was successful both in
terms of contemporary audiences and the literary criticism of posterity, its
arguments are worth hearing:6
When I have to write a play
I lock away the precepts with six keys,
and remove Terence and Plautus from my study
to stop them speaking to me.
I then write for the art invented
by those who, like me, wrote for the applause of the crowd,
because as the crowd pays,
it is only fair to speak foolishly to please them.
(lines 40–8)
Those learned critics should now shut their mouths.
I mix the tragic with the comic
and Terence with Seneca,
even though the result be another Minotaur of Pasiphae.
One part will be serious, another risible
because this variety causes much delight.
Nature gives us such a good example,
for its beauty derives from its variety.
(lines 174–80)
Y cuando he de escribir una comedia,
encierro los preceptos con seis llaves
saco a Terencio y Plauto de mi estudio
para que no me den voces, que suele
dar gritos la verdad en libros mudos,
y escribo por el arte que inventaron
los que el vulgar aplauso pretendieron
porque como las paga el vulgo, es justo
hablarle en necio para darle gusto.
(pp. 284–5, lines 40–8)
Cierren los doctos esta vez los labios.
Lo trágico y lo cómico mezclado,
5
6
The translation given here is my own. For a full translation, see Lope Félix de Vega Carpio, The
New Art of Writing Plays (written c.1604–08, printed 1609), trans. William T. Brewster (New
York, 1914). For the Spanish original, see Lope Félix de Vega Carpio, Arte nuevo de hacer
comedias en este tiempo, ed. Juana de José Prades (Madrid, 1971).
For an account of Lope’s influence on the theatre, see McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, especially
chapters 3 and 4.
60
Tragicomedy in Spain
y Terencio con Séneca, aunque sea
como otro Minotauro de Pasife,
harán grave una parte, otra ridícula,
que aquesta variedad deleita mucho.
Buen ejemplo nos da naturaleza,
que por tal variedad tiene belleza.
(pp. 291–2, lines 174–80)
The references to nature and the importance of the audience speak of a
response to life in its multiplicity rather than the artificial categories of human
theory, while the intriguing term minotaur suggests many possibilities of how
Lope regarded his art and might be compared with Philip Sidney’s term ‘mongrel tragicomedy’.7 This play-as-minotaur acknowledges the classical heritage
of theatre while representing the playwright as one who gives birth to this
monstrous form. But of course, this is a form which is monstrous only to those
who see through a lens of idealism or who wish to maintain a barrier between
genres and, given the link between comedy and the lower orders, a barrier
based on social rank. Lope’s term is thus ironic.
One of the few prose defences of the theatre against its critics was written by
the Valencian playwright Ricardo de Turia (real name Pedro de Rejaule y
Toledo). In his Apology for Spanish Comedies (1616), much of which plagiarises Guarini, he argues that the theoretical attacks are misguided because their
arguments are based on theories of tragedy and comedy, whereas what is being
produced in Spain in the seventeenth century is tragicomedy:
The classicising critics of our time condemn all the comedies written and
performed in Spain, accusing them of being monstrous in invention and disposition as well as improper in their speech. They claim that comic poetry does not
permit the introduction of grave characters such as kings, emperors, monarchs
and popes.8
Suelen los muy críticos terensiarcos y plautistas destos tiempos condenar
generalmente todas las comedias que en España se hacen y representan, así por
monstruosas en la invención y disposición, como impropias en la elocución,
diciendo que la poesía cómica no permite introducción de personas graves,
como son reyes, emperadores, monarcas, y aun pontífices. (Turia, pp. 147–8)
He then makes a further claim which expands on Lope’s term for mixing genre
(see New Art, line 174):
Not one of the comedias now performed in Spain is in fact a comedy. They are in
reality tragicomedies, a mixture formed of the comic and tragic. From tragedy
they take serious characters, lofty action, terror and pity, while from comedy
7
8
On Sidney, see the Introduction, pp. 10–11.
The translation given is my own. For the Spanish original, see Ricardo de Turia, Apologético de
las comedias españolas, in Preceptiva dramática española del renacimiento y el barroco, eds
Federico Sánchez Escribano and Alberto Porqueras Mayo (Madrid, 1965), pp. 147–53.
61
Geraint Evans
they take individual affairs, laughter and wit. Nobody should regard this mixture
as improper, as there is nothing unseemly in mixing grave and humble characters, either in life or in poetic art.
Ninguna comedia de cuantas se representan en España lo es, sino tragicomedia,
que es un mixto formado de lo cómico y lo trágico, tomando déste las personas
graves, la acción grande, el terror y la comiseración; y de aquél el negocio particular, la risa y los donaires, y nadie tenga por impropiedad esta mixtura, pues no
repugna a la naturaleza y al arte poético que en una fábula concurran personas
graves y humildes. (Turia, pp. 148–9)
Like Lope he justifies the mixing of styles by recourse to the audience:
Those who write do so to satisfy the taste of those they write for [. . .] it is wrong
to think that not following the rules is a sign of ignorance of those rules [. . .] The
Spanish character demands in plays what it demands in fashion, where we see
new styles of clothes every day.
Los que escriben es a fin de satisfacer el gusto para quien escriben [. . .] y hace mal
el que piensa que el dejar de seguillas nace de ignorarlas [. . .] Pues es infalible que
la naturaleza española pide en las comedias lo que en los trajes, que son nuevos
usos cada día. (Turia, pp. 150–1)
The citing of public taste as a justification is perhaps consciously balanced by
his drawing on the classics to back up his points. To stress the uniqueness of
tragicomedy he refers to Aristotle’s writing on chemical change, developing
this into the poetic image of the hermaphrodite:
The Philosopher, in his On Generation and Corruption, explains the difference
between a mixture and a combination. In a mixture the parts lose their form and
create a third material which is very different, whilst in a combination each part
is preserved as it was before [. . .] We can compare a mixture to the fabulous
Hermaphrodite, while a combination is similar to a man who embraces a
woman, and when they separate, each reverts to their own self.9
Doctrina es del filósofo en el primero de Generatione, muy vulgar, donde
muestra la diferencia que hay entre lo mixto y lo compuesto. Porque en lo mixto
las partes pierden su forma y hacen una tercer materia muy diferente, y en lo
compuesto cada parte se conserva ella misma como antes era, sin alterarse ni
9
I have translated the terms ‘mixto’ and ‘compuesto’ as ‘mixture’ and ‘combination’ as this is
how Aristotle’s terms are translated in modern editions. See Aristotle, On Coming-to-be and
Passing-away [On Generation and Corruption], in On Sophistical Refutations, On Coming-to-be
and Passing-away, On the Cosmos (London, 1955), pp. 253–63, I.10.327a 30–328b 20. Turia’s
‘compuesto’ would be closer etymologically to the English ‘compound’, but strictly speaking
the distinction made in modern chemistry is in fact the opposite: ‘mixture’ denotes a combination of substances which are brought together while retaining their original qualities, while
‘compound’ denotes the production of an entirely new substance. I am indebted to Victor
Dixon for pointing this out.
62
Tragicomedy in Spain
mudarse [. . .] Lo mixto podemos comparar (porque ejemplificando declararemos mejor nuestro concepto) al fabuloso Hermafrodito [sic]. [. . .] Lo
compuesto es semejante a un hombre que se abraza con una mujer, y desasidos,
cada uno vuelve en su ser. (Turia, pp. 149–50)
Turia’s concept of the mixture is obviously taken from Guarini but, while his
analogy is evocative, he unfortunately does not explain in detail what such a
mixture might be. On the whole, the Spanish playwrights did not theorise
what they did, they simply did it, and thus genre terminology usually lacked
precision. McKendrick points out that when the Spanish term tragicomedia is
used, it tends to mean a tragic play with an ending which was satisfactory for
some characters, or a light-hearted play with a tragic ending.10 Spanish writers
were certainly aware of Guarini’s work: Cristóbal Suárez de Figueroa twice put
Il pastor fido into Castilian (1602, 1609), a translation praised by Cervantes in
Don Quijote.11 Calderón collaborated on an adaptation of the play which was
performed before the monarchs on at least three occasions, as well as writing
by himself a religious play (auto sacramental) with the same title for the festival
of Corpus Christi in 1678.12 The influence of Guarini’s drama can be seen in
several other Calderón plays, for example the misreading of an oracle which
leads to conflict between father and son, and the lament by Amarili that brute
animals have more liberty than human beings, are both found in La vida es
sueño (1634–35).13
However, Guarini insisted that tragicomedy should end in joy, not punishment, an idea avoided by Turia, perhaps conscious that Spanish theatre was
decidedly unlike that of Guarini’s ideal in this respect. Guarini looks to tragedy
for the movement of feelings but not the disturbance of them, for the serious
pleasure of tragedy but not its sadness, for its danger but not its death. From
comedy, he is prepared to take laughter but not excessive laughter. Following
Lope, most Spaniards wrote with one eye on the crowd, and far from pursuing
a gentle mean, they revelled in extremes. The rest of this chapter will offer
examples of how such revelling might produce a mixture, in Turia’s sense,
rather than a combination.
10
11
12
13
McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, p. 79.
Giovanni Battista Guarini, El Pastor Fido, Traduzida de Toscano en Castellano por Christoval
Suarez de Figueroa (Valencia, 1609). Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote, trans. John
Rutherford (London, 2000; repr. 2003), Part II, chapter 62, p. 915.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Antonio Solís and Antonio Coello, El pastor fido [c.1651], ed. Juan
Eugenio Hartzenbusch, in Biblioteca de Autores Españoles XIV (Madrid, 1899), pp. 489–515.
For its relation to Guarini’s play, see A.J. Valbuena Briones, ‘Calderón y su relación con la
tragicomedia de Guarini’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 70 (1993), 165–73. For royal performances, see N.D. Shergold and J.E. Varey, Representaciones palaciegas: 1603–1699. Estudio y
documentos (London, 1982), pp. 71, 238, 253, 256. Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El pastor fido
[auto sacramental], ed. Fernando Plata Parga (Kassel, 2003).
For other examples of influence, see Valbuena Briones, esp. pp. 166, 171–2.
63
Geraint Evans
Although the term tragicomedy goes back to Plautus, in Spain it is associated above all with the dramatic dialogue La Celestina (sometimes translated
into English as The Spanish Bawd), written by Fernando de Rojas. Published as
the Comedia de Calisto y Melibea in 1499, its title was changed for a further
edition several years later, now presented as the Tragicomedia de Calisto y
Melibea to reflect the new serious ending. The work as we know it can be seen
as tragicomic in two ways. Firstly, it contains both high and low characters,
whose social rank is reflected in their speech. Secondly, the initial coarse
humour and farce lead us eventually to a tragic and moralistic ending, as the
lustful male lover Calisto falls to his death, closely followed by that of his
grief-stricken lover Melibea, who throws herself from a tower. Although La
Celestina is too long to be easily performed on stage, it could be read aloud in
groups, and its influence on Spanish literature has been profound.14
This mixture of high and low characters becomes an important aspect of
Spanish public theatre, for as the life of Calisto is bound up with that of his
servants, so the typical male protoganist of the urban comedia is accompanied
by his lackey. This master-servant relationship would be a staple of Spanish
theatre and it would even influence the major prose work of the period, Miguel
de Cervantes’ Don Quijote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615), which is striking for the
interrelation of its two protagonists: Quijote, an hidalgo or lesser noble, and
Sancho Panza, a peasant. In turn, the comic double act of this novel influences
the social dynamics of the stage. In both Don Quijote and the popular theatre,
while decorum requires that linguistic register be appropriate to the social
order of the speaker, this does not prevent the juxtaposition of different
discourses. Humour comes from the servant whose words and actions
frequently offer ironic commentaries on the life of his noble master and the
values of his social rank.
This mixture of high and low was important in a commercial theatre which
had above all things, as Lope suggested in the New Art (see above, p. 60, lines
44–7), to appeal to a cross section of the population. The cheapest entry was
for men who stood in the patio, while most women, who could form up to a
third of the audience, sat in a balcony. Benches by the stage, or the boxes on the
first or second floors, were more expensive and occupied by wealthier or more
educated spectators. Plays not only appeal on different cultural levels, moving
swiftly from coarse humour to erudite reference, but also explore the social
dynamics of Spanish society: a society represented in microcosm within the
auditorium. Servants and peasants are often crucial to the meaning of the play,
14
Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina / The Tragicke-comedy of Calisto and Melibea, trans. James
Mabbe [1631], parallel text ed. Dorothy S. Severin (Warminster, 1987). For a modern translation see Fernando de Rojas, Celestina, The Spanish Bawd, trans. J.M. Cohen (Harmondsworth,
1964). The text has been adapted for the stage, notably at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004 in a
production directed by Calixto Bieito.
64
Tragicomedy in Spain
and the mixed audience would identify in complex ways with the social
conflicts portrayed on stage.15
Some of the most interesting mixing of social rank is found in Lope’s
Fuenteovejuna, a play set towards the end of fifteenth-century Spain, as the
Catholic Monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella are busy uniting the Crown of
Aragon to Castile and thus, so the mythology of the later centuries would read,
initiating the ascent of Spain into its Golden Age.16 The villain of the piece is
Fernán Gómez, an aristocratic commander of the military order of Calatrava,
who transgresses acceptable norms of conduct in two ways. Firstly, he rebels
against Ferdinand and Isabella, an act of treason which forms the sub-plot.
Secondly, he mistreats the people of the town of Fuenteovejuna for whom he is
responsible, stealing from the townspeople and sexually abusing the women,
thereby precipitating the main action of the play in which the town rises in
revolt and kills the commander. There is thus a plot which concerns the rights
and duties of ordinary people and their lords, with a sub-plot which involves
the higher aristocracy against royalty.17 But more importantly we have a
serious play of lofty issues such as political rebellion and abuse of power,
themes theoretically held to be suitable for higher-ranking protagonists, but
the protagonists of the play are both low and high.
As is common in Spanish theatre, there is both the constant threat of death
and a great deal of coarse humour from the peasants. But significantly, these
elements are combined and developed in a way which might relate to Turia’s
sketched concept of the mixture. Mengo is a country bumpkin who conspicuously rises from the depths of crude comedy to the higher realms of selflessness
in the face of death. Because the town has illegally killed the aristocratic
commander, the queen sends an investigator to extract information from the
inhabitants by torture. The townspeople refuse to give the names of those most
guilty, and in response to interrogation reply with just three words which have
gone down in Spanish folklore: ‘Fuenteovejuna did it’ (‘Fuenteovejuna lo
hizo’). At the beginning of the play Mengo had made jokes at the expense of
others and his professed credo was one of self-love. Yet under torture this
crude figure, expected by everyone to yield, exhibits bravery in resisting
torture, thus behaving in a lofty manner. Of course, this being the comedia, he
then brings us back down to earth with jokes about how red and sore his
bottom is after the torture, even in the presence of the monarchs, but this only
strengthens the mixture of high and low.18
15
16
17
18
For more on the social make-up of the audience, see McKendrick, Theatre in Spain, ch. 7, pp.
178–208.
Lope de Vega, Fuente Ovejuna, trans. and ed. Victor Dixon (Warminster, 1989).
As Valbuena Briones points out, regarding the need for a sub-plot to be inextricably linked to
the main plot, Lope uses the word ‘inserta’ which corresponds to Guarini’s term ‘innestare’.
See Lope de Vega, New Art, lines 181–7, and Valbuena Briones, p. 168.
Lope de Vega, Fuenteovejuna, Act II lines 1650–1, Act III lines 2426–9.
65
Geraint Evans
I would now like to look at endings, which, while not mentioned by Turia,
perhaps because he was well aware that they did not conform to Guarini’s
model of disaster avoided, are crucial to an understanding of what a mixture of
the comic and tragic might be. Let us imagine a spectrum or scale running
from comedy to tragedy. Towards one end are plays considered to be comic,
but in which there are hints of alternative tragic endings beyond the timescale
of the events shown on stage. At the other end there are tragic endings which
suggest the lost possibilities for comic resolution and happiness or contain a
parody of comedic elements which serve only to emphasise the horror. I will
look briefly at one play from either end of the scale, and then look at two plays
which could be seen as falling between those extremes, plays which might
more comfortably sit within a definition of tragicomedy.
When David Johnston’s translation of The Dog in the Manger by Lope was
directed by Laurence Boswell for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2004, the
production contained a wealth of comedic elements which appealed to the
modern audience and would certainly have appealed to the early modern
public:19 the jokes of the gracioso (comic servant) with the music and dancing,
notably that which accompanied the closing marriage. But critical opinion has
produced various interpretations of its comic status, with E.M. Wilson and
Duncan Moir even calling this play a ‘dark comedy’, for beneath the surface
there are many aspects which hint at danger and disaster.20
Objections to tragicomedy were partly a reaction to a perceived threat to
social stratification: where the the high language and noble deeds of tragedy
were thought suited only for the higher social orders, the cruder humour of
comedy was thought appropriate for the lower orders. While linguistic appropriateness is maintained, The Dog in the Manger threatens social decorum and
stasis by dramatising love and sexual desire across boundaries of social rank.
There are three social strata in the play: firstly, the countess Diana and her aristocratic suitors; secondly, the higher palace employees, including Teodoro the
secretary, who eventually marries Diana; and thirdly, the lower orders,
including Teodoro’s own servant, Tristán. The hints of darkness begin in the
opening seconds through classical topoi: as Teodoro escapes from a nocturnal
tryst with the servant Marcela, Tristán extinguishes a light with his hat, causing
the feathers to burn. This leads into several implicit and explicit references to
19
20
See various reviews by Michael Billington et al. in Theatre Record, 24.8 (2004), pp. 508–13;
25.3 (2005), pp. 122–4. Lope de Vega, El perro del hortelano, ed. Victor Dixon (London, 1981).
For the performed translation, see Lope de Vega, The Dog in the Manger, trans. David
Johnston (London, 2004).
E.M. Wilson and D.W. Moir, A Literary History of Spain, The Golden Age: Drama 1492–1700
(London, 1971), pp. 52–3. For a summary of critical interpretations of its comic or serious
qualities, see J.W. Sage, ‘The Context of Comedy: Lope de Vega’s El perro del hortelano and
related plays’, in Studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age presented to Edward M. Wilson,
ed. R.O. Jones (London, 1973), pp. 247–66 (249).
66
Tragicomedy in Spain
Icarus and then Phaeton, symbols of ambition and over-reaching for the early
modern audience who consequently wonder whether Teodoro will be the
Icarus who falls to his death after daring to aspire to the heights of Diana’s love.
The danger becomes more real when the aristocratic suitors Ricardo and
Federico jealously plot to have Teodoro murdered, and although this is
presented humorously, it does contribute to the ambiguity and threat of the
ending. In early modern plots, love across social rank is commonly resolved
via a last minute revelation that one of the two lovers is in reality of high blood
but was separated from their true family in infancy. This device superficially
reconciles two incompatible desires: the need to believe that love may conquer
all and the desire to believe in the essential superiority of noble blood, while
perhaps also appealing to the Freudian family romance in the spectator.
In this case the solution is deceitful, engineered by the servant Tristán who
invents a false life story for his master Teodoro. Count Ludovico had lost his
son as a boy, so Tristán devises a plan to convince the count that this son is in
fact our Teodoro, who is thus able to marry Diana, now his social equal. But
the final words of the play, in which the servant Tristán begs us the audience to
keep this secret, remind us of the fragility of the arrangement, for revelation of
the truth would mean death for the upstart husband. Near the end of the play,
three characters apostrophise Fortune, asking her to stop the turning of her
wheel, yet as the early modern audience knew, Fortune does not hold her
wheel. This foregrounding of the lovers’ precarious position invites us to go
beyond the play’s formal end towards thoughts of a possible disaster should
the truth be known, and thus to muse on social values and the barriers against
social movement. Of interest is the fact that Lope always resented his lack of
integration into higher circles and for a while was himself, like Teodoro, the
secretary of an aristocrat, the Duke of Sessa.21
In her exploration of the complications of tragicomedy, Verna Foster refers
to Bernard Beckerman who distinguishes between the theatrical experience
and the memorial experience of a play.22 The Dog in the Manger inspires an
initial theatrical response, in this case to the laughter and jollity of the end, but
the subsequent memorial response picks up the subtleties and implicit meanings. The possibility of tragedy beyond the last lines complicates our response,
encouraging a critique of the social values which restricted Diana, forming a
memorial response which could be regarded in terms of Turia’s mixture rather
than combination.
At the other extreme is Calderón’s El medico de su honra (written
c.1633–35), usually translated as The Surgeon of His Honour or The Physician of
21
22
For more on his life, see Hugo Rennert, The Life of Lope de Vega, 1562–1535 (Glasgow, 1904).
Verna A. Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy (Aldershot, 2004), p. 4. Bernard
Beckerman, Dynamics of Drama: Theory and Method of Analysis (New York, 1979), p. 131.
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Geraint Evans
his Honour.23 In a plot often compared with Othello, the jealous Gutierre
arranges the death of his innocent wife, Mencía; but this Calderonian
wife-murderer does not kill himself, and in the closing scene the king, the
symbol and voice of justice, arranges for him to marry again. Marriage is the
creator of personal and social harmony, bringing into union body and soul, as
well as uniting different families in social alliance. Comedias typically end with
marriage, in some cases even double or triple marriages, yet they often play
ironic variations on this theatrical convention. The woman to whom Gutierre
is finally forced to give his hand is Leonor, an ex-lover he had jilted after seeing
a man leave her house and wrongly assuming her to be unfaithful. When
subsequently married to Mencía he again misinterprets evidence, becomes
pathologically jealous, and this time has the woman killed. So at the end of the
play when he is betrothed to Leonor, the audience understands that a marriage
to the woman whom he has already suspected before the play opened will
almost certainly end the same way as his first marriage: Leonor will die. The
physical symbol of theatrical comic resolution is the hand offered in marriage
but the hand that Gutierre offers and which she accepts is bloodstained. This
closing marriage, in its incongruity, unwelcomeness and apparent lack of
poetic justice, presents to the audience the possibility of a further tragedy in
the second marriage beyond the confines of the play. While this play is very
much a tragedy rather than a tragicomedy, my point is to show that playwrights did manipulate genre expectations for effect, as will be seen in the next
two plays.24
Moving into the middle ground of tragicomedy, the ending of Fuenteovejuna, discussed above, also contains a provocative ending. The killing of the
commander by the peasants takes place more than five hundred lines before
the final bows; but the play is not allowed to end here, for the peasants have
acted illegally and the monarchs are duty-bound to examine the killing of an
aristocrat. The official interrogator is unable to extract a confession out of the
townspeople, and so informs the king that there are two possibilities: either the
whole town should be executed, or all should be pardoned. In the remarkable
closing scene the entire peasant cast appear before the monarchs to pledge
their allegiance. It is only this humble self-abnegation which persuades the
king, who again stresses that they have committed a crime, but agrees to
pardon them. The plot contains a trajectory which alone justifies consideration as tragicomedy. The action moves through political sedition and rebellion to eulogies of rural peace, to violence inflicted by a noble upon peasants
23
24
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, The Physician of his Honour / El médico de su honra, trans. Dian
Fox with Donald Hindley (Warminster, 1997).
For debates on the validity of the term tragedy as applied to Spanish theatre, see McKendrick,
Theatre in Spain, pp. 78–83. For a discussion of peculiarly Spanish approaches to tragedy, see
A.A. Parker, ‘Towards a Definition of Calderonian Tragedy’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 39
(1962), 222–37.
68
Tragicomedy in Spain
(including rape), to a wedding scene of bucolic harmony which is interrupted
by the commander who abducts the bride, to peasant rebellion and the killing
of the local lord, to a final resolution which allows the villagers to survive and
the newly-wed peasants to live together in a once again united Spain. We thus
have a tragic climax of rebellion followed by a comic ending. Yet the happy
ending is in doubt until the last lines are spoken and it is only the final decision
of the king which allows justice to be done. The precariousness of the tragic/
comic outcome is, like The Dog in the Manger, a veiled comment on the justice
that reigns in the real world beyond the walls of the corral theatre.25
Another ambiguous ending can be found in Calderón’s The Mayor of
Zalamea (El alcalde de Zalamea, 1642–4?).26 The drama presents the conflict
between a peasant family and soldiers who are billeted in the western town of
Zalamea as the army are marching towards Portugal. After Captain Álvaro
Ataide has raped Isabel, the daughter of Pedro Crespo, a wealthy peasant,
Crespo considers vengeance against the captain, but then receives the news
that the townspeople have elected him mayor. The office of alcalde, mayor,
also included that of magistrate, so it is now his responsibility to deal with the
rapist as a representative of justice, without the interference of personal
vengeance. Crespo begs the captain to marry Isabel, and only after the captain
has arrogantly refused does Crespo give the order for his execution. But in so
doing, the mayor has acted illegally, as soldiers had the right to be tried by a
military tribunal. Enraged, the army commander now advances on the town,
with the intention of burning it to the ground. Zalamea is only saved by the
arrival of King Philip II, who acknowledges Crespo’s fault but agrees that the
captain’s crime merited the punishment.
The play can be seen to be problematically tragicomic in two ways. Firstly,
the text had opened in comic mode, with jokes, song, and an alfresco scene
where Crespo and the Commander dine together. But with the rape, the tone
changes and the play seems to be moving towards tragedy. The captain is
garrotted, and although the execution takes place offstage, the curtain of the
discovery space is drawn back to present the audience with his lifeless corpse.
The subsequent threat from the army is very real, as the early modern Spanish
audience would have known by first or second hand.27 The town and the lives
25
26
27
The richness of the play has given rise to various interpretations, including ones which have
stressed the revolutionary aspects: in Tsarist Russia; by Federico García Lorca during the
Spanish Second Republic; and an adaptatation by Alan Sillitoe during the heady days of the
late 1960s: All citizens are soldiers / Fuenteovejuna, trans. and adapted by Ruth Fainlight and
Alan Sillitoe (London, 1969). For a survey of theatrical interpretations, see Teresa J. Kirschner,
‘Sobrevivencia de una comedia: historia de la difusión de Fuenteovejuna’, Revista Canadiense
de Estudios Hispánicos I (1976–77), 255–71.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El alcalde de Zalamea, ed. Peter N. Dunn (Oxford, 1966; repr.
1968). For an English translation see Calderón, Six Plays, trans. Edwin Honig (New York,
1995).
For accounts of destruction wreaked by Spanish soldiers on the civilian population of Flanders
69
Geraint Evans
of its inhabitants are saved, but as in other Spanish plays of the period, the fact
that it took a deus ex machina (the arrival of the king) to save them reminds us
that without this fortuitous intervention, the town would have been destroyed.
Once again there is a strong memorial experience, prompting considerations
of social justice, or the lack thereof.
Secondly, although there is peace at the end it is marked with loss. Reputation, often expressed in terms of honour, is defined and cherished by many of
the protagonists, but at the end of the play all have lost honour. No longer a
virgin, Isabel enters a convent without ever having expressed a religious vocation. The army commander, who defended the right of soldiers to try their
own, has seen his authority compromised by peasants and the king, while
Crespo has seen his family split up, and the captain is dead. Order, associated
with comic resolution, is restored but at a cost.
This discussion of tragicomedy has paid close attention to the audience, an
awareness seen in Guarini, who, as Verna Foster shows, distinguished between
the instrumental and the architectonic end. The instrumental end is what is
imitated, the type of action, while the architectonic end is the effect. So tragedy
might imitate terrible or pitiable action, which is the instrumental end, but the
architectonic end is the effect of that action on the audience.28 However,
Guarini’s concept of tragicomedy is of limited relevance to the Spanish
comedia. As Foster reminds us, Guarini’s aim of mixing subordinates tragic
effect to comic effect in that the architectonic end of tragicomedy is similar to
that of comedy, the purgation of melancholy. As we have seen, Spanish tragicomedy is often darker. Guarini believes in an integration of comic and tragic,
but his ideal is different, more gentle. In Spanish theatre we tend to find greater
extremes of laughter and danger, which begs the question whether it is possible
to integrate effects which encompass such extremes. Foster shows how, in
England, John Dryden and Samuel Johnson had suggested that fully comic
and tragic responses might be created in alternation, or what Johnson refers to
as ‘combination’, but this implies separate effects and not integration.29 Foster
then points out that J.E. Schlegel and G.E. Lessing, the latter a Hispanist
responsible for creating interest in Spanish drama among German Romantics,
theorised a fusion of tragedy and comedy whereby there is a dual perspective,
and the spectator is affected emotionally in two ways simultaneously.30 Foster
discusses examples of how such effects are created in secular plays before
embarking on a historical exploration of tragicomic effects in religious drama,
28
29
30
see Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567–1659 (Cambridge, 1972)
pp. 179–81. Crimes by soldiers included rape, as in this play.
Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, p. 19.
Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, pp. 22–4.
Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, pp. 24–6. For the importance of Spanish theatre
for Lessing, see Henry W. Sullivan, Calderón in the German Lands and the Low Countries: His
Reception and Influence, 1654–1980 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 128–42.
70
Tragicomedy in Spain
for in Western culture there is indeed a tradition of art which is simultaneously
comic and tragic, and which has its roots at the centre of Christian faith.31 The
Passion, telling of Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, is both loss and hope
for the future, both death in life and rebirth in God. The patterns that Foster
traces through the religious drama of medieval and early modern England can
also be seen in the martyr plays of Spain, a genre to which Lope contributed
fourteen plays.32 Martyrs die for their faith in the certainty of salvation, so
what may be interpreted as tragedy on a worldly level becomes joy on the
eternal one. These Christian plays are by no means a simple unordered combination, and neither are they what Sidney would call mongrel tragicomedy, for
the Christian message imposes an order on events.
The double vision of tragicomedy is here formed of two perspectives, that of
the characters and that of God. Bruce Wardropper has discussed the concept
of cosmic irony in Spanish drama as a development of dramatic irony.33 In
ordinary dramatic irony, the audience is placed in a privileged position, able to
perceive meanings in the spoken words of which the speakers are unaware.
With cosmic irony, the characters do not understand the full import of their
speech, but God does, and if we the audience are also allowed to understand
the full meaning, we are being encouraged to share the viewpoint of God,
seeing events not from a human but from from a global or rather heavenly
perspective. Further, even though life might seem to lack purpose for the characters on stage, God does indeed see a purpose which gives meaning to life, so
we can link cosmic irony to Providence.
Wardropper writes of Calderon’s martyr play, The Prodigious Magician (El
mágico prodigioso, first version 1637), that whereas the other characters are
either completely blind to the truth or only glimpse it, the Christian martyr
Justina sees God’s plan from the beginning, as indeed the spectator is encouraged to do. Cosmic irony thus concerns not only individual moments of
dramatic irony, as in a secular play, but we become aware of a divine plan
which permeates the entire play. Similarly, in Acting is Believing (Lo fingido
verdadero, c.1608), Lope’s dramatisation of the martyrdom of St Genesius, a
play published as a tragicomedy and studied for its metatheatricality, a double
perspective is encouraged.34 Metatheatrical devices suggest the wider perspective; references to bread move from the literal to the transubstantiated; the
31
32
33
34
Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, pp. 35–51.
For a full study of Lope’s hagiographic plays, see Elaine Canning, Lope de Vega’s ‘Comedias de
tema religioso’: Re-creations and Re-presentations (Woodbridge, 2004).
Bruce Wardropper, introduction to Pedro Calderón de la Barca, El mágico prodigioso (Madrid,
1985), pp. 45–50. For a translation, see Calderón de la Barca, The Prodigious Malician / El
mágico prodigioso trans. and ed. Bruce W. Wardropper (Madrid, 1982).
Lope de Vega, Lo fingido verdadero, in Obras Escogidas III (Madrid, 1974), pp. 169–204. There
are two translations: Acting is believing, trans. Michael D. McGaha (San Antonio, 1986), The
Great Pretenders / The Gentleman from Olmedo, trans. David Johnston (London, 1992).
71
Geraint Evans
Empire of Rome prefigures that of Christ; the image of the phoenix suggests
both death and rebirth; the inability of the Emperor to comprehend events
foregrounds the cosmic irony seen by the audience, for whom the tragedy of
execution is also a comedic rebirth in heaven.
Returning to Turia and Guarini, does the experience of death followed by
rebirth constitute a combination or a mixture? One might argue that the
events of Good Friday are followed by the Resurrection on the third day and
that the sequential knowledge of one event followed by another is a combination. But the Christian spectator who witnesses a representation of the Passion
is in a unique position, knowing the whole story, experiencing the tragic in the
expectation of the ending, and then experiencing the Resurrection conscious
of the pain and loss to the world. The spectator is encouraged to take a cosmic
view.
Foster thus writes of how in English medieval religious drama the historical
perspective of the characters is different from the perspective of the audience
which is aligned with the eternal perspective of God.35 She shows how this
ironic departure from the historical or literal is encouraged in many ways:
linguistic irony or wordplay; the use of the future tense; typology, where future
actions are prefigured by present ones, as events in the Old Testament may
prefigure events in the New; anachronisms which place a modern reference in
a past context, and thus encourage us to view the past through the lens of the
future, or rather through the lens of the eternal. The potential tragedy of the
historical is thus seen through the comic perspective of eternity and
Providence.
Lope’s The Last Goth in Spain (El último godo de España, c.1599–1603) is a
historical play which contains many of the tragicomic elements associated
with martyr plays.36 It retells the myth of Spain’s fall to the Muslim invader in
AD 711: King Rodrigo, the last Visigothic king of Spain, rapes Florinda
(known to posterity as La Cava), whose father Count Julián seeks revenge by
allying with the Muslims of North Africa to invade his homeland. The audience possess a knowledge of history which leads from this defeat through
Islamic rule, the long centuries of reconquest and the eventual recapture of
Granada in the annus mirabilis of 1492. The text manipulates this knowledge,
dropping clues into the mind of the audience to provide pleasure in the recognition of the whole story.
Anachronisms such as the reference to the two Indies (I, p. 643a) may seem
strange in a play set nearly eight centuries before the departure of Columbus,
but remind the audience of more glorious days to come. The scene in which
portraits of medieval Spanish kings are discovered similarly refers to the
35
36
Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, p. 36.
Lope de Vega, El último godo, in Obras Escogidas III (Madrid, 1974), pp. 635–65. The play has
also been published as El postrer godo. The translations given are mine.
72
Tragicomedy in Spain
Reconquest which followed the fall (III, p. 665a). The audience gains pleasure
from recognising these ironies, which on one level are dramatic but on another
cosmic, given early modern Spain’s official view of itself as the providential
guardian of Christianity in a world of Protestants, Muslims, heathens and
Jews.
Bearing in mind Foster’s discussion of typology, it is interesting to see how
the play’s biblical references suggest a trajectory of Fall and Resurrection. After
the rape, Florinda accuses Rodrigo of having eaten her fruit in lines which
liken the Fall of Spain to the Fall of Humanity:
FLORINDA Custodian of my garden,
with such false and cunning treason
you have eaten my fruit
and left the tree barren.
FLORINDA Guarda de jardín, que has hecho
traición tan falsa y astuta
que, comiéndote la fruta,
dejas el árbol deshecho. (II, p. 649a)
Following this there comes reference to the flood, with the claim that it is the
punishment of God, inviting the cosmic perspective:
ARSINDO
RODRIGO
ARSINDO
RODRIGO
The whole of Africa
seems to be landing
fearlessly in Spain.
Or else Noah
is opening his Ark
to increase the numbers.
[. . .]
This is the punishment of heaven.
Toda la África, señor,
Parece que desembarca
En España sin temor.
O que abre Noé su arca
Para número mayor.
[. . .]
Del cielo ha sido el castigo (II, pp. 653b, 655b)
But as humanity will be redeemed by Christ who is heralded by John the
Baptist, so the salvation of Spain is stressed by recurrent references to John.
When we first see the Moors they are celebrating the eve of St John; they are
then shipwrecked on the day itself; and when the Moor Abembúcar converts
to Christianity he intends to change his name to Juan (III, p. 657b). All this
seems to prefigure a sequence of events similar to the Passion, which must also
include a Resurrection. Count Julián, the Spaniard who has brought the
Moors across the Straits, is likened by Rodrigo to Judas (II, p. 653b). Julián has
73
Geraint Evans
played Judas to Spain itself, which will die spiritually in AD 711 and be resurrected as the leader of Christendom. The mythological phoenix is thrice linked
to the Asturian warlord Pelayo, who towards the end directly addresses the
allegorical figure of Spain. We may infer that, from Pelayo, the new spirit of
Spain will rise.
However, comic and tragic effects depend upon perspective, and the story
of the fall and reconquest of Spain has two sides, the Christian and the Muslim,
as is pointed out by Elizabeth Drayson.37 She develops ideas of Melveena
McKendrick, who in a study of political drama analyses the concept of ‘saying
without saying’ (‘decir sin decir’) expounded by the late seventeenth-century
writer Francisco Bances Candamo.38 So far we have considered the Christian
perspective on the play, but on another level we are invited also to identify with
the Muslims who are largely presented as trustworthy and loyal in contrast to
the Christians: the wilful Rodrigo, the treacherous Julián, the renegade Bishop
Orpaz. After the opening scene which portrays the political machinations of
the Spanish, the second scene is more sympathetic, presenting the dancing and
singing of the Africans. But although the Muslims are apparently the victors of
the historical events, aspects of the drama also suggest the subsequent humiliation and erosion of Muslim identity. As in plays discussed above, a memorial
experience is created based on knowledge of history. This is significant
because, as Drayson reminds us, when the play was being written, politicians
were discussing a possible expulsion of the Moriscos, a possibility which
between 1609 and 1614 became fact when up to 300,000 Muslims were forced
to leave Spain.39
Again, wordplay invites the audience to see two levels. When news of Pelayo
arrives from the north, it is brought by a messenger described as an Old Christian (cristiano viejo) (III, p. 657b). He is indeed an old man, but in early
modern Spain ‘Old Christian’ referred to a Spaniard free of the taint of Jewish
or Moorish blood, whose family had not converted to Christianity. The pun
thus anachronistically suggests the racist neologism of hierarchy which when
applied to converts equated ‘New Christian’ with second class.
As Drayson points out, when Zara is brought to court following the shipwreck, Rodrigo tells her she can stay if she converts, as was later the case for
Muslims in Spain. We then see Zara wearing Christian dress, which had been
one of the conditions of the Pragmatic which sparked the Revolt of the
Moriscos in the Alpujarras in 1568. Abembúcar wants to marry Zara but he
37
38
39
Elizabeth Drayson, ‘Reading against the grain: tragicomedy as a vehicle for cultural ambivalence, ambiguity and subversion in El postrer godo de España by Lope de Vega’, paper
presented at ‘Tragicomedy: Renaissance to Restoration’, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, 15
April 2005.
Melveena McKendrick, Playing the King: Lope de Vega and the Limits of Conformity (London,
2000), pp. 105–26.
Henry Kamen, Spain 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict, 2nd edn (London, 1991), p. 221.
74
Tragicomedy in Spain
also must convert to Christianity, and fearing his Muslim colleagues will find
out, Zara tells him to arrange a clandestine baptism, suggesting the conversion
of convenience employed by Muslims and Jews (III, p. 657b). All these details
remind the audience of the second-class status of the Moriscos in early
modern Spain. The changing balance of cultures is reflected in Abraydo’s
complaints (and this is the eighth century) that the Christians are establishing
themselves in the north and showing signs of superiority by wearing better
clothes (III, p. 663b). The announcement of Christian resistance, and descriptions of Moors fleeing, can be related to the final result of this, the potential
expulsion from Spain.
The multiplicity of tragicomic form explored here reflects the development
of a genre which was not theorised fully in Spain but was nevertheless a crucial
part of the popular theatre. Perhaps the most important aspect of tragicomedy
is what Foster refers to as double vision, a term that demands we think in terms
of the audience.40 Irony is an important part of any popular art form which
also aspires to intellectual appeal, and irony within Spanish drama results from
manipulating expectations of comedic and tragic potential. The double vision
is particularly pronounced in many of the endings, indeed in El último godo
what was initially a double vision of tragedy and comedy for the Christians has
been doubled again to include the reverse: comedic victory followed by
tragedy for the Muslims. This complicated quadruple vision could truly be
seen as a mixture rather than a combination.
40
Foster, The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, p. 36.
75
5
Highly Irregular:
Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
NICHOLAS HAMMOND
F
RENCH tragicomedy is a strange fish. If its impact were to be measured by
the number of seventeenth-century tragicomedies which are still
performed today, one could only conclude, to continue the angling metaphor,
that tragicomedy is the one that got away. After all, the only tragicomedy from
the period which everybody knows about, Corneille’s Le Cid, suffered the
indignity (or should it be dignity?) of being renamed a tragedy by Corneille
himself a number of years after the first performance. Yet, to assess tragicomedy on these terms alone would seriously underestimate the importance
of the role it played in the development of drama and indeed in the many
debates between ancients and moderns over the course of the seventeenth
century. At a time when French drama was being discussed and theorised as
never before, tragicomedy was by far the most popular genre. Between 1628
and 1634, for example, fifty tragicomedies were published, whereas only
sixteen comedies and a mere ten tragedies appeared in that time. Moreover,
the heyday of French tragicomedy, the 1630s, coincides precisely with some
fundamental changes within French culture, with the furious debates which
raged around Le Cid, known as the Querelle du Cid, and of course the founding
of the Académie Française. Whenever tragicomedy was discussed then and
indeed when it is still analysed now by many critics, questions of regularity
remain an ongoing concern in France which do not seem to intrude quite so
incessantly into debates on the theatre in other countries.1
In 1637, the year that Le Cid completely transformed French perceptions of
the theatre, there appeared within a few days of the first performances of Le
Cid another play, which was to make significant waves of its own in the seven-
1
I take ‘regularity’ here in its sense of conforming to rules as defined by rule-making bodies,
such as in this case the Académie Française.
76
Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
teenth century.2 Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin’s comedy Les Visionnaires revolves
around the three daughters of Alcidon. The first daughter, Mélisse, is in love
with Alexander the Great, which, given the fact that he has been dead for
centuries and that all subsequent suitors do not measure up to his prowess or
reputation, makes her chances of finding true love somewhat slim. Daughter
number two, Hespérie, on the other hand, is convinced that every man on the
planet is in love with her. When a potential lover comes to call, such is her
concern for the many men she would be rejecting if she were to choose just one
man, her odds of getting hitched become higher by the minute. As she
exclaims, ‘Unceasingly I am importuned by a thousand lovers, And I believe
that Heaven has destined me to this torment’ (II, 2, 433–4).3 And then there is
Sestiane, who is passionately devoted to the theatre, to the exclusion of all else.
During the course of Les Visionnaires she provides a commentary on and
indeed becomes a living metaphor for many preoccupations of the theatre at
the time, not least the debates which were raging around Le Cid. In Act II,
scene 4, for example, Sestiane discusses with the poet Amidor the merits of the
three unities as formulated by what she calls ‘these critical and severe minds’
(577). Amidor replies by pleading for diversity in drama: he argues, ‘Diversity
both pleases and surprises us’ (600). Sestiane then provides him with the
subject matter for a piece of drama which transgresses every unity and rule
governed by regularity: ranging over many lands and many years, incorporating orphans, tigers, giants, kings and princesses, and including enough
material for twenty plays, as Desmarets tells us in his preface to the play (vol. 2,
p. 406), her description is interrupted by Amidor, who declares:
This subject-matter is very beautiful, serious yet soothing, magnificent;
And, if I am not mistaken, it is tragi-comic. (653–4)
Amidor’s perception of tragicomedy lies very much on the side of those who
located its roots in the irregularity of the traditional romance. Yet, in case we
are tempted to associate Amidor’s point of view with that of the playwright, we
should bear in mind Desmarets’ description of Amidor in the preface to the
play as ‘a bizarre poet’, who is so in love with the language of the ancients that
he does not realise that it is not readily comprehensible to the people of his
own age (vol. 2, p. 405).
The major confusion concerning tragicomedy was that, given the relative
lack of examples within ancient literature or theory, nobody could agree on
what precisely it was. Perhaps the first quarrel which concerned traditionalists
2
3
Although the exact date of the first performance of Le Cid is not certain, it is generally thought
to have been in January 1637; see J.-M. Civardi, La Querelle du Cid (1637–1638) (Paris, 2004),
p. 25, footnote 1. The first performances of Les Visionnaires took place between 15 February
and 6 March 1637; see J. Scherer and J. Truchet, eds, Théâtre du xviie siècle (Paris, 1986), vol. 2,
p. 1357.
All translations from French into English are my own.
77
Nicholas Hammond
and modernists alike was over the one identifiable ancient source for the genre,
Plautus’ prologue to his play Amphitryon:
Nam me perpetuo facere ut sic comoedia,
Reges quo veniant et di, non par arbitror.
Quid igitur? Quoniam hic servus quoque partes habet,
Faciam sit, proinde ut dixi, tragicomoedia.
For to write a comedy from one end to the other where kings and gods appear is
not a good idea. What therefore should one do? Since a slave also has a role in it, I
will make it, as I have said, a tragicomedy.
As Hélène Baby has pointed out, both the contradictory exploitation and the
lack of mention of this quotation effectively sum up all the ambiguities
surrounding the theoretical discourse on tragicomedy.4 There are some theorists, primarily those like Mareschal and Ogier, arguing for the irregularity of
drama, who choose not to mention Plautus at all. Mareschal and Ogier see
themselves as modernists, and the omission of Plautus from their discourse
shows perhaps their wish to emphasise the modernity of the term. Ogier,
whose treatise on irregular drama appeared as a preface to Schelandre’s 1628
tragicomedy, Tyr et Sidon, is not in the least backward in showing off his erudition, and it is very likely that he knew of the passage from Plautus. However,
instead, he puts forward the argument that the ancients did indeed write tragicomedies but that they simply did not use the term; Euripides’ Cyclops, for
example, is in his view a perfect tragicomedy because of the way in which it
mingles wine and jokes with blood and rage (and I am using Ogier’s own
terminology here). As he adds, ‘The thing is therefore ancient while the name
is new.’ Corneille himself only refers to Plautus at the moment that he definitively moves on from tragicomedy as a genre, and I will return to this later.
Interestingly, it is above all those who espouse traditional and regular drama
who refer most often to Plautus, principally to undermine and question his use
of the term. The abbé d’Aubignac, whose influential theoretical work La
Pratique du théâtre is as illuminating as his own attempts at writing theatre are
stultifying, follows Scaliger in interpreting Plautus’ use of the word as simply a
joke which should not be taken seriously. As he states, ‘Plautus at no point
named his Amphitryon a tragicomedy, but because the Gods and Kings that he
introduces in the play hardly act at all according to their dignified status [. . .],
he boldly calls his play a Comedy in several places of his Prologue.’5 Tragicomedy for d’Aubignac is located as resolutely modern and therefore should
be condemned as such. He goes on to say about Plautus:
4
5
H. Baby, La Tragi-comédie de Corneille à Quinault (Paris, 2001), p. 48.
D’Aubignac, abbé de, La Pratique du théâtre (Paris, 1657, written in 1640s), ed. P. Martino
(Geneva, 1996), I, x, p. 151.
78
Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
That he is the only one [of the ancients to have used the term] cannot be
doubted; and so the Moderns were unable to support their argument from any
other Latin author while the language remained alive in Italy; it therefore follows
that it is a term which Plautus delivered and which nobody since wished to
adopt, as it was dead in the cradle long before the death of the Latin language.6
Given the lack of accord over Plautus’ appellation, it is hardly surprising that
there were diverging interpretations of what the genre itself constituted.
Many of the earlier writers of tragicomedy stress epic romance as the inspiration of its subject matter, very much in the lineage of what was considered to
be the first French tragicomedy, Garnier’s Bradamante of 1582 (which is
drawn from Ariosto’s epic poem Orlando Furioso). Others, mainly practitioners of the genre like Jean Mairet in the preface to his 1631 tragicomedy La
Silvanire and Georges Scudéry in his Observations sur le Cid, see the genre as a
composite of both tragedy and comedy, thereby mingling both noble and
lesser characters, but usually veering more towards comedy than tragedy.
Scudéry, himself the author of nine tragicomedies, in criticising Le Cid,
stresses that the spectator of tragicomedy must be kept in suspense by some
kind of intrigue which can only be resolved at the end.7 As he emphasises, in a
statement which could almost be that of Desmarets’ Almidor, in Le Cid ‘no
diversity and no intrigue is to be found’.8 Others, mainly theorists like La
Mesnardière and D’Aubignac, see the tragicomic genre as more akin to tragedy
with a happy ending. In fact, D’Aubignac is so keen to debase the idea of tragicomedy as a genre at all that he devotes a whole chapter of his Pratique du
théâtre to attempting to prove that tragicomedies are simply tragedies in
disguise. Tragedy, according to him, is better suited to the high seriousness
and regularity of the French as opposed to comedy of the morally dubious
Italians. As he states,
As for Tragedy, it has been better preserved by us, because as the morals of the
French are heroic and serious, they have preferred to see the adventures of heroes
on stage and have been less disposed to suffer that mixture of different kinds of
buffoonery which the Italians like.9
Although D’Aubignac is correct in asserting that tragicomedies generally have
happy endings, another of his statements is more contentious: ‘in the plays for
which we use this term composed of the words Tragedy and Comedy, there is
no sense of Comedy; everything in it is serious and marvellous, nothing
popular or farcical’.10 D’Aubignac, writing in the 1640s (and therefore just
6
7
8
9
10
Ibid., p. 149.
J.-M. Civardi, La Querelle du Cid (1637–1638): édition critique intégrale (Paris, 2004), pp.
374–5.
Ibid., p. 375.
D’Aubignac, La Pratique du théâtre, I, X, p. 147.
Ibid., p. 148.
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Nicholas Hammond
when the vogue for tragicomedy was in decline), clearly has a model like
Corneille’s Le Cid in mind. Indeed, Corneille is the playwright to whom he
referred most frequently until a squabble between the two resulted in
D’Aubignac, in a fit of pique, crossing out all references to Corneille in drafts
for a future edition of the Pratique. However, even with Le Cid as D’Aubignac’s
model here, he is wrong to assert that there is no sense of comedy in it.
