The Word Is Older Than the Genre

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Plautus used the word tragicomoedia first, in the prologue to his own Amphitruo, sometime in the early second century BCE, and he used it as a joke: a play about gods disguising themselves as mortals and a slave outwitted by his own master could not decently call itself a tragedy with so much low comedy in it, so the prologue coins a new word rather than pick a side. That is not the genre a modern reader means by tragicomedy. The Renaissance genre, built close to eighteen centuries later on Battista Guarini's defense of Il Pastor Fido, published in 1590, borrows Plautus's word without borrowing his plot: no gods, no slaves, no joke, just a serious action that carries every weight of tragedy up to the edge of a death it declines to deliver. The two tragicomedies share a name and almost nothing else, a reminder that a genre's own word can survive its own definition changing underneath it entirely.