Tragicomedy

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.

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

Battista Guarini spent a good part of his career defending one play. Il Pastor Fido provoked a pamphlet war the moment it appeared in 1590, Italian critics arguing that mixing tragedy and comedy broke Aristotle's own categories and produced neither. Guarini's answer was structural rather than defensive: borrow tragedy's gravity, its danger, its threatened deaths, its public stakes, but withhold the deaths themselves, so the audience feels tragedy's full weight of fear without ever paying tragedy's price. John Fletcher, writing in England a generation later, distilled the same idea into one sentence in his preface to The Faithful Shepherdess: a tragicomedy wants deaths, which keeps it from being a tragedy, yet comes near enough to some that it cannot pass for a comedy either. The genre, on this account, is not a blend of two moods but a single mood, danger, held right up to the line and then not crossed.