Although the characters within the play are noble, there are a few episodes
more akin to comedy than tragedy, such as the verbal virtuosity of certain
scenes and the feigned death of Rodrigue. Even the ways in which Corneille
flouts the unity of place, stretches to its limit the unity of time, and veers away
from unity of action by including the seemingly superfluous figure of the
Infanta, suggest a malleability which tragicomedy afforded him. It should be
added that, even though Le Cid is the face that launched a thousand diatribes,
other tragicomedies with similar concerns appeared in the very same year.
Laure persécutée (first performed 1637, published in 1639), for instance, which
is a reworking of a Lope de Vega play by a prolific writer of tragicomedies, Jean
Rotrou (he wrote twelve in all), manages to contain comic devices like disguise
and quiproquos (characters speaking at cross-purposes) in the midst of tragic
situations.
Indeed, at the very time that boundaries of taste, decorum and aesthetics
were becoming more and more rigidly defined, tragicomedy’s lack of clear
borders gave it a flexibility and a freedom which would not be seen again on
the French stage within the seventeenth century. I have already mentioned the
way in which the irregularity of tragicomedy is heralded by writers such as
Ogier and Mareschal. As far as the subject matter of tragicomedies is
concerned, I would argue that there is a similar flexibility.
Same-sex desire, for example, which exists only in the margins of gossip (in
letters, memoirs, journals etc.) and not in officially sanctioned literature,
manages somehow to rear its head within tragicomedy with greater ease than
in other genres.11 Because of the early modern period’s phallocentric and
procreative notion of sexuality, desire between women is often alluded to or
explored on the stage (usually through mistaken identity or disguise) but is not
treated as transgressive in the way that desire between men is. In the 1634
tragicomedy, Cléagénor et Doristée by Rotrou, for example, the character
Diane concludes the play with a reflection on the fact that she fell in love with
the female Doristée cross-dressed as Philémond: ‘I found myself giving in to
love and I hoped for everything of her’, she tells us, before correcting herself
11
While one can discern homoerotic subtexts in a comedy like Molière’s Tartuffe (where the
father of the household, Orgon, is obsessed by the religious impostor, Tartuffe) or a tragedy
like Racine’s Bérénice (where the friendship between Titus and Antiochus forms part of the
shared history of the three protagonists), they are never more than suggestions. The possibilities afforded by the greater number of cross-dressed parts in tragicomedies of the time would
seem to allow a more overt display of same-sex desire on the stage.
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Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
and saying, ‘But nature came to my aid’ (V.7). As Joseph Harris in his excellent
book on cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France, Hidden Agendas, states
of this scene, ‘what Diane desired of “Philémond” is the one thing that
“Philémond” naturally lacks’.12 As far as same-sex desire between men is
concerned, there are a number of tragicomedies where the possibility is
alluded to. Corneille’s 1632 tragicomedy, Clitandre (another play he later
renamed a tragedy) includes a scene between the prince Floridan and his
favourite, the eponymous Clitandre, where it is left deliberately ambiguous
whether it is the branches of the elm tree or the limbs of the two men which are
‘interlaced’ (II.4). In a number of other tragicomedies, such as Desfontaines’s
Eurimédon (1635), Durval’s Agarite (1636), Mareschal’s La Cour bergère
(1640) and Sallebray’s L’Amante ennemie (1642), desire between men is hinted
at through cross-dressing even if all accompanying risks of actually acting
upon such impulses are effectively neutralised by the denouement.
It should be remembered that, unlike in England, almost all female roles in
seventeenth-century France were played by women, so the transgressive
potential of cross-dressed roles is perhaps greater for the very reason that they
were less pervasive. If we were to reinterpret some of Joseph Harris’s data (he
does not explicitly discuss the connection between tragicomedy and crossdressing), it is perhaps illuminating to find that between 1629 and 1650, of
thirty plays which feature cross-dressing, seventeen are tragicomedies, the
other genres being ballets, pastorales, comedies or tragedies. This might be
seen to correlate numerically to the popularity of tragicomedy as a genre, but,
if we consider the period when it declined sharply in popularity, between 1639
and 1650, the same preponderance can still be found: five of the eight plays to
include cross-dressing are tragicomedies.
Given the infinite scope for variety and innovation within tragicomedy, the
question remains why it was so short-lived as a genre in France. Undoubtedly
custom plays a part: tragicomedy simply fell out of fashion. One can see the
traces of this, for example, as early as 1639 when Desmarets, in the prefatory
material to his play Scipion, admits that the reason he chose to call it a tragicomedy was largely in order ‘to follow the fashion such as it is’.13 Corneille, as I
mentioned earlier, refers to Plautus’ Amphitryon at the moment that he definitively rejects tragicomedy as a plausible genre. Justifying his decision to call his
new play Don Sanche d’Aragon (1647) a ‘heroic comedy’, he remarks in the
prefatory epistle, ‘You know how the French are: they love novelty’; he then
goes on to criticise Plautus’ reasons for using the term ‘tragicomedy’, claiming,
in a clear echo of Aristotle’s Poetics (1450a15), that the Latin playwright was
‘deferring too much to the characters and paying too little consideration to the
12
13
J. Harris, Hidden Agendas: cross-dressing in seventeenth-century France (Tübingen: Biblio 17,
2005), p. 169.
Desmarets de Saint Sorlin, Scipion (Paris, 1639), Epître.
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Nicholas Hammond
action’.14 It perhaps comes as no surprise that by the time Molière wrote his
own version of Amphitryon in 1668, the vogue for tragicomedy was so
outmoded that he had no hesitation in calling his play a comedy. Despite
Corneille’s claim that his new genre of heroic comedy was only an interim
measure in his attempts to write great tragedy, in fact, while he never wrote
another tragicomedy, two of his final plays, Tite et Bérénice (1670) and
Pulchérie (1672) were named heroic comedies.
But, to return to the question of tragicomedy’s demise, I would suggest that
there are more important reasons than fashion alone. In a sense, a condition of
tragicomedy’s success was its eventual failure. The very fluidity of definition
and experimentation within the genre might have given it a dynamism and
freshness which appealed to audiences and playwrights alike, but it also made
tragicomedy so flexible as to transpose itself easily into other forms such as
heroic comedy, as we have seen with Corneille. Even though in the 1630s tragicomedy had some general features, such as its roots in traditional romance and
happy endings, this was not always the case. In the 1630s, for example, there
are three tragicomedies (Chabrol’s L’Orizelle and La Selve’s Léandre et Héron
from 1633, and Dorothée De Croy’s Cinnatus et Camma of 1637) which have
unhappy endings. But even comedies seem to have had the freedom to defy
conventions which would be more closely observed later in the century.
Desmarets’ comedy Les Visionnaires, which I discussed at the beginning of this
paper, is an example of this, as it refuses to resolve itself with the expected
comic ending of multiple marriages. All three deluded daughters remain
resolutely unmarried. The fact that a comedy could end with all central characters persisting in their fantasies proved too much to bear for a Jansenist
moralist like Pierre Nicole, who branded dramatists like Desmarets as ‘public
poisoners’,15 and became engaged later in the century in a vigorous debate
with Jean Racine over the moral status of the theatre. Before the Querelle du
Cid, other genres were able to encroach upon the tragicomic territory. Looking
back at his 1636 metatheatrical comedy L’Illusion comique, for instance,
Corneille’s description in 1660 makes its hybridity seem more akin to a tragicomedy than a comedy: ‘The first act seems only to be a prologue, the three
following acts make up a play which I am unable to define: its outcome is
tragic; [. . .] but the style and characters are entirely comic. [. . .] The fifth is a
rather short tragedy [. . .]. All this woven together makes a comedy, the action
of which lasts no longer than the performance of it.’16 By casting this retro14
15
16
‘Tragedy is mimesis not of persons but of action and a life [. . .] It is not in order to provide
mimesis of character that the agents act; rather, their characters are included for the sake of
their actions.’ Poetics 1450a15.
P. Nicole, Traité de la Comédie et autres pièces d’un procès du théâtre, ed. L. Thirouin (Paris,
1998), p. 219.
P. Corneille, L’Illusion comique (Paris, 1639, first performed 1636), Examen (first published
1660).
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Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
spective glance at what he admitted was an ‘extravagant piece of theatre’, it is
amusing to see how he tries to apply a certain veneer of respectability by
showing how it still conformed to the unity of time.
To conclude, therefore: tragicomedy at its height, highly irregular as it was
deemed to be by some critics, had the effect that tragedy and comedy were
forced to define themselves all the more rigorously and as a result became ever
more separate from one another. Even if Corneille tried out new forms of
heroic comedy, interestingly he never achieved the success of his earlier
theatre: the stylish innovation of his early explorations in tragicomedy
attracted the attention of theatre-goers in a way which his heroic comedies did
not. It is fascinating to see how the great comic writer and the great tragic
writer of the latter half of the seventeenth century, respectively Molière and
Racine, negotiated their own theatre in reaction to the various debates which
focused on tragicomedy. Molière made a virtue of exploiting the many influences of comedy, not least the commedia dell’arte of those buffonish Italians so
excoriated by D’Aubignac, resulting in a wonderfully rich theatre which
shocked those critics who thought one could not mix high and low comedy.
Racine, on the other hand, who possessed a copy of D’Aubignac’s Pratique du
théâtre, moved in the opposite direction, creating a pure theatre which rigorously observed the various conventions and unities and yet which, because of
rather than in spite of those restrictions, managed to attain poetry and drama
of transcendent beauty. It is not far-fetched to say that we have tragicomedy to
thank for them.
83
6
In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not to Lose Your Head:
Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
ROS KING
T
HIS CHAPTER traces a journey that began for me in 1996 at the Globe
Theatre in London when I became dramaturg for a production of Richard
Edwards’s play, Damon and Pythias. This, the first designated tragicomedy to
be written in English, had its likely first performance at court by the children of
the Chapel Royal during Christmas 1564–65. It is thus twenty years earlier
than Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido, and more than forty years earlier than The
Faithful Shepherdess, John Fletcher’s version of Guarini, and the play with
which most critical accounts of tragicomedy in England begin.1 Edwards’s
play, by contrast, has nothing whatsoever to do with shepherds. Instead, it
owes its genesis and literary theory to the city plays of Terence and Plautus,
and to the urbanity of Horace’s Defence of Poetry, whose authority is acknowledged and appealed to in the Prologue: ‘If this offend the lookers-on, let
Horace then be blamed’ (D & P, Prologue 24). It is, however, set in Sicily
which, ever since Theocritus wrote his Idylls, has seemed the natural home of
the pastoral poetry with which tragicomedy has been most often associated
because of Horace’s brief, rule-breaking reference to the allowability of mixing
humour and tragedy in satyr plays.2 Edwards thus seems aware of the issues
and negotiates a minefield of classical and contemporary literary theory with
wit and aplomb.
My journey progressed via work on The Comedy of Errors and Cymbeline,3
1
2
3
See Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays
(Newark, 1997); Nancy Klein Maguire (ed.), Renaissance Tragicomedy; Explorations in Genre
and Politics (New York, 1987); Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope (eds), The Politics of
Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London, 1992).
Horace, Ars Poetica, tr. Ross S. Kilpatrick in The Poetry of Criticism: Horace, Espistles II and Ars
Poetica (Edmonton, 1990), ll. 220–5.
See my revision to T.S. Dorsch (ed.), The Comedy of Errors (Cambridge, 2004); dramaturgy for
a production of Cymbeline (dir. Danny Scheie, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, 2000); Ros King,
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Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
and this chapter will end with Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, but in the bathetic nature
of tragicomedy it had its comically cathartic moment while I was driving to
work, listening to the radio, when I encountered Evita Bezuidenhout for the
first time.4 This lady describes herself as wife of Dr J.J. de V. Bezuidenhout, MP
for Laagerfontein; intimate friend to H.F. Verwoerd, Tini Vorster and Eliza
Botha; and South African Ambassador to the Independent Black Homeland
Republic of Bapetikosweti. Often billed as ‘The most famous white woman in
South Africa’, and in receipt of an award previously given to Hilary Clinton
and Mother Teresa, she is of course ‘a man in a frock’, the creation of comedian Pieter-Dirk Uys. His analysis of how he managed to evade the censorship
laws struck a chord. The censors were only concerned if the words ‘fart’ and
‘God’ appeared in his work. The fact that he was speaking damning truth
about the politics of apartheid in South Africa was somehow overlooked,
partly because, in the persona of Evita, this truth came out of the mouth of
someone who was blissfully unaware of the actual implication of what she was
saying, and partly because it was just a man in a frock. According to Uys,
censorship in such regimes is ‘a ridiculous embrace of the literal in a parody of
due process’ . . . ‘Cross-dressing puts the censor in a spin’ . . . ‘You just can’t
take drag literally’. Photographs show a very gorgeous, mature woman,
extremely glamorous, but not too much over the top.5 And that is the reason, I
think, that in her audiences, whether black or white, ‘The women recognised
the woman and the men forgot the man.’ It is a subtle distinction because it
means that, beguiled by her appearance, while knowing her to be a charade,
audiences register the truth of what ‘she’ is inadvertently saying. Tellingly,
Nelson Mandela was allowed to listen to her radio show while in prison
because his jailors thought it was not important. Mandela later told Uys how
sustaining it had been to him and the other political prisoners.
Evita got – and, under the present South African government, continues to
get – her topical, political laughs because her logic is undeniable and because of
the gap between what she evidently intends and the only possible interpretation. I find her interesting partly because Uys is indeed hilarious because so
politically astute, and partly because of the analogy we can draw with Elizabethan and early Stuart drama. I am suggesting that the cross-dressed element of
this drama, which we have recently been taught is a problem of sexual discrimination, actually functioned in much the same way as Uys’s Evita. The ludicrousness of the means of theatrical production, epitomised by cross-dressed
boys and men, but also reflecting the subversive play of household servants
(the status of all professional actors) literally ‘dressed up’ as their betters,
4
5
Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot and Burlington, 2005). I am indebted to
Ashgate for permission to reuse certain sections of that book for part of this chapter.
Simon Fanshawe (presenter), Laughter from the Edge, BBC Radio 4, Tuesday 1 February, 2005.
See <http://www.pdu.co.za/photo.htm> <http://www.evita.co.za/photo_gallery.htm>
<http://www.evita.co.za/who_is_she.htm> accessed 27.04.07.
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Ros King
fostered in England a peculiar form of mixed-genre entertainment that was
eminently enjoyable, but also socially and politically useful. It is precisely
because theatre is just play that it can tackle serious issues with a measure of
impunity. In a cross-dressed theatre in particular, it is not clear who is
speaking, and therefore it is a matter of discrimination and even deliberate
choice whether anything of importance has actually been said at all. The
mixed-genre form, incorporating all the elements of ‘theatricality’ – song,
dance, slapstick, surprise and melodramatic horror – is inherently popular,
indeed its elements can be found in English medieval popular drama, but in
elite domestic and educational circles in England it developed in full knowledge that it was contravening classical laws of writing for the theatre. It exploits
this transgression and is frequently outrageous in its combination of horror
and humour to the extent that it can still leave critics bewildered.
Damon and Pythias: tyranny and friendship
The title page of the printed edition of Edwards’s play, published five years
after his death, states that it is ‘the same’ as was performed before the queen,
‘except the Prologue that is somewhat altered for the proper use of them that
hereafter shall have occasion to plaie it, either in private, or open audience’.
The extent of this alteration is unknowable, although it need be no more than
the omission of some specific reference to the presence of the queen in the
audience. The opening ‘Prologue’, an intriguing mixture of voice, recent real
life event, and literary antecedent and theory, raises further questions. Here,
we are told, is a play written by someone who, it seems, is something of a
maverick. With more than a nod to the personal political difficulties expressed
by the Prologues in the plays of Terence, this Prologue states that the ‘author’
has written plays for the court on many occasions, although the last one caused
great offence. We are not told why. Perhaps it was too satirical; perhaps merely
scurrilous. He pleads pardon:
A sudden change is wrought,
For lo, our author’s muse, that masked in delight,
Has forced his pen against his kind, no more such sports to write.
[. . .]
seeing that he did offend,
Of all he humbly pardon craves – his pen that shall amend.
(D & P, Prologue 6–12)6
Whatever the reason, the Prologue promises that this time the author is going
to mix ‘mirth and care’, and produce something he is calling a ‘tragical
6
All quotations from Damon and Pythias are taken from the edition in Ros King, The Works of
Richard Edwards: Politics, Poetry and Performance in Sixteenth-Century England (Manchester,
2001).
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Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
comedy’. This label, and the disclaimer ‘We speak of Dionysius’ court, we
mean no court but that’ (D & P, Prologue 38, 40) is a disingenuous invitation
for his audience, including Elizabeth herself, to see themselves and to apply the
essential lesson of the play: that under an autocracy, friendship between
subjects and monarch is the only defence against tyranny on the one hand and
assassination on the other. As the closing song puts it:
The strongest guard that kings can have
Are constant friends their state to save.
True friends are constant, both in word and deed,
True friends are present and help at each need,
True friends talk truly, they glose for no gain,
When treasure consumes, true friends will remain,
True friends for their true prince, refuse not their death,
The Lord grant her such friends, most noble Queen Elizabeth.
Damon and Pythias, followers of the philosopher Pythagorus, are on a
grand tour of the classical world. They arrive in Syracuse, a Greek city-state
which, under the dictatorships of the two Dionysiuses, father and son, was a
byword for tyranny in Elizabethan England. Damon is duped, arrested as a
spy, and sentenced to death. The play reaches a terrible climax in a scene in
which the two friends argue with each other in front of Dionysius for the right
to die for the sake of the other. The very extremity of their feeling for each
other is intensely moving. But the insistence with which they make their
demands, kill me – no kill me – no kill me, combined with the matter-of-fact
caustic observations of the hangman, Groano, who grumbles that he could cut
off lots of heads if only those in authority would get themselves organised, is
blackly funny – particularly if Groano is played, as is likely, by a little boy with a
very large sword. After witnessing this spectacle, the tyrant has a sudden recognition of the power of theatre to change hearts – marked by a break from the
highly irregular verse form in which most of the play is written into regular
syllabic measures:
O noble gentlemen, the immortal gods above
Has made you play this tragedy, I think, for my behove.
Before this day, I never knew what perfect friendship meant,
My cruel mind, to bloody deeds was full and wholly bent.
My fearful life, I thought with terror to defend,
But now I see there is no guard unto a faithful friend,
Which will not spare his life at time of present need –
O happy kings, within your courts, have two such friends indeed.
(D & P, Scene 15, 217–24)
He pleads with them, in a ludicrously touching way, to ‘make [him] a third
friend’ (line 228). We do not really believe it, though we wish it could be true.
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Ros King
But the implication is clear: on both sides, friendship is a way of ensuring that
you do not lose your head.
Audience response: the giggle factor
Seeing Damon and Pythias in performance in front of an audience of nine
hundred people at the Globe was a revelation. We had a cast of professional
actors, but in order to explore the sense of dislocation between actor and
character that might have arisen in its original performance by seasoned boy
players, they were, deliberately, all women; all the characters are male.7 The
actors were dressed as men and played the characters with conviction but were
careful not to mimic any generalised notion of masculinity. The circular
arrangement of the audience around the stage at the Globe in the same light
conditions inevitably heightens audience consciousness of theatricality. This is
no ‘suspension-of-disbelief’ theatrical experience. I have never found that to
be a particularly convincing explanation as to why and how we submit
ourselves to a theatrical experience, but it is peculiarly inappropriate for drama
written before the time when the auditorium lights were switched off for
performance. Those Elizabethans used to seeing plays in performance were
not unsophisticated about the process. The one extensive eyewitness account
of audience response to a play in the entire period – a performance before the
queen at Oxford in 1566 of Edwards’s evidently spectacular and sadly lost last
play, Palamon and Arcyte – shows a range of reactions from wonder, to disapproval, to game-playing interactions between stage and audience, and between
different sections of that audience, but all firmly rooted in the reality of their
present moment.8 Whereas in the afternoon dress rehearsal at the Globe in
1996, a few guests of cast members scattered round that vast auditorium had
experienced the play as individuals in terms of the emotion of the story and the
conventions of fourth wall theatre, the populous evening audience who could
all see each other as clearly as they could see the actors on the stage, saw the
pathos but also the ridiculousness of the story. They giggled – as the only
appropriate response to the overblown language. But they also squirmed
because the actors held on to the real horror of the situation, resisting the pressure to send it up. The tension between the will of the audience and that of the
actors made for exciting spectator sport.
Giggling is a common response to a shock, and to any event that seems to
occur ‘inappropriately’ or at odds with the mood of the moment. We can often
find ourselves giggling at such discrepancy or dislocation even while knowing
7
8
Damon and Pythias, Globe Theatre, London, Gaynor MacFarlane (dir.), Maureen Beattie
(Damon), Patricia Kerrigan (Pythias), reviewed in The Guardian, and The Scotsman,
10.9.1996.
King, Works of Richard Edwards, pp. 78–85.
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Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
that the event is serious, even terrible. Such a response is acutely embarrassing
and often only results in an increased desire to giggle. The emotion is perhaps
akin to ‘rubber-necking’ while driving past an accident. There is a fascination
in the horror of the scene because of the tension between that, the ever-present
danger to oneself, and one’s current safety. Taking a stern moral line against
such behaviour is a denial of the complex emotional ways in which we interact
with the world around us, and, in terms of literary criticism, is akin to insisting
that dramatic forms should be ‘clean’ – either comic or tragic, but not a
mixture of both.
Amphitruo, Jack Juggler and The Comedy of Errors:
identity and duality
Damon and Pythias may be the first designated tragicomedy in English but the
only play to claim that label in the classical repertoire, Plautus’ Amphitruo, had
already found its way into English consciousness in the comedy Jack Juggler,
which is again probably by Richard Edwards.9 The Amphitruo concerns
Jupiter’s adultery with Alcmena. He has disguised himself as her husband and
is making love to her while Mercury, disguised as the family slave, Sosia,
guards the door. Most of the humour in the play derives from the real Sosia’s
puzzlement and frustration at coming face to face with his double who refuses
to let him into his master’s house. It is this centrality of the slave’s role in a play
about the god Jupiter, which necessitates Plautus’ ironic coinage of the term
‘tragicocomoedia’.
What’s that? Are you disappointed
To find it’s a tragedy? Well, I can easily change it.
I’m a god, after all, I can easily make it a comedy,
And never alter a line. Is that what you’d like? . . .
But I was forgetting – stupid of me – of course,
Being a god, I know quite well what you’d like,
I know exactly what’s in your minds. Very well.
I’ll meet you half-way, and make it a tragicomedy.
[tragicocomoedia]
It can’t be an out-and-out comedy, I’m afraid,
With all these kings and gods in the cast. All right, then,
A tragicomedy – at least it’s got one slave-part.
(Amphitruo, Prologue, 50–60)10
Jack Juggler was evidently written to be performed at Christmas, since Jack’s
opening speech calls on Christ, Saint Steven, and Saint John, celebrated on 25,
9
10
Jack Juggler is most commonly ascribed to Nicholas Udall, but in terms of prosody is quite
unlike the comedy Ralph Roister Doister (ascribed to him by Thomas Wilson in The Rule of
Reason). See King, Works of Richard Edwards, pp. 10, 13–15.
Plautus, Amphitruo, trans E.F. Watling in The Rope and Other Plays (Harmondsworth, 1964).
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Ros King
26 and 27 December respectively. But its references to four deaths seven years
previously, and to being ‘washed in warme blod’ (364–8) mean that it is not
just a bit of seasonal fun. Like Damon and Pythias, it starts by making claims
about what it is not: the play is ‘not worthe an oyster shel’; it will treat of
‘mattiers of non importaunce’ (l.54); no-one should ‘looke to heare of mattiers
substancyall / Nor mattiers of any gravitee’ since such things are not appropriate for ‘litle boyes handelings’ (ll.73–6).11 As with the reference to
Dionysius’ court, these protestations work as both disclaimer and pointer, in
this case to the play’s play on language, which will allow audiences to hear it as
a metaphor for the most ‘substantial’ matter of the sixteenth century: the question as to whether the bread and wine of the communion service came to
‘represent’, to ‘carry the memory of’, or to ‘be’, the body and blood of Christ.
In October 1551, some ten months after what I believe was the first performance of Jack Juggler, Archbishop Cranmer himself cited Alcmena’s deception
by Jupiter in Amphitruo as an example of ‘an illusion of our senses, if our
senses take for bread and wine that whiche is not so indeed’.12
Plautus’ Amphitruo also forms an important source for what is probably
Shakespeare’s earliest experiment with the mixed-genre form, that curious,
broken-backed, but greatly undervalued play, The Comedy of Errors. This play
contains an extraordinary number of Christian references that have previously
puzzled critics, although recently several commentators have suggested that it
too forms a commentary on religious difference.13 The comedy, Jack Juggler,
may offer a firmly Protestant line in accordance with Edwardian politics, but
the tragicomedy, The Comedy of Errors, seems much more ecumenical; its
solution to the very real dangers of confused identity is the acknowledgement
and welcoming of both difference and equality:
We came into the world like brother and brother
And now let’s go hand in hand, not one before another.
(C of E, 5.1.429–30)
The last word goes to the slaves, not the masters. Similarly in Damon and
Pythias, it is Stephano, the slave, who has the job of finishing off the main
story, celebrating not just the happy resolution of his masters’ trials, but his
11
12
13
All quotations from Jack Juggler are taken from Three Tudor Classical Interludes, ed. Marie
Axton (Cambridge, 1982).
An Answer of the most reverend . . . Thomas archebyshop of Canterburye . . . unto a crafty and
sophisticall cavillation devised by Stephen Gardiner . . . late byshop of Winchester (London,
1551), cited Axton (1982), p. 20.
See Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Comedies (Newark, 1993); Richard
Dutton, ‘The Comedy of Errors and The Calumny of Apelles: an exercise in source study’, in A
Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Comedies, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard
(Oxford, 2003), pp. 316–17; compare Laurie Maguire, ‘The Girls from Ephesus’, pp. 361–5 in
The Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays, ed. Robert Miola (New York and London, 1997).
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own future as a newly freed man, and even wishing his court audience a future
lived in friendship:
O most happy, pleasant, joyful, and triumphant day!
Poor Stephano now shall live in continual joy –
Vive le roi – with Damon and Pythias in perfect amity.
[Exeunt all but STEPHANO.]
Vive tu Stephano, in thy pleasant liberality,
Wherein I joy as much as he that has a conquest won –
I am a free man, none so merry as I now under the sun.
[To audience] Farewell my lords, now the gods grant you all the sum
of perfect amity
And me long to enjoy my long desired liberty.
(D & P, Scene 15. 264–72)
A dramatic form that allows us to see gods, masters and slaves rubbing
shoulders on equal terms, even if we do not quite believe it, has the potential to
be very subversive indeed.
Cymbeline: royalty and the law
The marriage of danger and humour that I am outlining likewise operates in
Cymbeline. This is a play that has excited very mixed reactions and tends to go
down better with audiences than with readers. Its central, most notorious,
scene is one in which the Princess Imogen grieves over a headless body that she
believes to be the husband who had tried to murder her. We know it is the
suitor (the queen’s son, her father’s stepson), who wanted to rape her. Either
way it is an affront to ordinary human sensibility. Readers of the play are likely
to be caught up by the pathos of her speech, hearing only her distress. But for
audiences, the physical presence of the ‘body’ serves to distance the grief. It
constantly reminds us that she has got the wrong person, while its very
headlessness also means that we sit there considering how well wardrobe
and/or props have pulled off the effect. The intensity of the character’s
emotion in these circumstances is embarrassing, slightly distanced, and therefore bound to make us laugh. The turning point in the scene is when she dips
her fingers into what we know can only be a gobbet of stage blood positioned
within a false neck, and then smears that paint on her face in a macabre version
of the body painting which even the Elizabethans knew was Celtic custom. At
that moment, our imagination of what that physical act might actually feel like
takes over, and giggles turn to genuine horror.
Few productions of the play – and none that I know of in England – have
dared to give full reign to its gruesome humour. We have been too wedded to
the concept of the play as a romance. The Victorians may have thought they
loved it, but that was only because their acting versions had cut out most of the
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Ros King
blacker humour and turned Shakespeare’s spirited princess (Cymbeline’s
daughter Imogen) into the epitome of middle-class wifely virtue. A glance at
the prompt books for both of Peter Hall’s productions – the first in 1957 with
the fifty-year-old Peggy Ashcroft playing Imogen and the second in 1988 with
Geraldine James – reveals that right from the very first scene he cut lines that
are likely to raise a laugh.14 The inimitable Kenneth Tynan, reviewing the first
of these productions along with Peter Brook’s Titus, proposed a new company
for the two Peters, ‘Hall and Brook Ltd; the Home of Lost Theatrical Causes,
collapsing plays shored up, unspeakable lines glossed over, unactable scenes
made bearable’.15 Giving examples of the precise words cut by both directors,
he observed ‘when Caius Lucius exclaims: “Soft ho! what trunk is here without
his top?” Mr Hall deletes the last three. This is inexcusable cowardice. Those
who devote themselves to making silk purses out of sows’ ears are in duty
bound to go the whole hog.’ I would rather say that the action is not so much
cowardice as suicide since it removes the context that enables the extremity of
this scene to work. Nevertheless, in describing Harriet Walter’s performance
in Bill Alexander’s production for the RSC, Michael Billington wrote that ‘the
true test of her power is that when she daubed her cheeks with the blood of a
headless corpse not a titter, as Frankie Howerd might say, ran through the
house’.16 The reference to the stand-up comedian widely loved in Britain for
his outrageous double entendres, and at that time most famous for his role as
the slave and continually thwarted ‘Prologue’ in the TV sitcom Up Pompeii, is
perhaps more appropriate than Billington intended. But the titter is only a
problem if the production is single-mindedly in romance mode throughout,
where of course salacious or irreverent laughter is out of place. Rather more
perceptively, Paul Taylor described the same production as ‘incapable of doing
more than one thing well at a time which, with Cymbeline, is an enormous
handicap. Harriet Walter expertly pulls out all the pathos in this corpse scene,
but somehow does not leave an audience a space for a contrary, irreverent
perception to slide in.’17 Walter herself, however, said later, ‘I learned to dare
to give a pause [. . .] just long enough to let the audience know that they can
laugh – that I the actress intend the joke, though the character is innocent of it
– a challenging knife-edge to tread.’18
In Cymbeline, Shakespeare outrageously stages the cutting off of a semiroyal head as black humour in order to explore issues of succession, marriage,
14
15
16
17
18
These prompt books are held by the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford-upon-Avon, and the
National Theatre Archive, respectively.
The Observer, 3 July, 1957.
The Guardian, 24 March, 1988.
The Independent, 24 March, 1988.
Harriet Walter, ‘Imogen in Cymbeline’ in Players of Shakespeare 3: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, ed. Russell Jackson
(Cambridge, 1993), p. 213.
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law, religious observance and British independence. Forty years after the play
was written, Charles I would have his head chopped off for setting himself
above the law and attempting to rule without parliament. But his father, James
I, had already embarked his family on that journey. In the year Shakespeare’s
play was first performed, he told his parliament ‘Kings are not only God’s
Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself
they are called Gods’. One of those who heard him wrote to a friend that this
two-hour-long speech ‘showed great learning, admirable memory, and
exceeding piety, to the great contentment of all parties; only the most strictly
religious could have wished that his highness would have been more sparing in
using the name of God, and comparing the Deity with princes’ sovereignty’.19
The MP was justifiably worried about the threat that James’s views on kingship
posed to the traditional liberty of speech enjoyed by the English parliament. As
a king and a god, James repeatedly claimed the right to exercise law but not to
be subject to it, arguing that he was ‘above the law, as both the author and giver
of strength thereto’.20
In the play, the royal figure who loses his head is an odious blockhead, but
Shakespeare has given him a significant name: Cloten. In Holinshed’s Chronicle, one of the sources for the play, Cloten is the name given to an ancient king
of Cornwall, father of Mulmutius who, as Shakespeare’s Cymbeline proudly
tells the ambassador from Rome, was not only the first British king to wear a
crown but the first to set down the laws of the country. Holinshed says that
Mulmutius’s laws, translated first into Latin, and then by Alfred the Great into
Anglo-Saxon, have passed into English common law ‘albeit that we know not
certainly how to distinguish them from others, that are in strength amongst
us’.21 While the historical Cloten, as Mulmutius’s father, could be considered to
be above the law in a genealogical sense, Shakespeare’s Cloten believes that he is
above the law because he is ‘the Queen’s son’. It is a typically generous Shakespearean joke, since those who do not know their Holinshed will be contented
with the pun on ‘clot’. As such, the character bullies and swaggers his way
through the play until he eventually meets his death in Wales at the hands of
Guiderius, the long-lost heir to the British crown. The dark twist to this desired
outcome is that the rightful prince, though brave and fearless, also acts without
thought – without using his head – and even without caring very much. It is a
pretty thuggish prospect for the future government of the country.
Guiderius With his own sword
Which he did wave against my throat, I have ta’en
His head from him – I’ll throw’t into the creek
19
20
21
Letter from Sir John More, 24 March 1610, in Sir Ralph Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State
in the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I (London, 1725), vol. 3.
C.H. McIlwain (ed.), The Political Works of James I (Cambridge, Mass., 1918), p. 63.
Raphael Holinshed, The Historie of England, 15.b.34–9, also The Description of England, pp.
176–7, in Holinshed, Chronicles (London, 1574), vol. 1.
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Behind our rock, and let it to the sea,
And tell the fishes he’s the queen’s son, Cloten.
That’s all I reck. (4.2.150–55)
The play’s setting on the geographical and temporal edge of the Roman
empire at the time of the birth of Christ, during a period of epochal change for
ancient Britain and for the Mediterranean world, is used by Shakespeare to
re-imagine analogous changes in process at the time of writing: the rise of
competing western European empires, and the split in Christianity. Its mixed
tragic and comic structure expresses a whole gamut of opinions and positions,
thus allowing the peculiar logic of the play world to interact with the opinions
of its audiences. This is an important function, and not only for the governed.
The government too needs to hear these issues rehearsed – playfully. It is part
of the central business of counsel which characterises Tudor and early Stuart
England. The uneasy peace at the end of the play in which Roman and British
flags ‘wave friendly together’ even while, in an ominously Clotenesque phrase,
the ‘crooked smokes’ of sacrificial offerings waft up to the ‘nostrils’ of the gods,
might even allow its original audience to question whether the nation state
that James was inadvertently creating, while trying fairly unsuccessfully to
impose his will as an autocratic monarch, was actually at odds with his other
great project, which was to bring ecumenical peace to a Europe riven by religious war. The play thus confronts problems that are still with us, and offers
startling opportunity for reinterpretation in modern performance precisely
because it deals so deftly and metaphorically with the (literally) burning issues
in the culture of its own time and place.
Dr Faustus: hollow laughter and received religion
In all of the plays I have mentioned, an understanding of the local significance of the play at the time of writing is dependent on the literary identification of the mixed genre, the ‘tragedy with comedy’, which is the literal
meaning of Plautus’ tragicocomoedia. I do not really want to use the term
‘tragicomedy’ because that has come to signify a play which, like The Comedy
of Errors, starts tragically and turns out well. Shakespeare came to realise that
the genre had greater possibilities if it was more consistently mixed up. The
plays I have discussed all share the quality of being, in Posthumus’s words, ‘a
senseless speaking, or a speaking such as sense cannot untie’ but nevertheless,
like the prophecy in Cymbeline to which he refers, there is something about
them which rings true to our ordinary cycles of aspiration and disappointment: ‘Be what it is, The action of my life is like it’ (Cymbeline, V.iv.149–50).
This dynamic between the outrageous and the real, which corresponds to
what Aristotle terms the ‘likely impossibility’, and which he accurately
states is more the hallmark of effective theatre than the ‘unconvincing
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possibility’,22 sets up a space in which surprising things can be thought –
things which may be far outside the normal moral injunctions of one’s
society.
Due attention to the mixed-genre form thus enables us to recognise the
organisational structure of some otherwise very problematic plays. Almost all
criticism of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, for example, downplays everything but the serious aspects of Faustus’s pact with the devil, virtually ignoring
the Rafe and Robin conjuring scenes by claiming that they are, in execution at
least, likely to be by an author other than Marlowe. It also neglects the extensive humour which involves Faustus himself, not just in the notorious slapstick scenes with the Pope or the horse courser, but the black comedy that
arises throughout the play by virtue of its dramaturgical structure. As with
Cymbeline, this humour can be difficult to gauge, or even to identify, from the
printed page. Susan Snyder’s rather grudging remarks that Faustus works ‘as
spectacle’ is the most that is usually said about this aspect of the play.23
Comedy and spectacle have always contributed to the success of Faustus on the
stage. Henslowe knew this when he tried to prolong its popular life by paying
good money for Birde and Rowley to make their ‘adicyones’ to the text in
1602.24 It is now generally accepted that these alterations probably included
the extended scene of anti-Papal propaganda found in the B-text of the play,
which reduces theological questioning to narrowly sectarian certainty; an
increase in the incidence of dragons, devils and fireworks; extensions and
repetitions to the horse courser and stag’s head incidents; and added moralising dialogue in the later scenes. These combine to overbalance and obscure
the structure I am trying to describe here. My argument, therefore, is confined
to the A-text, which alone (and significantly) states that divinity is ‘basest’ of
the various arts, ‘Unpleasant, harsh, contemptible, and vile’ (Faustus, A-text,
1.1.110–11).25
In the preface to their edition, David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen offer a
scrupulous and detailed account of the polarisation in criticism of the play
between those who take an orthodox religious line on Faustus’s rejection of
salvation and those who stress the tragedy of the non-fulfilment of his
humanist intellectual aspirations. But whereas the German Faustbuch and its
earliest English translation are careful to describe Faust’s story and actions as
22
23
24
25
Aristotle, Ars Poetica, 24.1460a, ed. and trans Ingram Bywater, Aristotle on the Art of Poetry
(Oxford, 1909).
Susan Snyder, ‘Doctor Faustus as an inverted Saint’s Life’, in Doctor Faustus, ed. David Scott
Kastan (New York and London, 2005), p. 320.
The Henslowe Papers, ed. R.A. Foakes (London, 1977), f. 108v.
Christopher Marlowe and his Collaborator and Revisers, Doctor Faustus: A- and B-texts (1604,
1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester, 1993), pp. 64–77. All quotations are taken from this edition.
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damnable, declaring Faust to be an ‘enemy unto all man-kind’,26 Marlowe’s
play, at least in the A-text, seems designed from the outset to encourage
diametrically opposed interpretations.
A sixteenth-century audience is likely to have been far more acutely aware
than we are of the inadequacy both of Faustus’s knowledge of that in which he
is supposed to be expert, and of the bargain that he makes for himself. As every
editor notes, he misascribes On kai me on (‘being and not being’) to Aristotle
rather than to the sceptic, Gorgias of Leontini, and omits the promise of salvation that should form the antithetical second part to each of his quotations
from the Bible in that scene (1.1.12, 39–44).27 Selective biblical quotation to
make a point is, of course, nothing unusual. As a student at a medieval university, Faustus has been trained in the ability to argue as required on either side
of a problem in philosophy with equal and opposite precedent and citation.
Anxiety concerning the intellectual sterility of such scholastic disputation,
however, led in the late sixteenth century to new editions of the account of
ancient Greek, Pyrhonnian scepticism by Sextus Empiricus (c. AD 160–210),
whose Adversus Mathematicos (‘Against the Schoolmasters’, vii.66) indeed
cites On kai me on. Since scepticism entails religious agnosticism, the decision
to publish these editions was defended on the grounds that if it is not possible
to trust the evidence of our senses, and if all human knowledge is therefore
derived from logical argument and thus capable of logical refutation, the only
certainty is Christian faith.28
For the benefit of the censor, Marlowe’s play similarly appears to be
perfectly on message: just the right amount of anti-Catholic satire and an
apparently clear insistence, in line with the later Elizabethan English Church,
on salvation through the simple fact of Christ’s sacrifice. The Good Angel and
the Old Man, among others, repeatedly remind Faustus of this, but he knows
that for him it is impossible: his worldly bargain logically prevents it, and his
only salvation from an eternity of torment would be complete physical disintegration, ‘dissolv’d in elements’ or like a ‘foggy mist’ (5.2.111, 91).
The Good and Bad Angels are regularly described in criticism as a feature
borrowed from medieval morality drama, although Marlowe in fact may not
have known the play The Castle of Perseverance, in which they occur.29
Dramaturgically in Dr Faustus, however, their arguments demonstrate the
26
27
28
29
The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus, trans. P.F.
(London, 1592), f. A4v.
His quotation from Romans 6:23, ‘For the wages of sin is death’, should continue: ‘but the gift
of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord’. Similarly, ‘If we say we have no sin, we
deceive ourselves and truth is not in us’ (1 John 1:8–9) continues: ‘If we acknowledge our sins,
he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness’.
Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (New York, revised
edition, 1968), p. 35.
Bevington and Rasmussen, Doctor Faustus, p. 9.
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sceptical position: their equal and opposite assertions cancel each other out,
although the Bad Angel is also always left with the last word. The Good Angel,
ironically, in urging Faustus to ‘lay that damnèd book aside’ reinforces his
sense of the inadequacy of received knowledge, the knowledge that is to be
found in books, whereas the Evil Angel in urging him the way he is going – ‘Go
forward, Faustus, in that famous art / Wherein all nature’s treasury is contained’ – offers him a glimpse of empirical knowledge as well as a promise of
worldly power (1.1.72–9).
The play thus dramatises a philosophical question: the nature of the criterion for truth. Books, or perhaps rather the authority of the allowed written
word, are very much the problem. Faustus’s dissatisfaction with the state of
received human knowledge is presented both linguistically and visually as he
sets aside the tomes that represent the summation of each academic discipline.
He knows enough to be dissatisfied by the limitations of rhetorical argument
and is desperate for concrete experiential knowledge that would cut through
his mass of contradictory thoughts culled from an array of philosophers and
traditions. He follows a straightforward question about the precise location of
Hell in a mediaeval cosmology, for instance, with an incredulous ‘Think’st
thou that Faustus is so fond / To imagine that after this life there is any pain?’
(2.1.136–7), an Epicurean idea that he might have found in Lucretius’
comforting poem De Rerum Natura, with its triumphant hymn on the
mortality of the soul and hence the impossibility of punishment after death.30
For his part, Mephistopheles can do nothing but tell Faustus ‘truths’ that
he and most members of the audience not only already know, but may also
know as rather out of date. Faustus’ tacit acceptance of what Mephistopheles
tells him, although he knows it to be inadequate, again calls into question the
validity of all received knowledge. Mephistopheles, of course, knows about
the relationship between knowledge and experience: ‘Ay, think so still, till experience change your mind’ (2.1.131), although in this statement he is
claiming that conventional belief in the existence of hell will be proved by
experience.
Having sidestepped Faustus’s direct questions, Mephistopheles gives him a
book. In the circumstances, this is comfortingly familiar territory and the
B-text Faustus is content. In the A-text, however, Faustus then asks for a book
that will let him conjure spirits when he pleases. Mephistopheles merely turns
the pages. Faustus again asks for another book that will show him the movement of the planets. Again, Mephistopheles turns the pages. Now Faustus
pleads for ‘one book more’ detailing all plants and trees – and Mephistopheles
turns the pages (2.1.162–82). All of creation in the one book? All already
written down? The repetition of demand and page-turning means that we can
see it coming. We can smile. Faustus, however, is no further forward and,
30
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (London and Cambridge, Mass., 1947), III. 912–77.
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given his terrible bargain, his comment ‘O, thou art deceived’ (2.2.181) is
arguably the most tragic moment in the play.
The play thus presents a situation in which what God and the Devil have to
offer in this life are equally unsatisfactory. The Devil gives you what you know
to be a dubious account of cosmology, a show of seven fairly unpleasant and
unalluring deadly sins, and a devil with a firework, instead of a wife. This last
might entertain a packed theatre with misogynistic thoughts of a nagging ‘her
indoors’, but Helen of Troy she ain’t. God in the person of the Old Man, on the
other hand, offers blood and tears. No wonder Faustus turns to despair. The
audience safe in the theatre, observing this story, and enjoying its staging, can
observe the problem but is not forced down the same emotional road. Our
experience of the play is that each scene that shows Faustus grasping after
demonstrable truth while being fobbed off with conventional a priori argument is followed by a scene in which Rafe and Robin reduce that particular
aspect of the problem to absurdity.31 Their comic antics likewise depend on
the use of books. For the present argument, it does not matter who wrote these
scenes, only that they work dramaturgically. The brief is that they should turn
the tragic scenes on their head, which they do very effectively. Robin’s horizons are more limited than Faustus’s, but one knows that he is just as likely to
be disappointed: ‘Here I ha’ stol’n one of Doctor Faustus’ conjuring books
[. . .] Now will I make all the maidens in our parish dance at my pleasure stark
naked before me, and so by that means I shall see more than e’er I felt or saw
yet’ (2.2.1–5). The scene ends bathetically with him going to clean his boots.
The next time we see him he has forgotten his impossible dream about naked
girls and got a more down-to-earth idea for a spell that he thinks will make
him a fortune in his trade as an ostler.
It is therefore interesting that once Faustus is in command of his own magic
choices (although of course he is entirely dependent on Mephistopheles for
their execution) the nature of the desired show changes. He reports that he has
flown round the world, seeing first hand the wonders of the natural world and,
no less marvellous, the cities built by man: Trier, Paris, Naples, ‘Venice, Padua
and the rest’ (3.1.1–20). The shows with which he delights other people are
visions of human aspiration, achievement and love: Alexander and Darius;
Helen of Troy; and grapes grown by humans in accordance with nature –
albeit on the other side of the world. Thus it is that the first Chorus’s protestations that the author has left aside the themes of war, love and aspiration that
he had covered in Tamburlaine and Dido are demonstrated as being disingenuous. Rather, this play is a continuation of these central aspects of the human
31
I have here accepted Bevington and Rasmussen’s argument (Doctor Faustus, pp. 287–8) that
the long scene in the A-text, in which Faustus finally sells his soul to the devil, should be
intercut with the first of the two consecutive Rafe and Robin scenes that are misplaced later in
the printed text, possibly as a result of being the work of a collaborator and therefore written
on a separate sheet and inserted out of place in the manuscript.
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condition, but in another form. Faustus’s intellectual aspirations are reduced
to tricks on the body – the legerdemain of the conjurer, or the stage manager –
discomforting those who fail to take him seriously or try to get one over on
him. He places horns temporarily on the head of the disparaging knight in the
Emperor’s court and appears to lose not his head but his leg to the horse
courser.
Just as the carrier and the horse courser fail to outwit Faustus in their
bargains with him, so we know that Faustus will be kept to his horrific bargain
with the devil. And we enjoy both. Faustus’s final speech is an agony of
conflicted theology, accepting the possibility of salvation, denying it, flirting
briefly with Pythagorean metempsychosis and cursing his parents; no, himself;
no, Lucifer (5.2.99–115). Although the speech occurs in both versions of the
play, it is easier to read as a real psychological problem in the A-text as it has
not been preceded there by yet another argument between the Good and Bad
Angels, as occurs in B. Instead the A-text has a scene (not in B) in which the
Old Man confronts the devils, claiming victory over them, although since they
exit simultaneously by different doors, the visual message as to who is fleeing
whom is ambiguous: ‘Hence, hell! For hence I fly unto my God’ (5.1.119).
Faustus never gives up his very human struggle, demanding both ‘God, look
not so fierce on me’ and ‘Ugly hell, gape not’ before trying a last ditch bargain
‘I’ll burn my books’ (5.2.120–3). Whether his final ‘Ah Mephistopheles’ is
despair or ecstatic recognition is a production choice that does not have to be
determined by the final Chorus’s conventional summing up.
It is the mixed-genre experience, not the simple moral message, which
provides endless fascination. The structure gives the audience the opportunity
to ask themselves not just whether they would want to lose their heads, their
lives, their supposed eternal lives, in the way Faustus does, but what would
make it worth it – for them. Marlowe poses the question which neither religion
nor law enforcement dare ask: not just why people risk so much for so little,
but what the emotional payback is that makes them want to do it. All the questions that previous critics have raised are of course still there, but attention to
the mixed-genre structure means that we no longer have to plump for one
side, one angel, or the other. Faustus’s aspiration as the child of relatively
unprivileged parents (and in that he must correspond not just to the author
but also to most of those who have ever read or seen the play) is to make sense
of a world which is not actually what we are told it is by teachers, or religious
and political leaders. The fact that he fails does not mean that we will, or
should, ever want to give up trying.
In identifying the political potential for the mixed genre we can therefore
progress beyond the dichotomising effects of much recent criticism, which has
tended to characterise drama as alternately elitist or subversive. Much like
Edwards before him, who was probably a groom of the Chamber, as well as a
gentleman and later Master of the Chapel Royal, Shakespeare, as a member of
the Chamberlain’s company of actors and later as one of the King’s company,
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was in part, at least, a royal servant, paid in that tangled mix of public private
finance peculiar to the Tudor and Stuart courts. As a very secret servant of the
government, Marlowe’s life was a blacker version of that same transaction. But
as licensed men, the job of all three was both to entertain and, in that
resounding phrase, ‘speak truth to power’ – provided that the public expression of such truth was sufficiently distanced by setting or character, or in the
case of Dr Faustus, overt moral structure.
The archetypal V-shape of later conceptions of tragicomedy has a certain
pre-ordained certainty about it and is easily applied to the shape of the Christian story with mankind’s descent into sin and to hell followed by Christ’s
redemption and resurrection. That particular form of tragedy-then-comedy is
perhaps best understood as the reassertion of the status quo but in ameliorated
form. Everything’s OK really. The Elizabethan mixed-genre form has the
capacity to be a much darker beast. All the plays I have considered in this
chapter explore and take delight in a complex, even contradictory, sense of
good and evil. The false philosopher, Carisophus, the cause of all the trouble in
Damon and Pythias, is whipped out of the court by Eubulus (Good Counsel) in
the final scene of the play but has no doubt that he will be back (Scene 16. 10).
And we, of course, knowing what we do about princes’ courts, are certain of it.
In drama, ‘truth’ derives from the complex emotional process of reception in
which audiences make sense for themselves through a combination of their
own prior experience, and their understanding of the current significance of
the old story they see being played out before them. In this ‘remembered present’, the adaptive capacity of the brain to link prior and current experience in
imagining a future,32 it is the amused knowledge that it certainly isn’t all right
really, that might – just might – encourage us to try to make a difference.
