The Politics of Tragicomedy

Shakespeare and After

Gordon McMullan, Jonathan Hope, Gordon McMullan, Jonathan Hope

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000350081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After offers a series of sophisticated and powerful readings of tragicomedy from Shakespeare's late plays to the drama of the Interregnum. Rejecting both the customary chronological span bounded by the years 1603-42 (which presumes dramatic activity stopped with the closing of the theatres) and the negative critical attitudes that have dogged the study of tragicomedy, the essays in this collection examine a series of issues central to the possibility of a politics for the genre.

Individual essays offer important contributions to continuing debates over the role of the drama in the years preceding the Civil War, the colonial contexts of The Tempest, the political character of Jonson's late plays, and the agency of women as public and theatre actors. The introduction presents a strong challenge to previous definitions of tragicomedy in the English context, and the collection as a whole is characterized by its rejection of absolutist strategies for reading tragicomedy.

This collection will prove essential reading for all with an interest in the politics of Renaissance drama; for specialists in the work of Shakespeare, Fletcher, and Jonson; for those interested in genre and dramatic forms; and for historians of early Stuart England.

1

Introduction: The Politics of Tragicomedy, 1610–50

Gordon McMullan and Jonathan Hope

I

Tragicomedy was arguably the single most important dramatic genre of the period 1610–50. Yet despite the inroads which contemporary criticism has made into value-judgements based on ‘unity’, tragicomedy’s ‘good broken music’ still appears to unsettle those who study it. Part of the problem for the critic is that the word ‘tragicomedy’ itself seems never to have acquired anything akin to a fixed meaning. In the English Renaissance, the term covered an astonishing variety of forms, from formulaic popular drama to courtly romances based on wonder, from formal Italianate pastoral to plays which close with an uneasy combination of marriage and death. To accept Dr Johnson’s even-handed definition of the genre as ‘a drama compounded of merry and serious events’ has never seemed quite adequate in face of this sheer plenitude of forms gathered under one heading.

The closest to a standard survey of the genre remains Marvin Herrick’s Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England, which attempts to provide a comprehensive overview from Plautus to Davenant and beyond. The very grandeur of conception of this treatment, however, weakens it, and Herrick concludes by suggesting only that ‘English tragicomedy never went far beyond’ Florio’s 1598 definition of the genre in his Worlde of Wordes as ‘halfe a tragedie, and halfe a comedie’.¹ Other works, such as Eugene Waith’s standard treatment of Fletcherian tragicomedy, attempt somewhat mechanically to define the term according to certain characteristic tenets and themes.² But few critics achieve a satisfactory generic understanding, and very few attempt any analysis of the complex relations of tragicomedy and politics in the period. Part of the problem is the tendency of most critics of Renaissance tragicomedy to rely for a working definition of the genre on a short piece of prose by John Fletcher entitled ‘To the Reader’, which forms part of the elaborate publication apparatus for his pastoral tragicomedy The Faithful Shepherdess, which was published in 1609 or 1610.³ Fletcher was Shakespeare’s successor as chief playwright for the King’s Company. He collaborated with Shakespeare on the latest of the late plays, and the stamp of the older playwright was always apparent in his work. Yet Fletcher was as influential as Shakespeare in determining the direction the drama would take up to, during, and beyond the English Civil War, and he is most readily thought of, along with his early collaborator Francis Beaumont, as the playwright who developed the form of tragicomedy in the period. The statement he made early in his career about the form of one of his plays has thus always seemed the best place to begin a study of the genre.

At first glance, Fletcher’s ‘To the Reader’ does indeed appear to provide a succinct description and definition of tragicomedy. As a result it has been rather more widely quoted and discussed than has the play it attempts to ‘justifie’. To most critics, ‘To the Reader’ seems to confirm the consistent reliance of English tragicomedy upon Italianate models from 1610 onwards. The Faithful Shepherdess and its defence are quite clearly indebted in various ways to the dramatic theory and practice of Giovanni Battista Guarini, whose Il Pastor Fido was first published in 1590 and reappeared with a preface and annotations in 1602 and 1603.⁴ The conditions of publication as well as the title and matter of Guarini’s and Fletcher’s plays demand comparison. Il Pastor Fido attracted criticism, and Guarini’s justification of tragicomedy, Il Compendio della Poesia Tragicomica (1601), was written in response. Fletcher’s preface is a similar attempt to justify his work in face of negative public reaction. One crucial feature of The Faithful Shepherdess, after all, is its abject failure on the stage when it first appeared. Its subsequent success at court years later in 1634 in completely different political circumstances should not blind us to the initial reaction of the theatre audience in James’s day. The publication of the text of The Faithful Shepherdess is in fact a literary justification of the play in the wake of its failure on the stage. Chapman’s definition of the piece in his dedicatory verse as a ‘Poeme and a play too!’ confirms the manoeuvre which is executed in what Beaumont refers to as ‘This second publication’.⁵ In a move which anticipates Jonson’s presentation of his own plays as Workes in 1616, print is used to elevate dramatic writing to the level of literature, both because reading is a sign of education (as Beaumont points out with Inn-of-Court arrogance) and simply because print lasts longer than the memories of an audience. The ploy of appealing over the heads of the original audience to the market for printed poetry (and after all, Fletcher claims that the initial failure of the play was due to its being too intellectual for its first audience) was intended to secure Fletcher’s reputation as a writer, but it confirms that what we have in ‘To the Reader’ is a post hoc literary justification for a dramatic failure. It seems to have worked. By the time of the Conversations with Drummond, Ben Jonson has apparently forgotten all about the play’s initial lack of success on the stage.⁶ And certainly by 1634, in totally different ideological and theatrical conditions, it had become a spectacular success.