32
Gerald M. Edelman and Giulio Tononi, Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination
(Harmondsworth, 2000), pp. 102–10.
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7
Taking Pericles Seriously
SUZANNE GOSSETT
Every literary work changes the genres it relates to.1
S
OMETIME in the early winter months of 1609 two young men must have
had a rather unhappy and worried conversation. Perhaps for mutual
support both emotional and physical they had it in the bed they so famously
shared – as it was no doubt cold, and the conversation was largely about
failure. As the new year began Francis Beaumont (b. circa 1585) was about
twenty-four; his good friend and collaborator John Fletcher (b.1579) was
turning thirty. They had worked hard since coming to London and had already
written, separately and together, at least four and possibly as many as six plays,
all for children’s companies: certainly The Woman Hater (1606), The Knight of
the Burning Pestle (1607), Cupid’s Revenge (1607–08), and The Faithful Shepherdess (1608–09), and perhaps also The Scornful Lady and The Coxcomb.2
But prospects were very bleak. First of all, their two most brilliant and individualistic plays, The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Faithful Shepherdess,
had notoriously failed. Next, they were losing their institutional outlets. Paul’s
Boys, which had produced The Woman Hater, had closed in 1606; the variously titled Blackfriars’ Boys, who had produced The Knight of the Burning
Pestle, Cupid’s Revenge, and The Faithful Shepherdess, by March 1608 had
finally overreached themselves in performing satire, leading the king to swear
that ‘they should never play more, but should first begg their bred’.3 And, most
immediately, after a brief respite that ran from April through June of 1608, the
1
2
3
Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes
(Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 23.
The Scornful Lady is often dated 1608–10, but the title page says it was acted by the Children of
her Majesties Revels, which went out of business in 1608. The Coxcomb is also dated 1608–10
by Philip Finkelpearl, Court and Country Politics in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher
(Princeton, 1990), pp. 115–27.
Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearian Playing Companies (Oxford, 1996), p. 354.
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Suzanne Gossett
plague had returned in full force, closing all the theatres, a situation that,
although the collaborators could not yet know this, would last until early 1610.
As Philip Finkelpearl has demonstrated, these apparently well-connected
young men had no ‘personal ties of dependency or even of friendship with the
great Jacobean courtiers and patrons’.4 Instead their circle consisted primarily
of intellectuals and writers, largely impecunious like themselves, and their only
prospect of support lay in the plays they could write. Hence, I propose, as they
sat together to construct what would prove their first great success, Philaster,
they set themselves a dual goal: to write for adult actors, modifying those
elements of their style that had been adjusted for the boys, and to write a play
that would please specifically the King’s Men, who had reclaimed the lease to
the Blackfriars in July 1608 when the Queen’s Revels boys went under.
Beaumont and Fletcher were professionals: soon after coming to London
they knew ‘everyone’; they wrote copiously, under whatever circumstances
were possible; as is particularly evident in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, they
were almost tactilely aware of the latest in dramatic fashion. Perhaps in their
early years as authors this sense of the market was especially true of Beaumont.
Fletcher, after all, had initiated his solo career with The Faithful Shepherdess,
and both his preface ‘To the Reader’ and the commendatory poems that
appeared with the play reiterate that the audience had not understood how to
frame the play generically. It was all very well for Fletcher to tell Sir William
Scipwith that his aim had not been to gain ‘greater name’ nor to make the play
‘serve to feed / at my neede’, but the angry pedagogical tone with which he
explains pastoral, shepherds, and tragicomedy probably grew from a recognition that he could no longer afford to share Nathan Field’s reassuring
contempt for ‘Opinion, that great foole’.5 Fletcher’s play had not succeeded, to
use Alastair Fowler’s terms, partly because the audience had failed to grasp its
generic ‘domains of association’. Genres, as Fowler notes, are necessary to
‘adjust a reader’s mental set and help in selecting the optimally relevant associations that amount to a meaning of the literary work’.6 The Faithful Shepherdess had failed to provide sufficient help, and its meaning had escaped its
desired audience.
Fletcher’s early blindness to the range of possible communicative codes in
tragicomedy is the more striking because he was not the first to bring elements
of Guarini’s Il pastor fido to the English stage. Marston’s 1604 Malcontent
borrows from Sir Edward Dymock’s translation, yet nothing could be less like
The Faithful Shepherdess. Completely unpastoral, containing no god, set at
4
5
6
Finkelpearl, p. 47, italics in original.
Fredson Bowers, ed., The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, 10 vols.
(Cambridge, 1966–96), III, pp. 490–5. All quotations from Beaumont and Fletcher plays are
taken from this edition, unless otherwise stated.
Alastair Fowler, ‘The Formation of Genres in the Renaissance and After’, New Literary History
34 (2003), 185–200 (190).
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Taking Pericles Seriously
court rather than among ‘familiar people’, and including four false deaths that
violate Fletcher’s rule that in tragicomedy there be only ‘such kinde of trouble
as no life be questiond’ (III, 497), The Malcontent right up to its final masque
keeps threatening to turn into a Jacobean revenge tragedy. In the Induction
added for the King’s Men, Sly calls it a ‘bitter play’, and Condell elaborates that
‘’tis neither Satyre nor Morall, but the meane passage of a historie’ (A3v). Yet
the play was entered in the Stationer’s Register as a ‘tragiecomedia’7 and, as the
collaborators could see, had so attracted the King’s Men that, after some now
obscure hanky-panky by the boys, the men had violated the ground rules that
usually obtained in the Jacobean theatre and produced Marston’s play despite
‘another company having interest in it’ (A4r). The Malcontent, therefore, had
done just what the collaborators wished for themselves, transferring successfully from the boys’ to the men’s company.
Stimulated, then, by a desire to capitalise on the trajectory initiated by The
Malcontent, and perhaps sustained by professional praise despite Fletcher’s
infuriating failure, the two young authors still hoped to discover the elements
necessary to the ‘coded structure . . . or matrix’ for tragicomedy.8 At this point,
I suggest, they made a list. Their information was almost certainly better and
more complete than ours, because they knew about plays now lost and they
had access to gossip from theatrical circles. But basically, given their hopes,
they would have considered as primary the plays the King’s Men had newly
presented between the arrival of King James and 1608. Revivals did not count;
their object was a sale. As Roslyn Knutson shows, this list of new plays was
heavily weighted toward tragedy.9 Among the fresh tragedies the King’s Men
had acquired from their resident playwright were Othello, King Lear, Macbeth,
Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, and Timon of Athens; from Jonson they had
purchased Sejanus and the only partly comical Volpone; from others they had
bought A Yorkshire Tragedy, The Devil’s Charter, and the lost Gowrie. Two new
plays from the most recent seasons, 1606–07 and 1607–08, stood apart from
the overwhelming prevalence of tragedy: The Miseries of Enforced Marriage
and Pericles. And these, I want to argue, form the immediate backdrop to the
change in the collaborators’ fortunes.
Both Miseries and A Yorkshire Tragedy are based on the unfortunate Walter
Calverley’s attempted murder of his wife and slaying of his two young sons.
7
8
9
G.K. Hunter, in his edition of Marston’s The Malcontent (London, 1975), p. lxii, suggests that
‘Tragiecomedia in the Stationers’ Register refers to Marston’s programmatic attempt to reconstruct this genre in English’; Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, eds, The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After (London and New York, 1992), p. 19, n. 18, point out that the
first instance of ‘tragicomedie’ in the Stationers’ Register comes in 1598 from Samuel
Brandon’s ‘tragicomedie of the Virtuous Octavia’.
Fowler, ‘Formation’, p. 190.
Roslyn Knutson, The Repertory of Shakespeare’s Company (Fayetteville, Arkansas, 1991), pp.
106–7.
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Suzanne Gossett
Although Miseries was printed in 1607 and A Yorkshire Tragedy in 1608, Yorkshire Tragedy, now attributed to Middleton, was apparently the earlier play. It
adheres closely to the June 1605 pamphlet’s recounting of events, and it ends
with the wife on her way to plead for Calverley’s pardon; later it would probably have capitalised on Calverley’s August execution for a scene of gallows
repentance.10 Miseries, on the other hand, was printed in 1607 with the
title-page claim to present the play ‘As it is now playd by his Maiesties
Servuants’. Ernst Honigmann has shown that more than once Wilkins unscrupulously sold his plays simultaneously to the actors and to a publisher; ‘now’
probably accurately represents Miseries’ appearance in both forms in 1607.11
Miseries provides a rationalisation of Calverley’s actions. Rather than
blaming ‘demoniac possession’,12 Wilkins picks up on a hint from the opening
scene of A Yorkshire Tragedy. There the servants allude to a ‘young mistress’
who ‘keeps such a puling for her love’ but does not know that ‘he’s married,
beats his wife, and has two or three children by her’ (1.35–44). None of the
characters in this scene reappears, and no more is heard of the forsaken young
woman. The scene’s connections to the remainder of the play are never articulated. But in Miseries it is explicitly the hero’s horror at being forced to marry
after he has betrothed himself elsewhere that starts him on his prodigal path,
and his despair is confirmed when Clare, his fiancée, kills herself.
A familiar discomfort with tragicomedy is obvious in Glenn Blayney’s
suggestion that, in its present form, Miseries was not ‘consistent with
[Wilkins’s] first and best intentions’ but was revised from a tragedy in which,
rather than the prodigal surviving, sparing his children, and receiving a
generous bequest from the guardian who had enforced his marriage, the
guardian dies early and the children are murdered.13 This, in Blayney’s view,
would ‘have given realism and fine unity of theme, action, and feeling’ (p. 39).
Instead, the play in its current form has a happy ending, largely brought about
by the family butler who finds means of support for the other siblings –
including a highway robbery – and keeps the hero from murder.
Bibliographically Blayney is convincing. That something happened in the
course of the printing is indicated by altered speech prefixes and the removal
10
11
12
13
On authorship see Roger Holdsworth, ‘Middleton’s Authorship of A Yorkshire Tragedy’,
Review of English Studies 45 (1994), 1–25. For a date shortly after the murder see A.C. Cawley
and Barry Gaines, eds, A Yorkshire Tragedy (Manchester, 1986), pp. 1–2. Holdsworth,
however, wants to move the date to ‘late 1605 . . . some five months later than that usually
assumed’ (p. 6), on the basis of borrowings from King Lear.
E.A.J. Honigmann, The Stability of Shakespeare’s Text (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1965), pp. 178–80.
Stanley Wells, ed., A Yorkshire Tragedy, in The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. Gary Taylor
and John Lavagnino (Oxford, forthcoming), p. 2.
Glenn Blayney, ‘Wilkins’s Revisions in The Miseries of Inforst Mariage’, Journal of English and
Germanic Philology 16 (1957), 23–41 (23).
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Taking Pericles Seriously
of a leaf (H4) just after a soliloquy in which the hero, Scarborrow, in despair,
may refer to his guardian’s death:
Nay, euen the greatest arme, whose hand hath graft,
My presence to the eye of Maiesty, shrinkes back,
His fingers cluch, and like to lead,
They are heauy to raise vp my state, being dead.14
But these lines remain ambiguous, and Wilkins’s ‘intention’ – based on
appraisal of the theatrical market rather than a desire for aesthetic perfection –
seems to have been to build a tragicomedy around the complications of private
betrothals and the abuses of wardship.
Like The Winter’s Tale after it, Miseries includes a real death, that of Clare,
and a great deal of dangerous trouble. Blayney contends the play has been
modified from tragedy from the beginning of what seems to be the fifth act
(H3v), but it is precisely here that Wilkins fulfills Fletcher’s injunction to ‘want
deaths yet bring some near it’. For example, the younger brother sets out to
confess to the highway robbery, expecting to be hanged ‘on the tree of shame’
(2618); the wife attempts to calm Scarborrow by presenting their children, but
he is ‘troubled in his mind’ (2604) and threatens to kill them all: ‘These for thy
act should die, she for my Clare, / Whose wounds stare thus vpon me for
reuenge’ (2792–3). Only at the last minute does his entire family arrive, full of
forgiveness and good news about the generosity of the guardian who ‘knew /
Your sinne was his, the punishment his due’ (2840–1).
Watching Miseries at the Globe, audience members who recognised the
notorious Calverley source might well have anticipated a tragic ending. Jean
Howard points out that dramatic genre has to be ‘materialised’ during performance;15 Wilkins works to adjust audience expectations by varying his tone
throughout, so this is not just a tragedy with a happy ending. The early scene in
which Sir John Harcop mourns his daughter’s death is touching. He begs,
Lift vp thine eyes, and looke vpon thy father,
They were not borne to loose their light so soone,
I did beget thee for my comforter,
And not to be the Author of my care. . . .
I prethee speake to me?
Thou art not ripe for death, come backe againe,
Clare, my Clare, If death must needs haue one,
I am the fittest, prethee let me go,
Thou dying whilst I liue, I am dead with woe. (885–98)
But it is hard to find tragic the Butler’s tricks or his Falstaffian commentary as
14
15
Blayney, Glenn, ed., The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (Oxford, 1964), 2244–8; H3v.
Howard, Jean E., ‘Shakespeare and Genre’, in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Kastan
(Oxford, 1999), 297–310, p. 302.
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Suzanne Gossett
he watches the inept younger brothers during the robbery: ‘A man had better
lyne a good handsome payre of gallows before his time, then be born to do
these sucklings good, their mothers milke not wrung out of their nose yet, they
knowe no more how to behaue themselues in this honest and needeful calling
of Purse-taking, then I do to peece stockings’ (1540–44). Ultimately, as
Leanore Lieblein notes, in Miseries, unlike most domestic tragedies, ‘economic
realities have ceased to provide the context for domestic strife and have
become instead the subject’.16 Murder, death on the gallows, marital rejection:
all evaporate with the guardian’s bequest. General reconciliation occurs in
fewer than seventy lines. Yet the play is surprisingly powerful, its popularity
confirmed by reprinting and, probably, revival, in 1611.17 I am not persuaded
that its remaining deficiencies were caused by externally forced revision. It
seems more likely that Wilkins did his best to create a version of the latest
form, and that his efforts were noticed by Shakespeare, who proceeded to take
him on as a collaborator in his own first effort at a new type of tragicomedy.
Together the two produced the wildly popular Pericles.
The popularity of Pericles is worth insisting on. The play was first produced
at the Globe, in all likelihood between April and June of 1608. Audiences
included members of the diplomatic corps and the more ordinary combination
of ‘Gentiles mix’d with Groomes’, in such large numbers as to be recalled by an
anonymous pamphleteer a year later. Once the theatres had closed and the play
became unavailable for viewing, publishers eagerly provided alternate means of
transmission. By late 1608 Wilkins had produced The Painfull Adventures of
Pericles Prince of Tyre, a short novel that proclaims itself – presumably to entice
frustrated theatre buffs – ‘the true History of the Play of Pericles, as it was lately
presented by the worthy and ancient Poet John Gower’, that is, not merely as a
prose version of a familiar tale but as a recounting of the suppressed dramatic
performances. In 1609 a quarto of ‘THE LATE, And much admired Play, Called
Pericles, Prince of Tyre. With the true Relation of the whole Historie,
aduentures, and fortunes of the said Prince: As also, The no lesse strange, and
worthy accidents, in the Birth and Life, of his Daughter MARIANA’ became
available. This is the notoriously deficient first quarto, which nevertheless must
have sold out rapidly and justified the publisher’s investment, because later in
the same year Gosson brought out a second quarto.18
The popularity of Pericles was manifest both in publication – six quartos by
1635 – and performance. In the public theatre and at court, performances
lasted throughout the Jacobean and Caroline period and recommenced when
Pericles was the first Shakespeare play presented in the reopened theatres in
16
17
18
Leanore Lieblein, ‘The Context of Murder in English Domestic Plays, 1590–1610’, Studies in
English Literature 1500–1900 23 (1983), 181–96 (195).
Knutson, pp. 138–9.
If Gosson confused Marina with the Mariana of Measure for Measure, he must have been
remembering a performance, as that play was not published until the First Folio.
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Taking Pericles Seriously
1660. None of this popularity is surprising to the theatre companies that have
produced the play, nor is it unfamiliar to scholars. But in commentary on
Shakespeare’s romances, tragicomedies, or late plays, critics tend to pass over
Pericles as rapidly as possible, if they do not ignore it entirely.
One reason is that the play is anomalous. Whatever pattern the critic identifies in these plays, Pericles tends to stretch beyond recognition, and this has, I
believe, hindered our ability to enter into the mindset of Beaumont and
Fletcher in early 1609. Even in one of the best attempts to think about Shakespeare and Beaumont and Fletcher together, Lee Bliss acknowledges the play
only to exclude it. In a brief paragraph she describes Pericles’ ‘archaic flavor . . .
episodic sweep . . . fabulous events . . . flat characterization . . . [and] Gower’s
. . . old-fashioned language and apparent naiveté’. However, her attention
soon narrows to ‘the structural and thematic features that allow Cymbeline,
Winter’s Tale, and Tempest, on the one hand, and Philaster, Maid’s Tragedy,
and King and No King, on the other, to epitomize the passing of one order and
establishment of the next’.19 Pericles is nowhere in sight.
The critical slighting of Pericles has been assisted by uncertainties about the
dating of the six plays just mentioned. Central to a discussion that presumes
Beaumont and Fletcher were studying the King’s Men’s latest offerings is the
question of the priority of Cymbeline and Philaster. In 1901, when Ashley
Thorndike radically proposed The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on
Shakespeare, and suggested that from Philaster Shakespeare learned how to
write Cymbeline, his argument was disparaged or dismissed in an atmosphere
of bardolatry.20 In his 1969 edition of Philaster Andrew Gurr hedged, claiming
that both plays developed in parallel out of Sidney’s Arcadia.21 But recent
scholarship has rethought the matter. The Oxford Shakespeare editors, for
example, date The Winter’s Tale in 1609, Cymbeline in 1610, and point out that
‘Beaumont and Fletcher could only have been influenced by Shakespeare’s
play through performance, and the London theatres were closed because of
plague . . . perhaps until January or February 1610’. Yet topical allusions date
Philaster to 1609. On the other hand, ‘as sharer and primary dramatist for the
King’s Men Shakespeare would almost certainly have seen the manuscript of
Philaster before it was performed; he would have had the opportunity to read
the entire text, without being dependent on memories of performance.
19
20
21
Lee Bliss, ‘Tragicomic Romance for the King’s Men, 1609–11’, in Comedy from Shakespeare to
Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English Dramatic Tradition, ed. A.R. Braunmuller and
J.C. Bulman (Newark, 1986), 148–64 (149–51).
See A.H. Thorndike, The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakespeare (Worcester,
Mass., 1901; repr. New York, 1966). For a powerful example of the reaction to Thorndike’s
claims, see Harold Wilson, ‘Philaster and Cymbeline’, in English Institute Essays 1951 (New
York, 1952), pp. 146–67.
Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Philaster, or Love Lies-a-bleeding, ed. Andrew Gurr
(London, 1969).
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Suzanne Gossett
Moreover, he might have seen the text months before it was performed’.22 In
his 2005 Cambridge edition of Cymbeline, Martin Butler concurs that Philaster
came first and adds new evidence that Cymbeline was probably being written
in May/June of 1610 or shortly afterward, with its first performances in
December 1610.23
The logical inferences of this sequence are rarely pursued. Obviously, if
Cymbeline is a model for Philaster, then Pericles, especially because of its formal
peculiarities, becomes less significant. But if Cymbeline had not yet appeared
when the two young men were contemplating the King’s Men repertoire,
popular Pericles was a key consideration. And Pericles is a play that seems to
have stayed with Fletcher, in particular, a long time. A clue to the depth of his
lingering reaction is found in brief reminiscences embedded in his later plays.
Two are especially revealing. The first is from The Woman’s Prize, written in
1611, only a couple of years after Pericles. In its last act this comedy,
constructed as a response to The Taming of the Shrew, unexpectedly invokes
Pericles. Two servants are carrying Petruchio’s chests to the sea so that he can
flee his second wife Maria:
Now could I wish her in that Trunk . . .
For in the passage if a Tempest take ye,
As many doe, and you lie beating for it,
Then, if it pleas’d the fates, I would have the Master
Out of a powerfull providence, to cry,
Lighten the ship of all hands, or we perish;
Then this for one, as best spar’d, should by all means
Over-board presently.
22
23
Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion (Oxford, 1987), p.
132.
Martin Butler, ed., Cymbeline (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 3–6. In an unconvincing attempt to date
Cymbeline a year earlier, to Christmas 1609, Ros King denies that the mention in Philaster of
the hero’s visit to the ‘new platform’ is a reference to the ‘great platform’ on which Phineas
Pett constructed a model of Prince Henry’s ship, the Prince Royal, and which King James went
to visit in May 1609. Instead she argues that the reference is to the lower deck or orlop of the
ship, into which a child fell in September of 1610. However, the OED finds no use of the term
‘platform’ for this section of a ship until sixty years later. The ‘platform’ was clearly new in
1609; a year later a topical reference might have taken a different form. It is also unlikely that
Philaster or any prince would make a special visit to the ‘new platform’ if that were merely a
hidden part, a lower deck, of a ship. King assumes her conclusion in stating that if Philaster
were written no later than December 1609, ‘this in turn would mean that Cymbeline could
have been written no later than the summer of 1609’. That is only true if Cymbeline came
before Philaster. In any case, if Cymbeline were produced at court in late 1609 while the theatres were closed, it would have been inaccessible to Beaumont and Fletcher and they would
have continued to think about Pericles as they contemplated their new play. See Ros King,
Cymbeline: Constructions of Britain (Aldershot, 2005), p. 40.
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Taking Pericles Seriously
Jacques replies with language recalling the fisherman scene (Pericles 2.1) and
Pericles’ particular enemy, the ‘masked Neptune’ (3.3.37):24
But believe me Pedro,
She would spoyle the fishing on this coast for ever,
For none would keepe her company, but Dog-fish,
As currish as her selfe; or Porpisces,
Made to all fatall uses: . . .
She would make god Neptune, and his fire-forke,
And all his demi-gods, and goddesses,
As weary of the Flemmish channell Pedro,
As ever boy was of the schoole. (V.ii.11–33)
The combination of Lucina, mentioned earlier, throwing one’s wife overboard
in a chest, and Neptune sounds like unconscious recollection of Pericles. Less
unconscious is Evanthe’s angry reply to the corrupt servant who has betrayed
her to the king in A Wife for a Month from 1624: ‘I had rather thou hadst delivered me to Pirats, / Betraid me to uncurable diseases, / Hung up my Picture in
a Market place, / And sold me to wilde bawds’ (I.ii.116–19), a rapid summary
of Marina’s experience of being carried off by pirates and sold to the brothel,
where one customer ‘brought his disease hither’, ‘the little baggage’ made
another ‘roast meat for worms’, and Bolt reports to the Bawd that he has ‘cried
her through the market . . . drawn her picture with my voice’ (Pericles
4.2.102–3, 20–2, 84–7).
These recollections, spanning Fletcher’s career, suggest that when the
younger dramatists thought about Pericles, they concentrated not on the
archaic flavor, episodic sweep, fabulous events or Gower’s language. Instead
they noticed the unplayful sexuality in the incest and brothel scenes; the social
commentary; and the moments of powerful emotion, all elements suited to
adult actors and also prominent in The Malcontent. Particularly remarkable in
Pericles were the tone and the radical division of attention between two central
figures, father and daughter.
Such a division of attention and a similarly complex tone are notable in
Philaster. The unheroic protagonist recalls – not in specific action but in what
Fowler calls family resemblance – Pericles’ weakness, his early flight from
danger, his almost catatonic withdrawal at Marina’s apparent death. More
critical is the revised treatment of the collaborators’ female figures. Fletcher’s
willingness to focus on women was already apparent in The Faithful Shepherdess, which centres on Clorin and whose major plot – major enough for bits
to be reworked into Philaster – divides its attention equally between Amoret
and Perigot, the unchaste Amaryllis and the Sullen Shepherd. But in The
Faithful Shepherdess and Cupid’s Revenge, women who choose for themselves
24
All citations from Pericles, ed. Suzanne Gossett (London, 2004).
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Suzanne Gossett
and woo are blind or wicked, where the women of Pericles are strong but admirable. Thaisa takes the initiative in wooing Pericles and later sends her father
word of her unalterable choice. In this she prefigures Arethusa choosing,
wooing, and marrying in despite of her father. Similarly, in A King and No
King, Panthea, like Marina, rejects a powerful wooer whom the situation
marks as sexually transgressive. Recollections of Marina’s angry speeches to
Lysimachus and Bolt are transferred to the other heroine, Spaconia, who tells
her straying lover that he is ‘more unconstant / Then all ill women ever were
together’ and then unexpectedly echoes Marina speaking about her birth in
Pericles (4.1.51–63):
The wind is fixt to thee, and sooner shall
The beaten Marriner with his shrill whistle,
Calme the loude murmurs of the troubled maine,
And strike it smooth againe; then thy soule fall
To have peace in love with any. (IV.ii.48–57)
Echoes of Pericles continue as Spaconia’s father finds her imprisoned with
Tigranes. Treating her as a prostitute, he sounds like Lysimachus questioning
Marina: ‘Are you in private still, or how? . . . Doe you take money? are you
come to sell sinne yet? . . . O thou vild creature, whose best commendation is,
that thou art a young Whore’ (V.ii.31–5). Compare, ‘Now, pretty one, how
long have you been at this trade?’ and, when Marina replies, ‘E’er since I can
remember’, ‘Did you go to’t so young? Were you a gamester at five, or at
seven?’ (Pericles 4.5.70–80).
Another link between Pericles and Beaumont and Fletcher’s early tragicomedies is the complex and multiple vision of family. Bliss exaggerates, I believe,
in claiming that for Beaumont and Fletcher, ‘the interaction between generations holds no interest. Philaster’s King exists only as political tyrant and
blocking father figure for Arethusa’s intended romantic comedy’.25 But even
in Cupid’s Revenge both plots had been based in just that familial interaction.
In Philaster the moment when the king demands that the courtiers produce the
lost or strayed Arethusa – ‘I doe command you all, as you are subiects, / To
shew her me’ – is so often analysed in terms of the political debate over
whether subjects’ obedience can be limited to ‘things possible, and honest’ that
critics tend to forget the king is frantic because ‘y’haue let me loose / The Iewell
of my life’, that is, his daughter (H1v).26 The loss and finding of a daughter is
reiterated in the second plot, where Euphrasia’s father Dion’s recognition of
her in the 1622 good quarto is a clear echo of Pericles identifying Marina
(5.1.75–170):
25
26
Bliss, 152–53.
All citations from Philaster are from the 1622 quarto.
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Taking Pericles Seriously
Di.
Bel.
Di.
Bel.
But thou speak’st
As like Euphrasia as thou dost looke, . . .
draw neere
That I may gaze vpon thee, art thou she,
Or else her murderer? where wert thou borne?
In Siracusa.
What’s thy name?
Euphrasia. (L2r)
Generational conflict develops further in A King and No King, where a
continuing plot line is the unexplained hostility of Arbaces’ mother, Arane,
who since his father’s death has repeatedly tried ‘To take by treason’ his
‘loathed life’ (1.1.469). Eventually it emerges that Arbaces is not Arane’s real
child and hence is blocking her natural child’s right to the throne – another
echo of Pericles, where Dionyza’s murderous hostility to her foster daughter,
Marina, arose because ‘She did distain my child, and stood between / Her
and her fortunes’ (4.3.31–2). In both cases the child is innocent but the
mother a serious threat.
It is the difficult-to-describe tone, more than anything else, that the young
collaborators could study in Pericles. Tone, I think, had been the critical
problem in their earlier plays. For example, Cupid’s Revenge is ostensibly
tragedy, although many of its plot elements reappear in Philaster. The
emphasis on a form of cross-generational incest – the prince’s mistress
becomes his father’s wife and hence, as he repeatedly says, his ‘mother’, but she
keeps begging him to lie with her – is even stronger than in Pericles. But,
despite the eventual deaths of all the major characters, it is hard to be moved.
The princess’s love for a hideous dwarf, the king’s absurd attempts to make
himself seem younger, Urania’s countrified simplicity, are close to grotesque,
while Urania’s self-sought death is pathetic rather than tragic. In the final
scene, when it seems that the prince’s virtue will finally be rewarded, he is
suddenly stabbed by the lustful queen. Logically this completes the revenge
that Cupid seeks, but dramatically the climax appears coincidental. The play’s
failures of mood and structural coherence show why the collaborators needed
to find a new framework that could integrate their talents for comedy, action,
and dangerous passion.
That the framework could not be Italianate pastoral tragicomedy they had
learned from The Faithful Shepherdess. The problem there, as Finkelpearl
argues, is that the play is ‘excruciatingly boring’, its poetic strength vitiated by
‘static pace’ and ‘overwrought rhetoric’.27 This is true even when the action is
closest to Pericles, as for example when Amoret is flung into the well to her
death but unexpectedly rises in the arms of the river god who, like Cerimon
reviving Thaisa, discovers ‘shee’s warme . . . shee pants’ (3.1.379, 387).
27
Finkelpearl, p. 111.
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Suzanne Gossett
Unfortunately we are without feeling for Amoret, or, in fact, for any of the
characters in The Faithful Shepherdess. In contrast, the emotional effect of Pericles is not only well attested in modern performance history but revealed anew
in a contemporary comment recently discovered by Tiffany Stern. A 1636 jest
book recounts that ‘Two Gentlemen went to see Pericles acted, and one of
them was moved with the calamities of that Prince that he wept, whereat the
other laughed extreamely. Not long after the same couple went to see the
Major of Quinborough, when he who jeered the other at Pericles now wept
himselfe, to whom the other laughing, sayd, what the Divell should there bee
in this meery play to make a man weep. O, replied the other, who can hold
from weeping to see a Magistrate so abused? The Jest will take those who have
seene these two plaies.’28 Despite varying responses, then, clearly the ‘calamities’ of Pericles could arouse a strong emotional reaction. Notice, by the way,
that it is not at Pericles that the second man laughs, but at his companion, and
that it is the man who jeers at becoming emotionally moved by Pericles but
then misses the satire in Middleton’s The Mayor of Queenborough who is the
eventual butt of the joke. Weeping at Pericles – not a ‘merry play’ – is fitting.
The influence of Pericles has been slighted partly from scepticism about
collaborative composition but more specifically from disdain for the work of
George Wilkins. Yet, as Miseries shows, Wilkins was engaged in the shared
effort to create the new tragicomic form. Perhaps inspired by working with
Shakespeare, in the first acts of Pericles he came closer, tonally, than he had
previously managed alone. The opening scenes of incest threaten death, but
Pericles escapes with danger; the deaths of Antiochus and his daughter will
only be reported. The scene of the fishermen is comic in diction, but Pericles’
address to the elements that shipwreck him, while it does not achieve the full
Shakespearean range heard in the next storm, approaches it:
Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven!
Wind, rain and thunder, remember earthly man
Is but a substance that must yield to you,
And I, as fits my nature, do obey you.
Alas, the seas hath cast me on the rocks,
Washed me from shore to shore, and left me breath
Nothing to think on but ensuing death. (2.1.1–7)
Wilkins even rewrites bits of his earlier play for Pericles. For example, before
Scarborrow goes wooing Clare, his friends parody an eager father who leaves a
courting couple alone long enough for the young woman ‘to aske, but Sir, will
you marry me, and thou in thy Cox-sparrow humor replyest, I (before God) as
I am a Gentleman wil I, which the Father ouer-hearing, leaps in, takes you at
28
Tiffany Stern, ‘Re-patching the Play’, in From Script to Stage in Early Modern England, ed. Peter
Holland and Stephen Orgel (Basingstoke, 2004), 151–77 (151–2).
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Taking Pericles Seriously
your word, sweare hee is glad to see this; nay he will haue you contracted
straight, and for a need makes the priest of himselfe’ (108–12; A3v). In Miseries
these jokes about paternal manipulation are inappropriate; they clash with
Scarborrow’s affection for Clare and his eventual grief. But in Pericles,
Simonides’ jocular trickery to bring Thaisa and Pericles together (2.5) reflects
their own attraction to each other and strengthens the structural contrast
between the dangerous paternity of Antiochus and the warmth of the
Pentapolian monarch. Even in the heartbreaking moment when Pericles
carries off Thaisa’s body, both collaborators may have remembered not only
Lear but Scarborrow carrying Clare to her grave:
This to my armes, my sorrow shall bequeath,
Tho I haue lost her, to thy graue Ile bring,
Thou wert my wife, and Ile thy Requiem sing: (995–7; D3r)
Thomas Pavel usefully distinguishes two kinds of generic definition:
formal, as for the sonnet, and ‘Terms like “tragedy” and “comedy” [that] have
a moral and existential meaning’.29 We find such meaning in the four conventionally grouped tragicomedies of Shakespeare. Beginning with Pericles, all are
based on a fantasy of recovery from loss: morally and existentially, tragic
suffering gives way to comic renewal when a child assumed dead, and sometimes a wife as well, is miraculously recovered. The children in The Miseries of
Enforced Marriage are similarly recovered from the tragic fate that impends
and that the audience knew awaited their real models. Beaumont and
Fletcher’s first successful tragicomedy, Philaster, approximates this pattern. All
three of the main characters are imprisoned and condemned, but Philaster
warns the king, who has rejected paternal care and threatened to kill his
daughter, ‘If you haue a soule, / Thinke, saue her, and be saued’ (K1r). The
restoration of child to father is reiterated in the discovery of Euphrasia, not
dead but lost. The Q2 conclusion, in which Euphrasia rejects marriage and will
‘be laide in earth / Without an Heyre’ (L3v), again recalls the tragicomic
complexity of the end of Pericles. There, just at the moment when Thaisa
recovers her husband, child, and the future son-in-law who will guarantee
posterity and social recovery, she informs Pericles, ‘Lord Cerimon hath letters
of good credit, sir, / My father’s dead’ (5.3.78–9). In Philaster, in Shakespeare’s
tragicomedies, in Wilkins’s Miseries, death is admitted and families are permanently fractured even when there is restoration – for Prospero, ‘every third
thought shall be my grave’.
Our young authors needed to begin where Shakespeare began, with Pericles.
But the tragicomic tone was hard to establish and maintain. The 1620 first
29
Thomas Pavel, ‘Literary Genres as Norms and Good Habits’, New Literary History 34 (2003),
201–20 (203–4).
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Suzanne Gossett
printed version of Philaster, reflecting, I believe, a censored performance text,
had ‘dangerous and gaping wounds’, as Thomas Walkley, publisher of both
quartos, informs the reader of Q2. One was the greatly reduced recognition
between Euphrasia and her father (‘I should know this face; my daughter.’
‘The same sir.’ [Q1 I4v]); another was the marriage rapidly arranged for her; a
third eliminated the threats of torture.30 All move the play away from tragicomedy and away from Pericles. Soon Beaumont and Fletcher would be setting
the example, themselves moving away from existential meaning. The end of A
King and No King includes a weak recollection of the fantasy of recovery as
Arbaces finds his true father. But it is more important that the king loses his
title. What the young collaborators modelled from Pericles as they moved to
the King’s Men was the power of sexuality to disturb the state, the mixture of
social classes, the strong, virtuous heroine, and most of all the ability to move
audiences. These would recur throughout their plays.
30
For full discussion of the texts of Philaster see my forthcoming edition.
114
8
‘The Neutral Term’?:
Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the
Idea of the ‘Late Play’
GORDON MCMULLAN
I
C
RITICS SEEM largely to agree that the problems involved in calling the
rgroup of plays in the Shakespeare canon from Pericles to The Two Noble
Kinsmen ‘tragicomedies’ or ‘romances’ are sufficiently substantial that it is best
to avoid doing so altogether. Both terms are seen as too limiting and exclusive
adequately to embrace the plays’ extraordinary generic dependencies and
possibilities. There are exceptions, though. Alison Thorne’s recent ‘New Casebook’, for instance, in calling the plays ‘Shakespeare’s Romances’, sustains the
legacy of E.C. Pettet, Northrop Frye, Stanley Wells, Howard Felperin, Robert
Uphaus and others who have championed ‘romance’, though she is careful to
qualify the term and acknowledge the issues in her helpful introduction. There
is also Barbara Mowat who, despite having spent the first section of her essay
on the last plays in Richard Dutton and Jean Howard’s Companion to Shakespeare’s Works explaining why neither of the terms ‘romance’ or ‘tragicomedy’
is adequate, in fact goes on to provide the most convincing recent analysis of
the plays as romances by offering a detailed demonstration of their roots in the
kind of sixteenth-century dramatic romance that had notoriously frustrated
Philip Sidney yet was visibly still alive and well on the Jacobean stage in the
shape of Mucedorus, an old play which was revived in 1606 and again in 1610
in time to provide an impetus for late Shakespeare.1
1
Shakespeare’s Romances, ed. Alison Thorne, New Casebooks (Basingstoke, 2003); E.C. Pettet,
Shakespeare and the Romance Tradition, with an introduction by H.S. Bennet (London, 1949);
Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and
Romance (New York, 1965); Stanley Wells, ‘Shakespeare and Romance’, in Later Shakespeare,
ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 8 (London, 1966),
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Gordon McMullan
But Diana Childress’s 1974 essay ‘Are Shakespeare’s Last Plays Really
Romances?’ marks the moment after which such arguments must necessarily
seem, to some extent at least, defensive. ‘Romance’, after all, is not technically a
term for a dramatic genre and is arguably better viewed as modal rather than
generic, signifying tone, style and narrative rather than dramatic form per se,
its very malleability undermining its usefulness. To call the last plays
‘romances’ is to beg the question of the nature of their engagement with earlier
textual forms, to leave the extent of their generic self-irony unaccounted for,
and to assume that the plays as a group are characterised by the kind of benign
clarity once thought to be their hallmark but which readings over the last few
decades – postcolonial readings of The Tempest being the most obvious
instance – have suggested is simply not an adequate way to understand the
impact of these plays in their first contexts. Once the ironic and alienated
nature of the deployment of the romance materials apparent in these plays
comes under close scrutiny, it becomes harder and harder to think of the plays
themselves simply as ‘romances’.
Childress provides a helpful summary of the issues. ‘[I]t is the later meanings added to “romance” ’, she argues,
that have made the term so plastic. Any poet who draws his inspiration from
medieval romance is assumed to be writing romances, even though he may be
using romance materials to quite different ends – for an allegory, an epic, or a
play.2
And she lists a series of features that keep the plays distinct from romance:
irony, estranging humour, grotesqueness. These are elements that could, she
acknowledges, be derived from or absorbed into romance, but for her it is their
conscious deployment by Shakespeare for distancing purposes that resists his
last plays becoming romances in any adequate sense. Though clearly a highly
significant influence on all the plays of the final period, then, ‘romance’ is
perhaps more useful in thinking about the episodic, itinerant Pericles, as
Suzanne Gossett implies in the introduction to her excellent recent Arden
2
pp. 49–79; Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, 1972); Robert Uphaus,
Beyond Tragedy: Structure and Experience in Shakespeare’s Romances (Lexington, 1981);
Barbara A. Mowat, ‘ “What’s in a Name?” Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy’, in A
Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 4 vols, vol. IV:
‘The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays’ (Oxford, 2003), pp. 129–49. See also Marco
Mincoff, Things Supernatural and Causeless: Shakespearean Romance (Newark, 1992; first
published Sofia, 1987); Robert M. Adams, Shakespeare: The Four Romances (New York, 1989);
Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word (Lewisburg, PA, 1990); and, most recently,
Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth
to the death of Shakespeare (Oxford, 2004), who offers a series of valuable caveats.
Diana T. Childress, ‘Are Shakespeare’s Late Plays Really Romances?’, in Shakespeare’s Late
Plays: Essays in Honor of Charles Crow, ed. Richard C. Tobias and Paul G. Zolbrod (Athens,
OH, 1974), pp. 44–55 (45–6).
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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
edition, than it is for some of the others – The Tempest, for one, unromantically obedient to the unities as it is, and certainly Henry VIII and The Two
Noble Kinsmen, which may engage in several ways, not all of them ironic, with
romance but which are certainly not themselves adequately represented by the
term. ‘Romance’ certainly tells us a good deal about the last plays but, in
Robert Henke’s words, it ‘hardly exhausts the plays’ dramaturgy’.3
Henke is himself a proponent of ‘tragicomedy’ as the key generic label for
the late plays, building on work by Ashley Thorndike, Frank Ristine, Marvin
Herrick, Joan Hartwig and others in reading the plays through the lens of the
writings of the highly influential Italian theorist Giambattista Guarini, who
defended the genre against charges that, in its hybridity, it constituted a travesty of decorum.4 Guarini argued for a generic flexibility rejected on humanist
grounds by his peers, reading tragicomedy as the legitimate offspring of the
classical genres, tragedy and comedy, offering historically appropriate new
possibilities for theatre, and insisting that genre is not fixed but responsive to
changing contexts. The critical motivation for considering ‘tragicomedy’
rather than ‘romance’ as a cohering generic label for Shakespeare’s last plays is
thus obvious enough. As Hartwig observes,
[a] certain uneasiness arises from viewing the plays in terms of the romance
tradition alone because the strictures of classification occasionally impose limits
on what Shakespeare was free to do with the romance conventions.5
Tragicomedy appears enough of a broad church to encompass the various
traits critics have noted in the late plays which do not themselves constitute an
adequate generic ascription yet which require acknowledgement and incorporation into whichever overarching title is chosen. These include not only the
presence of pastoral but also the influence of the masque. Moreover, by necessarily post-dating its constituent originary genres, tragicomedy assumes a
sense on the part of its target audience of theatrical history, an ability to
recognise and appreciate the conscious redeployment of earlier modes.
Without this recognition and appreciation, the irony of the redeployment is
3
4
5
Robert Henke, Pastoral Transformations: Italian Tragicomedy and Shakespeare’s Late Plays
(Newark, 1997), p. 40.
Ashley Thorndike, The Influence of Beaumont and Fletcher on Shakspere (Worcester, MA,
1901); Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origins and Development in Italy, France, and
England (Urbana, 1955); Frank H. Ristine, English Tragicomedy: Its Origin and History (New
York, 1963); Joan Hartwig, Shakespeare’s Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge, 1972). Guarini’s
theories are expounded in his Compendio della poesia tragicomica, tratto dai duo Verati, per
opera dell’autore del Pastor Fido, colla giunta di molte cose spettanti all’arte (Venice, 1601), but
the first attack on Guarini appeared, long before he had published either his pastoral tragicomedy Il pastor fido or the Compendio, in Jason Denores’s Discorsi di Iason DeNores intorno à
que’ principii, cause, et accrescimenti, che la comedia, la tragedia, et il poema eroico ricevono dalla
philosophia morale, e civile, e da’ governatori delle repubbliche (Padua, 1586). For more on
Guarini and Denores, see Matthew Treherne’s chapter in this volume.
Hartwig, p. 11.
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Gordon McMullan
lost. Tragicomedy, for Henke, requires ‘an audience sophisticated and experienced enough to recognize the codes of the historically prior dramatic genres’
and is thus a term which, in its belatedness, has a certain appropriateness for
the works of a playwright not only writing for an audience of knowledgeable
theatregoers but also, arguably, negotiating the end of his own career.6
Yet from Ristine onwards these critics, even as they argue for ‘tragicomedy’
as the term best suited to the task of encompassing the complex intersection of
generic, ideological, cultural and historical forces that combine to produce the
last plays, are forced to acknowledge that Shakespeare’s practice in those plays
meshes at best uncomfortably both with Guarinian theory and with the developing English practice of, on the one hand, John Marston and, on the other,
John Fletcher in tragicomic form. Shakespeare did of course write tragicomedies, plays that mix tragic and comic elements and that offer a range of political
and aesthetic possibilities quite other than the conservatism traditionally
assigned to them. But his experiments include material a long way beyond the
range of Guarini’s ideas (Measure for Measure, for instance, which, while
providing a fascinating precursor for Prospero, is a very different kind of tragicomic drama from that described in the Compendio) and it was the tragicomedies of his late coadjutor Fletcher, at least as much as Shakespeare’s own, that
set the agenda for the theatrical future both before and after the Civil War.
This eventuality does not provide, for certain Shakespeareans, the right comic
outcome to the tragedy of the closing of the theatres and has, for the most part,
been elided. Yet to point out that Marston, Daniel, (Beaumont and) Fletcher
and others were, in the second decade-and-a-half of the seventeenth century,
in various ways experimenting with and creating a genre that reaches far
beyond, and is ultimately shaped rather differently from, the Shakespearean
late plays – which are, after all, only one manifestation of a genre in, to use
Ristine’s term, ‘transition’ – is not to deny either Shakespeare’s own experiments or their subsequent impact, but rather to place them in an appropriately
broader context.
Moreover, both generic ascriptions for the last plays, ‘romance’ and ‘tragicomedy’ – and I use ‘ascription’ deliberately for its echoes of authorship attribution, since it seems to me that at times the desire to establish a single clear
generic label for these plays is akin to the determination to prove that a given
play was written by a clear, unequivocal individual, a desire rooted in contextually inappropriate assumptions about the respective merits of hybridity and
unity – have come to evoke a conservatism that many current critics would
choose to reject, seeing no need to create readings which are, in David
Norbrook’s phrase, ‘more royalist than the King’s Men’. 7 ‘Romance’ in
6
7
Henke, p. 17.
David Norbrook, ‘ “What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?”: Language and Utopia
in The Tempest’, in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullan
and Jonathan Hope (London, 1992), pp. 7–24.
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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
particular is lined up alongside the influence of the masque to ascribe a reactionary politics to the plays, a trend still apparent, for instance, in David
Bergeron’s essay in the Dutton and Howard Companion: ‘As spectacle complements state and majesty in masques,’ he tells us, ‘so it completes romance in
Shakespeare’s last plays.’8 Particularly by way of colonial accounts of The
Tempest, but also through, for instance, readings of Cymbeline in the context
of archipelagic history, critics have chosen to resist this equation of masque
and romance as intrinsically conservative forms and to emphasise instead the
complexity and multiplicity of political viewpoint in the last plays.9 Equally, it
is clear that, as Henke notes, ‘Italian tragicomedy was mainly a courtly
phenomenon, and the powerful, mysterious, and providential harmonies
wrought in the final act of tragicomedies like Il pastor fido surely reflected the
power of ducal courts like that of Ferrara.’10 Though Guarini’s play directly
inspired the first overt Jacobean foray into Italianate pastoral tragicomedy,
Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess, critics are understandably chary of imposing
without qualification a political model of this kind onto the emergent English
form.11
For a range of reasons, then, critics who happily refer to Hamlet as a tragedy
or Twelfth Night as a comedy have in recent years avoided the generic terms
‘romance’ and ‘tragicomedy’ (or the hybrid ‘romantic tragicomedy’) as an
overarching way of gathering into a single group the plays Pericles, Cymbeline,
The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, along, increasingly often, with Henry VIII
and The Two Noble Kinsmen. This is not always simply a ducking of the issue.
For Ruth Nevo, the plays, in their numinous lateness, have a post-generic
quality. ‘In his later plays’, she argues,
Shakespeare, like late Yeats, like late Picasso, yields to his themes, loosens or even
8
9
10
11
Dutton and Howard, eds, p. 213.
The obvious essays on The Tempest are Paul Brown, ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge
mine: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’, in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in
Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985), pp.
48–71, and Francis Barker and Peter Hulme, ‘ “Nymphs and reapers heavily vanish”: the
discursive con-texts of The Tempest’, in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London,
1985), pp. 191–205. More recently, Cymbeline criticism has profitably switched the focus,
reading the play as a representation of reverse colonialism, that is, of the colonisation of
Britain by the Romans, thereby problematising Jacobean ‘Golden Age’ ideology: see, for
instance, Jodi Mikalachki, ‘The Masculine Romance of Roman Britain: Cymbeline and Early
Modern English Nationalism’, Shakespeare Quarterly 46 (1995), 301–22, and Valerie Wayne’s
forthcoming Arden Shakespeare edition of the play.
Henke, p. 24.
In any case, as Jonathan Hope and I argued in our introduction to The Politics of Tragicomedy,
pp. 1–7, Fletcher’s prefatory note, ‘To the Reader’, in the quarto of The Faithful Shepherdess
does not represent the form of tragicomedy as it subsequently developed in his work with
Beaumont and, later, Massinger and/or others, which is at best obliquely related to pastoral
and frequently not at all.
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Gordon McMullan
abandons the constraints of classical category and moves beyond genre towards
an indeterminate mode akin to reverie.12
For Nevo, chronology outweighs – supersedes, even – generic ascription: late
style, is, for her, simply ‘beyond genre’. Yet even as she turns for a parallel to
her principal critical influence, Freud – suggesting, in a broadening of the
applicability of ‘late work’, that ‘[t]here is a strange affinity between these
strangely anguished “comedies” and Freud’s late review of his own theories’ in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle – she contradicts herself, offering a clear demonstration of the difficulty of negotiating between the temporal manifestations of
the allegedly transtemporal mode that is late style and the historically bound
concept of genre. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, she argues, is ‘a melancholy
disquisition, Freud’s displaced mourning for his daughter, an oceanic deathwish fantasy’ – that is, for her, ‘a tragicomedy’ – and she adds that ‘Shakespeare’s tragicomedies are also essays beyond the pleasure principle and
toward mourning’.13 The urge to substitute for genre a discourse of lateness
that transcends form thus appears to fall in on itself: as chronology reappears,
it is almost immediately elided with tragicomedy, even in the midst of an
attempt to move beyond generic terminology.
That said, Nevo is not alone in her desire to move beyond genre. A.D.
Nuttall argued in 1966, in response to the debate over generic nomenclature,
for the unique status of the last plays. ‘There is’, he claimed, ‘a sense in which
the last plays of Shakespeare are sui generis, so that any word would do (the
blanker the better).’14 This sentiment is echoed by Henke, who – despite
arguing vigorously for the relationship of the late plays to tragicomedy in the
pastoral tradition – concludes that, in the end, ‘[a]s a label, the neutral term
“late plays” is probably best, for there is always danger in announcing that one
has finally discovered the true generic identity of these odd creations’.15 Partisans for ‘romance’ seem equally inclined to adopt this ‘neutral term’. Barbara
Mowat, for instance, appears to treat ‘late play’ as a kind of inflectionless
default label for plays whose complex generic affiliations she wishes to address.
For Mowat, despite her focus on dramatic romance, the various generic terms
need to be treated with kid gloves and given very careful, historically aware
definition. ‘Late’, on the other hand, as a description of the plays, has no more
or less significance than it does in a phrase such as ‘the late 1600s’. Yet ‘late’ is,
as critics tend to forget, a word loaded with a specific critical history which is
both subjectivist – which, that is, treats texts as manifestations of authorial
state of mind at the time of composition – and anti-theatrical – designed to
12
13
14
15
Nevo, p. 6.
Nevo, p. 6.
A.D. Nuttall, ‘William Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale’, Studies in English Literature 26
(London, 1966), 10.
Henke, p. 31.
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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
resist the material conditions of theatrical production – and which brings with
it a series of presumptions and elisions that arguably do far more than either
‘romance’ or ‘tragicomedy’ to limit our understanding of the last plays in the
Shakespeare canon. ‘Late play’, I want to claim, is no ‘neutral term’, and it is
useful to remind ourselves why.
II
The lives of artists, writers and composers are, like their works, typically
thought of episodically and progressively, as having beginnings, middles and
endings, and for a range of reasons the latter in particular have taken on particular significance as validation of the entire career. This has, in a sense, been
true from classical times: the idea of the cursus, the rota Virgilii, the poetic
career running from pastoral via eclogues to epic, is an obvious instance of an
artistic teleology, a way of mapping the creative life as a development towards a
generic consummation, with a powerful and sustained impact – creating
lasting problems, for instance, for Milton scholarship in negotiating the work
subsequent to Paradise Lost and leaving Pope, centuries later, with lifelong
anxiety because, despite all his achievements, he had never completed his
projected epic. This is a teleology which is willed, doubly willed, in a way, since
an early modern writer following the Virgilian path is deliberately and
self-consciously reworking an already deliberate and self-conscious career
structure: the imitator, like Virgil himself, produces something knowing,
something that makes a clear statement to the contemporary reader of the
reach of his ambition.
The last years of certain major artists, however, from Titian to Picasso, from
Sophocles to Shakespeare, from Beethoven to Shostakovich, have been taken
by critics in the course of the last two centuries as instances of something quite
different from the genre-based poetic progress for which Virgil’s career is the
guiding example. They are read as exemplars of a phenomenon both personal
and impersonal, a shared, transhistorical phenomenon, that of ‘late writing’ or
‘late style’: terms which signify the qualities associated with a last brief period
of renewed energy that comes after the major achievements of the life of a
creative artist in any discipline, extending, completing and validating that life.
This is, of course, a characterisation of the artistic life that depends upon a
biographical imperative in the ordering of the creating subject, a linear narrative and a clear sense that the works of the last years of certain artists are qualitatively and stylistically distinct from those artists’ earlier work (though often
reminiscent of the very earliest work) and are marked by a manner – an
accomplished, sometimes serene, sometimes irascible, manner – felt in some
way to reach ‘beyond the subjective’. Late-period work is typically depicted
not, as in the Virgilian model, as a steady development towards an epic climax,
but as a kind of coda, a supplementary phase of the creative life which
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manifests itself at the same time as a renewal, a rediscovery, a renaissance,
characterised in particular ways: by looseness of facture, a tendency towards
intense colour or expression, perhaps a certain difficulty and abstraction of
manner, and by a distinct style which is in a way childlike and yet at the same
time – and this is frequently the key authenticator of true lateness – predictive
of styles yet to be established by the artist’s successors, of future developments
in the particular art form in question, as work, in other words, that is outside
its own time. Late work is not generically bound; it is personal, essential, autobiographical; it is a supplement to the main body of the artist’s work which is
also a fulfilment of that work; at the same time, it has ramifications beyond the
personal, expressing a sense of epochal lateness or of a going beyond the possibilities of the current moment or, combining the two, of a certain paradoxical
prolepsis in its finality. For the most sophisticated theorist of lateness,
Theodor Adorno, for instance, late Beethoven, in its fragmented redeployment of, and resistance to, convention, predicts the as yet unthinkable musical
revolution of Schoenberg and Webern.16
The attribution of a late phase has thus come to serve as a signal of the elect
status of the poet or painter or composer in question – incontrovertible
evidence of his (and it is, conspicuously, almost always his, not her, a lacuna
which itself suggests the time- and culture-bound origins of the idea) status as
an individual of genius. The irony of this, of course, is that the late phase as
described is effectively identical from artist to artist, from period to period,
from country to country – a transhistorical, transcultural phenomenon – thus
seeming to undermine the very claim to individuality that is its apparent
purpose. But go to any monographic art show, walk through to the last room,
and read the wall text: what you will see, almost certainly, is a version of the
standard description of a late phase, a period typically seven or eight years
before the artist’s death (less than a decade, but long enough to be significant)
in which there is a profound shift of style, a turn back to the early which is also
a looking forward to future forms of art (so, for instance, late Turner is celebrated as proleptic Impressionism), a looseness of facture which seems simultaneously to echo an essential serenity or perhaps resignation on the part of the
artist and at the same time to offer certain difficulties of categorisation (this is
the earliest feature of late style ever delineated, by Vasari in his account of late
Titian). There may be a certain primitivism, an engagement with the things of
childhood reshaped from the perspective of maturity; there will often be a
residual sense of darkness left over from the tragic phase that typically precedes
the late period. But in one or other version the basic map remains constant.
Art history and musicology formulated their versions of late style a little
later than literary criticism (though the first late phases, not called such but
16
See Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Fragments and Texts, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, 1998; first published in German, 1993).
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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
clearly doing the same work, were constructed for Mozart and Beethoven at
the beginning of the nineteenth century).17 It was in the 1900s that German art
historians began to theorise what they called Altersstil or Spätstil, ‘old-age style’
and ‘late style’, treating lateness and old age as synonymous and delineating
many of the features I have described, particularly in relation to a certain
abstraction, a late loosening of brushwork. As Michael Millgate’s excellent
book Testamentary Acts demonstrates, literary lateness pre-dated this by a
couple of decades. Certainly, a sense of late style as the hallmark of genius was
already fully established by the time Henry James – in a classic deliberate late
gesture – began work on the New York Edition, in which he carefully reshaped
his early work to establish a clear dynamic for his life as an author culminating
in a neatly delineated late style best known to us from The Golden Bowl (and
not too difficult to parody). The agonising self-consciousness of Jamesian lateness is at its clearest in a lateish short story called ‘The Middle Years’, in which
the dying writer, Dencombe,
soaring again a little on the weak wings of convalescence [. . .] found another
strain of eloquence to plead the cause of a certain splendid ‘last manner’, the very
citadel, as it would prove, of his reputation, the stronghold into which his real
treasure would be gathered.18
The acquisition of a ‘last manner’, then, by 1893 when this story was written,
had become established as a marker of literary genius. James himself was painfully aware of the centrality of Shakespearean lateness to any subsequent
ascription of late style, significantly choosing to break off from his work on the
New York Edition just once, in order to write an introductory essay to The
Tempest for Sidney Lee’s Complete Works in which he expresses his profound
and deeply anxious inability to understand Shakespeare’s decision, in middle
age, to draw his career to a close, and he reads the play, in Millgate’s words, as
a flattering analogue for what he confidently expected to be his own culminating
achievement. James celebrates the play as constituting the occasion when, after
‘too much compromise and too much sacrifice,’ Shakespeare at last ‘sinks’
profoundly, as an artist, into ‘the lucid stillness of his style’ –
an attitude to Shakespeare’s last writing which is intrinsically anti-theatrical,
reading professional work for the theatre – no doubt in response to his own
17
18
See Alexander Dmitryevich Ulïbïshev, Nouvelle Biographie de Mozart (Moscow, 1843);
Wilhelm Von Lenz, Beethoven et ses Trois Styles, new edn, ed. M.D. Calvocoressi (Paris, 1909;
reprinted New York, 1980). For an immensely helpful account of the relationship between
style and period-of-life in early nineteenth-century musicology, see Music Analysis in the
Nineteenth Century, ed. Ian Bent, vol. I: Fugue, Form and Style (Cambridge, 1994), esp. pp.
255–329.
Henry James, ‘The Middle Years’ (1893), in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, ed.
Frank Kermode (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 239–54 (252).
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less-than-triumphant experience as a dramatist – as ‘compromise’ and ‘sacrifice’.19
James treats such lateness as a given, but Shakespeare studies had taken its
time in achieving a large enough view of the career to coalesce a distinct notion
of lateness. There could, for one thing, be no late period before there was a
chronology and, since Malone, at the end of the eighteenth century, was the
first to attempt to fix an order of composition for the plays, it is with him that
the history of Shakespearean lateness begins.20 That said, there is no evidence
that Malone had any sense whatsoever of a Shakespearean ‘late style’: he uses
‘late’ very loosely to signify roughly the second half of the career and for a very
long time he insisted that Twelfth Night was in fact the last play – a dating
which demonstrates that Malone pre-dates the equation of Shakespeare with
Prospero and thus the general belief in the quintessential lateness of The
Tempest. His choice of Twelfth Night as the last play is doubly instructive
because it underlines his basic anti-theatricalism: he was convinced that its
‘completeness’ as a comedy means that it must have been written on the
peaceful riverbanks of Stratford-upon-Avon, not in the grubby professional
atmosphere of London’s Bankside. ‘When Shakespeare quitted London and
his profession, for the tranquillity of a rural retirement’, wrote Malone,
it is improbable that such an excursive genius should have been immediately
reconciled to a state of mental inactivity. It is more natural to conceive, that he
should have occasionally bent his thoughts towards the theatre [. . .]. To the
necessity, therefore, of literary amusement to every cultivated mind, or to the
dictates of friendship, or to both these incentives, we are perhaps indebted for
the comedy of Twelfth Night; which bears evident marks of having been
composed at leisure, as most of the characters that it contains, are finished to a
higher degree of dramatick perfection, than is discoverable in some of our
author’s earlier comick performances.21
Even as Malone focuses his attention erroneously on Twelfth Night as the last
play, though, there may, in the image of the poet ‘bending his thoughts’ from a
distant location (though there is no suggestion of a desire to return from exile)
and in the echo of the mage’s reassurance to Alonso at the end of Act 5 that he
will explain all ‘at picked leisure’, be a hint of the identification – later, of
course, to become standard – of Shakespeare with Prospero. This was already,
in any case, beginning to be implied by others. For John Gilbert Cooper, for
instance, writing in 1755, Shakespeare is a magician of obvious power:
19
20
21
Michael Millgate, Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy (Oxford, 1992).
On Malone’s chronology and its impact, see Margreta De Grazia, Shakespeare Verbatim: The
Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford, 1991), pp. 132–76.
Edmond Malone, ‘An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to
Shakspeare were Written’, in The Plays of William Shakspeare, ed. Samuel Johnson and George
Steevens, 10 vols (London, 1778), I, p. 344.
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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
For my Part, I am of opinion, that there is now living a Poet of the most genuine
Genius this Kingdom ever produced, SHAKESPEAR alone excepted. By poetical
Genius, I don’t mean the meer talent of making Verses, but that glorious Enthusiasm of Soul, that fine Frenzy, as SHAKESPEAR calls it, rolling from Heaven to
Earth, from Earth to Heaven, which, like an able Magician, can bring every Object
of the Creation in any Shape whatever before the Reader’s Eyes.22
If it seems a little odd that a direct association of Prospero and Shakespeare was
not in fact made (in print, at least) until as late as 1831 – in Thomas Campbell’s
edition of the plays – then it is clear that critics and poets had already begun to
imply this identification a lot earlier, long before a distinct understanding of
the late plays had been established.
It was in fact Coleridge who first described something along the lines of a
late period for Shakespeare, presenting the playwright’s life in an 1819 lecture
as a five-act drama and describing the last act as a period beyond the height of
creativity he had achieved in the major tragedies, when ‘the energies of intellect’ had become ‘predominant over passion’.23 Coleridge, though, had either
not read or chose to ignore Malone’s chronology, and he includes in his fifth
period several plays – including Measure for Measure, Julius Caesar and Troilus
and Cressida – which we would not now recognise as late Shakespeare. So that
it was not, in the end, until as late as 1875 that a critic fully delineated a Shakespearean late phase. That critic was, as is well known, Edward Dowden,
Professor of English in Dublin, who – drawing on F.J. Furnivall’s vehemently
expressed wish in his prospectus for the New Shakspere Society for a book
which deals in [a] worthy manner with Shakspere as a whole, which tracks the
rise and growth of his genius from the boyish romanticism or the sharp
youngmanishness of his early plays, to the magnificence, the splendour, the
divine intuition, which mark his ablest works –
set out to establish an overview of Shakespeare’s career.24 He divided the life,
drawing again on Furnivall and on the German scholar G.G. Gervinus, friend
and correspondent of Goethe, into four periods – personal phases that correspond to generic categories. The first phase he calls ‘In the workshop’, the
work of an ‘industrious apprentice’ displaying ‘a quick enjoyment of existence’; the second ‘In the world’, featuring work which is ‘strong and robust’
and which begins ‘to deal in an original and powerful way with the matter of
history’; and the third ‘Out of the depths’, marking the grimmest period of the
22
23
24
John Gilbert Cooper, Letters Concerning Taste (London, 1755), p. 101.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 On Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes, 2 vols
(comprising vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen
Coburn, associate ed. Bart Winer) (London and Princeton, 1987), I, pp. 373–5.
F.J. Furnivall, ‘Introduction’ to G.G. Gervinus, Shakespeare Commentaries, trans. F.E. Bunnett
(London, 1875), pp. xix–l.
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playwright’s life, in which the grief caused by the deaths of his father and his
son prompted him ‘to inquire into the darkest and saddest parts of human life;
to study the great mystery of evil’.25 The ‘Fourth Period’, which he sees as
wholly distinct from the preceding phases, he calls ‘On the heights’, reading it
as a time in which the artist emerges with a ‘clear and solemn vision’ to
produce plays in which ‘there is a resolution of the dissonance, a reconciliation’ expressed as a ‘pathetic yet august serenity’.26 ‘The impression left upon
the reader by Shakspere’s last plays’, he claims confidently, ‘is that, whatever
his trials and sorrows and errors may have been, he had come forth from them
wise, large-hearted, calm-souled.’27 As a result, the dramatist created theatre
quite different from anything that had gone before, plays characterised by
a certain abandonment of the common joy of the world, a certain remoteness
from the usual pleasures and sadnesses of life, and at the same time, all the more,
[a] tender bending over those who are like children still absorbed in their individual joys and sorrows.28
The mood of the plays as a group is central to his analysis of each:
The spirit of these last plays is that of serenity which results from fortitude, and
the recognition of human frailty; all of them express a deep sense of the need of
repentance and the duty of forgiveness. And they all show a delight in youth and
the loveliness of youthful joy, such as one feels who looks on these things without
possessing or any longer desiring to possess them.29
This godlike serenity had not come easily to Shakespeare but, emerging from
the profound crisis which yielded King Lear and Timon of Athens, he found a
new mood which ‘demanded not a tragic issue’ but rather ‘an issue into joy
and peace’.30 The ‘dissonance’ that had characterised the tragedies would
instead ‘be resolved into a harmony, clear and rapturous, or solemn and
profound . . . a reconciliation’ (p. 406). In part, this was the result of Shakespeare’s detaching himself from the theatre: for Dowden, The Winter’s Tale,
for instance, has a ‘breezy air’ which ‘is surely that which blew over
Warwickshire fields upon Shakspere now returned to Stratford; its country
lads and lasses . . . are those with which the poet had in a happy spirit renewed
his acquaintance’.31 But, above all, the final reconciliation was the logical end
point of the romantic understanding of the growth of genius, inflected with a
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
Edward Dowden, Shakspere, Literature Primers (London, 1877), pp. 58–9.
Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London, 1875), pp. 403,
406, 380.
Dowden, ‘Primer’, p. 60.
Dowden, Mind, p. 415.
Dowden, ‘Primer’, p. 60.
Dowden, Mind, p. 406.
Dowden, ‘Primer’, p. 151.
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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
Christian (or at least a post-Christian) urge for redemption. This was, then,
both a period unique to Shakespeare, something that emerged from his particular experience of life – in other words, a very personal development – and at
the same time a manifestation of a process that could have been expected from
the very beginning, because it is in the nature of genius to develop in stages and
because it would be unthinkable for the National Poet not to find salvation at
the end. As Sir Walter Raleigh anxiously phrased it fifty years later, demonstrating a basic dependence upon Dowden’s narrative,
[m]any a life has been wrecked on a tenth part of the accumulated suffering
which finds a voice in the Tragedies. The Romances are our warrant that Shakespeare regained a perfect calm of mind. If Timon of Athens had been his last play,
who could feel any assurance that he dies at peace with the world?32
The late plays serve as reassurance to the anxious critic that Shakespeare left
this world in the knowledge of his own salvation.
It was only with Lytton Strachey’s 1906 essay ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’,
in which he deliberately turns the lateness thesis on its head, arguing that ‘it is
difficult to resist the conclusion that [Shakespeare] was getting bored . . . with
people, bored with real life, bored with drama, bored, in fact, with everything
except poetry and poetical dreams’, and with C.J. Sisson’s British Academy
lecture of 1934 – in which he mocked the idea that ‘dramatists write tragedies
when their mood is tragic and comedies when they are feeling pleased with life’
– that Dowden’s way of reading the last plays received critiques commensurate
with its impact.33 Yet Sisson and other Shakespeare critics, performing historical critique, never achieved the ubiquity of Dowden’s (or, for that matter,
Strachey’s) subjectivist views, and the idea of the Shakespearean late phase
never really went away, persisting into the twentieth century and merging with
the developing sense of lateness in art history and musicology, sustained in
particular by Jungianism in its search for artistic archetypes. Amongst Shakespeareans, the persistence of transcendent lateness in the second half of the
twentieth century is typified by Kenneth Muir and David Grene, who both
wrote books (the latter apparently unaware of the former, despite writing six
years later) thematically connecting the late works of Shakespeare with those
of Sophocles, Racine and Ibsen.34 In each case, the connections drawn suggest
both that late writing is a hallmark of individual genius and that it is a
32
33
34
Walter Raleigh, Shakespeare, English Men of Letters series (London, 1926), p. 212. I am
grateful to Kevin de Ornellas for directing me to Raleigh’s comments on Shakespearean
lateness.
[Giles] Lytton Strachey, ‘Shakespeare’s Final Period’, in Book and Characters, French and
English (London, 1922), pp. 47–64 (60); C.J. Sisson, The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare,
Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy (London, 1934).
Kenneth Muir, Last Periods of Shakespeare, Racine, and Ibsen (Liverpool, 1961); David Grene,
Reality and the Heroic Pattern: Last Plays of Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Sophocles (Chicago, 1967).
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phenomenon beyond time and context, manifesting itself similarly in ancient
Greece, Jacobean England or nineteenth-century Norway. It should seem
obvious to contemporary Shakespeareans, aware from a range of studies over
the last thirty years of the conditions of production that made the Shakespearean late plays what they are – the habitually collaborative nature of
playwriting, the contingency of style in the early modern understanding of
rhetoric, the centrality of company repertory and competition to theatrical
output – that this transhistoricity is wishful thinking, yet critics remain nonetheless largely complicit in sustaining the idea of Shakespearean lateness. After
all, we all know that subjectivism is questionable just as we know that The
Tempest wasn’t Shakespeare’s last play – that, even if we ignore Henry VIII and
The Two Noble Kinsmen (which of course we cannot), we have no firm external
evidence to guarantee that it came after The Winter’s Tale or Cymbeline – but
this doesn’t stop us all, in our heart of hearts, from continuing (with Campbell) to see something of Shakespeare in Prospero as he drowns his book.35
And that equation continues to underpin the received idea of late Shakespearean serenity in even the most current work on late style – most recently,
that of Edward Said, who sets up late Shakespeare as a bland, unified, resigned
norm against which to promote his preferred manifestation of artistic lateness
as fragmented, resistant, irascible.36
‘Late play’, then, is far from being a ‘neutral’ alternative to ‘romance’ or
‘tragicomedy’. It bears at least as much baggage, if not more, as those terms
and it depends upon a series of presumptions that run counter to the understanding that theatre historians have achieved of the conditions of production
for the plays written by Shakespeare and his collaborators in the period 1607 to
1613. In fact, it is possible to argue that Shakespeare wrote no ‘late plays’ at all
in the sense that the astonishing run of plays he wrote or co-wrote in the last
seven years of his life, plays which share a range of characteristics in more or
less complex and revealing ways, do not correlate with ‘lateness’ as criticism
since Dowden has conceived it. These plays, in their negotiation with the
forms of tragicomedy that were emerging at the time, offer a degree of contingency, of responsiveness to circumstance and theatrical fashion, of material
engagement, that simply does not fit with the numinous lateness imagined by
Dowden and his successors. More to the point – and this is not always recognised – Shakespearean lateness is irreparably tied to (subsumes, even) both
romance and tragicomedy. Dowden, after all, having determined the existence
of a distinct group of plays at the end of the career, called them not ‘the late
plays’ but ‘the Romances’: Shakespearean romance and late Shakespeare are,
35
36
Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Tempest in a Teapot: Critics, Evaluation, Ideology’, in ‘Bad’ Shakespeare:
Revaluations of the Shakespeare Canon, ed. Maurice Charney (Rutherford, 1988), pp. 61–73.
Edward Said, ‘Untimely Meditations’, review of Maynard Solomon, Late Beethoven: Music,
Thought, Imagination, in The Nation 277 (September 2003), 38–42 (38); see also Said, On Late
Style (London, 2006), pp. 6–7.
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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
for him, one and the same. At the same time, Dowden’s account of Shakespeare’s life is a tragicomic biography, beginning with the youthful energy and
enthusiasm embodied in the early comedies and channelled for a while into
the patriotism of the histories before the tragedies signal a dark and threatening midlife crisis which plunges the playwright down to the condition of a
Timon before he emerges at last, redeemed, onto the serene sunlit uplands of
the late plays. This is an inescapably tragicomic narrative, reading the story of
Shakespeare’s life as if it were itself a late play. As Valerie Forman has argued,
tragicomedy is a redemptive genre, ‘explicitly modeled on Christian redemption . . . in which the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve result in the coming
and sacrifice of Christ’.37 What is lost is found again. The child hath found its
father. The early is reclaimed and redeemed in the wake of tragedy. This is both
the pattern of Shakespearean tragicomedy and the structure of the life of
Shakespeare à la Dowden. In other words, the supposedly ‘neutral term’ is
implicated in the two ‘loaded’ terms right from the start.
III
Still, as with both ‘romance’ and ‘tragicomedy’, the term ‘late play’ has certain
heuristic resonances and I want, in conclusion, to tease out some further possibilities in the latter for thinking about the plays we know as ‘Shakespeare’s late
plays’. Some of these further connotations are unhelpful. There is, for
instance, a sense in which the plays are read implicitly as coming at the end not
only of a career but at the same time of an epoch, as the end of the era marked
by Shakespeare’s death but going beyond the confines of the canon of his
works – in other words, of the ‘decadence of the drama’, the old-historicist
sense of post-Shakespearean theatre as decline mapped partly through the
excesses of Jacobean revenge tragedy but also through tragicomedy viewed as a
bastard, disunified, emotionally unstable genre and as metonymic of the
decline to Civil War. This in a sense draws Shakespeare’s late plays – and Jacobean drama in general – into the conjunction of late style and connoisseurship
of which you can see glimpses in late Henry James – the sense of epochally late
art exquisitely poised on the brink of destruction that draws its value from its
position at the last moment of a civilisation before it is destroyed by imminent
barbarism but which is, at the same time, undermined by its own implication
in that barbarism. In this sense, Shakespeare’s late plays either stand apart
from Jacobean decadence as the true conclusion to the age of Elizabeth (five or
ten years after her death) or they participate in that decadence and thus mark a
terminal decline in the art of which they are a final flowering – an argument
37
Valerie Forman, ‘The Economics of Redemption in Early Modern English Tragicomedy’,
unpublished paper given at the ‘Tragicomedy: Renaissance to Restoration’ conference,
Cambridge, 2005.
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confirmed for its champions by the ‘lapse’ into collaboration after the writing
of The Tempest. In either case, the late plays mark more than the end of the life
of a playwright.
Neither of these options has much contextual validity. There is, though, one
possible further way to rehabilitate the ‘late’ in ‘late play’ and at the same time
to rethink Shakespearean tragicomedy as neither serene postscript nor decline
into decadence but rather to reimagine its place in the overall scheme of early
modern theatre. In order to do so, I wish to turn briefly and finally to Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson. The last plays of Jonson, while forming a
distinct block at the end of his career, do not comfortably fit received ideas of
the stylistic or generic features associated with lateness. As Martin Butler has
argued, plays such as The New Inn and The Tale of a Tub are by no means the
‘dotages’ Dryden thought them.38 At the same time, to try to manipulate them
to fit either Dowdenesque serene transcendence or Saidean late resistance to
the oncoming of death is just as unhelpful: they are adequately explained
neither by mapping them overtly onto the model of late Shakespeare, as Anne
Barton implies in reading passages from A Tale of a Tub as, ‘like certain
sections of Pericles, Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, [. . .] an immensely
sophisticated attempt to re-create the atmosphere of early Elizabethan drama’,
nor by setting them up, with Larry Champion, as the opposite phenomenon,
the last works of a stubborn personality who, ‘in character until the end, did
not, like Shakespeare via Prospero, break his staff and drown his book’.39 For
Julie Sanders and others in recent years, these readings ‘underestimate the [. . .]
topicality’ of the Jonsonian late plays, ‘as well as the continuing exercises in
dramatic experimentation’ they represent.40 Late Jonson, rather than embodying a tragicomic transcendence of matters political, appears instead to be the
product of contexts social and political – of its composition, for instance,
immediately prior to the recall of the last of Charles’s early Parliaments, in
March 1629, [. . .] a moment in which rapprochement or accommodation,
rather than confrontation, might at last have been achieved between the court
and the court’s critics.41
38
39
40
41
Martin Butler, ‘Late Jonson’, in McMullan and Hope, pp. 168–88.
Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge, 1984), p. 322; Larry S. Champion, Ben
Jonson’s ‘Dotages’: A Reconsideration of the Late Plays (Lexington, 1967), p. 140.
Julie Sanders, ‘Print, Popular Culture, Consumption and Commodification in The Staple of
News’, in Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender, Politics and the Jonsonian Canon, ed. Julie Sanders,
with Kate Chedgzoy and Susan Wiseman (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 183–207 (183). See also
Butler, ‘Late Jonson’; Helen Ostovich, ‘The Appropriation of Pleasure in The Magnetic Lady’,
Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34 (1994), 425–42; Sanders, ‘ “The Day’s Sports
Devised in the Inn”: Jonson’s The New Inn and Theatrical Politics’, Modern Language Review
91 (1996), 545–60; and Part Three of Sanders’s Ben Jonson’s Theatrical Republics (Basingstoke,
1998).
Butler, p. 172.
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Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
Thus, for Sanders, the emphasis on ideal communities in The New Inn, The
Magnetic Lady and The Sad Shepherd is not the product of classic late
otherworldliness but rather of tangible political imagining.
Jonson, impatient and ambitious, had in any case, by the time he wrote his
‘late plays’, long used up a significant ‘late’ gesture by publishing his collected
plays in midlife. The 1616 folio Works, though deliberately chronological and
ostensibly encyclopaedic, is not late per se, pre-empting the latter end of
Jonson’s life by two decades. To read the plays on the basis of Jonson’s personality in this way is to be complicit in foregrounding both Jonson’s own
construction of his poetic selfhood and that of subsequent critics in thrall to
Jonsonian authorialism over the actual conditions of production for early
modern theatre. Still, the curious irrelevance of the volume’s frontispiece,
analysed intriguingly in recent years by Joseph Loewenstein and, in slightly
more detail, by Robert Henke, perhaps offers a way to understand the
conjunction of tragicomedy and lateness despite the inadequacy of both terms
for the plays that follow.42 This frontispiece, as both Loewenstein and Henke
have shown, represents the ascent of drama from ritual origins to urban
sophistication and is both a map of generic synthesis and a celebration of
theatrical hybridity. The image is that of a triumphal arch, in the central space
of which is the title of the volume, The Workes of Beniamin Jonson; across the
frieze runs a phrase from Horace – singula quaeque locum teneant sortita
decenter – which translates as ‘Let each individual kind hold its rightful place’.
In the left-hand niche stands Tragedy, and beneath her, on the base of the arch,
is an image of a wagon, a plaustrum, which is drawn by a horse and has a sacrificial goat tethered to the back; inside it stands an actor striking a pose, representing the primitive origins of tragedy as the earliest form of drama. In the
right-hand niche stands Comedy, glancing across at her sister (perhaps
acknowledging her generic primacy), who surmounts an image of an ancient
open-air amphitheatre, a visorium, in which a group of men and women dance
around a sacrificial fire: this, in turn, offers a vision of comedy as originary, less
primitive than tragedy because inhabiting a later, fixed, purpose-built space,
but nonetheless associated with pagan religious activity and thus underlining
the pre-Christian origins of the genre. Above the arch are three figures. To the
left is a satyr with panpipes, to the right a shepherd with crook and cornet,
figures representative of pastoral (and perhaps, in the case of the satyr, as
Henke suggests, noting the preferred, though incorrect, early modern
etymology, also of satire); above them, front and centre, is the figure of Tragicomedy, dressed in a combination of the clothing of Comedy and Tragedy and
42
Joseph Lowenstein, ‘Guarini and the Presence of Genre’, in Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics, ed. Nancy Klein Maguire (New York, 1987), pp. 33–55; Henke, pp.
13–16; see also Sara van den Berg, ‘Ben Jonson and the Ideology of Authorship’, in Ben
Jonson’s 1616 Folio, ed. Jennifer Brady and W.H. Herendeen (Newark, 1991), pp. 111–37, esp.
pp. 114–17.
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Gordon McMullan
holding a sceptre. Beneath her is an image, a little larger than those of the
wagon and the early amphitheatre, of a Roman theatrum, three storeys high,
with a fixed stage and tiring-house, a predictive amalgamation of early modern
indoor and outdoor theatres, of Globe and Blackfriars. It is clear from this 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.
Tragicomedy, in this representation, is in a certain way a late genre – late in
the history of theatre, that is. It is not untheatrical or reactionary, but is rather
a logical corollary of and development from, urbane in the broadest sense, the
primitive forms of tragedy and comedy. It is a genre that engages with the early
– the primitive theatrical spaces, plaustrum and visorium, associated with the
generic simplicities of tragedy and comedy – but also embraces the contemporary and prospective, going on (though of course Jonson and the engraver,
William Hole, were not to know this) to dominate the stage before and after
the closing of the theatres. The visual hierarchy of the frontispiece celebrates
tragicomedy for its synthetic, hybrid qualities, its simultaneous dependence
upon and transcendence of tragedy and comedy and its association with the
early modern theatrum, the fixed, sophisticated, urban locus of contemporary
drama, ensuring that we recognise in tragicomedy, emerging belatedly from
the classical forebears it (literally, in the frontispiece image) supersedes, the
future of theatre. Prompted by this image – puzzling as it undoubtedly is as a
representation of the dramatic art of Jonson – we might, then, reconceive early
modern tragicomedy itself as a kind of ‘late work’, not late in the subjectivist
sense à la Dowden but late in the way it is understood by Adorno, that is, as
prolepsis, as work that reaches beyond what is currently possible, opening up
possibilities not yet imaginable, appearing to contemporaries, and even to
those trying to comprehend it at later times, difficult to define, as work whose
divergent logic remains obscure. Thus, finally, despite all I have said to
condemn it, we might in fact recuperate the term ‘late play’ and celebrate
through it the simultaneous looking back and looking forward that provides
the basic tension of late Shakespeare, not as a closing down, a gesture of
finality, but as a beginning, an opening out, a glimpse of a theatrical future
Shakespeare himself would not live to see.
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9
Shakespeare by the Numbers:
On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays1
MICHAEL WITMORE and JONATHAN HOPE
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies:
Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces’ . . .
Sonnet 17
Return, forgetful Muse, and straight redeem
In gentle numbers time so idly spent . . .
Sonnet 50
S
INCE THE late nineteenth century, critics have tried to group some or all
of the plays Shakespeare wrote late in his career – Coriolanus, Cymbeline,
The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Pericles (co-authored with George Wilkins),
Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen (both co-authored with John
Fletcher) – into a single critical category, usually on the basis of thematic,
dramaturgical, or linguistic similarities among members of the group. While
there is no consensus on which category is most appropriate for such a
grouping (designations such as ‘late plays’, ‘romances’, and ‘tragicomedies’
have been proposed), there is nevertheless a persistent feeling among Shakespeare’s readers that something distinguishes several of these plays from the
others and that this ‘something’ ought to be the object of critical analysis.2 At
1
2
The authors would like to thank David Kaufer, Pantelis Vlachos, and particularly Suguru
Ishizaki for their technical support and advice in the preparation of this paper.
The first generic identification of some of these plays as ‘romances’ was made by Edward
Dowden in 1877, drawing on the results of metrical analysis by Furnivall and his colleagues in
the New Shakspere Society, established in 1874. Furnivall’s work was exclusively formal,
attempting to establish a chronology of Shakespeare’s plays on the basis of metrical patterns.
These analyses grouped four of the plays we now know as ‘Late Plays’ – Pericles, The Tempest,
The Winter’s Tale, and Cymbeline – for the first time in critical history, placing them together
at the end of Shakespeare’s career on the basis of his increasing use of hypermetrical lines.
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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope
times the perception of such a similarity has been so strong that it has led to
categorical declarations of the sort made by Gerard Eades Bentley in the mid
twentieth century, who asserted that ‘no competent critic who has read carefully through the Shakespeare canon has failed to notice that there is something different [about these plays]’.3 Philip Edwards (1958) went even further
on this score, arguing that ‘the [late plays] seem more closely related than any
other group of Shakespeare’s plays’.4 Given that Shakespeare’s first editors,
Heminges and Condell, found no need for a fourth generic category when
dividing the plays in Shakespeare’s First Folio (1623) into histories, tragedies
and comedies, Edwards’ claims about the definitive unity of some additional
generic grouping seem particularly extravagant. While Shakespeare’s first
editors were not entirely consistent in their use of early modern genre distinctions to group the thirty-six plays in their edition (the First Folio omits Pericles
and The Two Noble Kinsmen), they were certainly no worse judges (‘no
competent critic . . .’) than those who came after them. What, then, have critics
been seeing in these plays for over a century that is so vivid, so pervasive, that it
confounds the generic distinctions of some of Shakespeare’s most intimate
seventeenth-century contemporaries?
Genre distinctions are notoriously difficult to express in formulae or
abstract terms, even if particular genre labels can be recognised and applied
with little experience; genre critics since Aristotle have thus tended to use
examples or tokens of a particular genus in order to express one or another
feature of a type. Ever the biologist, Aristotle tended to think of genre in genus
and species terms, and this particular habit of thought persists through most
attempts to specify genre. A tragedy shows a character of high standing being
laid low: the rule can be illustrated by any number of examples, of which Aristotle supplies two, Oedipus and Thyestes (Poetics 1453a.10–11).5 Renaissance
3
4
5
Dowden extended this chronological grouping with content-based criteria, stressing the presence of the sea, and lost children as contributors to the romantic element. In 1901, Thorndike
added ‘tragicomedy’ to the mix, claiming the influence of Beaumont and Fletcher, and this
recasting of the late plays was strengthened by other critics, such as Bentley, who associated the
plays with masque, and the purchase of the Blackfriars theatre (see Bentley’s article in the first
issue of Shakespeare Survey). What started as an association of the plays by chronology, arrived
at by a purely formal metrical test, quickly became one of genre and theme, with hitherto
unperceived overlaps in subject matter and concern being readily identified. For a full account
of the critical history of this genre and relevant bibliography, see Barbara A. Mowat, ‘ “What’s
in a name?” Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy’, in A Companion to Shakespeare’s
Works: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays, ed. Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard, 4
vols (Oxford, 2003), IV, 129–49. See too Russ McDonald, Shakespeare’s Late Style
(Cambridge, 2006).
Gerard Eades Bentley, ‘Shakespeare and the Blackfriars Theatre’, Shakespeare Survey 1 (1948),
47–48.
Philip Edwards, ‘Shakespeare’s Romances’, Shakespeare Survey 11 (1958), 1.
Aristotle, The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, trans. Ingram Bywater (New York, 1984), pp.
238–39.
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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
literary criticism followed the model of genre as genus or formal type, with
theorists such as Guarini outlining typical features of a specimen within a
genre such as ‘tragicomedy’ and then going on to provide concrete examples.6
In some cases a particular ‘token’ might be taken to exemplify the genre in all
of its attributes, as was perhaps the case with John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, which was designed to introduce English audiences to Guarini’s tragicomic ideal in all of its aspects. For Fletcher, this play and others of its kind
possessed certain attributes and lacked others: ‘A tragi-comedie is not so called
in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough
to make it no tragedy, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no
comedie.’ 7 Some of these features have been attributed to Shakespeare’s later
plays, leading critics to identify them as ‘tragicomedies’ as well. We will return
to this argument later, but it is enough at this point to notice that Fletcher’s
definition of genre not only specifies what must be in a play to qualify it for
membership in a genre, but also what it must lack. The notion that genre is a
set of co-ordinated presences and absences of features is one we will take up in
the conclusion of our paper, below.
Of course, criticism after the Renaissance has developed further critical
categories with which to approach the question of genre in Shakespeare’s
plays, relying variously on biographical, formal, historical and dramaturgical
criteria for membership in a generic group. The Victorian critic Edward
Dowden, for example, felt that The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and Pericles were
alike in their tendency to retreat to a serene, enchanted world, one that Shakespeare craved after having plumbed the depths of the tragedies earlier in his
career.8 More recent critics have emphasised the seemingly mythical or folkloric atmosphere of these plays, suggesting that the improbabilities of plot
found in the later works evidence a desire to enact a messianic quest ending in
deliverance or to test the nature of reality by framing it in a deliberately artificial way.9 Arguments about tone and atmosphere have been accompanied by
6
7
8
9
Giambattista Guarini, Compendio della poesia tragicomica (Venice, 1601).
John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepheardesse (London, 1610). It is worth pointing out, however,
that Fletcher’s introduction is an attempt to justify as literature a play that had failed as drama
– and that the plays he went on to write with Beaumont and others, generally taken as exemplars of English tragicomedy, are very different in form and tone from Guarini’s model, and
Fletcher’s own solo attempt at it (see Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope, ‘Introduction’
in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon McMullan and Jonathan
Hope (London, 1992), pp. 3–7).
Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art, 3rd ed. (1899) (New York,
1967), p. 415.
The interpretation of romance as messianic struggle is advanced in Northrop Frye’s The
Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1997). The association of the late plays with folklore appears
in Stanley Wells, ‘Shakespeare and Romance’, in Later Shakespeare, Stratford-Upon-Avon
Studies 8 (New York, 1967), 49–80 (53). The association of romance with improbable tall tales
told by women and gossips is explored in Mary Ellen Lamb, ‘Engendering the Narrative Act:
Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest’, Criticism 40, no. 4 (1998), 28–43,
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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope
inquiries into sources and dramaturgical techniques. Barbara Mowat, for
example, has argued that Shakespeare’s later plays get their distinctiveness
from their source (the Greek novel), suggesting moreover that the ‘family
resemblance’ among these plays defies generic labels – although the plays have
a tendency to mix disjunctive presentational and representational modes
(essentially, modes of telling and showing).10 In having recourse to an
explicitly Wittgensteinian notion of ‘family resemblance’, Mowat is bearing
out Fletcher’s insight that generic identity is not just a bundle of sine qua non
features that are ‘present’ in every token member of a type, but that membership and type only become intelligible within the fullness of a highly variable
group.
Whatever it is that critics are reaching for when they see a generic or ‘familial’ resemblance among different late Shakespeare plays, perhaps that ‘something’ is not a roll-call of features (to use the analogy, dimples, dark
complexion, curly hair), but a variously distributed set of features common
only to the entire group, a set that can further be contrasted in their absence
with those that appear in members of another group. The late plays are
‘romances’ because they bring families together; they are ‘tragicomedies’
because they bring happiness only after trial. These are real features that can be
pulled out of many of the plays listed above, but they do not appear in exactly
the same way in each play. Indeed, the basic difficulty Mowat identifies in past
attempts to name a fourth genre of Shakespeare’s plays may be a difficulty
common to all attempts to create stable genre definitions; and yet such distinctions are nevertheless intelligible in practice and can be debated in rich detail,
as the critical history rehearsed above suggests. In what follows we would like
to take a different approach to the problem of naming a fourth genre in the
Shakespeare canon, one that attempts to re-describe the difference critics have
sensed between ‘romances’ or ‘tragicomedies’ and the more traditional First
Folio genres, not by qualitative analysis of tone, atmosphere or plot, but by
quantitative analysis of linguistic features. Like Fletcher, we believe that this
analysis shows genre to be a fully relative construct in the sense that it involves
the strategic collocation of features common to other genres, features that are
emphasised or missing in a coordinated way. But we also believe that such
analysis calls attention to a heretofore invisible set of dramaturgical strategies
at work in the late plays, strategies that mobilise language so consistently and
on such a pervasive verbal level that their effects have gone unnoticed by more
traditional literary genre criticism.
10
while the notion that these plays seek to question or establish a ‘reality principle’ can be found
in Howard Felperin, Shakespearean Romance (Princeton, 1972), p. 50.
See Barbara Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances (Athens, 1976), pp. 36, 69 and
‘ “What’s in a Name?”: Tragicomedy, Romance, or Late Comedy’, p. 134. Mowat credits the
adaptation of Wittgensteinian ‘theory of resemblance’ to genre theory to Alastair Fowler’s
Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, 1982).
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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
*
In order to conduct such analysis, we have made use of a computer text analysis tool called Docuscope. Docuscope is a text analysis and comparison
program developed by a team of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, USA. The program was designed for use in writing/rhetoric classes
(as understood in the North American model), and aims to allow tutors to
make fast, statistically reliable comparisons between texts written by students.
To accomplish this function, the program consists of a first stage of textual
analysis tools – essentially, smart dictionaries – that comb texts for strings of
words which are then assigned to a predetermined set of rhetorical categories.
(As we will see below, these dictionaries are ultimately an expression of the
designers’ views on how language works; they are thus, in effect, a working
rhetoric.) The frequency results from this combing are then displayed in
various graphical formats by the program’s sophisticated and user-friendly
visual interface. These results can also be exported into statistical analysis
packages for more complex statistical analysis.11
The rhetorical categories used by Docuscope have been explored in practical and theoretical terms by the designers in a book entitled The Power of
Words: Unveiling the Speaker and Writer’s Hidden Craft.12 Here the primary
architect of the dictionaries, David Kaufer, and his colleagues support the
choices made in creating Docuscope by advancing an essentially phenomenological view of how different types of language shape or recreate an
experientially vivid world for an engaged reader or listener. Here we can
provide a brief overview of the categories that the program assumes are
working to accomplish this goal; further below we will describe how these
categories relate to ‘tragicomedy’ or ‘romance’ and to our own sense of what
‘genre’ must be in the theatre. As it scans an electronically formatted text,
Docuscope organises word strings into three high-level categories (termed
‘clusters’). These clusters correspond to a theoretical model of the effects texts
seek to have on their readers developed from a Hallidayan theoretical base (pp.
51–5).13 The model groups rhetorical effects as follows:
1
11
12
13
Internal Perspectives: those sequences of words – ‘strings’ in the parlance
of Docuscope’s creators – that are used to communicate the interior mind
of the writer, or a character, to the reader (for example, grammatical first
person features, expressive and subjective vocabulary, complex
tense/aspect constructions that imply a relation between two different
times entertained in a narratorial consciousness).
Those interested in examining the precise statistical procedures and data used in this paper are
invited to contact the authors.
David Kaufer, Suguru Ishizaki, Brian Butler, Jeff Collins, The Power of Words: Unveiling the
Speaker and Writer’s Hidden Craft (London, 2004).
This approach is set out in M.A.K. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 2nd edn
(London, 1994).
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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope
2
Relational Perspectives: strings used to connect readers to the representations within a text. For example, aspects of the language that recognise or
engage shared processes of reasoning between reader and author or their
implied social ties; also strings that orient readers to other locations in the
text.
3
External Perspectives: strings that refer out of the text, but to the physical
world (rather than the metatextual or social values of ‘Relational Perspectives’). These strings include types of description of physical objects,
strings describing the spatial location of objects, and representations of
movement through space and time.
A fundamental assumption of the creators of Docuscope is that texts will vary
in the frequency with which they employ string types from each of these clusters depending on the writer’s purpose. Variation visible at the highest level is
rather crude, but a broad expectation would be that fiction and autobiography
ought to be high in cluster 1, while instructional writing (technical manuals for
example), ought to be high in clusters 2 and 3. This is hardly an impressive or
surprising finding. The real value of Docuscope comes, rather, in the finegrained analysis that becomes possible when comparisons are made at a far
more detailed level of string category. Within Docuscope, the three high-level
clusters are further divided into six ‘families’, and then further into ‘dimensions’ that contain multiple ‘language action types’ (LATs) which allow a high
degree of interpretive distinction to be made in the analysis of texts. An
example, adapted from the authors’ exposition of their categories (59–88), is
given below:
Cluster 1: Internal Perspectives
Family 1: Interior Thinking (strings involved in exposing the audience to
the activity of another mind)
Dimension 1: First person
LAT: Grammatical first person e.g. first person pronouns – ‘I’,
‘me’, ‘my’, ‘mine’
LAT: Self-disclosure: e.g. first person plus simple past – ‘I went’
LAT: Autobiographical reference: e.g. first person plus habitual
past verb phrase – ‘I used to go’
Dimension 2: Inner thinking
LAT: Private thinking e.g. private cognition or thinking verbs –
‘contemplate’, ‘decide’, ‘discover’
LAT: Disclosures e.g. verbs of speaking, some adverbs –
‘confessed’, ‘acknowledged’, ‘personally’, ‘frankly’, ‘tellingly’
LAT: Confidence e.g. ‘that’ – complement, situational ‘it’,
existential ‘there’: ‘I know that the box is upstairs’; ‘It’s a boy!’;
‘There’s an apartment down the street that you can afford’
LAT: Uncertainty e.g. adverbials – ‘allegedly’, ‘to the best of my
knowledge’, ‘nearly’, ‘almost’
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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
Dimension 3: Positive affect
LAT: Think positive – e.g. ‘loving’, ‘succulent’; attitudinally
marked prepositions: ‘up’
Dimension 4: Negative affect
LAT: Think negative – e.g. ‘too many’, ‘too much’;
attitudinally marked prepositions: ‘down’
Note how the shift from ‘family’ to LAT allows the analyst to make some relatively fine distinctions in the stylistic effects produced by texts, particularly
when each of these distinctions can be counted and compared with one
another across a large corpus of texts. Within the Dimension ‘First person’, for
example, Docuscope distinguishes bare first person pronouns such as ‘I’, ‘me’,
‘mine’, which produce a simple point of view within a text, from ‘pronoun +
tensed verb’ strings (‘I went . . .’, ‘I’ll go . . .’), which produce a particularised
consciousness, self-realised in terms of time. Look at the difference between
these examples:
I often use facts about Einstein’s laws in my work
I often used facts about Einstein’s laws in my work
In the first example, ‘I’ appears with a simple present tense and establishes that
the text is written by a specific individual, but not much else. The second
example, however, complicates the point of view presented considerably: the
self constructed in the sentence is one who looks back on a past state of selfhood, analyses itself, and discloses something about that analysis. As
mentioned above, Docuscope assigns strings to the various dimensions identified by the development team using a set of dictionaries that seek out word
clusters (so for example, ‘I’ on its own will be assigned to the LAT Grammatical
first person, but ‘I’ followed by a past tense verb will instead be assigned to the
LAT Self-disclosure). Words can only be counted as part of one string, and the
program always counts the longest possible string. In practice, Docuscope is
capable of parsing or categorising an enormous number of strings within the
English language. When used to ‘read’ the Frown Corpus, a multi-genre
corpus of contemporary American English of approximately one million
words, the version of Docuscope used for this paper classed 76% of its
contents; when used to ‘read’ the plays of the First Folio, Docuscope classified
approximately 75% of all the words or phrases, which is approximately the
average ‘find rate’ of the tool for most large collections of texts it is used to
study.14
14
Many of the unclassifiable words were place or person names, non-standard English words,
hyphenated words, or extremely common words such as ‘and’ or ‘that’. The set of dictionaries
employed by Docuscope is under continuous revision, which is why we asked that a state of
those dictionaries (14 May 2006) be ‘frozen’ so that our future analyses of texts (for example,
the Middleton corpus) could be made under identical conditions and the results compared.
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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope
*
Our initial research with Docuscope involved the analysis of the First Folio of
1623, a promising starting point for our work, we felt, because the Folio
presented us with a concrete editorial decision about generic divisions (the
editors sorted the plays by comedy, history, and tragedy). Furnished with that
initial qualitative decision, we could then attempt to re-describe it in statistical
terms and see if we learned anything new. Our initial findings were reported in
2004, and we have since embarked on several research projects examining
Shakespeare’s genres and the historical development of his style. In the course
of this research, we have learned that Docuscope, a device created to teach
writing four hundred years after Shakespeare wrote his plays – and by
designers with no academic interest in Shakespeare or early modern drama –
can nevertheless ‘see’ the First Folio genres, sometimes quite distinctly.15 It
should be said here that if Docuscope were redesigned to count different
things (different strings of words, based on a different interpretation of how
texts work), we would still expect it to find statistically significant patterns of
string usage that differentiate the various genres; this is because, assuming
enough different types of items are being counted, such items ought still to
show signs of coordination because (1) theatrical language is saturated, potentially at every level, with dramaturgical effect and (2) the particular type of
story that critics recognise as ‘history’, ‘comedy’, ‘romance’, or ‘tragicomedy’
makes certain material demands on the speakers of a play and thus the
language they must use to advance the story. Our conclusions about Shakespeare so far are based on a micro-analysis of LAT frequencies rather than
assumptions about how such LATs may group into Families or Clusters. This
is a crucial point, since it allows us to remain agnostic on the question of
whether or not the architecture of categories used by Docuscope represents the
‘best’ or most ‘functional’ way to organise language. Ultimately, the statistical
patterns we are interpreting are used as prompts or pointers to particular uses
of words that remain invisible in the linear flow of reading, but may nevertheless have some more general rhetorical and dramaturgical function. The art
here is not in crafting the ‘best’ categories, but in seeing how the coordinated
presence and absence of various types of words (type being itself an interpretation) might function in a concrete, dramaturgical setting. We call this assumption of pervasively coordinated rhetorical patterning the ‘principle of
dramaturgical saturation’. In adopting it, we are assuming that the material
constraints of the theatre and the temporal entailments of certain narrative
15
The results of our earliest attempt to discriminate the Folio genres using Docuscope appear in
Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, ‘The Very Large Textual Object: A Prosthetic Reading
of Shakespeare’, Early Modern Literary Studies 9.3 / Special Issue 12 (January, 2004), 6.1–36.
URL: http://purl.oclc.org/emls/09–3/hopewhit.htm.
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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
conventions create a situation in which even the smallest particles of language
are regularly pressed into the service of telling a particular type of story.16
With these caveats in mind, we move to the questions that motivate this
essay: What could a literary linguistic analysis using Docuscope provide in
support of the claim that the late plays constitute a distinct group? We know
from our previous work with Docuscope that the three Folio genres have
distinct linguistic features: do the late plays, identified as such first of all by
formal metrical tests, also share formal linguistic features that characterise
them, aside from their shared content concerns with the sea, lost children,
reunited parents, and so on? To what extent can a quantitative analysis of
different classes of language yield clues about (1) the dramaturgical strategies
that may have coloured the composition of these plays or (2) the interpretive
criteria that have led critics to make such claims as those offered above? What,
further, can such analysis reveal about the degree to which these plays are an
amalgam of previous genres such as comedies and tragedies, as the term ‘tragicomedy’ suggests?
To answer these questions, we are going to rely on two types of evidence.
The first consists of findings based on a statistical procedure known as ‘factor
analysis’, a procedure that is blind with respect to genre judgments and instead
simply looks for correlations among frequently used types of words or phrases.
To the non-statistician, this procedure might be understood through the
following example: if you were to create thirty-six unique packs of playing
cards at random from an infinite pile of cards, you would expect the resulting
packs to differ from one another in certain ways. A factor analysis would
compare the relative frequency with which different ‘types’ of card (twos,
threes, queens, etc.) occur in every pack, working then to characterise any
pattern that cuts across all of the packs. For example, it might turn out that
packs containing lots of fours and fives have almost no sixes: this ‘factor’ (the
metavariable that coordinates ‘having’ fours and fives with ‘lacking’ sixes)
could then be used to ‘rate’ all of the packs in order, from those that are highest
in this factor (they have lots of fours and fives but no sixes) to those that are
16
In one of our experiments, we asked Docuscope to count the number of words beginning with
the letters ‘m’ ‘o’ ‘a’ and ‘i’ and then to use only these counts to produce a recipe for the various
genres. Unsurprisingly, it did. A factor analysis indicated that comedies are distinguished by a
relative lack of words beginning with ‘o’ combined with a relative abundance of words beginning with ‘m’ and ‘i’. The experiment showed us that with enough observations (counted
items), a statistical portrait of a genre can be created out of almost anything; the trick is
knowing what to make of what you count – being able to connect a quantity of something
counted to an activity that is meaningful (e.g., a dramaturgical event such as dreaming,
narrating, arguing, etc.). Given the principle of total dramaturgical saturation, we would hold
that eventually even the lack of ‘o’ in comedy could be explained in terms of the dramaturgical
features of the genre. It would take something like a virtuoso form of Vico’s ‘maker’s knowledge’ with respect to writing, performing and staging plays to get at what these ‘o’ words were
not doing in comedies, however.
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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope
lowest (they have almost no fours and fives but lots of sixes). If you think of
each Shakespeare play in the Folio as a pack of cards in this example, and the
individual cards (two of hearts, two of spades, two of clubs, two of diamonds)
as being like the words (or strings of words) that Docuscope is organising into
types and then aggregating as factors, you begin to understand the nature of
the procedure. Sometimes a factor will arrange the plays in a way that make no
sense to the observer – it is picking up on a pattern that has nothing to do with
genre.17 But often a factor ends up ‘sorting’ the plays in such a way that almost
all specimens of a particular Folio genre appear at one end of a particular spectrum, something we discovered was the case with Shakespeare’s histories; this
is a particularly powerful statistical finding, precisely because the computer
knows nothing about the target genre grouping that is being sought.
The second type of evidence we will be introducing is that resulting from
something called analysis of variance (ANOVA) among single variables, which
looks at the relative frequency of particular types of words or phrases in groups
that we have already sorted into generic types. Unlike factor analysis, which
characterises those broad patterns that emerge from frequent and consistent
use of certain types of words or strings of words, single variable analysis can
hone in on those strings and words (LATs) that are (1) used less frequently but
still occur in very different proportions across a predefined group of genres or
(2) on LATs that appear in dense clusters rather than a consistent spread
throughout the entire text. Taken together, the two techniques give us a
detailed picture of how the words identified by Docuscope’s counting procedures are really working to separate out the genres.18
We began by dividing the Folio plays into four groups – the original comedies,
histories and tragedies of the 1623 editors Heminges and Condell – and a
fourth called ‘late plays’ that consists of Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The
Tempest, and Henry VIII.19 Because Docuscope looks for and correlates over
17
18
19
In our procedure, Docuscope generates factors without any knowledge of the Folio genre divisions and then, once these are obtained, automatically screens the results for those factors that
separate out the genres we have identified; this latter procedure is mediated by a statistical
algorithm, the Tukey Test for statistical significance, eliminating our role in the selection
procedure. Since these algorithms are well known in statistics, our results could be independently reproduced.
The packs are somewhat loaded in this second type of analysis since, in single variable
ANOVA, Docuscope is only re-describing, as it were quantitatively, a set of generic distinctions that have already been assumed in the initial constitution of the four generic groups.
The electronic text used in the analysis was that of the Complete Moby(tm) Shakespeare.
Speech prefixes, stage directions, and act/scene divisions were ‘stripped’ from the plays for the
purpose of analysis, since some of these – particularly speech prefixes such as ‘King’ – were
dead giveaways to Docuscope when it went to produce factors for genre. We plan to write
about this decision to exclude non-spoken text and its implications for our theory of genre
and dramaturgy in a future article.
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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
ninety LATs, we further subdivided the plays into smaller chunks – of 2500
and 7500 words – before dropping them into our four genre containers (C, T,
H, L). This chunking procedure is normal statistical practice: ideally, the
number of individuals in a population to be analysed (i.e. the number of plays,
or chunks of plays) should exceed the number of categories being searched for.
The thirty-six plays of our sample are thus too small a population to search for
over ninety LATs with statistical rigour. By automatically chunking the plays
into 1000-, 2500- and 7500-word sections, we make the procedure statistically
respectable, and also ensure that items identified as statistically significant in
their distribution are consistently used throughout the texts of the plays identified. This final point is important: ‘chunking’ means that we only identify as
significant LATs which are consistently used across the whole text of a play
(they appear in a high number of the chunks of a play). LATs that appear in
only a few chunks of a play, even if they have a very high frequency there, are
excluded.
Using the results of Docuscope’s counting procedure, we employed
multivariate statistical analysis to identify factors – again, metavariables that
capture coordinated variations in smaller variables (high amounts of A appear
in plays with low amounts of B and C) – that differentiated the genres from
each other, particularly those that distinguished the late plays from all of the
other genres contained in the original Folio genre divisions. We then examined the LATs that Docuscope relied upon in making such discriminations,
returning to read the texts of the plays in order to see what these particular
types of words or phrases were doing rhetorically, dramaturgically, thematically, and the like. In the process of rereading the plays with the significant
LATs highlighted for easy recognition, we consulted the results of the single
variable analysis (ANOVA) to see which individual LATs were reliably present
or absent in the late plays in comparison with all the other genres. Finally, we
returned to the factor analysis to see what aspects, if any, the late plays shared,
heightened or excluded from the previous three genres – in effect, looking for
the ‘family resemblance’ within and across the late plays in the larger context
of the Folio genres.
Our most significant finding was that multivariate analysis could indeed
identify factors which separate the late plays as a distinct linguistic group from
the other Folio genres. In our analysis, two factors emerged as statistically
significant, producing a clear separation of the late plays from all of the other
genres – that is, the ranges of variation for these factors showed no overlap
between the late plays and those of the other genres. This is a striking finding:
Docuscope, and multivariate analysis, have identified a familial linguistic
resemblance between plays which were not generically associated until the late
nineteenth century. Further, the single variable analysis (ANOVA) supported
the initial findings by factor analysis (which is initially ‘blind’with respect to
genre), suggesting that, on both the pervasive and local levels, certain types of
language were being used in ways that created a statistical footprint for the late
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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope
plays different from that of any of the earlier Folio genres. In the following
discussion, we first describe the two comparative factors which distinguish the
linguistic texture of the late plays from that of the rest of Shakespeare’s work.
We follow this with a brief examination of those aspects of comedy, tragedy
and history that are only partially present in the late plays, concluding with a
discussion of how multivariate analysis of linguistic structures might compliment traditional understandings of genre in future studies of early modern
texts.
CF7: Focalised Recollection
The first comparative factor (CF7/2500 in our analysis) is closely involved with
the communication of the past. Two LATs are highly significant in constituting this factor: Narrative Verb (Narrating) and Think Back (Retrospect).
Narrative Verb strings consist of simple past tense verbs. Note the following
example, which like others we will be discussing, contains the LATs under
discussion underlined in the passage:
I was by at the opening of the fardel, heard the old shepherd deliver the manner
how he found it [. . .] only this methought I heard the shepherd say, he found the
child
(The Winter’s Tale 5.2.2–6/TLN3013–7)20
As it does in hundreds of instances across the late plays, Docuscope is tracking
the past tense narration of events through simple past constructions like
‘heard’ and ‘found’. The linguistic effect of this type of past narration is to
focus on the event itself, which is usually presented as a discrete, completed
action. The narrator, though clearly present, is not made a vivid part of the
events described or the context in which they take place: to a large extent, the
past events are presented directly, without narratorial comment.
The second LAT on CF7, Think Back, involves a more complex presentation
of past events. Think Back is triggered by past forms of to be and some auxiliary
constructions and, under single variable ANOVA analysis, proved to be a
regular feature of the late plays, but relatively absent in the other three
genres:21
but the changes I perceived in the king and Camillo were very notes of admiration: they seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their
eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they
20
21
Quotations are from the Moby Text Shakespeare, as analysed by Docuscope. As this is an electronic text, line numbers are unreliable, so we have also included Folio through-line
numbering (TLN).
For histories, the median and mean frequencies of Think Back for 2500-word chunks were
0.57 and 0.58; for comedies, 0.52, 0.54; tragedies: 0.52, 0.54; late plays 0.72, 0.74.
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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: a notable
passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more
but seeing, could not say if the importance were joy or sorrow
(The Winter’s Tale 5.2.8–18/TLN 3020–8)
Here continuous states rather than discrete events are communicated and,
significantly, the past state is presented via an explicit narratorial present. That
is, the past is filtered through the consciousness of the narrator who is, quite
frequently, making some sort of implied or explicit emotional evaluation of
the events described. The distance of one time from another (narrative present
to historical past) becomes less important than the emotional effects created
by that distance. Note the Think Back verbs tagged in the following:
First Gentleman: The dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and
princes; for by such was it acted
(The Winter’s Tale 5.2.72–74/TLN 3088–89)
and now note the effect of shifting them to Narrative Verb:
The dignity of this act justified the audience of kings and princes; for such acted it
Here, a shift away from past forms of to be into simple past forms of main verbs
strips away the focalising presence of the First Gentleman: the actual events
(the justification, the acting) are arguably more vivid, but we lose the sense
that we experience them through his consciousness and judgement.22
This comparative factor then, shows us that one of the most striking
linguistic differences between the late plays and the other genres is that the late
plays show an increase in the direct representation of the past (the LAT Narrative Verb is more frequent), but also, at the same time, an increase in the focalised representation of the past, where the representation is directed through
the explicitly realised consciousness of the narrator (via the LAT Think Back).
Past events could therefore be argued to be more important in the late plays
than in the early work – but this increase in concern with the past is also
accompanied by a shifting relation to the past: the past is important in as much
as it is relevant to, and contextualised via, the present. The increased use of
language designed to focalize past events in the late plays appears, in our view,
to be connected with these plays’ thematic preoccupation with family
reunions and plots of wandering, both of which place a dramaturgical
premium on the emotionally charged narration of past events with an eye
toward a redemptive, corrected present.
22
On focalisation, see Mieke Bal, Narratology, 2nd edition (Toronto, 1994), pp. 142–60.
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CF5: Subjective Particularisation
The second comparative factor that distinguishes the late plays (CF5/2500 in
our analysis) correlates the presence of the two LATs Asides and Verb State.
The Language Action Type known as Asides identifies strings that introduce or
end digressive comments: ‘by the way . . .’, ‘anyway’, ‘as an aside’, ‘let me
digress’, ‘incidentally’, ‘to return’, ‘at any rate’. A significant marker of asides
for the developers of Docuscope is ‘which’ as a non-restrictive relative
pronoun – that is, a relative introducing information which is non-essential,
hence an aside. Indeed, when Docuscope analyses Shakespeare, Asides strings
are almost wholly made up of ‘which’ forms, and there is a significant increase
in these strings over his career, and particularly in the late plays.23
We have already identified (on CF7) a trend in the language of the late plays
that sees Shakespeare increase the frequency of two types of past narration,
and in particular Think Back, which presents the past filtered through the
explicit consciousness of a narrator. It is possible to identify a similar effect in
this increase in Asides over the course of Shakespeare’s career. We will take as
an example The Winter’s Tale, act 5, scene 2, where the discovery of Perdita is
narrated by one ‘gentleman’ to two others, employing a linguistic style which
relies heavily on which-relativisation. Note in the following how the relative
clause always introduces some form of subjective judgment or evaluation on
the part of the speaker:
Then have you lost a sight, which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of
(42–3/TLN 3052–3)
now he thanks the old shepherd, which stands by, like a weather-bitten conduit
of many kings’ reigns
(54–6/TLN 3064–5)
I never heard of such another encounter, which lames report to follow it, and
undoes description to do it
(56–8/TLN 3065–7)
Like an old tale still, which will have matter to rehearse, though credit be asleep,
and not an ear open
(61–3/TLN 3070–2)
this avouches the shepherd’s son; who has not only his innocence, which seems
much
(63–5/TLN 3072–3)
One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes, caught
the water, though not the fish, was when[. . .]
(81–3/TLN 3090–91)
Compare these subjectively inflected descriptions with those associated with
23
Here, too, single variable ANOVA for 2500-word chunks showed a significant increase of
Aside words in the late plays. For histories the median and mean frequencies of Aside were
0.17, 0.18; comedies, 0.14, 0.15; tragedies, 0.16, 0.18; late plays, 0.27, 0.29.
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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
‘that’ relatives, which tend to introduce material more likely to be objectively
true of the antecedent:
this avouches the shepherd’s son; who has not only his innocence, which seems
much, to justify him, but a handkerchief and rings of his that Paulina knows
(63–6/TLN 3072–5)
What, pray you, became of Antigonus, that carried hence the child?
(59–60/TLN 3068–9)
Neither relative here gives us access to any speaker’s subjectivity. Rather, each
supplies us with an objective fact about the head noun (Paulina recognises the
handkerchief and rings; Antigonus took the child away).
Remember: although we have concentrated on one scene, Docuscope has
shown that this type of effect increases significantly right across the late plays.
Asides play an important role, for example, in Prospero’s recounting of his
prior life as Duke of Milan to Miranda in The Tempest (2.1); in Giacomo’s
confession of his feigned seduction of Imogen at the conclusion of Cymbeline
(5.6); and in Henry’s declaration that it was his conscience that prompted him
to abandon his marriage to Katherine in Henry VIII (2.4). The very choice to
have the identification of Perdita narrated at the end of The Winter’s Tale
rather than enacted on stage seems characteristic of Shakespeare’s dramatic
style at this point: by this stage in his career, Shakespeare is exploring, and
exploiting, linguistic resources that allow him to track events through an individual’s consciousness rather than to depict them impersonally – a prefiguration of Henry James, perhaps. It is hard to imagine such a crucial scene being
narrated in one of the early plays.
We suspect that what Docuscope calls an Aside was, for Shakespeare and his
actors, a concrete opportunity for communicating a subjective impression of
things in the mind of the speaker (rather than rendering their supposed material
reality more ‘immediately’ in the physical world of the play). The dramaturgical
effect of this linguistic multiplication of ‘internal’ perspectives on the action
would have been atmospheric, contributing – as it still does – a certain prismatic
quality to the late plays that distances spectators from events rendered in the
play in a way that a more naturalistic theatrical practice does not. Folded into the
words and minds of the characters, events in the late plays can only, we might
say, be accessed from a particular linguistic angle. We have the option to go
further and make connections with other impressions that have been taken from
these plays – the sense that they are dreamlike, convoluted, difficult, spatially
impossible. These interpretations would be supported, but not dictated, by the
results of linguistic analysis, whose translation into dramaturgical strategy and
(thus) theatrical effects is never one way or automatic.
We can broaden this analysis of Asides in CF5 by looking to the second LAT
with which it is correlated, Verb State. This LAT consists mainly of present
tense usages of the verb to be (is, are, be) often taking the form: ‘X is Y’:
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A fair one are you
(The Winter’s Tale 4.4.82/TLN 1885)
the fairest flowers of the season
Are our carnations and streak’d gillyvors,
Which some call nature’s bastards
(The Winter’s Tale 4.4.86–8/TLN 1889–91)
over that art
Which you say adds to nature is an art
That nature makes
(The Winter’s Tale 4.4.96–8/TLN 1901–3)
This LAT is also triggered by ‘to be + Determiner’ combinations (as with ‘is an’
in the third example above), and have combining with forms such as being and
bearing on. The –ed forms of verbs also play a major role here, in combinations
with of (for example ‘composed of’), and when they occur clause-finally:
As you are certainly a gentleman, thereto
(The Winter’s Tale 1.02.391–2/TLN 499–500)
Clerk-like experienced
the need I have of thee thine own goodness hath made
(The Winter’s Tale 4.02.11–2/TLN 1624–5)
Non-finite forms such as ‘being’ and ‘given’, when used in a clause initially
(‘Being the mother of two sons . . .’; ‘Given the state of the roads . . .’) are also
coded for this LAT.
The common thread here is that all of these different Verb State strings are
associated with the communication of information that is taken to be (or at
least presented as being) universally true, or states of affairs which continue
from the past into the present. Verb State strings present continuous states
rather than discrete actions (‘He is kind’ vs ‘He acted kindly’). Interestingly,
modern rhetorical analysts associate its use with non-fiction texts: texts that
have a high information density, and texts that communicate information by
telling rather than showing. The tell/show distinction is useful in this
dramaturgical context because it helps us see that Verb State locutions are
inevitably distanced from the thick of unfolding action: a judgment of some
sort is being made in many of the examples above, the stative verb serving to
provide a snapshot of a person or thing in time so that the judgment or predication can take place. Even if the thing discussed – streak’d gillyvors, for
example – is a subject of heated debate, the ‘stilling’ or ‘fermata’ effect of the
stative verb seems more attuned to the ether of consciousness than the swells
of passion. A speaker who says ‘I love you’ is much more convincing than one
who states, ‘you are my love’.
The dramaturgical effects of this last feature is related, we believe, to the
subjective effects we have already identified in uses of its factor correlate above,
Asides. (Note the frequent co-location of both in the examples above). As we
have said, Verb State is involved with the communication of states rather than
actions, and we would argue that just as Asides involve a foregrounding of the
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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
subjectivity of the narrator, so Verb State tends to foreground the narrator, in
as much as it is more likely to involve the assertion of an opinion rather than
the description of an action. In terms of overall effect, this factor again suggests
a shift in dramatugical technique from the enactment of actual events in the
early genres (showing) to the depiction of the mind’s reaction to events in the
late plays (telling), what might be called a technique of subjective
particularisation. Note how in the following passage a simple statement of a
past event is elaborated with increasing subjectivity involving both Asides and
Verb State:
the penitent king, my master, hath sent for me; to whose feeling sorrows I might
be some allay, or I o’erween to think so, which is another spur to my departure
(The Winter’s Tale 4.02.6–9/TLN 1619–22)
The simple past event (‘the penitent king . . . hath sent for me’) becomes a
vehicle for reflection on the role of the speaker himself (‘to whose feeling
sorrows I might be some allay’), an explicit acknowledgement of selfabsorption (‘or I o’erween to think so’) and an assertion using Verb State and
Asides, which turns a subjective opinion into something resembling a generally
accepted truism (‘which is another spur to my departure’). The end result:
Asides and Verb State work hand in hand to render – not the truth of action
declared on the stage – but the truth of reaction as it unfolds in the mind.
Focalised retrospection and subjective particularisation are only shorthand
ways of describing the larger pattern of linguistic features that make the late
plays distinct. These descriptions were in some sense prompted by statistical
analyses, but were certainly not dictated by them. Nor can we say that the
factors above in any way exhaust the linguistic patterns that can be unearthed
through close analysis of the plays.24 Docuscope’s identification of Asides, for
example, as one of the key features of the style of late plays focused our attention on relativisation (and thus subordination) as a means of stamping the
subjective impressions of the speaker on what is said. A fuller analysis of
Shakespeare’s language in the late plays than we have space for here would
show that the effects we have associated with Asides are produced by a much
wider range of features than simply relatives introduced by ‘which’. Parallel
adverbial clauses and other forms of clausal subordination are also used to
specify or elaborate nouns with reference to prior events or actions, rather
than the attributive, adjectival modification we find in the earlier plays. These
24
Single variable ANOVA, for example, showed the late plays to be high in a LAT called Comparison, which includes words like ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’, ‘more’, ‘equal’, and ‘best’. This LAT was
not attached to any factor – it was not distributed evenly throughout the plays bur rather was
clustered in limited areas. It may be related to the tendency to stamp narratorial judgment on
the description of events, but then again, it may not. Linguistic features or patterns do not all
have to serve or respond to a single dramaturgical demand.
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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope
subordinating strategies cannot be ‘counted’ by Docuscope, but must be
turned up through careful parsing and comparisons of possible alternative
‘routes’ of expression. Where there is smoke, however, there is often fire, and
so the tokens of subordination counted by Docuscope may be more prominent precisely because all of the strategies being used in the late plays to
produce internal perspective are related. Our interpretive leap is to assert this
relatedness. The ‘which’ becomes worth counting, then, because it is a
linguistic footprint indexing complementary linguistic and dramaturgical
strategies; these, in turn, register or express a vision of the world and its order
that gets ascribed to tragicomedy by critics and is perhaps experienced by audiences in the theatre.
The factor analysis also suggests the ways in which the late plays are partially
like and unlike the other three genres, in effect mapping out the features of
family resemblance across a very large array of possible members. Although we
can only gesture toward these results here – no factor can really be understood
without an investigation and discussion of examples – it is clear that, given
what Docuscope can count, the late plays exhibit linguistic features that are
present in certain other genres but absent in others (or conversely, they lack
certain features that some cognate genre also lacks in relation to others). For
example, the late plays share features that distinguish both tragedies and
comedies, but not histories. At the level of 1000-word chunks, factor analysis
showed that the late plays were like both comedies and tragedies (and unlike
histories) in their comparatively high frequencies of the LATs named Denial/
Disclaim and Resistance (CF2/1000) and Person Pronouns (CF10/1000).25 The
late plays also lack something that both comedies and tragedies lack in relation
to histories – a LAT called Time Duration, which is made up of words and
phrases that indicate time spans, such as ‘in his eleventh year’, ‘summer’,
‘hour’, ‘when’, ‘while’, ‘day’, and ‘night’. While the resemblance with comedies
and tragedies is attested in one way or another by at least six factors at this
level, late plays do share some similarity with the history plays in that both
possess a comparatively high frequency of a LAT called Generalization, which
includes words and phrases such as ‘every’, ‘all’, ‘of all’, ‘for all’, ‘with all’, and
‘every thing’. An analysis of criss-crossing similarities and differences on this
scale is far beyond the means of this paper, but even a cursory glance at the
results points out the degree to which Docuscope’s understanding of ‘pattern’
and ‘significance’ implies multiple forms of relation, often predicated on the
simultaneous presence and absence of key features in groups of texts in some
apparent pattern of coordination.
25
Denial/Disclaim LATs include words and phrases such as ‘cannot’, ‘not’, ‘is not’, ‘nothing’,
‘no’, and ‘never’. Its partner in CF2/1000, Resistance, includes words and phrases such as ‘yet’,
‘but’, ‘against him’, ‘against her’, ‘even so’, ‘rather’, and ‘would not’. The LAT Person Pronoun,
which constitutes CF10/1000, includes the following: ‘he’, ‘his’, ‘him’, ‘himself’, ‘she’, ‘her’,
‘hers’, ‘herself’, ‘whose’.
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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
We must remain content here to conclude that, on a truly pervasive
linguistic level, the late plays seem to do what many auditors and readers have
experienced them doing on stage and page: they make way for inner life and
revelation through memory and recognition; they pivot theatrical and readerly
attention on the movements of a mind engaged in thought; they accommodate
complexity of plot and long stretches of wandering by allowing the contingencies of romance wandering to be glossed with ruminating digressions; and they
subordinate the declaration of actions present and past to the stillness of judgment. These dramaturgical possibilities are not dictated by the ‘types’ of
language being used, just as the ‘types’ of language that are spoken on stage are
not an expression of some universal set of theatrical scenarios or archetypal
‘scenes’. Rather, theatrical utterance and the action we associate with a particular genre must be part of a single structure – drama – which in the end is a
story told by speaking beings on a stage in a limited amount of time.
If approaching Shakespeare ‘by the numbers’ opens up another window
onto the playwright’s late plays and genre, it should also tell us something new
about the ways we might choose to read Shakespeare and other early modern
writers in the coming years. Initiatives such as the Text Creation Partnership
of Early English Books Online, for example, are creating a corpus of 25,000
digitised early modern texts that could be adapted to far-reaching forms of
quantitative analysis.26 As this corpus of Early English Books becomes available for statistical analysis, critics will have an unprecedented set of resources
to employ in thinking about traditional ‘literary’ questions such as genre, style,
influence, and perhaps authorship. Having worked through a limited number
of critical questions with one particularly rich corpus (Shakespeare’s plays)
and the institution of its criticism, we believe our work with Docuscope may
prove instructive to future scholars who want to understand the usefulness of
‘counting things’ in humanistic inquiry – quantity being perhaps one of the
last concepts in the humanities which has not come in for rigorous theorisation.27 How is it, for example, that something like a ‘factor’ from multivariate
statistical analysis might capture something as intimate as genre – ‘lateness’ in
Shakespeare’s style being, admittedly, a difficult concept to defend on even the
most subjective grounds?28 How can classifying vast numbers or ‘strings’ of
words into their ‘functions’ and then looking for patterns in their underlying
26
27
28
According to Early English Books Online, the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) is in the
process of creating SGML coding for the full text of 25,000 EEBO works, allowing users to
search the full ASCII text of the documents. Because Docuscope can analyse vast numbers of
texts once they have been rendered into ASCII form, we find the potential for future quantitative work with such a corpus tremendously exciting.
For a recent attempt to think about the value of quantity in literary studies, see Franco
Moretti’s polemically charged Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory (New
York, 2005).
See the essay by Gordon McMullan in this collection.
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Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope
use/absence provide a sense of the singular experiential richness of a literary
text? The answer, we believe, depends upon what one decides to count and
how one decides to understand the significance of what has been counted.
Both of these decisions are interpretive and contextual, even if the things
counted are either objectively ‘there’ or ‘not there’ to be counted in an editorially stabilized text.
Genre, it seems to us, is just as much a coordinated pattern of various types
of dramaturgical and linguistic effects as it is some kind of ‘defining set of
properties’: if it was not, genre would be completely inaccessible to multivariate analysis. Indeed, the difficulty of saying exactly what makes a genre a
genre, a difficulty that leads Mowat to invoke Wittgenstein’s family resemblance analogy, may be precisely what makes genre amenable to quantitative
statistical analysis: only multivariate analysis can produce a ‘thing’ as abstract
as a ‘factor’ that coordinates relative frequencies across large numbers of
groups. Only a factor, that is, can call the critic’s attention, in some organised
way, to the pervasive things that happen and don’t happen at the same time in
a set of literary texts. The fact that readers may actually register such quantitative factors as qualities within a particular work suggests that the proverbial
quantitative/qualitative divide – or Dilthey’s contrast between the geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) and the naturwissenschaften (natural
sciences) – hides certain areas of overlap that ought to be explored more carefully.29 As Henri Bergson would say, every change in quantity is ultimately a
change in quality, although he probably would never have dreamed of
counting non-restrictive clauses in the late Shakespeare.30
Just as important, the use of language in the theatre, because it is constrained by material factors such as the number of actors, the size of the stage,
the various ‘technologies’ for simulating experience (music, noise, machines,
etc.), is deeply marked by these constraints; when one is ‘counting’ the various
types of language that get used in the theatre, then, one must not underestimate the degree to which the texts of plays are saturated with dramaturgical
exigencies – the need to do something with language in a particular way in a
particular set of circumstances. If you want to tell a story about wandering
siblings and long-lost children and do it without the cinema technology of
flashback, expect to do a lot of verbalised retrospection. So too, you may have
to rely more on the emotional charge of subjective immersions, where a
speaker narrates his or her way around a memory to encounter joy or despair,
than on the narrated misfires of action in comic mishap (with its props and
29
30
The distinction is central to Introduction to the Human Sciences, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and
Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, 1988).
Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.
L. Pogson (New York, 2001), ch. 1. Bergson’s notion of ‘duration’, it should be noted, is specifically designed to foreclose attempts at ‘converting’ quantitative differences into qualitative
ones. We have, in our own analyses, tried to avoid such facile conversions.
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On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
circumstantial judgments), tragic plotting and counterplotting (with its
scenographically inclined onstage contrivers), or the concrete detail of historical conflict and battle. To understand what a particular kind of play does with
its verbal resources, which is really what we mean by the word dramaturgy
here, it makes sense to ask a blindfolded critic like Docuscope to feel its way
around the corpus. You could, similarly, learn a great deal about how your
house or apartment works by asking someone else to live in it for a month and
then tell you how it works. Certain things are connected that you may have
never noticed – the tap water pressure, say, seems to fluctuate whenever the
neighbours turn on their sprinkler. So too, rather prosaically, we have discovered that Shakespeare’s penchant for certain types of subordination and verb
forms in the late plays seems to complement a relative abundance of focalised
retrospection: these things seem appropriate given the kind of story he and his
company are trying to tell. One can try to grasp such interrelations through
trial and error, but the odds of doing so are probably only slightly better than
that of a monkey writing The Tempest. As literary critics attempting to read
Shakespeare by the numbers, we are much more lucky than the proverbial
monkey in the statistical parable. The deck is loaded in our favour – there are
patterns, no end of patterns, for us to pore over while reading Shakespeare by
the numbers. It is only because he was trying to do something in the theatre,
however, that even one of those patterns makes sense to us today.
153
10
Turn and Counterturn:
Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in
Massinger’s The Renegado
MICHAEL NEILL
W
HEN The Renegado was first published in 1630, it was advertised on its
title page as ‘A Tragicomædie’. Since the play was evidently printed
under Massinger’s close supervision, and since the dramatist’s formative professional years had been spent as the collaborator and protegé of the pioneer of
English tragicomedy, John Fletcher, the descriptor must have been carefully
chosen. Taking his cue from the theory and practice of the genre’s Italian
progenitor, Giambattista Guarini, Fletcher had done more than anyone in the
English theatre to establish the status of tragicomedy as a legitimate ‘third
kind’, distinguished from the ‘mongrel’ gallimaufries denounced by neoclassicists like Sir Philip Sidney. In his well-known epistle ‘To the Reader’ of
The Faithful Shepherdess, Fletcher had briefly paraphrased Guarini’s defence of
the new genre in The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, giving the Italian’s
elaborate neo-Aristotelian arguments a markedly pragmatic twist. Where
Guarini had devoted a good deal of his treatise to the ‘architectonic end’ of
tragicomedy, adapting Aristotle’s idea of tragic catharsis to fit a genre that
aimed, like comedy, ‘to purge the mind from the evil affection of melancholy’,1
Fletcher concentrated almost exclusively on what Guarini called its ‘instrumental end’, underlining the way in which tragicomedy absorbed elements of
tragic plotting and characterisation to produce an authentically mixed form:
insisting that ‘a God is as lawful in this as in a tragedie, and mean people as in a
comedie’. Fletcher gives special prominence to his reworking of Guarini’s
famous formulation, il pericolo, non la morte (the danger not the death): ‘A
tragi-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it
1
Cited from Allan H. Gilbert (ed.), Literary Criticism Plato to Dryden (Detroit, 1962), pp.
520–1.
154
Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado
wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, but brings some near it,
which is inough to make it no comedie.’2 In hindsight, this epistle, with its
emphasis on the comic peripety by which an apparently tragic sequence of
events is miraculously turned to benevolent comic ends, has come to read like
a manifesto, announcing the tastes and practice of a new generation for whom
the greatest source of dramatic pleasure would lie in the intricacies of plot and
the cunning manipulation of audience expectation.3 Thus William Cartwright’s verses for the 1647 Beaumont and Fletcher folio single out the wit of
Fletcher’s designs for special praise:
None can prevent the Fancy, and see through
At the first opening: all stand wond’ring how
The thing will be, untill it is; which thence,
With fresh delight, still cheats, still takes the sence.4
As a drama that was ‘tragic in possibility, but not in fact’,5 tragicomedy was
especially suited to such pleasurable deceit; and the key to its ‘delight’,
Fletcher’s apostles insisted, was to be found in the ‘wonder’ or ‘admiration’
excited by what Davenant called ‘the Plots swift change, and counterturn’6 – by
the dramatist’s ability (as Henry Harington put it in his verses on Fletcher’s
Wild Goose Chase) ‘T’excell our guess at ever turn and shift’.7
‘Turn’ and ‘counterturn’ referred to those sudden upsets and reversals of
expectation otherwise known as peripeteia – the ‘counterturn’ being identified
by Dryden with the penultimate element in classical plotting, the castastasis,
‘which destroys that expectation [hitherto created], imbroyles the action in
new difficulties, and leaves you far distant from that hope in which it found
you’.8 ‘Turn’ did, however, have another common application that had been
given prominence in the action of a number of plays dealing with the vexed
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
‘To the Reader’, in John Fletcher, The Faithfull Shepheardesse (London, 1610); cf. Compendium, p. 511: ‘tragicomedy takes from tragedy great persons but not its great action, its
verisimilar plot but not its true one . . . its danger but not its death . . . [while] from comedy it
takes . . . feigned difficulty, happy reversal, and above all the comic order’.
See the classic accounts of English tragicomic practice by Philip Edwards, ‘The Danger not the
Death’, in John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (eds), Jacobean Theatre, Stratford-uponAvon Studies 1 (1960), pp. 159–77, and Eugene Waith, The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven, 1952).
Cited from The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. Glover and A.R. Waller, 10
vols (Cambridge, 1905–1912). For a more detailed account of this trend in taste, see Michael
Neill, ‘ “Wits most accomplished Senate”: The Audience of the Caroline Private Theaters’, SEL
18 (1978), 341–60.
Compendium, p. 522
Epilogue to The First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House (London, 1656)
Cited from The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, ed. Fredson Bowers, 10
vols (Cambridge, 1966–96), V, p. 247
Essay of Dramatic Poesy, in H.T. Swedenborg et al., The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols
(Berkeley, 1951–89), XVII, p. 23.
155
Michael Neill
religious politics of the Mediterranean and Eastern worlds – not least in a work
to which The Renegado arguably served as a kind of theatrical riposte, Robert
Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1610).9 In this context, of course, ‘turn’
meant to change one’s religious allegiance – to apostasise and become a renegade, but also to undergo conversion or to repent (OED). As its title promises,
Massinger’s tragicomedy places this kind of ‘turning’ at the centre of its action;
but not only that – in it there turns out to be a striking consonance between
religious ‘turning’ and the successive peripeties on which the excitements of its
plot depend. By such means, this essay will suggest, the dramatist contrived to
give a new and deepened significance to the sensational turns and counterturns of tragicomic design, showing how the transformation of tragic
materials by the imposition of Guarini’s ‘comic order’ might be used to
express a providentialist vision running counter to the Calvinistic pessimism
of late Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedy. It will be part of my argument that
this approach to tragicomic design is related to two conspicuous oddities of
the play: the installation of a Jesuit priest at the moral centre of its action and
the adumbration of theological positions that seem strikingly sympathetic to
Catholic doctrine. In this context it becomes possible to see tragicomedy’s
increasingly dominant place in the theatrical repertory of the late 1620s and
1630s not simply as a matter of aesthetic fashion, but as an epiphenomenon of
larger tendencies in the religious politics of the time.
A fully historicised reading of Massinger’s play must also take account of a
second major alteration to his sources: The Renegado is based, in large part, on
a group of captivity narratives by Cervantes, of which the most important are
‘The Captive’s Tale’ from Don Quixote (Part 1, Chaps 39–40) and a drama
built on the same set of events entitled Los Baños de Argel (The Prisons of
Algiers). From them Massinger borrowed the two main elements of his plot:
the story of a Christian maiden’s abduction by a renegade and the efforts of her
grief-stricken brother to rescue her from the Turks; and the story of an infatuated Turkish woman’s pursuit of a handsome Christian lover. At times
Massinger makes quite detailed use of these originals: for example, the coup de
théâtre in 1.3, where Donusa unveils her dazzling beauty to make Vitelli fall in
love with her, exactly repeats an episode from Act 2 of Los Baños. In Cervantes,
too, the heroine, Zahara, spurns her high-ranking Moorish suitor, and is eager
to join her lover when the Christians engineer their escape from Algiers.
Zahara, however, has been a secret Christian from the start, so that the Spanish
play offers no equivalent to the sensational counterturn produced by Donusa’s
renunciation of Mahomet in Act 4. Massinger’s Tunis, moreover, is a very
different city from the Algiers that Cervantes remembered from his own experience as a prisoner of the Moors: its symbolic centre has shifted from the
prison to the marketplace – a point that the dramatist underlines by
9
See below, p. 159.
156
Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado
converting Cervantes’ Spanish Christians into citizens of Venice, a republic
famous for the wealth it garnered from trade with the Orient, and by introducing his hero as a merchant, come to do business in the bazaar.
For a play originally subtitled ‘The Gentleman of Venice’, The Renegado
begins in a surprising way: ‘You have hired a shop, then?’ (1.1.1).10 This blunt
demand seems better fitted to the commercial world of city comedy than to the
aristocratic and romantic ambience conventionally associated with tragicomic
drama; and the ensuing dialogue only compounds this sense of generic confusion. The speaker and his interlocutor are identified as a Venetian shopkeeper
(Vitelli) and his apprentice (Gazet) who have travelled to the Ottomancontrolled city of Tunis, where, capitalising on the ‘free-trading’ allowed to
foreigners in the ‘mart-time’ (1.1.45–6), they are preparing to vend a selection
of rather suspect consumer goods in the marketplace. In addition to their
stock of ‘choice China dishes . . . [and] pure Venetian crystal’ (1.3.1–2), they
plan to entice their customers with a display of alluring portraits. Ostensibly
‘curious pictures of the rarest beauties of Europa’, executed by the likes of
‘Michaelangelo, / Our great Italian workman’ (1.3.1–4; 129–30), these are
almost immediately revealed as no more than the ‘figures / Of bawds and
common courtesans in Venice’ (1.1.12–13) – cheap paintings of the kind
apparently used for advertisement in the Venetian flesh trade, objects of the
crudest commercial and sexual exchange.11 Together with the third scene,
where the apprentice is discovered in the shop itself, whipping up custom for
their ‘toys and trifles’ (1.3.103) with the familiar pedlar’s cry of ‘What do you
lack?’ (1.3.1, 4, 33, 91, 97) – this opening places Vitelli and Gazet in a milieu of
fleshly appetite, commercial appetancy, and petty fraud familiar to audiences
of Jonson and Middleton. Named as he is after a small Venetian coin, Gazet, in
particular, with his mixture of cynical opportunism, greed, and naivety, is a
character who would not be out of place in the appetitive world of
Bartholomew Fair or A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.
Since this rather dubious commercial setting has no precedent in
Massinger’s sources, its upset to audience expectations was clearly a deliberate
effect; and one of the striking things about the design of The Renegado is the
way in which it yokes together elements from a whole range of genres and
subgenres: in addition to Jonsonian city comedy and voyage drama, it recalls
Marlovian heroic tragedy in the blustering rant of the renegade Grimaldi, and
revisits citizen romance in its story of ‘A poor mechanic pedlar’ (3.4.80) who
wins the love (and dowry) of an oriental princess. It is as though Massinger,
remembering Sidney’s strictures on ‘mongrel tragicomedy’, had set out to
show how a judiciously mixed drama could successfully integrate the most
10
11
All citations from The Renegado are to the text in Daniel J. Vitkus, Three Turk Plays from Early
Modern England (New York, 2000).
See, for example, Angelica Bianca’s use of a portrait to advertise her charms in Aphra Behn’s
The Rover.
157
Michael Neill
diverse materials, exploiting them to help produce precisely those unexpected
switches of tone and direction that were so important to tragicomic delight.
Part of this strategy involves the referencing of individual works from a variety
of kinds – not least through the subtitle under which the play seems originally
to have been presented:12 inevitably ‘The Gentleman of Venice’ invites comparison with two of Shakespeare’s best-known dramas;13 and Massinger’s
handling of both plot and setting seems calculated to reinforce these connections. On the one hand, the story of Grimaldi – a Venetian Christian turned
Turk, who has become a captain in the service of Moorish Tunis, but who
repents and reverts to his former allegiance – resembles a reverse image of
Shakespeare’s tragic story of a renegade mercenary from the other side of the
Mediterranean divide – a play that first appeared in the Revels account books
under its alternative title, ‘The Moor of Venice’;14 on the other, Massinger’s plot
has obvious parallels with the comic design of The Merchant of Venice: in each
play a young Venetian wins himself an exotic bride endowed with fabulous
wealth, and in each a Christian lover successfully elopes with a convertite bride
whose dowry consists of rich jewels and a casket crammed with treasure. Yet
even as the play’s subtitle highlights this relation with The Merchant, it teasingly distances the play from the bourgeois world of commerce by suggesting
that its real concern is with the fortunes of a ‘gentleman’. It is as if, steering a
middle path between the mercantile venality of Shakespeare’s Venetian adventurers and the passion-driven extravagance of his Moor, Massinger were
offering to show how a gentleman of Venice should behave, tempering his
dangerous appetites with reason and faith.
Arguably, though, The Renegado’s most important debt to The Merchant is
12
13
14
The play was licensed by Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, on 17 April 1624, under the
title of ‘The Renegado, or the Gentleman of Venice’: the subtitle did not, for some reason,
survive in the published text; but Herbert must have found it on the manuscript submitted to
him, and the first performances were presumably advertised under this title. Given
Massinger’s close supervision of the published text, the decision to abbreviate it must have
been his: perhaps it resulted from the way in which by 1630, as Benedict Robinson has argued,
emergent Laudian polemics had retrospectively transformed Massinger’s meanings, making
questions of religious allegiance (and the role of Francisco) seem much more central than the
social and generic issues attendant on the protagonist’s rank – see Benedict S. Robinson, ‘The
Turks, Caroline Politics, and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado’, in Adam Zucker and Alan B.
Farmer (eds), Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English
Stage, 1625–1642 (Basingstoke, 2007); I am grateful to Dr Robinson for supplying me with
typescripts of this essay, and also of ‘Strange Commodities’, a chapter from his forthcoming
book, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to
Milton (New York, 2007).
Massinger’s subtitle may have influenced James Shirley’s choice of title for his tragicomedy
The Gentleman of Venice (1639), though there are no other apparent links between the two
plays, and Shirley’s play may perform its own meta-commentary on Shakespeare’s tragedy.
The reference is in the account book of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, which records a
court performance in November, 1604 of ‘The Moor of Venis’.
158
Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado
of a larger structural kind; for, though nominally a comedy, Shakespeare’s
play, with the spectacular bouleversement of its trial scene, provided an excellent home-grown prototype for the aspect of tragicomic design epitomised in
Guarini’s famous formula, il pericolo non la morte. With a stroke of engaging
wit, the ‘counterturn’ of The Merchant of Venice begins precisely as Antonio’s
fate appears to hang in the balance of a pair of scales – instruments that are said
to ‘turn’ when one side weighs heavier than the other; and, with a second ingenious flourish, it is completed at the moment when the villain Jew is forced
(against his nature) to submit to the demands of ‘kind’ (in the literary as well
as the moral sense of that word), to yield (against his faith) a ‘gent[i]le answer’,
and to ‘turn’ Christian – a transformation echoed in the light-hearted metamorphoses of the comic catastrophe in which women-turned-men turn
women again. In The Renegado, too, the counterturn involves a narrowly
averted execution and once again pivots on a spectacular episode of conversion, in which an infidel turns Christian. Such parallels are a reminder of how
often, in the increasingly self-conscious late-Jacobean and Caroline theatre,
plays have to be recognised as being in conversation with one another – something to which tragicomedy, with its inherently dialectical form, was especially
well suited. In the case of The Renegado this engagement with other plays
extends well beyond Shakespeare.
Daniel Vitkus has already drawn attention to ways in which The Renegado
can be read as ‘responding to’ a play by his former colleague in the Henslowe
stable – Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (c.1610) – ‘rewriting it
with a happier ending’.15 The conversion scene that makes possible that happy
turn of events may have been inspired by The Merchant, but its immediate
model lay closer to hand, in a tragicomedy by Massinger’s sometime mentor
and collaborator, John Fletcher: The Island Princess had been staged by the
King’s Men little more than a year before The Renegado was performed by their
rivals at the Cockpit. It is even possible that the Lady Elizabeth’s Men
suggested to Massinger the idea of a play that might emulate the success of
Fletcher’s oriental fantasy. Both plays exploit the glamour of exotic settings; in
both the gentleman protagonist achieves his ends by assuming the guise of a
merchant; and in both the choice of disguise can be seen as a device for validating English commercial ambitions – even as the play ostensibly disavows
them with the pretence that merchant enterprise is no more than a convenient
instrument for an old-fashioned chivalric heroism.16 Above all (as Marvin T.
15
16
Vitkus, Three Turk Plays, pp. 41–2. Cf. also Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the
Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 158–9; and Patricia Parker,
‘Preposterous Conversions: Turning Turk and its “Pauline” Rerighting’, JEMCS 2 (2002),
1–34.
See Michael Neill, ‘ “Materiall Flames”: Romance, Empire and Mercantile Fantasy in John
Fletcher’s The Island Princess’, in Putting History to the Question (New York, 2000), pp.
311–38.
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Michael Neill
Herrick long ago noted),17 The Renegado seems to model its climax on
Fletcher’s last triumphant peripety, when a foreign princess is so moved by her
Christian lover’s fortitude in the face of death that she announces her conversion to his inspirational faith.
Considered as a theatrical metacommentary on Fletcher’s play, The
Renegado exhibits some important differences, however – not least in its attitude towards cultural contact. The precipitate escape of Massinger’s Venetians
from Tunis contrasts with the amity and ‘universal gladness’ celebrated by the
triumphant Portuguese and their East Indian allies at the end of The Island
Princess, where the King of Tidore is sufficiently impressed by Armusia’s steadfast courage and his sister’s conversion to contemplate turning Christian
himself. While they may admire Vitelli’s unwavering resistance to conversion,
Massinger’s Muslim potentates feel no such admiration for Donusa’s apostasy,
and never deviate from their resolve to execute the offenders. The Renegado,
moreover, deliberately frustrates the conventional expectations of tragicomic
ending, replacing The Island Princess’s circle of cross-cultural reconciliation,
with a scene of frustrated bafflement: instead of focusing on the happiness of
the reunited lovers as they sail away from Tunis with the other Christians,
Massinger’s final scene is given over to the ‘grief and rage’ of Asambeg and
Mustapha, who are left to mutual recrimination and the prospect of torture at
the hands of their ‘incensed master’, the Sultan (5.8.31–9).18 This however
only makes the issue of religious conversion more important: where Quisara’s
change of allegiance is accomplished in four lines (‘Your faith, and your religion must be like ye . . . I do embrace your faith sir, and your fortune’,
5.2.118–21), Massinger extends Donusa’s conversion across two scenes,
climaxing it with a carefully improvised baptism that turns the hero from a
merely passive example of Christian virtue into a kind of surrogate priest. In
The Island Princess, as in Othello, it is colour that most conspicuously divides
European and ‘Moors’: Fletcher’s East Indians are distinguished from his
Portuguese adventurers primarily by their ‘tawny’ skins – and by the
17
18
Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy (Chicago, 1955), p. 291.
In ‘Strange Commodities’, Benedict Robinson, likening the Venetians’ flight with the abandonment of Prospero’s island at the end of The Tempest, argues that Massinger repudiates ‘the
possibility of any legitimate contact with “Turks” ’, because such intercourse can only be ‘contaminating’. However, given that the hero departs with a sizeable fortune in Ottoman jewels –
the portion of a princess who has herself been figured as the choicest commodity of all – the
conclusion we are to draw about his adventuring is not, perhaps, quite so clear-cut: in fact, it
might well seem that Massinger’s fugitives are allowed to have it both ways, returning from
their enterprise laden with wealth, even as they celebrate their departure from Tunis by
launching a defiant ‘broadside’ at their infidel pursuers. Such equivocation is in accord with
the divided attitude towards Ottoman Turkey described in Jonathan Burton, Traffic and
Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (Newark, 2005): Burton shows how ‘a
discourse of captivity and degeneracy’ competed with more positive reactions designed to
encourage trade – sometimes within the same text (p. 24).
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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado
lamentable want of ‘temperance’ of which their colour appears to be the
outward sign.19 In The Renegado, Donusa may scorn her Moorish suitor
Mustapha for his ‘wainscot face’ and ‘tadpole-like complexion’ (3.1.48–50);
but for Massinger (as his title indicates) the crucial divisions between Venice
and Tunis are cultural, political, and, above all, religious. Although the principalities of Tidore and Ternate, in common with most of their region, had by
the early seventeenth century given their allegiance to Islam, Fletcher seems
uninterested in ethnographic niceties, representing his East Indians simply as
generic heathens. As such they are creatures of unstable belief who – though
they fall easy prey to the villainous Governor’s seductions when he appears in
the guise of hate-mongering pagan priest – prove immediately susceptible to
conversion when faced with evidence of Christian spiritual and material superiority. Massinger, by contrast, imagines the conflict between European and
Turk as a war of opposed civilizations,20 making use of what were already
becoming two of the most enduring tropes of orientalism – on the one hand
stressing the distinction between Christian ‘liberty’ and Mahometan
‘license’,21 and on the other contrasting the ‘bondage’ imposed by arbitrary,
passion-driven whims of Turkish autocracy with the social and political ‘freedom’ enjoyed by rational Europeans. So the humiliations of Ottoman slavery
are set against the good ‘service’ that governs relations among the citizens of
Venice; the ‘unbounded’ power of the Sultan (2.4.89) and his tyrannous
subordinates is opposed to the voluntary submission and self-restraint exemplified by the Venetian hero; and the ‘free’ conduct allowed to European
women is contrasted with the repressive ‘restraint of freedom’ to which their
Turkish sisters are subjected by a religion that, while ostensibly ‘allow[ing] all
pleasure’ to its adherents, actually confines the ‘free enjoyment’ of desire to
men (1.2.16–50; 4.2.126–9).
It is this structure of oppositions, together with the attendant problematics
of trading between the two – above all by ‘turning Turk’ or turning Christian –
that helps to account for the key role given to two figures who have no obvious
equivalent in Massinger’s sources: Grimaldi, the blaspheming apostate who
gives the play its title, and Francisco, the Jesuit priest who manages its
sequence of redemptive conversions.22 Just as Donusa’s inward metamorphosis is without any counterpart in Cervantes, so too are Grimaldi’s defiant
19
20
21
22
See Michael Neill, ‘ “Materiall Flames”: Romance, Empire, and Mercantile Fantasy in John
Fletcher’s Island Princess’, in Putting History to the Question (New York, 2000), pp. 311–338
(330–4).
For an approach stressing this aspect of the play, see Jack D’Amico, The Moor in English
Renaissance Drama (Tampa, 1991), pp. 120–32.
On the endlessly recycled myths of Mahometan licence and lust, see Vitkus, Turning Turk, pp.
115–19), and ‘Turning Turk: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor’, Shakespeare
Quarterly 28 (1997), 145–77 (155–9).
Jonathan Burton has suggested that Francisco’s role may have been partially inspired by the
story of Sir Francis Verney – an English corsair who was active in Algiers from 1608 and
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Michael Neill
blasphemies and the sudden repentance that announces his reversion to
Christianity. The corsair who is responsible for Costanza’s abduction in Los
Baños is killed early in the play by a second renegade, who (like Grimaldi in Act
3) is a penitent – he, however, is quickly discovered and given no opportunity
to return to Christendom. Thus, where conversion and repentance are merely
part of the background against which Cervantes’ action unfolds, in The
Renegado, as the prominence given to Francisco’s spiritual counselling indicates, they are central to Massinger’s tragicomic purpose.
The addition of such a choric moraliser is the kind of adjustment we might
expect from a dramatist of Massinger’s didactic bent, but the choice of a
Catholic priest is much more surprising – especially since Francisco is no
ordinary priest but a a member of an order notoriously anathematised by all
God-fearing Protestants, and disliked even by loyalist fellow Catholics.23
Denounced as masters of equivocation and disguise, Jesuit priests were unique
in being required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Pope, and the suspicion
which this invited had seemed amply confirmed by their implication in the
Gunpowder Plot. The order had even been singled out for several pages of
execration in one of the travel narratives on which Massinger drew most
extensively for his picture of the Ottoman world;24 yet Francisco, unlike nearly
every papist cleric in the drama of the time, is presented as an entirely admirable character, no Machiavellian politician, but a steadfast friend and counsellor: saluted by Vitelli, as the ‘Stay of my steps in this life, / And guide to all
my blessed hopes hereafter’ (1.1.164–5), he turns out to be responsible not
only for the Christian hero’s salvation and the Turkish heroine’s conversion,
but for the redemption of Grimaldi, the renegade pirate, and hence for the
rescue of all the play’s Christian captives from their Turkish persecutors. The
priest, moreover, is made the agent of an exacting Christian stoicism, a code
whose moral and theological rigour produces a species of ethical counterturn
by paradoxically enabling a spiritual ‘liberty’ inaccessible to Turkish license.
To idealise a member of the Society of Jesus in this way would have been
problematic at any time; and in the atmosphere of controversy provoked by
the Prince of Wales’s negotiations for a Spanish match, it looks like a
particularly provocative choice – even if (or perhaps especially if) Massinger
were the closet Catholic suspected by Gifford, rather than the Whiggish
Protestant imagined by Coleridge.25 Yet (in contrast to Middleton’s militantly
23
24
25
converted to Islam in 1610; five years later, falling ‘desperately sick’ Verney was reconverted by
an English Jesuit (Traffic and Turning, pp. 149–50).
See Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660
(Cambridge, 1999), pp. 113–18.
See William Biddulph, The Travels of certaine Englishmen into Africa, Asia, Troy, Bithynia,
Thracia, and to the Blacke Sea (London, 1609), pp. 108–12, 120–1.
See William Gifford (ed.), The Plays of Philip Massinger (London, 1813), vol. 1, p. xliv, and vol.
2, p. 122 and T.A. Dunn, Philip Massinger (London, 1957), pp. 49–51, 184–91: Dunn offers a
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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado
anti-Spanish A Game at Chess, performed later the same year) The Renegado
seems to have attracted neither censorship nor any conspicuous public outcry.
Compounding the puzzle, the 1630 quarto appeared with a dedication to
George Harding, Baron Berkeley – a great-nephew and sometime ward, it is
true, of a prominent Catholic nobleman, the late Earl of Northampton – but
the same man to whom John Webster, using strikingly similar language, had
dedicated his thoroughly Calvinist tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, seven years
earlier.26 Given that The Renegado’s source material came from Catholic Spain,
it might easily be assumed that the priest was simply part of Massinger’s inherited baggage – but in fact he is entirely a creature of the dramatist’s invention,
and any serious attempt to understand the play in its historical context must
come to terms with his role.
Benedict Robinson has sought to circumvent the problem by proposing
that The Renegado is actually a veiled commentary on the events of 1622–23 in
which the categories Catholic and Turk need to be understood as standing for
something other than themselves:
the arrival of Gazet and Vitelli in Tunis, disguised, recalls Charles and
Buckingham’s disguised escapes to and from Spain, and the danger of Vitelli’s
being seduced into conversion surely evokes the danger of a Catholic marriage.
This requires, however, a rather strained ‘allegorical displacement’ whereby
the audience would ‘[read] Islam as a stand-in for Catholicism, and . . . forget
the actual Catholicism of the main characters’.27 Such oblivion seems unlikely,
not just because of the public mood in 1624, but because the dramatist actually
26
27
detailed account of the case for regarding Massinger as a crypto-Catholic or Catholic sympathiser. Claire Jowitt’s Voyage Drama and Gender Politics 1589–1642 (Manchester, 2003),
acknowledging that ‘Massinger’s use of Francisco . . . as a heroic figure at a time when there
was such strong anti-Catholic and anti-Jesuit feeling is unusual’, argues (unconvincingly, in
my view) that attention to the details of the plot exposes him as ‘an unstrustworthy machiavel’
(p. 182).
Nothing is known of Harding’s religious allegiance, but he had affiliations with Puritan as well
as Catholic families: he was related by marriage to the Earl of Huntingdon, the leader of a
strongly Puritan, anti-Buckingham faction, to whose sister Massinger had dedicated The Duke
of Milan in 1623. Massinger’s other dedicatees included the Catholic Earl of Caernarvon, to
whom he offered A New Way to Pay Old Debts in 1633, but the dedication invokes the dramatist’s ties to Caernarvon’s guardian and father-in-law, the Puritan Earl of Pembroke, whom his
father had served as steward.
See Robinson, ‘The Turks’, 224. A similar approach is taken by Claire Jowitt, who reads the
play as ‘a geographically displaced account of recent anxieties about Charles’s vulnerability to
conversion to Catholicism whilst negotiating a marriage with the Infanta’, in Voyage Drama,
p. 178. Jowitt’s and Robinson’s arguments were partially anticipated by Doris Adler in Philip
Massinger (Boston, 1987), who also interprets the play as a partial allegory of English politics,
‘hold[ing] out the hope that Prince Charles will make a good wife of Henrietta Maria [i.e. by
converting her like Donusa], but little hope that he will truly “husband” England [Paulina]’
(p. 59).
163
Michael Neill
seems to go out of his way to highlight the characters’ religious allegiance by
introducing a number of controversial points of doctrine, including justification by works (1.1.24; 4.1.96,129), the role of confession and penance
(3.2.1–11), the significance of the Mass and of ritual vestments (4.1.31–2,
81–2), the magical power of relics (1.1.146–53; 2.5.161–3), and the continuing
possibility of miracles (2.5.150). Most conspicuously of all, Massinger makes
the crucial ‘counterturn’ of his tragicomic plot depend upon the efficacy of lay
baptism (5.1.29–41; 5.3.110–16) – a ritual espoused only by those committed
to the Catholic belief in the magical efficacy of the sacraments.
As if conscious of the intractability of the conundrum, Robinson suggests
that it was ultimately ‘in the Caroline period that The Renegado discover[ed]
its [full] political relevance’ (‘The Turks’, 214). Thus his essay chooses to
concentrate on what he believes were the changed resonances of the play by
1630, when the full swing of the Laudian revolution would have made some
play-goers more ready to acknowledge the commonalities between Roman
Catholic and Anglican doctrine, less suspicious of ritual and sacramental
mysteries, and more sympathetic to a view of Mediterranean politics that
stressed the essential unity of Christendom in the face of an aggressive Islam.
Ex post facto reinterpretations like Robinson’s can hardly provide the explanation that he claims for The Renegado’s ‘apparent endorsement’ of Francisco.
A more fruitful approach is suggested by the work of historians such as Nicholas Tyacke and Thomas Cogswell which demonstrates the exceptional fluidity
and complexity of English religious politics at the time of the play’s composition and first performances.28 Already by the second decade of the seventeenth
century, the broadly ‘Arminian’ reaction against official Calvinism, which
would reach its apogee under the archbishopric of William Laud, had begun to
gather head, attracting powerful supporters both inside and outside the
Church. The direction in which the official wind was beginning to blow was
marked by the publication of Richard Montagu’s anti-Calvinist A New Gagg
for an Old Goose early in 1624, shortly before the appearance of Massinger’s
play.29 Montagu (who was to become one of Laud’s bishops) was especially
anxious to dissociate the Anglican Church from the rigid predestinarianism
associated with the Thirty-Nine Articles; and his book was accordingly
denounced in a petition to parliament as ‘full fraught’ with the ‘dangerous
opinions of Arminius’; however, Montagu’s claim that his book was printed
‘by King James’s speciall warrant’ suggests that his views enjoyed powerful
support, and that the king himself had begun to shift towards a more
28
29
Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists (Oxford, 1987); Thomas Cogswell, The Blessed Revolution:
English Politics and the coming of war, 1621–1624 (Cambridge, 1989).
Since Massinger’s earlier play, The Bondman, was not licensed for performance until 3
December 1623, it seems reasonable to assume that the writing of The Renegado must belong
substantially to the first three months of 1624.
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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado
Arminian position.30 Calvinists were not Montagu’s only target, of course:
indeed A New Gagg was ostensibly published in order to refute what he
claimed were Catholic misrepresentations of Anglican belief. Nevertheless,
Montagu insisted that Rome was, despite everything, ‘a true church and the
Pope not demonstrably an Antichrist’;31 and this concession reflected the
increasingly tolerant official attitude towards Catholicism at the beginning of
the 1620s, when James’s anxiety to conclude a Spanish match for his son had
led to a considerable relaxation of the penal laws against Catholics and their
religion: the king having sought to demonstrate his good faith by ordering an
end to harrassment by the pursuivants and by releasing all imprisoned Catholic priests.32 Polemicists on both sides of the divide had begun to use the prospect of a Spanish queen as an occasion to appeal for the greater ecumenical
understanding to which the pacific James himself was attracted.33 As a result of
these developments, 1623, the year in which Charles and Buckingham
departed on their ill-starred expedition to Madrid, became the year when (in
the words of one contemporary) ‘the Romish foxes came out of their holes’:
with prosecutions for recusancy now abandoned, Catholic priests – especially
Jesuits – had begun to appear openly in both London and the provinces, and
were proselytising with considerable success in the court and beyond.34
All of this may have emboldened Massinger and the Cockpit company – or
those in whose interest they were working – to risk a play whose doctrinal
attitudes are not merely compatible with Arminianism, but extend to open
sympathy with Catholicism, and seeming admiration for the Jesuits. Such a
move, however, was still a potentially dangerous one, and those associated
with the play can hardly have been unaware of the gathering reaction against
such attitudes, stoked by rumours of an impending French marriage for the
prince, and given voice in the fiercely anti-Catholic Petition of Religion drawn
up by Parliament on 3 April.35 The initial staging of the play must have coincided with the angry debate over the king’s reply which dominated Parliament
30
31
32
33
34
35
Tyacke, pp. 104, 103, 147–51.
Tyacke, p. 149.
See W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge, 1997), p.
317.
See Shell, p. 144, Patterson, pp. 343–4.
Cogswell, pp. 37–8 (the quotation is from stanza 40 of John Vicar’s Englands Hallelu-jah,
1631). In a private communication, Michael Questier has reminded me that ‘although
Charles’s and Buckingham’s return from Spain was, politically, the end of the Spanish match
project, the king was still thinking in terms of an Anglo-Spanish treaty, and did so more or less
to the end of his life. All during 1624 there were rumours that Gondomar was about to return
to England, and that Buckingham would be displaced. James was deeply distrustful of the
U-turn performed by Charles and Buckingham, and thought that the war policy was a serious
mistake.’
See Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of
Buckingham, 1592–1628 (New York, 1981), p. 199.
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Michael Neill
from 17–24 April, culminating in James’s reluctant acceptance of the petition,
and the subsequent proclamation banning the Jesuits – those ‘Janissaries of his
Holynesse’ as John Castle called them – on 6 May.36 From this perspective The
Renegado looks as though it may have been intended as one shot in a
campaign, supported by James, for tolerance and Christian unity. For this
reason it will also have formed part of the skirmishing between the king and
the Prince of Wales, who (along with Buckingham) had temporarily thrown
his support behind the Calvinists.37 This embroilment in religious politics may
well have been what attracted the attention of the hostile claque apparently
referred to in James Shirley’s commendatory verses for the published text,
where he writes of ‘A tribe who in their wisdoms dare accuse / This offspring of
thy Muse’. But any difficulties experienced either by the dramatist or the
company will presumably have dissolved quite quickly in the wake of Charles’s
marriage to Henrietta Maria and his subsequent commitment to the Arminian
cause, giving the published text (as Robinson argues) a much less controversial
currency.
Of course we may never understand precisely how The Renegado functioned in its immediate political and religious milieu; but in its theological
emphases it is certainly far from being the ‘undenominationally Christian’
work described by T.A. Dunn.38 The direction of events in 1623–24 at least
provides a plausible context for the play’s seemingly pro-Catholic tendency,
and helps to explain the prominence Massinger gives to matters of doctrine –
above all to the hugely contentious issue of lay baptism, which becomes the
enabling instrument of the conversion on which the main plot turns.
Because baptism played such an important part in its rituals, conversion
itself must have seemed a somewhat problematic enterprise under a Calvinist
dispensation, which denied any mysterious efficacy to the sacramental rites by
which unbelievers were customarily inducted into the Church.39 For predestinarians, baptism could claim no part in securing salvation; for Catholics or
Arminians, by contrast, it was an essential instrument of grace, so that in ‘cases
of necessity’ – where an unbaptised person might be about to die and no priest
was available – baptism by a layperson was considered an essential recourse. In
The Renegado, Francisco licenses Vitelli to ‘do that office’ for Donusa as she
36
37
38
39
Cogswell, pp. 246–53; Castle’s words are from a letter dated 14 May 1624 (cited p. 253).
However it would be dangerous to assume that the prince’s circle were necessarily hostile to
the Jesuits per se: Michael Questier further notes not only that ‘the Society, while seen by many
as the prime representative of popery, described itself at this stage as primarily non-political
and also broadly supportive of the regime’, but also that there were prominent Catholics in
Buckingham’s own circle who favoured Jesuit priests as chaplains – including the countess
herself, whose conversion was engineered by John Percy SJ.
Dunn, Philip Massinger, p. 177.
It was perhaps partly for this reason that, as Dunn notes (taking the conversion motif as
further possible evidence for Massinger’s Catholicism), the Roman Church was so much
‘more rigorous in proselytizing’ than its Protestant rivals (p. 187).
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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado
faces execution, assuring him that not only ‘do midwives, upon necessity,
perform it’, but also that ‘knights that in the Holy Land fought for / The
freedom of Jerusalem . . . have made their helmets / The fount out of which
their holy hands . . . drew heavenly liquor’ (5.1.29–39). By locating its counterturn in a layman’s baptism of a Turkish convertite, Massinger’s play makes its
opposition to Calvinist orthodoxy as defiantly apparent as possible.
It is The Renegado’s deep allegiance to the magical power of the sacraments
that underlies its repeated reference to the various kinds of false or misapprehended magic that produce the deceptive false ‘turns’ of a plot that is ushered
to its happy conclusion by the transformatory ‘counterturn’ of conversion
and baptism. The Turks’ religion is stigmatised as the work of an ‘imposter’
(5.3.133), a ‘juggling prophet’ whose impotent ‘sorceries’ are contrasted with
the ‘pious miracle[s]’ associated with Francisco (4.3.115, 125; 5.7.16).40 Not
for nothing is the chamber where Donusa seduces Vitelli compared to the
Prophet’s tomb in Mecca by the infatuated Mustapha (1.2.60–2);41 for the
fraudulent pretences of his religion are associated with the base transformations wrought by unlicensed desire, just as love for those who turn Christian
is shown to become an instrument of miraculous grace. Thus Asambeg feels
himself ‘transformed’ by the ‘charm’ of Paulina and the ‘angelical sounds’ of
‘her enchanting tongue’ which seem to ‘invade and take possession of my
soul’, convincing him that there is ‘something in her that can work miracles’
(2.5.104, 114, 132–4, 150). In much the same way, Donusa, overcome on her
first encounter with Vitelli by the ‘sudden change’ that makes her ‘turn
roarer’ and vandalise the Venetian’s shop (1.3.145), attributes this unaccountable passion to a ‘magic [that] hath ‘transformed me from myself?’
(2.1.5, 23). In each case, erotic fascination shadows the possibility of the
more profound transformation that grace might effect: Asambeg’s desire for
the saintly Paulina, the play intimates, arises partly as an unrecognised
response to the greater magic represented by the holy talisman given her by
Francisco, ‘a relic . . . which has power . . . To keep the owner free from
violence’ (1.1.147–9); Donusa’s desire, on the other hand, ultimately gives
way to the ‘holy motion’ that begins the process of her conversion at the end
of Act 4.42
40
41
42
For the propagandist association of Mahomet with magic and sorcery, see Parker, ‘Preposterous Conversions’.
The Prophet’s tomb, where his casket was reputedly suspended in mid-air by some dubious
spell, was strongly associated with sinister magic.
For a reading that explores the sexual relationships in the play as a response to intense gender
anxieties aroused by encounters with the Turkish world, see Burton, Traffic and Turning,
Chapters 2–3: ‘Asambeg experiences at Paulina’s hands the effeminization that Christian men
feared suffering in their encounters with Muslims’ (p. 114); ‘the virtuous Christian man overcomes temptation by converting lechery into propriety and the Muslim temptress into a
Christian wife. At the same time lechery is displaced from the former temptress onto the
167
Michael Neill
Faced with the prospect of execution for her dalliance with an infidel,
Donusa seeks to evade her fate by relying on what Asambeg calls ‘the magic of
her tongue’ in order to ‘turn this Christian Turk and marry him’ (4.2.159,
182). Instead she finds herself so overwhelmed by Vitelli’s ‘unanswerable’
arguments against her faith (l. 138) that the hero, sensing victory, draws on the
power of his own transformatory magic and marks her with the sign of the
cross (‘The sacred badge [God] arms his servants with’, l. 142), ensuring that it
is she rather than he who, to Asambeg’s horror, now stands ready to ‘turn
apostata’ (l. 159). Surrendering herself to the shackled Venetian as his moral
‘prisoner’ (l. 149), the princess yields to the ‘heavenly prompter’ within her (l.
141), defies the Viceroy’s threats, and ‘spit[s] at Mahomet’ (l. 158). Then, in
the last act, as the lovers prepare to take leave of life in a martyr’s ‘wedding’,
Vitelli completes Donusa’s conversion with his improvised baptism: assured
of its sacramental efficacy by his Jesuit mentor, he throws water on her face,
producing the miraculous effect that transforms the Mahometan princess into
‘another woman’:
till this minute
I never lived, nor durst think how to die.
How long have been blind! Yet on the sudden
By this blest means I feel the films of error
Ta’en from my soul’s eyes. O divine physician . . .
. . . Let me kiss the hand
That did this miracle.
5.3.121–29
The violent contempt with which Donusa repudiates her faith, spitting at
Mahomet, is evidently designed as the reverse counterpart of the act of sacrilege that announced Grimaldi’s apostasy – that act of ‘wanton, irreligious
madness’ in St Mark’s, when he snatched the Host from Francisco’s priestly
hands and ‘Dashed it upon the pavement’ (4.1.29–33); and when baptism
confirms Donusa’s release from ‘the cruelest of prisons, / Blind ignorance
and misbelief’ (5.3.131–32), it is as if Grimaldi’s violation of one sacrament
has been symbolically cancelled out by Vitelli’s performance of another. But
Grimaldi too is subject to a process of conversion: cashiered for his insolence
to the Viceroy, he descends from atheistic Tamburlainean rant to Faustian
despair, calling on fire, earth, air, and sea for the blessing of annihilation –
only to be rescued by Francisco. Moving through the proper stages of contrition, confession and penance, the renegade’s transformation comes to its
own histrionic climax in a scene that deliberately challenges the Calvinist
dismissal of ritual as empty and impious histrionics. By interrupting
Grimaldi’s desperate meditations dressed in the same ‘sacred vestments’
Muslim man whose foolhardy obsession with an unattainable Christian woman enables the
escape of all his Christian captives’ (p. 153).
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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado
worn during the Mass at which the apostate performed his original blasphemous assault, the Jesuit stuns him into a recognition of the redemptive power
of grace. Grimaldi ponders the sense of mysterious transformation that
results, and then goes on to meditate the efficacy of good works as an instrument of salvation:43
What celestial balm
I feel now poured into my wounded conscience . . .
. . . Can good deeds redeem me?
I will rise up a wonder to the world
When I have given strong proofs how I am altered.
(4.1.306)
Francisco’s appearance in the splendid cope that renders him ‘like a bishop’
is a transparently theatrical device that nevertheless becomes indistinguishable
from sacramental magic. Earlier in the play, however, the plot appears to associate ‘personation’ and disguise with less admirable forms of transformation –
above all, through the protagonist’s merchant disguise, with the deceits and
doubtful exchanges of the marketplace. In the dialogue that opens the play,
Gazet declares his allegiance to a commercial regime in which religion seems as
subject to ‘free-trading’ as any other commodity: ‘Live I in England, Spain,
France, Rome, Geneva’, he declares, ‘I am of that country’s faith’ (1.1.36–7). It
is only his fear of being ‘caponed’ that dissuades him from immediately
‘turn[ing] Turk’ in Tunis (ll. 36–40); and before long that is the path both he
and his master will take. First Vitelli establishes himself as ‘a royal merchant’ –
in both senses of that quibbling oxymoron – when he trades his virtue for the
favours of a Turkish princess (2.4.94). After Donusa has capriciously destroyed
the glassware in his shop, Vitelli is summoned to meet her in the palace, where
she tempts his sight with an array of treasure laid out on her table: looking for all
the world like a more sumptuous version of the ‘commodities’ displayed on his
own shop-counter (2.4.0), these bags of ‘imperial coin’ and Indian gems are
ostensibly offered as recompense for ‘The trespass I did to thee’ (2.4.82–6), but
are soon identified as ‘seeds’ of a more bountiful ‘harvest’, the ‘tender’ (as she
puts it) of her own person (ll. 97–8, 101).44 If Donusa has felt herself inwardly
metamorphosed by her sudden infatuation with this Christian (‘What magic
hath transformed me from myself’, 2.1.23), Vitelli is now subject to a conspicuous outward transformation: when he next appears in 2.6, he is costumed in a
‘rich suit’ and accompanied by the train of attendant Turks who mark his
new-found status as a ‘citizen turn[ed] courtier’ (l. 2). In a world of sartorially
defined identity where (as Donusa contemptuously suggests to Mustapha) any
French tailor can ‘new-create’ a man (3.1.57–8), Vitelli himself appears so
43
44
In a neat gloss on the play’s mercantile setting, Robinson suggests that ‘Francisco’s theology,
according to which grace can be “purchased” by works, also preserves at its heart a kind of
commerce, suggesting that commerce and conversion are versions of each other’ (‘The Turks’,
230).
A similar point is made by Robinson, ‘The Turks’, 221.
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Michael Neill
‘strangely metamorphosed’ that Gazet can barely recognise him as ‘mine own
natural master’, thinking him perhaps ‘some French ambassador’ (ll. 9,
19–20). It is as if ‘the gentleman of Venice’ were himself becoming the
renegado of the title: clad in what he later calls ‘the proud livery / Of wicked
pleasure’ (ll. 50–3), he is visibly in thrall to a religion that the play defines by
the fact that it ‘allows all pleasure’ (1.2.50); and from the perspective of Francisco, at least, his protegé appears ‘lost’ (2.6.1), as though to turn courtier in
this extravagant oriental fashion were, in effect, to turn Turk.
The effect of this metamorphosis on the impressionable Gazet is immediate: having been released from his apprenticeship and made master of
Vitelli’s shop (2.6.25–7), he sets about transforming himself into ‘A city
gallant’ (3.2.50) by dressing himself in his master’s clothes and insisting that
there is now no difference between them:
They fit me to a hair, too. Let but any
Indifferent gamesters measure us inch by inch
Or weigh us by the standard, I may pass.
I have been proved and proved again true metal.
3.4.11–14
To imagine the scales of social judgement thus ‘turning’ in his favour is not
enough, though: for Gazet next resolves to ‘change [his] copy’ (l. 32) and to
follow his master into the Turkish court. The parallel between the two is reinforced by the way that preferment in both cases is not only imagined in the
language of trade, but made contingent on a form of sexual exchange. Gazet,
who earlier confessed his fear of losing ‘A collop of that part my Doll enjoined
me / To bring home as she left it’ (1.1.38–40), now evinces himself willing to
‘sell my shop . . . And all my wares’ to secure the supposedly lofty office of
eunuch. In his ignorance he fails to recognise – even when the English castrato
Carazie assures him that the real ‘price’ is ‘but parting with a precious stone or
two’ (3.4.50–2) – that he is about to barter the one ‘commodity’ he has hitherto reserved from the market. Undertaking, if necessary, to ‘part with all my
stones’, he innocently declares himself a ‘made’ man, even as Carazie prepares
to unman him (ll. 53–5).45
The initial transformations of both Vitelli and Gazet, beginning as they do
in the promiscuous transactions of the bazaar, perfectly reflect those anxieties
about the dangerous fungibility of the self in a market-dominated world of
45
In a reading of the play that fascinatingly explores the relationship between gender anxieties
and trade, Gil Harris notes that ‘castration is . . . associated throughout the play with economic
loss’, moreover, since castration implicitly threatens all the play’s Christian males, ‘[i]t may
seem that the only way in which a male Christian visitor to Tunis can fully avert the risk of
castration is to receive the largesse of a powerful Turkish princess who, by filling his testicular
purse with precious stones, also restores his manly vigor’ – Jonathan Gil Harris, Sick Economies: Drama, Mercantilism, and Disease in Shakespeare’s England (Philadelphia, 2004), pp.
157–8.
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Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado
‘limitless profit, a[nd] radically unbalanced exchange’ such as Benedict
Robinson describes.46 But equally important is the way in which the standard
satirical motif of tradesman turning courtier is so rapidly linked to the idea of
turning Turk – and hence to the apostasy and reconversion of Grimaldi.
Gazet’s behaviour not only mimics his master’s folly, but serves to parody the
twists and turns of Grimaldi’s renegadism: dismissing even the deep inward
promptings of conscience as though they too were a form of degrading
costume, mere ‘scrupulous rags . . . Invented only to keep churchmen warm’
(1.3.46–8), Grimaldi is a man so free of any loyalty that, when he is slighted by
his Turkish masters, he can contemplate ‘turn[ing] honest and foreswear[ing
his] trade’ (2.5.5–6), as readily as he once turned Turk and forswore his natal
faith.
But just as true repentance and counter-apostasy are only made possible for
Grimaldi by Francisco’s ministrations, so the Jesuit’s spiritual counselling
produces a redemptive turnabout in the hero’s progress. In Act 3, just as his
apprentice is about to follow his example and turn courtier, Vitelli stages a
second sartorial metamorphosis: responding to Francisco’s spiritual counselling, he returns to Donusa’s chamber to ‘deliver back the price / And salary of
[her] lust’ (3.5.48–9): first returning her casket of jewels, he then tears off his
cloak and doublet, as if they were ‘Alcides’ fatal shirt’, and announces himself
free ‘Of sin’s gay trappings’ (l. 50). To Donusa, this volte-face represents a kind
of treason or apostasy: ‘you turn rebel to / The laws of nature . . . and deny allegiance / Where you stand bound to pay it’ (ll. 17–20); and she responds by
vowing to Asambeg that she will ‘turn this Christian Turk’ (4.2.158).47 The
hero’s new-found resolve proves unshakeable, however, issuing in the final
stage of his transformation, when he is hauled from the palace dungeon in the
chains and soiled garments of a prisoner – a costume that Francisco hails as the
splendid robe of a martyr:
I never saw you
Till now, look lovely . . .
All Roman caesars, that led kings in chains
Fast bound to their triumphant chariots, if
Compared with that true glory and full luster
46
47
See Robinson, ‘The Turks’, 221: Robinson further notes that the ‘metaphorical and literal sexiness’ of Vitelli’s ware suggests ‘that there is something promiscuous about buying and selling’
and that ‘the play continually sexualizes trade drawing out the simultaneously mercantile and
erotic associations of words like “commerce” and “commodity” ’ (219).
In ‘ “Best Play with Mardian”: Eunuch and Blackmoor as Imperial Culturegram’ (Shakespeare
Studies 34, 2006, pp. 123–57), Anston Bosman interprets Vitelli’s rejection of Donusa’s seductions (and the jewels she heaps on him) as a kind of ‘voluntary eunuchism, albeit of the spiritual variety’, in which the hero learns, in his own words, ‘To put off the condition of a man’
(3.2.9) – rather as Gazet does when he offers to surrender his own ‘jewels’. I am grateful to Dr
Bosman for supplying me with a draft of his essay.
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Michael Neill
You now appear in, all their boasted honors
Purchased with blood and wrong would lose their names
And be no more remembered.
4.3.9–20
Underlying these visible transformations, of course, is another even more
important one, since Vitelli has been from the beginning a man in disguise.
The audience is given a clue to the merchant-protagonist’s real identity as early
as the second half of Scene 1: enraged by news of his sister, ‘the virtuous
Paulina’, who has been abducted by the renegade, Grimaldi, and sold to the
Viceroy’s seraglio (ll. 109–117), Vitelli swears to discard his ‘borrowed shape’
and prove his ‘noble’ condition by exacting revenge on his enemy (ll. 119–20,
140–158). Francisco, however, dissuades him, ensuring that Vitelli remains
cloaked in his merchant role until the climactic moment of discovery in Act 5,
when (to Princess Donusa’s evident relief) Paulina at last reveals her brother to
be no merchant at all, but ‘a gentleman of the best rank in Venice’ (5.5.13).48 A
disguised hero is, of course, a conventional device of romance – so much so
that Vitelli’s Turkish rival, Mustapha, feels bound to discredit the possibility
that Donusa’s lover is a ‘prince disguised’, repeatedly insisting that he is ‘no
man of mark, nor honor . . . [But] A poor mechanic peddler’, ‘a delinquent of
. . . mean condition’ (3.3.77–80; 5.3.4). But while in romance ‘disguised greatness’ (5.3.5) frequently masks in humility, it rarely adopts such a realistically
bourgeois guise – a ‘sordid shape’ as Asambeg thinks it (5.3.5–6): even in The
Island Princess Armusia’s merchant disguise is a only a fleeting camouflage to
enable his heroic rescue of the King of Tidore, and one that compromises
neither the hero’s identity nor the play’s chivalric fantasy. By contrast, Vitelli’s
extended pretence not only installs the market at the centre of The Renegado,
but makes his successive transformations – from shopkeeper to courtier, from
sexual minion to penitent moralist and helpless prisoner, from prospective
apostate to intending martyr, and from merchant to ‘Gentleman of Venice’ –
significant turning points in the action.
The importance of Paulina’s disclosure of the hero’s true identity lies in its
implicit appeal to an essential self that remains unchanged beneath the casual
transformations effected by disguise and theatrical imposture or driven by the
powerful currents of desire and fear. Responding to Francisco’s applause,
Vitelli at first envisages his prospective martyrdom as a histrionic performance
of heroism, at the sight of which ‘a thousand full-crammed theaters / Should
clap their eager hands to witness that / The scene I act did please’ (4.3.22–4),
but then insists that it is proof of something much less ephemeral: ‘’Tis not in
man / To change or alter me’ (ll. 53–4). Even his torturer and intended
48
It is possible that Massinger’s emphasis on Vitelli’s status was influenced by Cervantes’ story
‘The Liberall Lover’, Book 3 of Exemplarie Novells (trans. 1640), where the lady Halima is
impressed by a rumour that her new slave, ‘Mario’, is actually ‘a Gentleman’ (p. 147).
172
Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in The Renegado
executioner, Asambeg, is made to marvel that this Christian ‘will not be altered
in his soul for any torments / We can afflict his body with!’ (5.3.35–6).
Donusa’s progress through the play follows a similar trajectory. Vitelli’s
theatrical metaphors call to mind his earlier dismissal of the princess’s
amorous overtures as ‘a personated passion’ (2.4.67), as well as her vain insistence on the veracity of the performance as ‘A part, in which I truly act myself’
(l. 74); and this echo is a reminder that the turns of fortune involve the heroine
in a parallel set of transformations, which (like Vitelli’s) culminate in another
of the play’s spectacular changes of costume, when in Act 4, scene 2, Asambeg
orders her to be stripped of her court finery and to be brought in ‘In black, as
to her funeral’ (4.2.65). Donusa’s mourning dress is symbolically linked both
to the deadly vehicle of ‘the Grand Signior’s pleasure’ – the sinister ‘black box’
which contains her sentence (4.2.57 sd., 59) – and to the Black Tower from
which the condemned Vitelli makes his escape in the penultimate scene; but
the princess’s ‘sad livery of death’ (4.2.75) proves (like her lover’s discarded
‘livery / Of . . . pleasure’) to stand for a more inward metamorphosis: for as
Vitelli persuades the Princess to ‘turn apostata’ (4.3.160), her black gown
becomes the penitential robe that announces her death to the world of sin,
before being identified in 5.3 as the wedding garment which – together with
her ‘choicest jewel’ (5.1.25), the baptismal cross with which Vitelli marks her
forehead – signifies her union not merely with her chosen husband, but with
the Church whose agent he now is.
It is just at this point, as bride and groom prepare to welcome martyrdom,
that Massinger adds one last extravagant counterturn to his plot. For scarcely
has Donusa’s sacramental transformation been effected, than the virtuous
Paulina denounces it, in language that once again recalls Calvinist indictments
of Church ritual, as empty theatre:
Who can hold her spleen
When such ridiculous follies are presented,
The scene, too, made religion.
5.3.140–42
Having up to now resisted Asambeg’s tyrannic efforts to make her ‘turn
apostata to the faith / That she was bred in’ (1.1.138–9), Paulina suddenly
announces herself ready to ‘turn Turk’ (l.152), demanding that the renegade
sultana change places with her, becoming her slave, while she adorns herself in
Donusa’s ‘choice and richest jewels’ (l. 166). Only one short scene elapses,
however, before Paulina is made to reveal that this seeming transformation
was merely a last theatrical imposture:
no way was left me
To free you from a present execution
But by my personating that which never
My nature was acquainted with.
173
5.5.4–7
Michael Neill
Like her revelation of Vitelli’s true identity a few lines later, Paulina’s invocation of her ‘nature’ appeals to an idea of essential, unchanging selfhood that
seems amply warranted by her resolute defiance of all Asambeg’s efforts to
make her yield to his importunities and ‘turn Turk’. But then we remember
that it was only the mysterious power of Francisco’s relic that guaranteed such
constancy, just as it was the sacramental influence of which he is the conduit
that enabled the conversion of Donusa, the recovery of Vitelli’s and Grimaldi’s
true selves, and their escape from the world of ceaseless transformation and
exchange epitomised by the seductions of the Turkish marketplace.
The way in which Massinger’s plot comes to ‘turn’ on episodes of conversion
or religious ‘turning’, demonstrates a crucial symmetry between the play’s
doctrinal stance and its dramatic form. It is not, I think, coincidental that the
conventional ‘turn and counterturn’ of tragicomic design should have become
the vehicle for a drama of apostasy and conversion just as English Arminianism was beginning to test its strength against Calvinist orthodoxy – nor is it
surprising that tragicomedy should have gone on to become such a favoured
genre during the Arminian ascendancy. For if the impossibility of effective
repentance in works like Dr Faustus and The Duchess of Malfi points to a
natural affinity between Calvinism and tragedy, then the sudden reversals and
metamorphoses of The Renegado suggest tragicomedy may have its own
doctrinal affiliations. Once we are alert to them, some interesting formal
patterns begin to emerge. I have tried to show how the structural bond that ties
turning-as-conversion to turning-as-peripety is linked to a pervasive preoccupation with various forms of metamorphosis, disguise, and theatrical
pretence, in which the superficial alterations produced by the ‘juggling sorceries’ and enchantment of infidel Turks are contrasted with the deeper transformations wrought by sacramental Christian magic. This patterning becomes
especially conspicuous in the light of Massinger’s changes to his source material: not just the unlikely invention of a Jesuit priest as the moral anchor of his
fable, but the prominence which the title gives to the role of the renegado
himself, and the relocation of the play’s symbolic centre from the prison of
Algiers where Cervantes’ Spanish captives languish to the Tunis bazaar where
Massinger’s Venetians drive their ambiguous trade.
174
11
Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
LUCY MUNRO
Every Writer must gouerne his Penne according to the Capacitie of the Stage he
writes too, both in the Actor and the Auditor.1
I wish you had kept better form. I like form as much as matter.2
J
AMES SHIRLEY’S narrative poem, Narcissus, or the Self-Lover, was accompanied on its publication in 1646 by a selection of ‘PROLOGVES AND
EPILOGVES; Written to severall Playes Presented in this Kingdom, and
else-where’. These include a series of prologues written in Dublin between late
1636 and spring 1640: ‘A Prologue to Mr. Fletcher’s Play in IRELAND’; ‘A
Prologue to the ALCHIMIST Acted there’; ‘A Prologue there to the Irish
Gent.’; ‘A Prologue to a Play there; Call’d, No wit to a Womans’; ‘A Prologue to
another of Master Fletcher’s Playes there’; ‘A Prologue to a play there; Call’d,
THE TOY’; ‘To another Play there’; ‘To a Play there, called the Generall’; ‘To his
own Comedy there, called Rosania, or Loves Victory’.3 The playhouse for which
Shirley wrote these prologues was built around 1635 on Werburgh Street,
Dublin, by John Ogilby, a member of the household of Sir Thomas
Wentworth, Lord Deputy in Ireland from July 1633 to March 1640.4 As Alan
J. Fletcher suggests, Wentworth saw theatre as an important part of his
‘general program for Dublin’s social upgrading’.5 The playhouse was located
1
2
3
4
5
‘The Printer to the Reader’, in A Pleasant Comedie, Called The Two Merry Milke-Maids
(London, 1620), f. A2r.
James I to his English Parliament, National Archives, S.P. 14/8, 93, quoted in J.P. Kenyon, The
Stuart Constitution (Cambridge, 1966), p. 41.
Narcissus, or the Self-Lover (London, 1646), C3r–D2r. On the length of Shirley’s stay in Ireland
see Allan H. Stevenson, ‘Shirley’s Years in Ireland’, Review of English Studies 20 (1944), 19–28;
‘Shirley’s Dedications and the Date of his Return to England’, Modern Language Notes 61
(1946), 79–83.
See Alan J. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cork, 2000),
pp. 261–5.
Drama, Performance and Polity, p. 261.
175
Lucy Munro
in a fashionable area of the city, and the building of an indoor playhouse rather
than an outdoor amphitheatre also hints at the relatively sophisticated tone
that Wentworth and Ogilby hoped to establish. Ogilby recruited among the
London companies, taking advantage of a prolonged outbreak of plague to
hire Shirley, at that time resident dramatist for Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men,
and a clutch of English actors.6 The project may have gained some notoriety in
London. A jest-book entered in the Stationers’ Register in April 1636, a few
months before Shirley arrived in Dublin, includes this joke: ‘A hireling Player
demanded an augmentation of his meanes from the Company, and received a
deniall; whereat being much offended he said, I protest if you mend not my
wages you shal see me in Ireland within these two dayes.’7
Something of the ambiguous cultural position of Ogilby’s Men and the
Werburgh Street playhouse can be seen in a prologue and epilogue ‘at the New
house’, written for a play previously produced in England by John Clavell,
another playwright associated with the London theatre.8 Clavell is acutely
aware of the Irish context within which Ogilby’s Men were operating, writing
in his epilogue,
Wee as Industrious planters have fenc’d in
This litle plott vpon your Land, (twere sin
To be ingratefull) as our profeits spring
To you, our Lords, w’ele thankfull tribute bring,9
The theatre, with its English patron, manager, dramatist and actors, is like a
colonial plantation; however, in a twist on the usual power dynamic, the
‘planters’ vow to bring tribute to the native inhabitants. At its inception, the
Werburgh Street project mirrors something of the complexity of ‘English’ and
‘Irish’ identity in early seventeenth-century Dublin; its position was to become
still more complex with the later involvement of playwright Henry Burnell, a
member of a Catholic Old English family.10
6
7
8
9
10
See Stevenson, ‘James Shirley and the Actors at the First Irish Theatre’, Modern Philology 40
(1942–3), 147–60; Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, pp. 267–71, updates and corrects
Stevenson’s findings.
A.S., The Booke of Bulls (London, 1636), f. C1r.
Clavell lived in Ireland 1631–33 and 1634–37; his only extant play is The Soddered Citizen,
performed in London by the King’s Men c.1630. See Alan J. Fletcher, Drama and the
Performing Arts in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 440–1, Drama, Performance and Polity, 262–3; see also Alastair Bellany, ‘Clavell, John (1601–1643)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [http://0-www.oxforddnb.com.catalogue.ulrls.
lon.ac.uk:80/view/article/5551, accessed 8 May 2006]. Another London playwright resident in
Ireland c.1635 was Robert Davenport. See G.E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7
vols (Oxford, 1941–68), III, 228–9.
Fletcher, Drama and the Performing Arts, 441, quoting Wiltshire Record Office 865/502, p. 86.
On Burnell see Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, pp. 276–7; Deana Rankin, ‘Burnell,
Henry (fl. 1640–1654)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [http://0-www.oxforddnb.
com.catalogue.ulrls.lon.ac.uk:80/view/article/4054, accessed 8 May 2006].
176
Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
Shirley’s prologues provide a snapshot of the Dublin repertory: revivals of
plays by Fletcher, Jonson and Middleton; his own new productions; a variety
of lost plays. In many ways – such as its preponderance of comedies and tragicomedies over tragedies, its inclusion of revived plays and, in particular, the
revival of plays by Jonson and Fletcher – this repertory is typically Caroline. It
is, however, a collection of plays that would have been impossible to stage in
London. The revived plays belonged to different London companies: Jonson’s
The Alchemist was owned by the King’s Men (and was regularly performed by
them in the 1630s), while the Dublin play titled ‘No wit to a Womans’ is probably Middleton’s No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, originally performed by
Prince Henry’s Men at the Fortune playhouse.11 It was apparently revised
specifically for its performance at Werburgh Street in 1638.12 The two Fletcher
plays have been associated with The Night-Walker and Wit Without Money,
plays that were revised by Shirley in the 1630s for Queen Henrietta Maria’s
Men.13 The Werburgh Street managers seem to have taken advantage of their
theatre’s remoteness from London to put together something of a fantasy
repertory, picking plays owned by a number of different London companies.
Given the importance of tragicomedy in 1630s theatrical culture, it is not
surprising to find that plays of this kind were regularly performed by Ogilby’s
Men. Three extant plays securely associated with the company – Shirley’s
Rosania, or Love’s Victory (known on the London stage and in print as The
Doubtful Heir) and St Patrick for Ireland, and Burnell’s Landgartha – are tragicomic in form. Another of Shirley’s Irish plays, The Royal Master, has marked
affinities with that genre, and a further tragicomedy, The Gentleman of Venice,
may also have been first performed in Dublin.14 Like tragicomedies performed
in London, the Dublin plays are self-aware and highly politicised, deploying
sexual material to spectacular and troubling effect. However, like the repertory
in general, they combine material in a fashion uncommon on the contemporaneous London stage. They are highly indebted to Fletcherian tragicomedy,
probably the genre’s dominant Caroline form and one employed by all of the
11
12
13
14
See John Jowett, ‘Middleton’s No Wit at the Fortune’, Renaissance Drama 22 (1991), 191–208.
On revivals of The Alchemist see N.W. Bawcutt, ed., The Control and Censorship of Caroline
Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73 (Oxford, 1996), 174;
John Munro, ed., The Shakspere Allusion Book, 2 vols (London, 1909), I, 443; G.E. Bentley,
‘The Diary of a Caroline Theatergoer’, Modern Philology 35 (1937), 61–72 (69).
See Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 1134.
The Night Walker was re-licensed for Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men on 11 May 1633 as ‘a play
of Fletchers corrected by Sherley’; it was performed at court on 30 January 1634 (Bawcutt,
Control and Censorship, p. 179, p. 187). Wit Without Money was performed at court by
Beeston’s Boys (who took over Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men’s Cockpit playhouse and much
of their repertory) on 14 February 1637 (Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 200). On Shirley’s
revision of Fletcher see Cyrus Hoy, ‘The Shares of Fletcher and his Collaborators in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon (IV)’, Studies in Bibliography 12 (1959), 91–116.
See Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 1113.
177
Lucy Munro
London companies to some degree, but they are also infused with other influences. Rosania engages with tragicomedies written by the courtier-dramatists
John Suckling and Thomas Killigrew for the King’s Men and Queen Henrietta
Maria’s Men, plays which might be termed ‘she-tragicomedy’, focusing as they
do on the trials faced by their exemplary heroines. These plays were performed
at the Blackfriars and Cockpit, small indoor theatres similar to the Werburgh
Street playhouse, and it is unsurprising to find Shirley and Ogilby gesturing
towards the most fashionable of contemporary experiments with tragicomedy.
In contrast, St Patrick and Landgartha combine direct Fletcherian influence
with another variant: the insistently tragicomic saints’ lives performed in
London amphitheatres such as the Red Bull. These two forms of tragicomedy,
associated with different theatres and different social groups in London, are
brought together in the Dublin plays. In part, this development seems to have
been propelled by Ogilby’s Men’s inability to find a dramatic mode appealing
to their audiences. The company’s engagement with various tragicomic modes
was also, however, made possible by the playhouse’s novelty, its detachment
from London and its effective monopoly on theatre-going in Dublin.
Fashionably Observing the English Scene: Rosania
The Dublin prologue to Shirley’s Rosania, or Love’s Victory, first performed
around 1639, muses on its own title, saying, ‘Rosania? Mee thinks I hear one
say, / What’s that? ’Tis a strange title to a Play’.15 It first suggests that an audience member might think that it comes from the name of a ‘pretty town in
France / Or Italy [. . .] call’d Rosania for the store of Roses’, before stating that
others that have seen,
And fashionably observ’d the English Scene,
Say, (but with lesse hope to be understood)
Such titles unto Playes are now the mood,
Aglaura, Claricilla, names that may
(Being Ladies) grace, and bring guests to the Play. (D1v)
Although Shirley assumes the superiority of London audiences, he nonetheless
links the two theatrical cultures together, associating Rosania with two English
tragicomedies named after their heroines: Suckling’s Aglaura, licensed on 26
January 1638, and Killigrew’s Claracilla, licensed in 1639.16 The narratives of
both of these plays focus squarely on the simultaneous chastity and desirability
15
16
Narcissus, D1r. Bawcutt’s discovery that Claracilla was licensed in 1639 suggests that Shirley’s
prologue dates from that year (Control and Censorship, p. 204).
See Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 1206–7; Bawcutt, Control and Censorship, 204.
Aglaura was performed at court in tragic and tragicomic versions; both endings were included
in the notorious folio edition published in April 1638.
178
Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
of their titular heroines. Aglaura opens with the secret marriage of Aglaura and
her lover, Thersames, and the question, ‘And will they lye together, think’st
thou?’;17 it raises a voyeuristic desire in its audience to see the relationship
consummated, only to repeatedly thwart it by means of Thersames’ father’s
incestuous desire for Aglaura. Similarly, almost every male character in
Claracilla is in love with its heroine; the villainous Seleucus tries to rape her
and, when he finally commits suicide at the end of the fifth act, declares,
‘witnesse my heaven which is Claracilla / I fall to love and scorne a Martyr’.18
Although the Rosania prologue suggests that Ogilby’s Men were trying to
establish a fashionable English mode in Ireland, the play itself is ambivalent
about the ‘she-tragicomedy’ of Suckling and Killigrew. Indeed, much of its
plot seems to ironise the gendered assumptions of Aglaura and Claracilla;
while Sucking and Killigrew centre their narratives on the bodies of their heroines, Rosania focuses its anxiety on the body of the hero. This was not a new
tactic for Shirley: in his first play for Ogilby’s Men, The Royal Master, he
refuses to make his recently widowed king remarry, having him declare that he
has ‘not paide yet the full tribute / To my Cesarias dust’.19 In a dedicatory verse,
W. Smith alleges that women in the audience, ‘Whose nicer thoughts their
female minds perplex’ (A4v), were discontented with this development:
Say they, what makes the King in his dispose
So Icy-temperd, as he frankly throwes
Freedome on all except himselfe? Contrives
The way for other men to purchase wives?
Takes joy to forward propagation,
By Nuptiall knot, yet to himselfe ties none? (B1r)20
In generic terms, the king’s refusal to remarry casts a tragicomic shadow over
the play’s otherwise comic conclusion. Rosania carries this tactic further still;
reworking his own play The Coronation (Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, 1635),
Shirley embodies the play’s tragic potential in its hero’s questionable chastity.
Rosania focuses on four characters: Ferdinand, the ‘doubtful heir’ of the
London title; Rosania, his childhood sweetheart; Ferdinand’s cousin Olivia,
Queen of Murcia; and Olivia’s fiancé Leonario, Prince of Aragon. Having been
17
18
19
20
Aglaura (London, 1638), f. B1r.
The Prisoners and Claracilla. Two Tragæ-Comedies (London, 1641), f. F12r.
The Royall Master (Dublin and London, 1638), f. L2r.
‘W. Smith’ may be the William Smith who wrote two poems preserved in the Ormonde manuscripts, and the ‘William Smyth’ who wrote dedicatory verses for Henry Burkehead’s A
Tragedy of Cola’s Furie, or, Lirenda’s Miserie (Kilkenny, 1645). See John T. Gilbert, ed., The
Manuscripts of the Marquis of Ormonde Preserved at the Castle, Kilkenny, HMC 14th report,
appendix, part VII, 2 vols (London, 1895), I, 106, 107, 109; Sandra A. Burner, James Shirley: A
Study of Literary Coteries and Patronage in Seventeenth Century England (Lanham, MD, 1988),
p. 125.
179
Lucy Munro
smuggled out of Murcia as a baby in order to protect him from Olivia’s tyrannous father, Ferdinand returns to pursue his claim to the throne, is defeated by
Leonario on Olivia’s behalf, and is imprisoned. Accompanying him, disguised
as a page called Tiberio, is Rosania. When he is brought to trial, Ferdinand’s
eloquence and defiance impress Olivia so much that she not only reprieves but
also marries him, spurning Leonario. Ferdinand cannot forget Rosania and
refuses to consummate the marriage, to Olivia’s fury.
The tragicomic conclusion of the play in the marriage of Ferdinand and
Rosania is therefore dependent on Ferdinand’s chastity and his ability to withstand Olivia. This resistance is not itself dramatised, but in an extraordinary
scene Shirley proxies Ferdinand’s body with that of the disguised Rosania.
Olivia calls ‘Tiberio’ to her chamber, hoping to seduce her husband’s servant
in revenge for his indifference. In a highly allusive sequence, she playfully
swaps gender roles with the supposed page, declaring that she is the man and
‘Tiberio’ the woman. ‘Think’, she tells Rosania,
I am the man, and learn a little better,
What beauty dwells upon this hand. What softness,
How like the Snow, or Innocence it shews,
Yet fires my heart with every gentle touch.
Rosa[nia]. Dear Madam; would the King would come.
Que[en]. This is a happiness that Kings should sue for,
And yet there are poor comforts in these Kisses;
Let hands preserve Societie with hands,
And with their change of whiteness, and of Balm,
Make wealthy one another: But let what
Was mean’t for kisses meet, and finde out pleasure
By warm exchange of souls from our soft lips.
Kisses.
Madam, how like you this?
Rosa[nia]. Madam.
Que[en]. I suppose you a Lady all this while,
And I the man, our lips must meet again,
Will this instruct thee nothing?
Ros[ania]. Gracious Madam.
Que[en]. And yet this recreation comes short,
Dear Lady, of what love might well allow us.
Admit you are a Queen, you are not bound
To thin your Royal Blood with frost, but as
Your power, your pleasure should exceed; nay gra[n]t
You have a man (a man said I) that can
Keep love alive, and warm a yielding bosom,
Yet where from the invitement of your eie,
And amorous choice, I am become your servant,
You may be a little kinder.21
21
The Doubtful Heir. A Tragi-Comedie (London, 1652), ff. E1r–v.
180
Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
Olivia parodies the language of male seduction, complimenting ‘Tiberio’ in
exaggeratedly Petrarchan style and insisting on her usurped male identity (‘a
man said I’); ‘Tiberio’, meanwhile, confesses her wish that Ferdinand should
surprise them, and insists that they should retain their ‘true’ gender roles.
Shirley’s debt to Fletcherian tragicomedy is evident here, as he reworks the
erotic triangle of Beaumont and Fletcher’s perennially popular Philaster.
However, because the audience know that Rosania is female, Shirley is able to
capitalise on an ironic layering of gender identities which is only available in
retrospect in Philaster. In Rosania, the characters are simultaneously
presented as two women (as the play’s narrative dictates), as a man and a
woman (as their costume would have been ‘read’ by a playgoer unable to hear
the dialogue), as a man in woman’s clothes and a woman in man’s clothes (as
they are in Olivia’s erotic narrative), and as two boys (as the actors are
beneath their costumes). In his handling of the resonantly named Olivia’s
attempted seduction of ‘Tiberio’, Shirley echoes the ambiguous, homoerotic
exchanges of Twelfth Night, itself a notoriously uneasy comedy. His treatment
of female eroticism can also be compared with the treatment of Kate
Low-Water’s male disguise in No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s, another play
in which a marriage goes unconsummated (in this case because the husband
is really a woman), and one seemingly revived at Werburgh Street shortly
before the first performances of Rosania. Underlining the scene’s role play,
Olivia later tries to persuade ‘Tiberio’ to swap clothes with her and Rosania
cloaks her refusal in comic-erotic allusions to Shakespeare’s Venus and
Adonis.
As the allusions to Venus and Adonis might suggest, the comic sequence
quickly gathers tragic potential when Ferdinand enters with the Murcian
courtiers and accuses Olivia of adultery, a crime punishable by death under
her own laws. The plot replicates the narrative trick of the impossible infidelity
employed in Philaster, but the fact that Rosania’s gender is known to the audience produces different effects. Shirley piles irony on irony by having Violetta,
Olivia’s waiting woman, hatch a plan to clear Olivia by disguising ‘Tiberio’ as a
woman. Then, when Rosania’s true sex is revealed, Olivia tells Ferdinand that
she suspected the deception and that she therefore wooed ‘Tiberio’ ‘to trie how
long the sex would be / Conceal’d’ (E4r). Like the heroine of Philaster, Olivia is
accused of sexual intercourse with a ‘boy’ who turns out to be a woman; unlike
Arethusa, Olivia is able to turn the accusation to her own advantage.
Shirley’s ironic reworking of Aglaura and Claracilla thus produces a renegotiation with Fletcherian tragicomedy, in which the body of the heroine also
frequently carries the weight of the narrative. In Philaster, the chastity of
Arethusa, and the impossibility of her supposed seduction by Bellario, is key to
the reversals of the final scenes, in which the happy and politically settled
ending is contrived. Rosania, in contrast, focuses on the body of the hero, his
dubious political legitimacy mirrored by his uncertain sexual loyalty. This
process is emphasised in the twists and turns of the final act, which focus on
181
Lucy Munro
the doubtful heir’s progress to political legitimation, and, finally, a marriage to
Rosania which is deferred until after the play’s close.
This Story Shall Not Fall So: St Patrick for Ireland
A rather different strategy is employed in St Patrick for Ireland. Where Shirley’s
other prologues grumble about the limitations of the Dublin spectators, the
prologue to St Patrick has a slightly desperate tone:
We know not what will take, your pallats are
Various, and many of them sick I feare:
We can but serve up what our Poets dresse,
And not considering cost, or paines to please;
We should be very happy, if at last,
We could find out the humour of your taste,
That we might fit, and feast it, so that you
Were constant to your selves, and kept that true.22
It has generally been assumed that St Patrick, with its self-consciously Irish
theme and setting, was calculated to appeal to these spectators. Ogilby’s Men
certainly attempted to engage with their audience through ‘local’ material elsewhere: the Werburgh Street repertory included plays called The Irish
Gentleman and (possibly) The Merchant of Dublin, and Landgartha capitalises
on its audience’s knowledge of Irish affairs.23 The sub-plot of Rosania, in
which the Captain induces a pair of citizens to whom he owes money to
convert themselves first into soldiers and then into courtiers, may represent
tensions between tradesmen and army officers in Dublin.24 The repertory of
Ogilby’s Men thus presents a complex negotiation between a desire to import
English forms and to mould an audience’s taste, and a perceived need to cater
to local issues and tastes.
Oddly enough, the subject matter of St Patrick for Ireland can also be
directly associated with the concerns of Shirley’s erstwhile patron in London,
Queen Henrietta Maria. In autumn 1638 Henrietta Maria wrote to Wentworth
22
23
24
St. Patrick for Ireland. The First Part (London, 1640), f. A2r.
Ogilby’s lost play The Merchant of Dublin may date from between 1636 and 1640 or from the
1660s (Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 950–1).
See La Tourette Stockwell, Dublin Theaters and Theater Customs (1637–1820) (1938; repr.
New York and London, 1968), p. 11; Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, pp. 273–4;
Deana Rankin, Between Spenser and Swift: English Writing in Seventeenth-Century Ireland
(Cambridge, 2005), pp. 100–2. A similar ‘application’ may have been made of Wit Without
Money’s treatment of landownership and absentee landlords; for discussion of this play in an
English context see Gordon McMullan, The Politics of Unease in the Plays of John Fletcher
(Amherst, 1994), pp. 80–3. I am very grateful to Dr McMullan for this suggestion, and for his
careful reading of a draft of this essay.
182
Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
in her own hand, asking that he restore the shrine at St Patrick’s Purgatory in
Donegal (which his predecessor as Lord Deputy, Henry Cary, Viscount
Falkland, had ordered to be destroyed), telling him that the local people would
use it ‘sy modestement, que vous n’aures point de Raison de vous en repentir;
& vous me seres un grand Plaisir’ [‘so unassumingly, that you will have no
reason to repent of it; and you would do me a great service’].25 He replied on 10
October 1638, advising her to wait for a better opportunity:
Being now absolutely taken away, there will be greater Difficulty to restore it,
than would be barely to continue and tolerate such a Devotion, prohibited by a
smaller Power, or discontinued for a shorter time, than this hath been. Besides
the Place is in the midst of the great Scotish Plantations, and I feare at this Time,
where some Men’s Zeal hath run them already not only beyond their Wits, but
almost forth of their Allegiance too, it might furnish them with something to say
in Prejudice and Scandal to his Majesty’s Government; which for the present
indeed is by all Means to be avoided.26
The restoration of St Patrick’s Purgatory was therefore a political issue, not
merely a matter of private devotion. Henrietta Maria seems to have accepted
Wentworth’s arguments; the Lord Deputy wrote to Sir John Wintour on 10
December, ‘I am much bound to her Majesty that is pleased so graciously to
interpret me in what I humbly offered concerning St Patrick’s Purgatory; and
cannot chuse but extremely much congratulate her Majesty’s Wisdom and
Moderation therein’.27
As Christopher Morash suggests, in this context St Patrick may well be a
piece of ‘special pleading’ on behalf of the queen.28 If so, the play is highly
divided in its religio-political stance: it asserts the positive impact of Patrick’s
mission but nonetheless incorporates anti-Catholic polemic in the Spenserian
name and characterisation of the villainous Archimagus, the highest authority
of Ireland’s pagan religion. As John D. Cox points out, the play may seem to
have a ‘tolerating impulse’ – Patrick is accompanied on his first appearance by
priests singing in Latin – but in its treatment of Irish Catholicism it is ‘as eager
an advocate of English colonization in Ireland as Spenser’s View of the Present
State of Ireland’.29 Shirley distinguishes between (Catholic) Irish on one hand
and (Catholic) Old and (Protestant) New English on the other, and accommodates the concerns of his two patrons, the Protestant Wentworth and the Catholic queen.
The same divided attention infuses the form of the play; in Deana Rankin’s
25
26
27
28
29
William Knowler, ed., The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Dispatches (London, 1739), II, p. 221.
I am very grateful to Karen Britland for her help with the translation.
Ibid.
Ibid., II, 257.
A History of Irish Theatre 1601–2000 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 8.
The Devil and the Sacred in English Drama, 1350–1642 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 200.
183
Lucy Munro
terms, it ‘bears the marks of generic and geographical strain’.30 While Rosania
incorporates allusions to fashionable Caroline tragicomedy, St Patrick has
often been perceived as a dramatic throwback. G.E. Bentley remarks that
compared with Shirley’s ‘generally sophisticated plays’, St Patrick is ‘conspicuous for its crudeness; it is more like a Red Bull play than like Shirley’s characteristic pieces for the Cockpit and Blackfriars’.31 I would like to take seriously
the idea that St Patrick is ‘like a Red Bull play’, and to argue that it combines
Fletcherian influence with that of a remarkable cluster of tragicomic saints’
plays first performed at the Red Bull between 1618 and 1622. These include
William Rowley’s A Shoemaker a Gentleman (Prince Charles’s Men, c.1618,32
focusing on the early lives of St Crispin and St Crispianus and dramatising the
martyrdoms of Saints Alban, Amphiabel, Winifred and Hugh); The Two Noble
Ladies (Company of the Revels, c.1619–22, focusing on the conversion of St
Cyprian by St Justina); Henry Shirley’s The Martyred Soldier (Revels, c.1619,
focusing on the conversion and martyrdom of the Vandal general Bellizarius
and his wife Victoria); and Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr (Revels,
1620, focusing on the martyrdom of St Dorothea and the conversion of her
persecutor, Theophilus). The Virgin Martyr has been suggested as a source for
St Patrick – Cox calls St Patrick ‘a spin-off, of sorts’ from the earlier play – and
this assertion gains greater force if we acknowledge Shirley’s use of another
Red Bull play, J.C.’s tragicomedy The Two Merry Milkmaids (1619).33
Although St Patrick is perceived as an oddity in Shirley’s dramatic corpus, he
also seems to have written the lost Tragedy of St Albans, entered in the Stationers’ Register in February 1640.34 What looks like a one-off experiment may
have been part of a longer engagement with popular tragicomedies of the kind
performed at the Red Bull.
All of these plays fuse comic and tragic elements. A Shoemaker a Gentleman
juxtaposes the martyrdoms of its saints – some taking place off-stage, others
gorily dramatised for the audience – with the tragicomic careers of the
disguised princes Crispin and Crispianus. Although tragicomic in form, The
Two Noble Ladies looks towards the eventual fate of Cyprian and Justina, the
Angel who appears at the moment of Cyprian’s conversion telling them to
travel to Antioch, where ‘shall you both (ere long) in Martyrdome / Mayntayne
30
31
32
33
34
Between Spenser and Swift, p. 99.
Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 1143.
See David Nicol, ‘A Shoemaker a Gentleman: Dates, Sources and Influence’, Notes & Queries,
n.s. 50 (2003), 441–3.
The Devil and the Sacred, 199; Hugh MacMullan, ‘The Sources of Shirley’s St Patrick for
Ireland’, PMLA, 48 (1933), 806–14, pp. 812–14; John P. Turner, A Critical Edition of James
Shirley’s St Patrick for Ireland (New York, 1979), pp. 53–4; 57–60.
See Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, V, 1142. R.S. Forsythe (The Relations of Shirley’s
Plays to the Elizabethan Drama [New York, 1914], pp. 150–2) suggests that this may have been
Shirley’s first tragedy, referred to in the dedication to The Maid’s Revenge (licensed 1626;
printed 1639); Stockwell, Dublin Theaters, p. 4, associates it with Werburgh Street.
184
Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
your faith, and meet the ioys to come’.35 A similar moment can be found at the
end of St Patrick, when Patrick declares, ‘’Twere happy for our holy faith to
bleed, / The Blood of Martyrs is the Churches seed’ (I4r), and the two plays
suggest, as Rankin states of St Patrick, that ‘true narrative redemption is only to
be found in death’.36 In an analogous fashion, The Martyred Soldier and The
Virgin Martyr are tragic in form, but tragicomic in their determination to look
beyond death to the martyr’s heavenly apotheosis.
Shirley’s use of spectacle – and in particular his staging of the guardian
angel, Victor – also owes much to the techniques of the Red Bull dramatists. At
the climax of St Patrick, a stage direction calls for ‘Soft Musick’ (I2r) before the
appearance of ‘Victor, and other Angels’ (I2v), who sing triumphantly as they
protect Patrick from the snakes summoned by the Archimagus. In A Shoemaker a Gentleman an angel ascends from Winifred’s holy well, accompanied
by music, to explain its health-giving properties.37 In The Two Noble Ladies,
the first appearance of the angel is accompanied by recorders; a stage direction
describes him as ‘an Angell shaped like a patriarch vpon his breast a [red] blew
table full of silver letters, in his right hand a red crossierstaff, on his shoulders large
wings’ (ll. 1101–3). In The Virgin Martyr, Angelo is revealed in his heavenly
glory at the moment of Dorothea’s martyrdom, which is accompanied by what
a stage direction calls ‘Loud Musicke’ and Sapritius calls ‘heauenly Musicke’.38
Similarly, appearances of the angels in The Martyred Soldier are accompanied
by music and song; at the climax of Act Five an angel ascends singing from
Victoria’s prison, heralding Victoria’s appearance as she ‘rises out of the cave
white’, and later in the scene two angels descend from the heavens, also
singing.39 It is not surprising that Abraham Wright remarked in his commonplace book that The Martyred Soldier was ‘very good for ye presentments and
songs by angel; by wch ye people were much taken’.40 Like the Red Bull saints’
plays, St Patrick bears the strains of post-Reformation engagement with saints’
lives and martyrology, a strain which is embodied in the connection of theatrical spectacle and miracle. Nova Myhill notes in The Virgin Martyr a ‘contest
between narrative and spectacle as the guarantor of truth’, which is played out
in the tension between Protestant and Catholic conventions of martyrology
and in ‘the assumptions of an audience that understands the theatre in
35
36
37
38
39
40
Rebecca G. Rhoads, ed., The Two Noble Ladies (Oxford, 1930), ll. 1879–80. The play is
preserved in British Library MS Egerton 1994.
Between Spenser and Swift, p. 104.
A Merrie and Pleasant Comedy: Never Before Printed, Called A Shoo-Maker a Gentleman
(London, 1638), ff. C3v–C4r.
The Virgin Martir, A Tragedie (London, 1622), f. K3r.
The Martyr’d Souldier (London, 1638), f. I1r.
Arthur C. Kirsch, ‘A Caroline Commentary on the Drama’, Modern Philology 66 (1969),
256–61, p. 259, quoting British Library Add. MS 22608.
185
Lucy Munro
primarily visual or verbal terms’.41 The same is true of the other Red Bull
saints’ plays and of St Patrick, which perhaps plays for higher stakes in its
representation of a saint who converts not only individuals but an entire
nation.
Interconnected with these plays’ concern with religious spectacle is their
disquieting exploration of rape. The Two Noble Ladies juxtaposes the threat of
sexual violence and sexual manipulation in each of its plots. Miranda is forced
to escape from her father, the Souldan of Egypt, when he proposes marriage to
her, and Justina’s conversion of Cyprian takes place when he about to rape her,
urged on by the demonic spirit Cantharides. In a comic sub-plot, Cantharides
– who shares his name with a common aphrodisiac – makes another woman,
Caro, declare love to three different men. The Virgin Martyr and The Martyred
Soldier both feature attempted rapes on Christian converts, and an association
between conversion and sexual violence is also clear in Maximinus’ casual
threat to the convert queen in A Shoemaker a Gentleman, ‘Ile prostetute thy
body to some Slave, / And if the issue prosper, make him a Hang-man’ (B3v).
In The Virgin Martyr, Sapritius tries to force first his son and then a British
slave to rape Dorothea; Dorothea’s imperviousness foreshadows her divine
protection later in the play, when her torturers are exhausted before their
actions have any effect on her. In The Martyred Soldier the king of the Vandals
threatens rape against Victoria, only to find that the camel-drivers he sets on
her are either sent mad or are blinded and deafened before they can touch her;
stage directions instruct two of them to ‘dance antiquely, and Exeunt’ (H2r).
The threat of sexual violence in the Red Bull saints’ plays is thus part of a
movement towards either conversion or martyrdom.
St Patrick similarly connects religious faith with sexual violence, and with a
disturbing kind of theatrical spectacle. While the main plot follows the progress of Patrick’s mission in Ireland, the sub-plot focuses on a love triangle
between two princes, Conallus and Corybreus, and a noblewoman, Emeria.
Corybreus fails to seduce Emeria, who is in love with Conallus, and, following
the Archimagus’s advice, disguises himself as the god Ceancrochi, gaining
access to her by wearing a magical bracelet which makes the wearer invisible.
He tells Emeria that it is her religious duty to submit to him, and when she
resists, saying, ‘I thought the powers above had beene all honest’ (E4r), he
replies,
’Tis in them chastitie, nor is it sin
In those we love to meet wit[h] active flames,
And be glad mothers to immortall issues:
How oft hath Jove, who justly is ador’d,
Left heaven, to practise love with such a faire one?
41
‘Making Death a Miracle: Audience and the Genres of Martyrdom in Dekker and Massinger’s
The Virgin Martyr’, Early Theatre 7.2 (2004), 9–31 (24).
186
Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
The Sun, for one embrace of Daphne, would
Have pawn’d his beames: not one, but hath sometimes
Descended, to make fruitfull weake Mortalitie.
Oh, if thou could’st but reach, Emeria,
With thy imagination, what delight,
What flowing extasies of joy we bring
Your sex, made nice and cold by winter lawes
Of man, that freeze the bloud, thou wood’st be fond
To my embraces, and petition me
To blesse thee with a rape, yet I woe thy
Consent. (E4r)
Despite his claim that he is ‘wooing’ her consent, Corybreus signals through
his references to classical precedent a willingness to use force that is made
explicit in his grotesque desire that Emeria might, in future ‘petition me / To
blesse thee with a rape’. When she continues to resist, he tells her,
Nay then, what should have beene with thy consent
A blessing, shall now only serve my pleasure,
And I will take the forfeit of thy coldnesse.
Em[eria]. Oh help, some man, I dare not call upon
The gods, for they are wicked growne, oh help.
Cor[ybreus]. I shall need none, thou thing of disobedience,
Thou art now within my power of love, or furie:
Yeeld, or I’ll force thee into postures shall
Make pleasure weep, and hurle thee into wantonnesse.
He carries her in.
The Devills rejoycing in a dance conclude the Act. (E4r–v)42
Like the Red Bull dramatists, Shirley associates pre-Christian faith – in this
case a mixture of classical and Celtic deities – with sexual exploitation and
violence. What is threatened against Christian converts in the Red Bull plays is
realised against the pagan Emeria. Shirley also follows these plays in his use of
spectacle: a Fletcherian moment, with its queasy combination of seduction
and rape, is transformed into theatrical spectacle as the devils celebrate
Corybreus’s violation of Emeria’s chastity. The appearance of the Devils serves
to link the two plots, reminding the audience that Corybreus’s sacrilegious
masquerade as a god has been achieved with the connivance of the
Archimagus. While rape victims in other plays lament the devilish behaviour
of their attackers, Emeria’s rape is hellish in a far more concrete sense.
It is perhaps for this reason that Emeria’s story does not follow either of the
standard early modern rape narratives. Her rape does not become the focus of
the tragic narrative typified by Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (Sussex’s Men,
c.1594?), Heywood’s The Rape of Lucrece (Queen Anne’s Men, c.1607–08),
42
These speeches are printed as prose in the 1640 quarto.
187
Lucy Munro
Fletcher’s Valentinian (King’s Men, c.1610–11) and Davenant’s The Cruel
Brother (King’s Men, 1627), in which the victim dies either through suicide or
at the hands of her male relatives, her dishonour (and, in most cases, that of
her family) being avenged by the very male relatives who in some versions
demand her death. Another storyline open to Shirley was the tragicomic
narrative in which a victim of rape eventually marries her rapist, as do Meriope
in Fletcher and Massinger’s The Queen of Corinth (King’s Men, c.1618) and
Clara in Dekker, Ford, Middleton and Rowley’s The Spanish Gypsy (Lady
Elizabeth’s Men, 1623). Suzanne Gossett suggests that these plays represent the
‘fulfilment of a fantasy of rape’, the guilt attached to both the act and the
fantasy removed by the eventual marriage: ‘rather than being a tragic crime
rape becomes a comic error cured by being brought into the social order’.43
Although this pattern can be found in Caroline tragicomedies such as Dick of
Devonshire (unknown company, c.1626?) and Arthur Wilson’s The Swisser
(King’s Men, 1631), Shirley rejects it. Instead, he adopts an alternative
storyline that is also found in William Heminges’ tragedy The Fatal Contract
(Queen Henrietta Maria’s Men, c.1638). In The Fatal Contract Chrotilda,
raped by Clotair years before the opening of the play, pursues her own revenge
in the guise of a Moorish eunuch. Like Chrotilda, Emeria attacks her rapist,
stabbing Corybreus when he returns to her later in the play. Although he
reveals his identity as he dies, Emeria is unrepentant, declaring that she has
‘done a justice to the gods in this / And my own honour [. . .] I am proude / To
be the gods revenger’ (F4r). Both plays set up a ‘rape-revenge’ narrative in
which the victim not only refuses to die after she is raped, but also pursues her
revenge more effectively than her male relatives.44 Emeria is, in fact, more
effective than Chrotilda, who is ultimately unable to kill Clotair and is fatally
wounded by him; she self-consciously refuses to die, saying, ‘I will live now,
this story shall not fall so’ (F4r). Instead, Emeria’s betrayal at the hands of the
Archimagus and Corybreus and, it is suggested, the pagan gods, is balanced by
her final Christian redemption; Patrick having ‘quieted the tempest in [her]
soule’, her fate is seemingly to become a nun and to be ‘Spouse to an eternall
Bridegroome’ (I1v).
Emeria’s ‘story’ thus combines the tragic and tragicomic rape narratives
prevalent in the Caroline theatre; she does not die, but Shirley also rejects the
problematic marriage of the rape victim to her attacker. The rape itself remains
a tragic act, one which cannot be assimilated into the social order or neutralised as a comic error – it is telling that Corybreus’ death is permanent: he is not
brought back to life and his death is not revealed to be false. It is, however,
43
44
‘ “Best Men are Moulded out of Faults”: Marrying the Rapist in Jacobean Drama’, in Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance, ed. Arthur F. Kinney and Don S.
Collins (Amherst, 1987), 168–90, p. 187.
I borrow the term ‘rape-revenge’ from Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in
the Modern Horror Film (London, 1992).
188
Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
followed by Emeria’s announcement of her religious vocation; the tragedy of
the rape is seemingly followed by the tragicomedy not only of Emeria’s conversion – strikingly figured in terms of the standard comic conclusion of marriage
– but also of the nation itself. Similarly, the sinister connotations that theatrical spectacle has gathered in the wake of Emeria’s rape are countered by the
appearance of the guardian angel Victor, and Patrick’s defeat of the
Archimagus’s venomous snakes. But the play as a whole resists this neat
conjunction of genre, narrative and theatrical spectacle, since King Leogarius,
who conspired with the Archimagus against Patrick, still remains to be
converted at the end of Act Five.
Kind Night-Imbraces: Landgartha
Similar generic concerns animate Landgartha, first performed on St Patrick’s
Day 1640, which seems designed, as Rankin suggests, ‘as a riposte to Shirley’s
vision of Ireland, past and present’.45 Basing its narrative on material taken
from Saxo Grammaticus,46 Landgartha reworks both the earlier Werburgh
Street tragicomedies and Shirley’s own influences. What Bentley describes as
the play’s ‘effeminate tone’ mirrors that of Caroline tragicomedies written for
indoor playhouses.47 Like Rosania, Aglaura and Claracilla, Landgartha is
named after its heroine, but Burnell’s description of her as a ‘patterne’ for his
female readers to imitate, combining ‘Chastity and other virtues joyn’d to
beauty, virtue single and manly fortitude in the female sexe’, suggests a role
similar to that of Victoria or Dorothea.48 Its use of spectacle is akin to that of St
Patrick and the Red Bull saints’ plays: for example, an angel appears to Harrold
and Eric in Act Five, accompanied by ‘a sweet solemne Musicke of Recorders’
(I1r), prophesying their political success and Landgartha’s eventual conversion to Christianity. Similarly, while the play’s depiction of Amazons might be
compared with that of William Cartwright’s privately acted The Lady Errant
(c.1633–35), it is also like that of the Red Bull tragicomedy The Two Noble
Ladies, in which the Amazonian Miranda fights bravely and successfully in
battle.
Like St Patrick, Landgartha mixes questions of sexual propriety with those
of national destiny. In the first scene, the extravagantly depraved king of
Norway, Frollo – who ‘minds nothing / But whom to kill, or foulely ravish’
(B1r) – appears leading a ‘weeping Lady’ (B1v) who he has evidently just raped.
Frollo is quickly and symbolically despatched by Landgartha, but the play’s
45
46
47
48
Between Spenser and Swift, p. 105. See also Catherine M. Shaw, ‘Landgartha and the Irish
Dilemma’, Éire-Ireland 13 (1978), 26–39; Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity, pp. 275–7.
See Shaw, pp. 29–32; Bentley, Jacobean and Caroline Stage, III, 97–8.
Jacobean and Caroline Stage, III, 97.
Landgartha. A Tragie-Comedy (Dublin, 1641), f. A2r.
189
Lucy Munro
concern with sexual propriety remains as she marries Reyner, the king of
Denmark, only to be abandoned when Reyner takes up with Frollo’s daughter
Vraca. The extent to which Landgartha’s generic structures are infused with
sexual concerns is clear in Burnell’s postscript to the printed text:
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 observe,
not to goe against Art, to please the ever-amorous. (K1v)
Burnell echoes not only Smith’s account of the Dublin audience’s disgruntled
reaction to the conclusion of The Royal Master, but also Fletcher’s address ‘To
the Reader’, which prefaced the first printed edition of The Faithful Shepherdess. Fletcher and Burnell differ in important respects, however, in their
approaches to tragicomedy. Fletcher famously writes, ‘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’.49 Tragicomedy in The Faithful Shepherdess functions
through a kind of abjection, in which characters and audience experience
something of the trauma associated with death but eventually escape its sting.
Burnell instead identifies his tragicomic effect in a combination of narrative
and tone, focusing not on death but on erotic harmony. In refusing to accept
the ‘kind night-imbraces’ of her bigamous husband, Landgartha ensures that
the play will end ‘neither [. . .] Comically or Tragically, but betwixt both’, and the
dramatist claims that he will not yield to pressure from an ‘ever-amorous’ audience who would prefer to see romantic reconciliation.
Landgartha’s refusal to be reconciled fully with Reyner means that Burnell’s
play ends in sexual and political stasis. She leaves the stage swearing, ‘I’ll end
my life, / An honest widdow, or forsaken wife’ (I4r), but her sister Scania tells
Reyner,
You know the way to Norway, Sir, and if
I might advise so wise a King to follow
Us thither, and not slowly: that honourable
Obligation would so bind your Queene
(Being seconded by us your friends, and reason)
That I beleeve what now she does denie,
She wo’d then grant. (I4r)
Reyner himself vows that if he cannot regain Landgartha he will commit
suicide: ‘(Strucke with my dyre misfortune) my owne hand / Shall send my
49
The Faithfull Shepheardesse (London, [1609?]), f. ¶2v.
190
Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
spirit to the Stygian strand’, while a seemingly repentant Vraca tells the audience, ‘seeing I’ve walk’d astray, I will from hence: / By future good to expiate
my offence’ (I4v). Her repentance is, however, notably sudden, given that only
eighty or so lines earlier she was exuberantly exchanging insults with
Landgartha. The last lines of Landgartha thus maintain the uncertain, tragicomic tone of the exchanges that precede them, and the play’s form mirrors its
political conclusions. If, as Catherine M. Shaw suggests, the steadfast
Landgartha represents Ireland and her wavering husband represents England
– the ‘union’ between Ireland and England allegorised as sexual union – then
no real solution to their dilemma can plausibly be reached. The play may
‘allegorically incline toward hope for a reassessment of the terms of union’,50
but any such ‘hope’ must be based on optimism rather than experience.
Conclusion
As I have suggested, the intertextual experiments of the Werburgh Street
dramatists were enabled by the theatre’s monopolistic position in Dublin,
where there were no other commercial playhouses. The theatre did not,
however, have a monopoly on popular entertainment. In ‘A Prologue to
another of Master Fletcher’s Playes there’, Shirley complains about competition from other pastimes:
Were there a Pageant now on foot, or some
Strange Monster from Peru, or Affrick come,
Men would throng to it; any Drum will bring
(That beats a bloudlesse prize, or Cudgelling)
Spectators hither; nay, the Beares invite
Audience, and Bag-pipes can doe more than wit.51
The reference to ‘wit’ is telling, since Caroline prologues and epilogues, particularly those written for indoor theatres, tend to emphasise it as the essential
quality of a discerning audience. Just as the sight of the bears attracts a larger
crowd than the sight of the actors, so the loud, unrestrainedly vulgar sound of
the bagpipes is prized over that of polished dramatic dialogue. Although the
company seem not to have had rivals in conventional theatre, they were nonetheless forced to position themselves in relation to opposing forms of
entertainment.
Rosania, St Patrick and Landgartha testify to the generic fluidity produced
by this uncertain environment, as dramatists turn to alternative models for
50
51
‘Landgartha and the Irish Dilemma’, p. 35.
Narcissus, f. C7r. On popular entertainment in Dublin see Fletcher, Drama, Performance and
Polity, p. 274.
191
Lucy Munro
tragicomic drama. Like Fletcherian tragicomedy, these plays have a strong
narrative investment in female sexuality; however, each reworks this material
to different ends and through a filter of later experiments. As I have explored,
these plays reconfigure the contours of the genre in ways that were uncommon
on the contemporaneous London stage, bringing together influences associated with different playhouses, companies and audiences. Rosania refashions
in ironic fashion the narrative structures of Aglaura and Claracilla, while St
Patrick turns instead to the innovations of plays such as The Virgin Martyr and
The Two Noble Ladies; Landgartha, meanwhile, looks back to the plays of the
courtier dramatists even as it responds to and reworks St Patrick. The Dublin
tragicomedies thus provide us with a means of rethinking the relationships
between London stages such as the Blackfriars, Cockpit and Red Bull. Moreover, the Werburgh Street experiment suggests that we patronise or underestimate the influence of popular modes on this so-called elite genre at our peril,
be they the Red Bull plays or Dublin’s pageants, monsters and bears.
192
12
‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of
Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
DEANA RANKIN
It’s because the Irish have a special gift for tragicomedy, and lord knows you can
never have too much tragicomedy. It’s a truism that only an Irishman could
make you laugh at three guys being held hostage in Beirut.1
W
HETHER or not you concur with the ‘truism’ outlined above, it
certainly seems to have become commonplace to claim that tragicomedy and Ireland are thoroughly enmeshed. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot, as the full title announces, is A Tragicomedy in Two Acts; many of Brian
Friel’s plays, not to mention recent international theatre hits such as Marie
Jones’s Stones in his Pockets or Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of
Leenane, have been described, in both critical study and newspaper review, as
tragicomic; Verna Foster’s recent study of the genre includes discussion of
eight examples of modern tragicomedy, three of which – Playboy of the
Western World, The Plough and the Stars, Waiting for Godot – are by Irish
writers.2
In what follows, I want to try to resist a very strong temptation: that of
making a historical necessity of a modern critical commonplace, offering a
national history of this particular genre, and tracing the links between Ireland
and tragicomedy back to a seventeenth-century point of origin. Such a point
could be plotted as being located somewhere at the intersection of the two
small, productive, though very differently constituted, literary circles which
1
2
Review of Frank McGuinness, Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me, www.ffwdweekly.com/Issues/
1998/1126/the2.html (consulted 5 March 2006).
See, for example, review of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, Time Magazine, 6 January 1992;
L. Christy, ‘Stones in his Pockets: How a Tragicomedy became a Legal Farce’, Entertainment
Law Review 15 (2004), 228–30; Nicholas Grene, ‘Ireland in Two Minds: Martin McDonagh
and Conor McPherson’, The Yearbook of English Studies 35 (2005), 298–311; Verna A. Foster,
The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy (Aldershot, 2004), pp. 135–48, 166–75.
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Deana Rankin
formed around John Ogilby and his Dublin theatres: first the Werburgh Street
Theatre, established with the approval of the Viceroy, Wentworth, in the
1630s; and second, the later Smock Alley Theatre, established at the Restoration when Charles II appointed Ogilby his official Master of the Irish Revels.3
The very structure of this collection seems actively to encourage such a
national historical perspective: a collection in which Spanish, French and
Italian strands of enquiry weave themselves around a central tragicomic preoccupation, never quite articulated as ‘English’. But the temptation is worth
resisting, in so far as such refusal opens up the possibility of asking an alternative set of questions, and exploring a further set of intersections. By way of a
selection of dramatic moments in seventeenth-century Ireland, I want here to
ask what territory has to do with tragicomedy, and thus to address the question
of geography and its influence on genre. For what is most intriguing about the
review of Frank McGuinness’s play, cited in the epigraph above, is not the
‘Irishness’ claimed for tragicomedy; it is rather the fact that tragicomedy
emerges between nations, inter-nationally.4 Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me
(London, 1992), a drama suspended between Ireland and Beirut, tells of
unwilling exiles, of hostages abroad. Indeed this particular production by the
Liffey Players – a company which takes its name from Dublin’s river, performs
only ‘plays by and about the Irish’, but is located in Calgary, Canada – gives
even sharper focus to a compelling snapshot of international displacement,
and so throws into relief a series of interlinked questions about hybridity, at
once cultural and generic.
Geographical displacement was, of course, one of Sir Philip Sidney’s chief
causes for complaint against ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’; that hybrid, cross-bred
genre which continually demands the impossible of its audience:
Now you shall have three ladies walk to gather flowers: and then we must believe
the stage to be a garden. By and by we hear news of shipwreck in the same place:
and then we are to blame if we accept it not for a rock. Upon the back of that
comes out a hideous monster with fire and smoke: and then the miserable
beholders are bound to take it for a cave. While in the meantime two armies fly
in, represented with four swords and bucklers: and then what hard heart will not
receive it for a pitched field?5
Sidney’s particular criticism of such constantly shifting locations is not simply
3
4
5
See W.S. Clark, The Early Irish Stage (Oxford, 1955), pp. 26–42; A. Fletcher, Drama, Performance and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland (Cork, 2000); C. Morash, A History of Irish
Theatre, 1601–2001 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 4–66 and my Between Spenser and Swift: English
Writing in Seventeenth-century Ireland (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 96–108, 159–90.
Cf. Richard Dutton’s apologetic inclusion of Beckett in his Modern Tragicomedy and the
British Tradition (Norman and London, 1986): ‘as an Irishman living in France, [he] is only
marginally defined by this context’, p. 6, see also pp. 55–89.
Sir Philip Sidney, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, eds,
Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford, 1973), pp. 59–122 (112).
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Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
that they stretch belief; it is also that they produce an attendant loquaciousness. His complaint is of theatre ‘where you shall have Asia of the one side, and
Afric of the other and so many under-kingdoms, that the player, when he
cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is, or else the tale will not be
conceived’ (113). Prolixity of place, then, produces prolixity of words; this in
turn both complicates and transgresses the desired unity of action. Faced with
the relentless geographical displacement of the early Renaissance stage, Sidney
longs with heavy nostalgia for the classical simplicity of the messenger speech:
I may speak (though I am here) of Peru, and in speech digress from that to the
description of Calicut; but in action I cannot represent it without Pacolet’s horse;
and so was the manner the ancients took, by some Nuntius to recount things
done in a former time or other place. (114)
If Sidney is disoriented by the wordy wastage of late sixteenth-century
‘mongrel tragi-comedy’, Shakespeare has little time for such high-minded
anxieties regarding Aristotle’s unities. Instead he delights in a profusion of
words, instigating his own mesmeric geography as he raids the store of French,
Italian and Greek romance to send Perdita to Bohemia, Pericles around the
Mediterranean, Prospero to his magical island.6 The long periods of
wandering and exile so characteristic – indeed so formative – of Shakespeare’s
late romances take on the redemptive function of pilgrimage. Characters
journey through foreign adversity to return, albeit bereft, at least safely, home:
they turn, with the help of narrative time, tragedy into tragicomedy. As he
explored the formation of dramatic character in ‘writers of tragi-comedy (and
Shakespeare is always a writer of tragi-comedy)’, W.B. Yeats recognised and
categorised this particular genius in a parenthetical remark.7 The positioning
of his sweeping judgement, slipped in between clauses, seems almost to
prefigure the topographical metaphor of precarious generic between-ness
which follows later in the same essay: Yeats’s realisation ‘that tragedy must
always be a drowning and a breaking down of dykes that separate man from
man, and that it is upon these dykes that comedy keeps house’ (241). Tragicomedy seems, then, to demand not only that playmakers conjure borders into
imaginative being, but also that they write, think and imagine beyond these
borders, at once geographic and generic.
Returning for the rest of this chapter to seventeenth-century Ireland, I want
in the first section to consider two rare mid-seventeenth-century definitions of
genre – one of tragicomedy, one of romance – composed by two very different
Irish writers. The first, Henry Burnell, was an Old Englishman, which is to say
a Catholic descendant of Henry II’s twelfth-century Anglo-Norman conquest
6
7
See Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford, 1997).
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Tragic Theatre’ in Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), pp. 238–45
(240).
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Deana Rankin
of Ireland. The second, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, was a beneficiary of the
Elizabethan Protestant plantations, part-heir to a fortune built up by his entrepreneurial father (also father-in-law to Edmund Spenser) Richard Boyle, first
Earl of Cork. In the second section, I shall examine two variant prologues for a
single tragicomedy, as it makes it way between Dublin and London.
Composed by James Shirley, and first performed during his residency at the
Werburgh Street Theatre, Dublin under the title Rosania or Love’s Victory
(c.1638), the play was presented shortly afterwards in London as The Doubtful
Heir.8 In conclusion, I will briefly consider a second play to make the journey
from Ireland to England, this time post Restoration: Orrery’s Altemira, first
produced in Dublin in 1662 and then two years later in London as The
Generall. In tracing this journey across three sections, I shall be exploring the
ways in which tragicomedy is inflected in both theory and practice ‘betwixt’
Ireland and England across the period. For what follows begins with the desire
of both Burnell and Orrery to define and delineate the nature of genre as it
arises between nations; then, by way of the anxiety experienced by Shirley, a
playwright returning from the cultural dislocation of exile to a home city made
strange by absence, the exploration concludes with the triumphant London
debut of Orrery, transporting his new Restoration heroic tragicomedy from
the cultural margins to the metropolitan, courtly centre. The argument that
tragicomedy’s situation lies ‘betwixt both’ is not, finally, specific to the intersection of England and Ireland; this critical journey might also encourage a
more global exploration not only of the interplay of geography and the tragicomic genre, but also of the relationship of this mixed form to historical event
and historiography.9
I
Landgartha: A Tragie-Comedy, as it was presented in the new Theater in Dublin,
with good applause, being an Ancient story (Dublin, 1641) was performed in the
Werburgh Street Theatre on St Patrick’s Day, 1639. Henry Burnell’s afterword
to the published version is both defensive and brief. It also offers, as Ristine has
pointed out, an English language definition of tragicomedy unique for the
period:
Some (but not of best judgements) were offended at the Conclusion of this Play,
in regard Landgartha tooke not then, what she was perswaded to by so many, the
8
9
Published as James Shirley, The doubtful heir. A tragic-comedie as it was acted at the private
house in Black-friers (London, 1652) and the following year as one of James Shirley, Six New
Playes (London, 1653).
See Paul Hernadi, Interpreting Events: Tragicomedies of History on the Modern Stage (Ithaca
and London, 1985).
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Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
Kings kind night-embraces. 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
observe, not to goe against Art, to please the over-amorous. To the rest of
bablers, I despise any answer.10
A brief outline of Burnell’s complicated plot suggests the difficulties that
(some of) his Dublin audience faced in making sense of his ‘Tragie-Comedy’.
When the play opens, Frollo, the warrior king of Sweden, has succumbed to
the dangers of settlement and his army has lost their military discipline. By the
end of the first act, he has been defeated and slain by the king of Denmark and
his allies, Landgartha and her Amazons. In the second act, against all Amazon
and military rules, Landgartha agrees to marry the lovesick Denmark and to
settle in Sweden. The third act protracts the view of court life between battles,
presenting a classical masque within the play and some more boisterous local
Irish colour for the play’s Dublin audience. One Captain Hubha and the one
Irish Amazon, Marfisa, dressed in ‘an Irish Gowne tuck’d up to mid-legge,
with a broad basket-hilt Sword on, hanging in a great Belt, Broags on her feet,
her hayre dishevell’d, and a payre of long neck’d big rowll’d Spurs on her
heels’, round off the act as they ‘Dance the whip of Donboyne merrily’ (ff. E3r,
F2v).11 The fourth act returns to Landgartha, at a point where her husband has
fallen out of love with her and returned from Sweden to Denmark. Two Christian Englishmen, Harold and Eric, bring Landgartha news of her husband’s
adultery and try to capitalise on the situation by offering to assist her in battle
against him. The fifth act sees Landgartha refuse the Englishmen’s offer.
Although pregnant, abandoned, and grieving at the news of her husband’s new
love, she sends her Amazons to his aid. Her loyalty causes Denmark, now fallen
into the trap of military lethargy which Frollo occupied at the start of the play,
to repent. The Amazons win his battle for him and, as the play rushes headlong
towards its close, the drive to happy resolution appears to take over.
Yet, as Burnell’s sometimes prickly, yet always clear and generically determined afterword acknowledges, the final resolution which some – ‘(but not of
best judgements)’ – might expect of tragicomedy is withheld. For the key relationship, that of the emblematic husband and wife – of the King and his
mistreated ally – remains ultimately, deliberately, unresolved. Landgartha
herself leaves the stage with an ambiguous statement of intent: ‘And as for me
(though yours:) I’ll end my life, / An honest widdow, or forsaken wife’ (f. I4r).
Her sister suggests the king should seek a reconciliation scene; but not yet, and
10
11
Burnell, Landgartha, f. Kv; F.H. Ristine, English Tragi-comedy, Its Origin and Development
(New York, 1910), p. 137. Guarini’s Compendio della Poesia Tragicomica (1601) was published
in a similarly defensive mode to respond to criticisms of Il Pastor Fido.
The specifically named dance links the scene to Ben Jonson’s ‘Irish Masque’, C.H. Herford, P.
and E. Simpson (eds), Ben Jonson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1925–52), IX, p. 401.
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Deana Rankin
certainly not on stage: resolution comes later. Burnell’s ending – as he terms it,
‘betwixt both’ – leaves the adulterous king, recently saved from disgrace by his
estranged wife, repentant yet facing an uncertain future; on stage, but in all
important respects both alone and divided from himself. To coin the rhythm
of Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King, the audience are left with a
husband and no husband, a wife and no wife, a tragicomedy and yet no
tragicomedy.
Landgartha, as its full title cited above suggests, is a play caught between
genres. The ‘Tragie-Comedy’ sits in tense relationship with the ‘Ancient story’
it represents. Rather than beguile the audience with one dramatic event – the
complex interwoven plotting which tells the tale of one battle lost, one love
won – Burnell follows the linear chronological structure of history. Abandoning the multi-stranded teleology of drama, Burnell recounts, act by act, a
sequential historical narrative, withholding the resolution, and so leaving his
audience with unfinished business. As the afterword makes clear, this left some
in the audience unfulfilled: the suspense on which successful theatre relies, and
tragicomedy more so than any other genre, some might say – the final revelation of birth, the arrival of the army, the finding of the father, the fulfillment of
prophecy – is nowhere to be found.
Burnell’s afterword to the reader of his play claims that this conclusion is no
mistake; it is, rather, the point: ‘a Tragie-Comedy sho’d neither end Comically
or Tragically [. . .]’. The hybrid term which names the genre does not describe
a move from one form to the next, from the first of its constituent parts to the
second: it is not tragedy-then-comedy one after the other. It is, rather, a properly hybrid form which remains deliberately undecided even – perhaps especially – in conclusion: ‘neither . . . or . . . but betwixt both’. The argument is
strongly articulated here as counter-argument; the reception of Burnell’s play
seems to have fallen between stools. On the one hand, there are the
‘overamorous’ and ‘the bablers’, whose taste for easy resolutions exemplified
by the concluding marriages of comedy he affects to despise. On the other
there are those ‘(not of best judgements)’, but who ought to know better. They
ought to exercise their ‘judgements’, to understand the rules of ‘Decorum’,
and the precepts of ‘Art’. They ought, in other words, to bring their classical
training to bear on Landgartha, but as they do not, they have misunderstood
his play.
Within its local Irish context, Burnell’s claim concerning the constitutive
inconclusiveness of his chosen genre has a further specific and political force.
For Landgartha attempts to give courtly shape to Old English aspirations of
playing a fuller part in the government of Ireland.12 It declares that, despite
their doubly marginal position as Catholic subjects in a sister-kingdom, the
12
See A. Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625–42 (London, 1966); N. Canny, Making Ireland
British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001); and my Between Spenser and Swift, pp. 75–116.
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Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
Old English, like Landgartha, remain loyal servants of the (English) king. For
all its ancient Scandinavian setting, then, Landgartha has a documentary
immediacy in its theme and composition; the movement between ancient
Norway and Sweden does not so much mirror as triangulate the contemporary
relationship of England and Ireland. The question at the heart of the play is
that of international relations: how to manage the still incomplete transition
between war and settlement.
There is also a further intriguing international resonance to Burnell’s brief
but unique moment of tragicomic self-reflection. It is impossible to ascertain if
he himself had read any of the various texts generated by La Querelle du Cid. It
is, however, highly likely that news of that spectacular argument about
Corneille’s violation of the rules of generic ‘decorum’ had spread to Dublin.
Corneille’s decision, at the close of Le Cid, to invoke, but defer still further,
beyond the end of the play, the marriage between the Princess Chimène and
her father’s murderer, Don Rodrigue, was already a cause célèbre. Le Cid was
tremendously popular among the London courtly theatre set: Joseph Rutler
translated and published it in English very soon after its first performance in
Paris and his version was performed in 1637 at James Shirley’s former home,
the Cockpit Theatre. But English tastes could not, it seems, leave the play
alone: Rutler went on to produce an English sequel which brought to fruition
the happy ending which Corneille had deliberately declined to stage.13
Conversations about Le Cid might well have taken place among the literary
coterie which had coalesced around James Shirley during his residency at the
Werburgh Street Theatre. If they did, as with so many seventeenth-century
Irish events, no records survive. All of the key texts of the Querelle, however,
were owned by James Butler, a leading young aristocratic figure of the day.
Proud both of his Anglo-Norman origins and of a lineage which could be
clearly traced to Henry II’s twelfth-century conquest of Ireland, Butler had
nonetheless found it expedient to jettison another important aspect of his
family inheritance: his Catholicism. His conversion to Protestantism did
much to ensure that he was adopted as a protégé of Wentworth’s. The Querelle
texts are listed, along with many unidentified volumes of French drama, in a
library catalogue compiled after the Restoration, when Butler was Duke of
13
See A. Gaste, La Querelle du Cid (Rouen, 1894) and, for a succinct discussion of French classical arguments and their relevance to English tragicomedy, together with the central texts and
David L. Hirst, Tragicomedy: The Critical Idiom (London and New York, 1984), pp. 48–61.
The British Library copy of Rutler’s translation, The Cid a Tragicomedy is dated 26 January
1637; in France Le Cid was entered for publication on 21 January 1637. Rutler’s 1640 MS
sequel was described as ‘A Tragi-comedy’. In it, Chimène’s father, presumed dead, returns,
thus licensing the marriage. For a discussion of French translations of Corneille on the Dublin
stage after the Restoration, see my ‘ “If Egypt now enslav’d or free, A Kingdom or a Province
be”: Translating Corneille in Restoration Dublin’ in Sarah Alyn Stacey and Véronique
Desnain (eds), Culture and Conflict in Seventeenth-century France and Ireland (Dublin, 2004),
pp. 194–209.
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Ormond and served as Viceroy himself.14 Burnell’s attempt to invoke the
‘Decorum’ of tragicomedy in defence of his play is tantalisingly contemporaneous with the French Querelle. That this young member of an emerging
group of Catholic intellectuals and writers in Ireland seems to be just as aware
of the literary as of the political battles being waged in the rest of Europe is
intriguing. That he finds it useful to draw on the key terms of such debates to
formulate a critical defence of his ‘tragicomedy’ against the ‘bablers’ of his
home city reminds us that this particular genre has always thrived, grown, and
been shaped between cultures.
Some fifteen years later, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery published the first
volume of Parthenissa, the first romance to be published in English after the
French model of Madame de Scudéry. Here, then, is another work written, in
geographical terms, between Ireland and England, triangulated by France. If
Orrery’s hagiographic biographer is to be believed, the inter-national dimension to the romance is quite specifically literal: he broke off work on
Parthenissa in England when Cromwell forced him out of quiet retirement to
join the 1649 campaigns in Ireland. The first volume was long believed to have
been published practically on the Irish battlefield, in Waterford, 1651.15 In
generic terms, Orrery was working between French and English models; and if
Burnell invoked the ‘betwixt both’ quality of his chosen form, Orrery’s venture
into French romance seems similarly to produce a defence of this allied genre:
in a form not quite ‘betwixt’ but ‘mixt’.
Beginning with a very personal tale of literary influence, Orrery shapes his
own engagement with romance as an education in readerly discernment:
In the Perusall of those Bookes, I mett with the names, & some of the Actions, of
those Hero’s, whome I had heard off, in the Scoole; This gave me a passionate
desire to separate the Truth from the Fixion, in the effecting whereof, I became as
much a Freind to readeing, as I had bin an Enemy to it.16
He then proceeds to defend romance in generic terms. Moving beyond
Burnell’s essentially dramatic terms, he invokes the parallel example of
‘history’:
Historyes are for the most Part but mixt Romances, and yet the Pure Romance
Part, may be as Instructive as, if not more than, the Historicall; since ’tis not the
Truth of a wise Councell or Ingenious Designe which invites Men to an
immitation thereof, but the Rationallity and Probability of it, whither it be reall
or Imaginary; had the Histories of Caesar or Hanniball bin as meere a fable as
14
15
16
Calendar of the manuscripts of the marquis of Ormonde, 8 vols (London, 1902–1920), VII, p.
515. See Dave Edwards, The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515–1642 (Dublin, 2004).
T. Morrice, A Collection of the State Letters of the Right honourable Roger Boyle (London, 1742),
p. 17. See also my Between Spenser and Swift, pp. 151–54, 180–81.
Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, Parthenissa, A Romance (London, 1655), fols I, Av, A2v–Br.
200
Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
they are the Contrary, we might yet have Deriv’d from thence as much instruction as wee now can, or doe. (I, f. Br)
Echoing Sidney’s hierarchy of writerly endeavour, Orrery’s defence invokes
rationality and probability over documentary truth; he asserts the value of the
means of the dramatist and the romance writer over the ends of the historian.
Romance offers, Orrery argues, greater educational, which is to say exemplary,
potential:
Besides Romances tell us what may be, whereas true Historyes tell us what is, or
has bin, – now what may be, is more uncircumscrib’d than what is, or has bin,
and consequently affoards a Larger Feild for instruction, and invention. (ibid.)
But Orrery’s preface protests too much. For if Landgartha’s dramatic form
is dangerously close to being stretched out of shape by Burnell’s desire to
represent an ‘Ancient story’, in Parthenissa the tension between romance and
unfolding history is evident throughout and threatens at times to hijack the
reader’s attention. The narrative focuses on the border kingdoms of Parthia
and Armenia and the encroaching threat of the Roman Empire; it is a tale of
colonial wars further complicated by domestic incident, as the opposing
princes of the two kingdoms become the best of friends, but are duty-bound to
obey self-interested kings. In other words, Parthenissa does far more than
simply carry echoes of Orrery’s Irish campaigns; contemporary history
appears at times to be inscribed all too clearly on its pages, the diversion of
Middle Eastern romance not so much allegorical of, as subject to, highly
fraught contemporary Irish event. In Artavades’ account of the fierce war
between neighbouring kingdoms, for instance, the king of Armenia takes the
Parthian city of Offala, giving the inhabitants twenty-four hours to leave. The
consequences are Cromwellian in their brutality:
For Artabazus Souldiers, whether to revenge their Companions deaths at the
precedent Battell, or out of some dispute which happen’d betwixt those of the
Army and the Garrison [. . .] put all that were in Offala as well Citizens and
Souldiers most barbarously to the Sword. (I, 89)17
The specifics of dispute between the ‘Army and the Garrison’ could be drawn
from the Cromwellian campaigns in Drogheda, or Waterford, or Limerick –
‘Offala’ and Offaly are not so far apart. Like Burnell, Orrery brings his foreign
historical romance wanderings home to roost; like Landgartha, Parthenissa is
thoroughly embedded in contemporary Irish history.
A tragicomedy of ancient Scandinavia and a romance of Middle Eastern
17
See T. Birch (ed.), The Works of Robert Boyle, 5 vols (London, 1744), VI, p. 50. Further examples are discussed in John Kerrigan, ‘Orrery’s Ireland and the British Problem, 1641–1679’, in
D.J. Baker and W. Maly (eds), British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge,
2002), pp. 197–225.
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Deana Rankin
empires, both penned by writers who inhabit the fraught space between
sister-kingdoms, who draw their literary inspiration from international
sources, and who filter their generic sensibility through Parisian courtly
culture. This sense of geographical dislocation, this awareness that they are not
quite of the London world, might be said to encourage in turn a sense of
generic self-consciousness. There is an awareness in the author that it might be
useful to explain not just the generic rules, but also the nature of his particular
innovations to those fellow authors, educated readers and audiences whom he
suspects are more at home in the metropolitan cultural mainstream than he.
From such assertions produced at a geographical distance, we turn now to ask
what happens when just such a metropolitan writer returns from temporary
‘exile’ in Ireland; what happens when that most prolific of mid-seventeenthcentury writers of what we now recognise as English tragicomedy, James
Shirley, brings his experience of the Dublin stage back home to London?
II
Shirley’s Rosania or Love’s Victory was probably produced in Dublin in 1638.
At some time, possibly in the same year, certainly before the outbreak of Civil
War and the closure of the theatres in 1641, it was also presented in London.
The play text, so far as we can judge, remained the same. It retained the same
complex convolutions of plot: the would-be usurper Ferdinand, who raises a
rebellion against a newly crowned queen, eventually turns out to be the
rightful, bloodline inheritor of the throne; along the way, Ferdinand’s new
‘wife’, the queen, fed up with their unconsummated marriage, tries to seduce
his ‘page’, Ferdinand’s cross-dressed lover, Rosania. The main plot is almost
hijacked by a complex ‘soldier sub-plot’ in which a captain teaches the city
merchants who are relentlessly chasing his debts a lesson in how to treat
soldiers. Finally, in perhaps Shirley’s most contrived tragic-comic ending, two
revolutions take place within two scenes: Ferdinand and Rosania are first
defeated, but then the apparently hostile enemy leader is revealed, by the
dramatic removal of a false beard, to be Rosania’s father in disguise: the lovers
are reunited again and all is redeemed. Ferdinand’s attempt to sum up the
action in the final lines is suitably breathless:
Our story hath been full of changes, but love
Hath met a glorious victory, and tied
Our souls together with most firm embraces.18
18
A. Dyce and W. Gifford (eds), The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, 6 vols (New
York, 1966), IV, pp. 275–362 (360). Marvin T. Herrick comments on the complexities of the
plot in Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France and England, Illinois Studies
in Language and Literature, vol. 39 (Urbana, 1955), pp. 301–2.
202
Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
When this fast-paced plot is transported to London, the title changes to The
Doubtful Heir, a tragicomedy. It is with this generically specific subtitle that the
play is entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1640 and eventually published in
1652 under the rule of that – to Shirley, doubtless – irredeemably ‘doubtful
heir’, Oliver Cromwell. Along with this shift of location and change of title
goes a change of prologue (IV, pp. 276–77).19 The two prologues are both,
albeit in very different ways, self-consciously concerned with the intersection
of genre and geography. The Dublin prologue plays upon the Dublin title:
Rosania or Love’s Victory. It begins with an extended imagined conjecture
among well-travelled but ultimately ill-informed ‘wits’ about the meaning of
the title:
ROSANIA? Methinks I hear one say,
What’s that? ’Tis a strange title to a play.
One asks his friend who late from travel came,
What ’tis? Supposing it some country’s name:
Perhaps says, ’tis some pretty town in France
Or Italy, and wittily discloses,
’Twas called Rosania, for the store of roses.
A witty comment: – others that have seen,
And fashionably observ’d the English scene,
Say, (but with less hope to be understood)
Such titles unto plays are now the mood,
Aglaura, Claricilla, – names that may
(Being ladies) grace, and bring guests to the play.
The coordinates of this wondering and wandering are those of Romance: small
towns in France and Italy. But they are also those of the metropolitan socialite,
who has recently attended Sir John Suckling’s Aglaura (London, 1638) at
Blackfriars, or Thomas Killigrew’s Claricilla (London, 1641) at Drury Lane. To
counter such conjectures, perhaps especially those made by the ill-qualified
men of mode who ‘fashionably observe’ and claim to understand the ‘English
scene’, Shirley turns to what he terms ‘honest English’. Forget the romantic
mysteries of ‘Rosania’, he tells his audience, focus on the subtitle ‘LOVE’S
VICTORY’. For that is what ensures the comic ending: ‘Fear not the war, the
victory is your’s / The battle will be ended in two hours.’
Ireland is nowhere referred to by name in this prologue, but the ghosts of
Spenser, Sidney and other Elizabethan commentators on Ireland and Irishness
haunt Shirley’s explications. Protective of his audience, he writes: ‘Not the
least rude uncivil language shall / Approach your ear, or make one cheek look
pale.’ By implication and association the ‘rude uncivil language’ which
Shirley’s ‘honest English’ seeks to drive from the stage is Irish. Shirley’s
language of generic explanation and clarity is championed against the slippery,
19
Both prologues were published in James Shirley, Poems (London, 1646), pp. 148, 154.
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Deana Rankin
insecure forms and definitions not just of romance, but also of Irishness.20 And
yet even as he invokes this apparent danger, Shirley also offers assurance. The
Dublin audience Shirley addresses is a civilized and sophisticated one; they
recognise both the hazards and the delights of romance, and of generic play.
When Shirley opens his London ‘Prologue, spoken at the Globe’ with the
apology that ‘Our author did not calculate this play/ For this meridian’, we
might expect him to elaborate further on the transfer of The Doubtful Heir –
now firmly generically defined as ‘a tragicomedy’ – from Dublin to London. In
the event, however, he is referring to a much more traumatic transfer: the
move from the north to the south of the river, when a play suited to the seated
silent audience of Blackfriars finds itself relocated to the boisterous Globe. The
feminised romance-style meanderings of the Dublin prologue are obliterated
as Shirley, for all that he is in London once more, finds himself not quite at
home in Shakespeare’s theatre, south of the river, home of a very different kind
of tragicomedy:
he did not mean
For the elevation of your poles, this scene.
No shews, no dance, and what you most delight in,
Grave understanders, here’s no target-fighting
Upon the stage, all work for cutlers barr’d;
No bawdry, nor no ballads; this goes hard;
But language clean; and what affects you not,
Without impossibilities the plot:
No clown, no squibs, no devil in’t.
Those elevating ‘poles’, the ‘grave understanders’, the ‘target-fighting’ and
‘cutlers’, the ‘bawdry’, the ‘going hard’ all invoke, even if under the sign of
negativity, a thoroughly hostile theatre audience, steeped in masculine ideas of
the theatre of action which Sidney so despised.
In contrast to the Dublin prologue, which seeks to clarify and console, the
Globe prologue offers a strangely negative definition of genre, one which
attempts to strike a contract with the audience by explaining what it is not
doing, what is not included, what Shirley did not mean to do.21 In his subsequent plea to the more discerning of his riotous audience – ‘But you that can
contract yourselves and sit / As were you now in the Black-friars pit’ – Shirley
also, by implication, defines his own well-crafted courtly tragicomedy in
20
21
See Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance
Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge, 2001).
This recalls the negatives used by Sidney in his description of tragicomedy: ‘observing rules
neither of honest civility nor skilful poetry’; ‘neither right tragedies, nor right comedies,
mingling kings and clowns . . . neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right
sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragi-comedy obtained’, Sidney, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, pp.
112, 114.
204
Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
contrast to the more extravagant dramatic inheritance of Shakespeare’s Globe.
Even in London, Shirley finds himself both generically and geographically a
little at sea. His only hope is to appeal once more, as he did in Dublin, but this
time a little less knowingly and a little more desperately, to the civilised among
his audience: to ‘you that can contract yourselves’, to those who ‘will not
disgrace / This play, meant for your persons, not the place’.
‘Persons, not . . . place’: Shirley’s discomfort with this not-quite-return to his
old London haunts is palpable. His reflections on the theory and practice of
tragicomedy explore how geography and genre feature as thematic concerns
for the dislocated dramatist. Echoing the generic concerns of Burnell and
Orrery, the prologues revisit and reorient the question of generic selfconsciousness from the position of an English writer working between England
and Ireland. Shirley too is left ‘betwixt both’: not simply between England and
Ireland, but also between Blackfriars and the Globe. Having heard rumours of
the civilised theatre successes of Aglaura and Clarcilla in Dublin, the playwright
now finds himself back in London, but on the wrong side of the tracks; still
under the curse of geographical displacement and unruly audiences. From the
perspective of Dublin, London audiences had seemed undifferentiated, and
ideal: they had all looked familiar, like home. But on his return, his Irish experience has left him a rather ‘doubtful heir’ to the still thriving but, to Shirley’s
tastes, uncivil English dramatic tradition of Shakespeare.
III
In conclusion, I want to consider very briefly one last play, this time by Orrery,
which makes the journey from Dublin to London in the aftermath of the
Restoration. On 18 October 1662, John Ogilby’s second Dublin theatre,
Smock Alley, opened for its first public performance a production of Fletcher’s
Wit without Money. That same day, Orrery hosted a private theatrical event.
Entertaining the new Lord Lieutenant, the Duke of Ormond, at Thomas
Court, his Dublin residence, he presented ‘a play of his own making’:
Altemira.22 In late February 1663, the same play was publicly presented on the
Smock Alley stage, named this time not for the love interest, the heroine, but
for the professional hero of the play: The Generall: A Tragi-comedy. In summer
1664, The Generall was produced at the Theatre Royal, London, where it had a
successful first run and remained in sporadic repertory for about five years.23
22
23
Mercurius Publicus, 43, 1662, Thursday October 23–30, p. 710.
W. Smith Clark II (ed.), The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, 2 vols (Cambridge
Mass., 1937), I, pp. 101–64. According to Clark, Thomas Killigrew had had the play in his
possession since 1661. Clark also claims The Generall to be the first English heroic play (ibid., I,
30) though this is contested in G.E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols (Oxford,
1941–68), III, pp. 34–35.
205
Deana Rankin
It was a tale which had instant resonance – painful and pleasurable – with
those who assembled to watch it in both its Dublin and London incarnations.
For in The Generall, an unnamed king, who has usurped the throne of Sicily,
imprisoned its rightful tenant and banished Clorimun – the general of the title
– is eventually overthrown when the army joins with the rebels to demand a
Restoration. In the first part of the play, the anxiety and confusion caused by
rebellion are palpable. Clorimun, at first reluctant to accept the invitation to
lead the military coup, finally grasps the nettle and dethrones the usurper.
Peopled by generals and officers who are not all they seem, bristling with a
vocabulary of rebels and confederacies, riddled with compromises and with
reminders that military might can overthrow both good and bad rulers, The
Generall offered to public view a tentative, but unmistakable, re-enactment of
those bitter wars and disputes which had, until very recently, preoccupied its
audiences both in Ireland and in England.24
By way of brief coda to this Restoration performance history, in c.1700,
Charles Boyle, grandson of the author, rediscovered his grandfather’s incomplete manuscript and, apparently unaware of its performance history in
Dublin and London, severely cut and reshaped The Generall for performance
at Thomas Betterton’s Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre in 1701. The revised text
was published as Altemira: A Tragedy (London, 1702): the original Dublin title
was unwittingly restored, but the generic classification, along with the text of
the play, had been remodelled.
This complex late seventeenth-century journey, from private to public
stage, from Ireland to England, from family archive back to the stage returns
us, perhaps, to the claim I made in the introduction: that I was not going look
for a national account of tragicomedy, that I was not going to seek out the
originary seventeenth-century moment for Irish tragicomedy, the better to ask
what territory has to do with the tragicomic. It is certainly possible to describe
the first play by Orrery to appear on the English stage as a tragicomedy
rehearsed and rewritten in Dublin, tried and tested on the Irish stage before it
was brought to London to launch his career as one of the most prolific writers
of heroic plays of the Restoration period. However, when this narrative is relocated within the context of earlier Irish attempts to define tragicomedy as a
genre, when it is placed alongside Shirley’s attempts to find his desired attentive audience in an unfamiliar London theatre, what seems instead to emerge
is something like a poetics of between-ness, a genre which is intrinsically never
quite at home. The rejuvenation of Restoration tragicomedy in the English
language does not so much move from the Irish margins to the metropolitan
centre, as emerge from a creative space between England and Ireland, Ireland
24
See Nancy Klein Maguire, ‘The “Whole Truth” of Restoration Tragicomedy’ in Nancy Klein
Maguire (ed.), Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics (New York, 1987),
pp. 218–39; Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge, 1992);
Kerrigan, ‘Orrery’s Ireland and the British Problem, 1641–1679’.
206
Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
and indeed France, from a silent suspension between the wars, the
historiographical lacuna sanctioned by the 1660 Act of Oblivion. Tragicomedy
might, then, be defined generically not merely as a form of reconciliation
between tragedy and comedy, but also as a means to finding a very particular
middle ground: someway between res gestae on the one hand (the acts, facts,
commemorations and silences of historical writing), and on the other, fictio
(the inventions, coincidences, recognitions and happy endings of romance).
Rather than confining this hybrid ‘mongrel’ genre within national borders,
and intermeshing its development within the politics of nationhood, it seems
useful to allow the poetics of tragicomedy its own and proper place, at once
geographical and generic: ‘betwixt both’.
207
INDEX
Adams, Robert M. 116n.
Adler, Doris 163n.
Adorno, Theodor 122, 132
Aeschylus, Eumenides 20
Alemannus, 20
Alexander, Bill 92
Alleyn, Edward 44
Andrews, Richard 30n., 51, 58
Apuleius, 10
Ariosto, Ludovico, Orlando Furioso 28, 39,
40, 47, 79
Aristophanes
Frogs 20
Thesmophoriazusae 20
Aristotle 15–27, 62
Poetics 2, 15–27, 28, 29, 34–6, 38, 39–40,
42, 46, 81, 94–5, 96, 134, 154
Armani, Vincenza 47, 48, 52
Ashcroft, Peggy 92
Averroes 19–20
Baby, Hélène 78
Bacelli, Giralomo, L’Odissa d’Homero tradotta
in volgare Fiorentino 26
Bacon, Roger 19, 20
Bakhtin, Mikhail 56
Bal, Mieke 145n.
Baranski, Zygmunt G. 29n.
Barker, Francis 119n.
Barnes, Barnabe, The Devil’s Charter 103
Barton, Anne 130
Bawcutt, N.W. 177n., 178n.
Beaumont, Francis 5, 25, 45, 101–14, 118,
119, 134n., 135, 155. For plays in the
Beaumont and Fletcher canon, see under
‘Fletcher, John’
Beccari, Agostino, Il sacrificio 47
Beckerman, Bernard 67
Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot 193
Beethoven, Ludwig van 121, 122, 123, 128n.
Behn, Aphra, The Rover 157n.
Bellany, Alastair 176n.
Beni, Paolo 35
Bentley, Gerald Eades 134, 176n., 177n.,
178n., 184n., 189
Berg, Sara van den 131n.
Bergeron, David 119
Bergson, Henri 152
Bevington, David 95
Biddulph, William 162n.
Bieito, Calixto 64n.
Billington, Michael 66n., 92
Blayney, Glenn 104–5
Bliss, Lee 107, 110
Boccaccio, Giovanni 49
Bosman, Anston 171n.
Boswell, Laurence 66
Boyle, Charles 206
Boyle, Richard, First Earl of Cork 196
Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery (or Orrerey), see
under ‘Orrery’
Brandon, Samuel, Tragicomedie of the
Virtuous Octavia 103n.
Brook, Peter 92
Brown, Paul 119n.
Burkehead, Henry, A Tragedy of Cola’s Furie,
or, Lirenda’s Miserie 179n.
Burnell, Henry 176, 190, 195–6, 205
Landgartha 7, 8, 9, 177, 178, 182, 189–93,
196–9, 201–2
Burner, Sandra A. 179n.
Burrow, Colin 16
Burton, Jonathan 161n., 167n.
Butler, Brian 137n.
Butler, James, Duke of Ormond 199–200
Butler, Martin 108, 130
Caldéron de la Barca, Pedro 59, 63
El alcalde de Zalamea (The Mayor of
Zalamea) 69–70
209
Index
Caldéron de la Barca, Pedro (cont.)
El mágico prodigioso (The Prodigious
Magician) 71
El medico de su honra (The Surgeon of His
Honour / The Physician of his Honour)
67–8
La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) 63
Calverley, Walter 103–4
Campbell, Thomas 125, 128
Candamo, Francisco Bances 74
Canning, Elaine 71n.
Canny, N. 198n.
Carey, Henry, Viscount of Falkland 183
Cartwright, William 155
Cartwright, William, The Errant Ladies, 189
Castelvetro, Lodovico 15
Castle, John 166
Castle of Perseverance, The 96
Cave, Terence 25n.
Cawley, A.C. 104n.
Cervantes, Miguel de
Don Quijote 63, 64, 156–7, 174
Los Baños de Argel (The Prisons of Algiers)
156–7, 162, 174
Novelas ejemplares (Exemplary Novels)
172n.
Chabrol, L’Orizelle 82
Champion, Larry 130
Chapman, George 23, 23n., 25, 26
Charles I, King (and formerly Prince of
Wales) 93, 130, 162, 163n., 165–6
Charles II, King 194
Childress, Diana 116
Christy, L. 193n.
Cinzio, Giambattista Giraldi 22–5
Altile 16
Antivalomeni 16
Discorsi 23
Egle 24, 30, 47
Epitia 23
Hecatommithi 23
On the Composition of Comedies and
Tragedies 16
Selene 16
Civardi, J.M. 77
Clark, W.S. 194n.
Clarke, A. 198n.
Clavell, John 176
Clover, Carol 188n.
Clubb, Louise George 46n.
Coello, Antonio 63n.
Cogswell, Thomas 164, 165n., 166n.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 125, 162
Colie, Rosalie 17
Collins, Jeff 137n.
Condell, Henry 103, 134, 142
Cooper, Helen 116n.
Cooper, John Gilbert 124–5
Corneille, Pierre 3, 11, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83,
199
Le Cid 76, 77, 79–80, 199
Clitandre 81
Don Sanche d’Aragon 81
L’Illusion Comique 82
Pulchérie 82
Tite et Bérénice 82
Cox, John D. 183, 184
Cromwell, Oliver 203
Croy, Dorothée de, Cinnatus et Camma 82
D’Amico, Jack 161n.
D’Aubignac, abbé 9, 79, 83
La Pratique du Théâtre 78–80, 83
Daborne, Robert, A Christian Turned Turk
156
Daniel, Samuel 45, 118
The Queen’s Arcadia 44
Dante (degli Alighieri) 7
The Divine Comedy 28–9, 39, 40
Davenant, Sir William 155
The Cruel Brother 188
Davenport, Robert 176n.
Dawson, Anthony B. 128n.
Dekker, Thomas
The Spanish Gypsy (with John Ford,
Thomas Middleton, and William
Rowley) 188
The Virgin Martyr (with Philip Massinger)
184–6, 192
Denores, Jason 34, 35–6, 38–42, 46, 117n.
Desmartes de Saint-Sorlin, Jean, Les
Visionnaires 77, 79, 82
Dewar-Watson, Sarah 2, 9, 10, 12
Dick of Devonshire 188
Dilthey, Wilhelm 152
Dixon, Victor 62n.
Dolce, Lodovico 47
210
Index
L’Ulisee, tratto dell’Odissea d’Homero 26
Donatus 19, 22
Donne, John 7
Dormer, Robert, Earl of Caernarvon 163n.
Dowden, Edward 125–7, 128, 129, 130, 132,
133–4n., 135
Drayson, Elizabeth 74
Dryden, John 12, 70, 130, 155
Essay of Dramatick Poesie 10–14
Dunn, T.A. 162n., 166
Durval, J.G., Agarite 81
Dutton, Richard 90n., 194n., 115, 119
Dymock, Sir Edward 102
Edelman, Gerald M. 100n.
Edwards, Philip 134, 155n.
Damon and Pythias 5, 84, 86–91, 100
Palamon and Arcyte 88
Edwards, Richard 99
Elizabeth I, Queen 44, 129
Estienne, Charles, Dictionarium Historicum,
Geographicum, Poeticum 26
Euripides 15, 20, 22
Bacchae 20, 22
Cyclops 15, 22–5, 78
Helen 20
Ion 20
Iphigenia in Tauris 20
Evans, Geraint 3, 8, 12, 13
Evanthius 18n., 19, 22
Fainlight, Ruth 69n.
Fanshawe, Simon 85
Felperin, Howard 115, 136n.
Field, Nathan 102
Figueroa, Cristóbal Suárez de, El pastor fido
(translation of Guarini) 63
Finkelpearl, Philip 102, 111
‘Flaminia’ 47
Fletcher, Alan 175, 176n., 182n., 189, 194n.
Fletcher, John 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 25, 45, 101–14,
118, 134n., 136, 154, 175, 176n., 177,
184, 190
Cupid’s Revenge 101, 109–10, 111
The Coxcomb 101
The Custom of the Country 25
The Faithful Shepherdess 1, 8, 12, 44–5, 84,
101, 102–3, 109–10, 111–12, 119, 135,
154–5, 190
The Island Princess 25, 159–61, 172
A King and No King 107, 111, 114, 198
The Knight of the Burning Pestle 101, 102
The Maid’s Tragedy 107
The Night-Walker 177 (see also under
‘Shirley, James’)
Philaster 12, 45, 102, 107–8, 109, 110–11,
113–14, 181
The Queen of Corinth (with Philip
Massinger) 188
The Scornful Lady 101
The Sea Voyage 25
Valentinian 188
A Wife for a Month 109
The Wild Goose Chase 155
Wit without Money (see also under ‘Shirley,
James’) 177, 182n., 205
The Woman Hater 101
The Woman’s Prize 108–9
Florio, John 44, 58
Forman, Valerie 129
Foster, Verna 4, 67, 70–1, 72, 73, 75, 193
Fowler, Alastair 45n., 101n., 102, 103n., 136n.
Freud, Sigmund 120
Beyond the Pleasure Principle 120
Friel, Brian 193
Dancing at Lughnasa 193n.
Frye, Northrop 115, 135n.
Furnivall, F.J. 125, 133n.
Gager, William, Ulysses Redux 24–5
Gaines, Barry 104n.
Garnier, Robert, Bradamante 79
Gaste, A. 199n.
Gervinus, G.G. 125
Gifford, William 162
Gilbert, Allan H. 16
Gilson, Simon 28n.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 125
Gondomar, Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña,
conde de 165n.
Gorgias (of Leontini) 96
Gossett, Suzanne 5, 12, 116–17, 188
Gosson, Henry 106
Gowrie (lost play) 103
Grazia, Margreta de 124n.
Grene, David 127–8
Grene, Nicholas 193n.
Grewar, Andrew 44n.
Grimald, Nicholas, Christus Redivivus 7
211
Index
Guarini, Giambattista 12, 28–42, 43, 45–6, 61,
63, 65n., 66, 70, 72, 117, 118, 154, 156,
159, 197n.
Il pastor fido 2, 5, 7, 13, 28–42, 45, 46, 47,
84, 102, 117n., 119
Gurr, Andrew 101n., 107
Hall, Peter 5, 92
Halliday, M.A.K. 137n.
Halliwell, Stephen 22n.
Hammond, Nicholas 3, 8, 12
Harding, George, Baron Berkeley 163
Harington, Henry 155
Harris, Jonathan Gil 170n.
Harris, Joseph 81
Hartwig, Joan 117
Hastings, Henry, Earl of Huntingdon 163n.
Heminges, John 134, 142
Hemminges, William, The Fatal Contract 188
Henke, Robert 2, 25n., 45n., 84n., 117, 118,
119, 120, 131–2
Henrietta Maria, Queen 163n., 166, 182–3
Henry, Prince of Wales 108n.
Henslowe, Philip 95, 159
Herbert, Philip, Earl of Pembroke 163n.
Herbert, Sir Henry 158n.
Hermannus 19
Hernadi, Paul 196n.
Herrick, Marvin T. 4, 19, 117, 159–60, 202n.
Thomas Heywood
Apology for Actors 18n.
The Rape of Lucrece 187
Hirst, David L. 99n.
Holdsworth, Roger 104n.
Hole, William 17, 132
Holinshed, Raphael, The Historie of England
93
Homer 22–4, 26
Iliad 20, 23n.
Odyssey 2, 15, 21, 23–6
Honigmann, Ernst 104
Hope, Jonathan, 4, 5, 6, 84, 103n., 119n.,
135n., 140n.
Horace 131
Ars Poetica (Defence of Poetry) 84
Howard, Jean 90n., 105, 115, 119
Howerd, Frankie 92
Hoy, Cyrus 177n.
Hulme, Peter 119n.
Hunt, Maurice 116n.
Hunter, G.K. 45n., 103n.
Ibsen, Henrik 127–8
Ishizaki, Suguru 133n., 137n.
J.C., The Two Merry Milkmaids 184
Jack Juggler (by Richard Edwards? Nicolas
Udall?) 89–91
James I, King 93, 103, 108n., 164, 165–6
James, Geraldine 92
James, Henry 123–4, 129
The Golden Bowl 123
‘The Middle Years’ 123
Javitch, Daniel 46n.
Johnson, Samuel 70
‘Preface to Shakespeare’ 13–14
Johnston, David 66
Jones, Marie, Stones in his Pockets 193
Jonson, Ben 10, 17, 44, 130, 130–2, 157, 177
Bartholomew Fair 157
‘Irish Masque’ 197n.
The Magnetic Lady 131
The New Inn 130, 131
The Sad Shepherd 17, 131
Sejanus 103
The Tale of a Tub 130
Volpone 103
Works (1616) 9, 131–2
The Alchemist 175, 177
Jowett, John 177n.
Jowitt, Claire 163n.
Jung, Carl Gustav 127
Kamen, Henry 74n.
Kaufer, David 133n., 137n.
Kelly, Henry Ansgar 18n.
Kemp, Will 44
Kennedy, William J. 32
Kermode, Frank 46, 51
Kerrigan, John 201n.
Killigrew, Thomas Claracilla (see also under
Shirley, James) 178–9, 181, 189, 192,
203, 205
King, Ros 4, 5, 13, 108n.
Kirsch, Arthur 185n.
Kirschner, Teresa J. 69n.
Knutson, Roslyn 103
Kyd, Thomas, Spanish Tragedy 44
La Mesnardière, Hippolyte-Jules de 79
La Selve, Léandre et Héron 82
212
Index
Lamb, Mary Ellen 135n.
Laud, William 164
Lea, Kathleen 50, 51, 52n., 53n., 56n., 58n.
Lee, Sidney 123
Lenzoni, Carlo 15–16
Lesser, Zachary 5
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 70
Lieblein, Leonore 106
Locatelli, Basilio 50, 51, 52, 53n., 56n.
Lockyer, Roger 165n.
Loewenstein, Joseph 131
Lorca, Federico García 69
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 97
MacMullan, Hugh 184n.
Maguire, Laurie 90n.
Maguire, Nancy Klein 4, 5, 6, 84n., 206n.
Mairet, Jean, La Silvanire 79
Malacreta, Giovanni Pietro 34, 37–8
Malone, Edmond 124–5
Mareschal, Antoine 78, 80
La Cour 81
Marlowe, Christopher 157
Dido, Queen of Carthage 98
Doctor Faustus 5, 85, 94–100, 168, 174
Tamburlaine the Great 98, 168
Marston, John 45, 118
The Malcontent 45, 102–3, 109
Martinelli, Drusiano 44
Massinger 45, 119n., 154–74
The Bondman 164n.
A New Way to Pay Old Debts 163n.
The Queen of Corinth (with John Fletcher)
188
The Duke of Milan 163n.
The Renegado 6, 7, 8, 154–74
The Virgin Martyr (with Thomas Dekker)
184, 192
McDonagh, Martin, The Beauty Queen of
Leenane 193
McDonald, Russ 134n.
McGuinness, Frank, Someone Who’ll Watch
Over Me 193, 194
McKendrick, Melveena 59, 60n., 63, 65n.,
68n., 74
McMullan, Gordon 4–6, 10, 26, 84, 103n.,
119n., 135n., 151n., 182n.
Middleton, Thomas 45, 157, 177
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside 157
A Game at Chess 162–3
The Mayor of Queenborough 112
No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (see also
under ‘Shirley, James’) 177, 181
A Yorkshire Tragedy 103–4
Mikalachki, Jodi 119n.
Millgate, Michael 123
Milton, John 121
Paradise Lost 121
Mincoff, Marco 116n.
Moir, Duncan 66
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 3, 83
Amphitryon 82
Tartuffe 80n.
Molina, Tirso de (Gabriel Telléz) 59
Montagu, Richard 164–5
Morash, Christopher 183
Morby, Edwin S. 59n.
More, Sir John 93
Moretti, Franco 151n.
Mowatt, Barbara A. 115, 120, 134n., 136, 152
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 123
Mucedorus 115
Muir, Kenneth 127–8
Munro, Lucy 7, 12
Myhill, Nova 185–6
Nashe, Thomas 44, 58
Neill, Michael 6, 7, 8, 12, 155n., 159n., 161n.
Neri, Ferdinando 50, 51, 54n., 55n., 57n.
Nevo, Ruth 119–20
Newels, Margarete 59n.
Nicol, David 184n.
Nicole, Pierre 82
Norbrook, David 118
Norton, Thomas 44
Nuttall, A.D. 22n., 120
O’Casey, Seán, The Plough and the Stars 193
Ogier, Jean 78, 80,
Ogilby, John 175, 176, 178, 194, 205
The Irish Gentleman 182
The Merchant of Dublin 182
Ornellas, Kevin de 127n.
Orrery, Earl of (Roger Boyle) 196, 205–7
Altemira 196
The Generall: A Tragi-comedy (London title
of Altemira) 196, 205–6
Parthenissa, A Romance 200–2
Ostovich, Helen 130n.
213
Index
Ovid 48, 54
Metamorphoses 26
Palfrey, Simon 195n.
Palmer, Patricia 204n.
Parker, A.A. 68n.
Parker, Deborah 28n.
Parker, Geoffrey 70n.
Parker, Patricia 159n., 167n.
Pasqualigo, Luigi, Gl’intricati 48, 50
Patterson, W.B. 165n.
Pavel, Thomas 113
Pescetti, Orlando 35
Petrarch 31
Pett, Phineas 108n.
Pettet, E.C. 115
Picasso, Pablo 119, 121
Pigna, Giovanni Battista 15–16
Pitcher, John 26n.
Plato, Symposium 20
Plautus 60, 64, 78, 84, 94
Amphitryo (or Amphitryon, or Amphitruo)
8, 9, 10, 17, 78–9, 81, 89–90
Pope, Alexander 121
Popkin, Richard H. 96n.
Questier, Michael 165n., 166n.
Racine, Jean 3, 11, 82, 83, 127–8
Bérénice 80n.
Raleigh, Sir Walter 127
Ralph Roister Doister (Nicolas Udall?) 89n.
Rankin, Deana 7, 176n., 182n., 183–4, 185,
189
Rasmussen, Eric 95
Rennert, Hugo 67n.
Ristine, Frank H. 4, 117, 118, 196–7
Robinson, Benedict S. 158n., 160n., 163, 164,
166, 171
Rogna, Luigi 47, 48
Rojas, Fernando de, La Celestina (or Calisto y
Melibea) 64
Rossi, Bartolomeo, La Fiamella 49, 50
Rotrou, Jean
Cléagénor et Doristée 80–1
Laure Persécutée 80
Rowley, William, A Shoemaker a Gentleman
184, 186
Rutler, Joseph, The Cid A Tragicomedy 199
Sage, J.W. 66n.
Said, Edward 128, 130
Sallebray, L’Amante enemie 81
Sampson, Lisa 34n.
Sanders, Julie 130, 131
Sannazaro, Jacopo, Arcadia 30, 32
Saxo Grammaticus 189
Scala, Francisco, Il teatro delle favole
rappresentative 49–50, 52, 53n., 54n.
Schelandre, Jean, Tyr et Sidon 78
Scherer, J. 77
Schlegel, Johann Elias 70
Schoenberg, Arnold 122
Scipwith, Sir William 102
Scudéry, Georges 79
Seneca 20, 60
Sextus Empiricus 96
Adversus Mathematicos 96
Shaheen, Naseeb 90n.
Shakespeare, William 2–6, 10, 14, 25, 43, 45,
47, 51, 57, 58, 99, 103–14, 115–32,
133–53, 158, 159, 205
Antony and Cleopatra 103
As You Like It 43, 52
Coriolanus 103, 133
Cymbeline 3, 5, 13, 45, 49, 57, 84, 91–4, 95,
107–8, 119, 128, 130, 133, 135, 142, 147
Henry VIII 117, 119, 128, 133, 142, 147
Othello 23, 68, 103, 158, 160
Pericles 6, 8, 103–14, 115, 116–17, 119, 130,
133, 134, 135, 195
The Comedy of Errors 84, 90, 94
Hamlet 48, 119
Julius Caesar 125
King Lear 103, 126
Macbeth 103
Measure for Measure 1, 8, 23, 106n., 118,
125
The Merchant of Venice 158–9
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 50, 51, 52,
53–4, 58
The Taming of the Shrew 108–9
The Tempest 2, 5, 6, 25, 45, 46, 49, 50, 51
52, 54–7, 58, 107, 116, 117, 118, 119,
123, 124, 125, 128, 130, 133, 142, 147,
153, 195
Timon of Athens 103, 126, 127, 129
Twelfth Night 119, 124
The Two Noble Kinsmen 115, 117, 119, 128,
133, 134
214
Index
The Winter’s Tale 1, 5, 14, 45, 49, 50, 51,
52, 57, 105, 107, 119, 126, 128, 130, 133,
135, 142, 144–9, 195
Titus Andronicus 92, 187
Troilus and Cressida 1, 125
Shaw, Catherine M. 189, 191
Shell, Alison 162n., 165n.
Shirley, Henry, The Martyred Soldier 184–6
Shirley, James 166, 176n., 177–8, 184, 187,
188, 189, 196, 199, 202–3
Aglaura (see also under ‘Suckling, John’)
178–9, 181, 189, 192, 203, 205, 206
Claracilla (see also under ‘Killigrew,
Thomas’) 181, 189, 192, 205
The Doubtful Heir. A Tragi-Comedie
(London title of Rosania) 180, 196,
203–5
The Gentleman of Venice 158n., 177
The Maid’s Revenge 184
Narcissus, or the Self-Lover 175, 191
The Night-Walker (see also under ‘Fletcher,
John’) 177
No Wit, No Help Like a Woman’s (see also
under ‘Middleton, Thomas’) 177, 181
Rosania, or Love’s Victory 12, 175, 177–82,
184, 189, 191, 196, 202–3
The Royal Master 177, 178, 190
St. Patrick for Ireland 177, 178, 182–9,
191–2
The Tragedy of St. Albans 184
Twelfth Night 181
Venus and Adonis 181
Wit without Money (see also under
‘Fletcher, John’) 177, 182n.
Shostakovich, Dmitri 121
Sidney, Philip 12, 61, 71, 115, 154, 157, 201
Arcadia 107
Defence of Poesy 10, 11, 17, 194–5, 204n.
Sillitoe, Alan 69n.
Simonini, R.C. 44n.
Sisson, C.J. 127
Snyder, Susan 95
Socrates 20
Solís, Antonio 63n.
Solomon, Maynard 128n.
Sophocles 45, 46, 121, 127–8
Oedipus Tyrannus 24
Philoctetes 24
Southampton, Earl of (Henry Wriothesley)
44n.
Spenser, Edmund, A View of the Present State
of Ireland 183
Spondanus, Homeri Quae Extant Omnia 26
Stern, Tiffany 112
Stockwell, La Tourette 182n., 184
Strachey, Lytton 127
Suckling, John, Aglaura (see also under
‘Shirley, James’) 178–9, 181, 189, 192,
203, 205, 206
Sullivan, Henry W. 70n.
Summo, Faustino 34, 36–7, 38
Synge, J.M., Playboy of the Western World 193
Tasso, Torquato 43
Aminta 13, 30, 31–2, 45, 46, 47
Gerusalemme Liberata 28, 33
Taylor, Gary 108n.
Terence 60, 84
Theocritus, Idylls 84
Theophrastus 19
Thorndike, Ashley 107, 117, 134n.
Thorne, Alison 115
Tilney, Sir Edmund 158n.
Titian 121, 122
Tononi, Giulio 100n.
Treherne, Matthew 2, 12, 13
Trissino, Gian Giorgio 36n.
Truchet, J. 77
Turia, Ricardo de (Pedro de Rejaule y
Toledo) 8, 13, 61–3, 65–6, 72
Apologético de las comedias españolas
(Apology for Spanish Comedies) 61–3,
65–6
Turner, J.M.W. 122
Turner, John P. 184n.
Two Noble Ladies, The 184–6, 189, 192
Tyacke, Nicholas 164, 165n.
Tynan, Kenneth 92
Ulïbïshev, Alexander Dmitryevich 123n.
Uphaus, Robert 115
Uys, Pieter-Dirk 4, 85
Valbuena Briones, A.J. 63n., 65n.
Valerini, Adriano 48
Valla, Giorgio 18
Vasari, Giorgio 122
Vega, Lope de 3, 13, 59–65, 71, 80
Adonis y Venus 59n.
215
Index
Vega, Lope de (cont.)
Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo
(The New Art of Writing Plays) 59–61,
64–5
El duque de Viseo 59n.
Lo fingido verdadero (Acting is Believing)
71–2
Fuenteovejuna 59, 65, 68–9
El laberinto de Creta 59n.
El perro de hortelano (The Dog in the
Manger) 66–7, 69
El ultimo godo de España (or El postrer
godo; The Last Goth in Spain) 72–5
Verney, Sir Francis 161n.
Vicar, John 165n.
Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham 163n.,
165–6
Virgil 32, 121
Aeneid 26
Vitkus, Daniel 159, 161n.
Vlachos, Pantelis 133n.
Waith, Eugene 155n.
Waith, Eugene 45
Walkley, Thomas 114
Walter, Harriett, 92
Wardropper, Bruce 71
Wayne, Valerie 119n.
Webern, Anton 122
Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi 163, 174
Weinberg, Bernard 28n.
Wentworth, Sir Thomas 175, 176, 182–3
Wilkins, George 5, 103–14
The Miseries of Enforced Marriage 103–6,
112–13
The Painfull Adventures of Pericles Prince of
Tyre 106
(for Pericles, co-written by Wilkins, see
under ‘Shakespeare’)
Wilson, Arthur, The Swisser 188
Wilson, E.M. 66
Wilson, Harold 107n.
Wintour, Sir John 183
Witmore, Michael 6, 140n.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 136, 152
Wright, Abraham 185
Wright, Louis B. 44n.
Yeats, W.B. 14, 119, 195
216
Studies in Renaissance Literature
Volume 1: The Theology of John Donne
Jeffrey Johnson
Volume 2: Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry
Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan
R. V. Young
Volume 3: The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature
Kisses of their Mouths
Noam Flinker
Volume 4: King James I and the Religious Culture of England
James Doelman
Volume 5: Neo-historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature,
History and Politics
edited by Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess
and Rowland Wymer
Volume 6: The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes
John T. Shawcross
Volume 7: Milton and the Terms of Liberty
edited by Graham Parry and Joad Raymond
Volume 8: George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance
in the Seventeenth Century
James Ellison
Volume 9: Shakespeare and Machiavelli
John Roe
Volume 10: John Donne’s Professional Lives
Edited by David Colclough
Volume 11: Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance
Alex Davis
Volume 12: Shakespearean Tragedy as Chivalric Romance:
Rethinking Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear
Michael L. Hays
Volume 13: John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late
Jacobean Pulpit
Jeanne Shami
Volume 14: A Pleasing Sinne:
Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-Century England
Adam Smyth
Volume 15: John Bunyan and the Language of Conviction
Beth Lynch
Volume 16: The Making of Restoration Poetry
Paul Hammond
Volume 17: Allegory, Space and the Material World in the
Writings of Edmund Spenser
Christopher Burlinson
Volume 18: Self-Interpretation in The Faerie Queene
Paul Suttie
Volume 19: Devil Theatre: Demonic Possession and
Exorcism in English Drama, 1558–1642
Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen
Volume 20: The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance
Sue P. Starke
Volume 21: Staging Islam in England:
Drama and Culture, 1640–1685
Matthew Birchwood
Studies in Renaissance Literature
Staging Islam in England: Drama and
Culture, 1640-1685
MATTHEW BIRCHWOOD
‘This stimulating book will be welcomed by historians, literary scholars, and anyone
interested in the history of the English fascination with Islam and the cultural exoticism
associated with the East.’ PROFESSOR GERALD MACLEAN
England’s close engagement with Islam in political and dramatic life from the
inauguration of the Long Parliament until the death of Charles II emerges clearly
in this study. It explores the reception and representation of Islam in a wide
range of English writings of the period, employing close textual and historical
research to trace the development of the ‘Turk’ from the archetype of cruelty and
treachery to the complex and often contradictory figure of mid-century discourse.
Throughout, it argues that Islam provided a repository of meanings ripe for
transposition to revolutionary and Restoration England, a process that transfigured
the ‘East’ through the lens of English politics and vice versa. 9781843841272
The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance
SUE P. STARKE
A key aspect of pastoral romance in Renaissance England between 1590 and 1650
is the shift to the daughter (rather than the son) of the gentle family increasingly
becoming the subject of the romance’s attempt to define and illustrate heroism,
representing honour and virtue in a changing society where traditional chivalric
definitions of honour hold decreasing purchase. Sue Starke examines the typical
challenges faced by the pastoral romance heroine: the foundling dilemma; the
loop-shaped quest; the rhetorical battle; the chastity threat; the reconciliation of
beauty to virtue; and familial reunification. She shows how the characterizations
of pastoral heroines in the works of Sidney, Spenser, Wroth, Fletcher, Milton,
and Marvell prefigure developments in the representation of female subjectivities
more usually associated with the novel. 9781843841241
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