But the specific justificatory context of 1610 makes the assumed value of ‘To the Reader’ as a considered and coherent definition (or prediction) of tragicomedy across the period to 1650 begin to appear questionable. Critics have not stopped to ask if Fletcher’s use of the word ‘tragicomedy’ in relation to The Faithful Shepherdess is relevant to the vast number of plays from the years 1610–50 which we now characterize as tragicomedies, and none has tested what Fletcher says in his preface against his own subsequent practice.⁷ To take just one example, Fletcher in ‘To the Reader’ asserts the ‘lawfulness’ of the appearance of gods in tragicomedy:

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.⁸

Fletcher’s professional practice, however, appears by and large to ignore this statement. When gods do appear in his subsequent work (and it is very rarely), the tone is often one of burlesque. In The Mad Lover, for example, Venus descends to punish the blasphemy of Chilax by kicking him up the behind: ‘I’le no more Oracles, nor Miracles,’ he cries, ‘It gave me on the buttocks, a cruell, a huge bang.’⁹ Many of the plays in which Fletcher was involved specifically reject supernatural influences. When Arnoldo in The Custom of the Country seeks a miracle cure, Manuel bluntly observes that ‘wonders are ceas’d Sir,’ and asserts that ‘we must work by means’.¹⁰ And the wholesome supernatural influences even in The Faithful Shepherdess might be seen to be at least partially circumscribed by recent readings of the play as a satire on sexual mores.¹¹ On closer inspection, The Faithful Shepherdess turns out to be anomalous in several respects in the context of Fletcher’s other writing. It is, for instance, wholly unrepresentative of the linguistic style of Fletcher’s subsequent plays, none of which repeats the highly artificial, Spenserian diction apparent in this early pastoral.¹² Thus when Cyrus Hoy presented his study of the linguistic determinants for establishing authorship of the various plays within the ‘Beaumont-and-Fletcher’ canon, he felt obliged to omit The Faithful Shepherdess from his statistical analysis as representing the one obvious exception to the rules he had ascertained for the rest of the canon.¹³

The crucial factor about the ‘definition’ provided by ‘To the Reader’ is the ex post facto reading that critics invariably make of it. Fletcher himself was after all blissfully unaware that he would go on in a few years to become Shakespeare’s successor as chief playwright for the King’s Company and produce the most substantial dramatic canon of the period. Within a year of the publication of The Faithful Shepherdess he was writing in a very different style (perhaps in a way more indicative of his ambitions) in The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tam’d, a good-humoured comedy which acts as a mock-sequel to The Taming of the Shrew. If his aim in this was to attract the attention of Shakespeare, then his collaborations with the older playwright on Henry VIII, Cardenio, and The Two Noble Kinsmen in 1612 and 1613 would appear to be proof of a certain level of success. But this can only be conjecture. Ascertaining Fletcher’s generic intentions in the years between his first collaborations with Beaumont and his work with Shakespeare at the point of Beaumont’s retirement remains a critical minefield. What evidence there is, however, suggests that The Faithful Shepherdess is perhaps the last place we should look for a working definition of tragicomedy in the Jacobean and Caroline period.

Lois Potter has pointed out the ‘inconsistency in the generic descriptions’ applied to the various plays in the period 1610–50 that we now group under the general heading of ‘tragicomedy’. As she notes, it took until 1679 for Fletcher’s ‘tragicomedies’ to be labelled as such in published form, and the use of the one-word description is decidedly erratic, at least prior to the 1630s.¹⁴ What becomes apparent is that there is a distinction between the very general ‘mixed-mood’ form denoted by the word ‘tragicomedy’, and the much more specific, Italianate form signified by ‘pastoral tragicomedy’. As Potter observes, ‘the evidence suggests that the term “tragicomedy”, in the public theatre, never quite lost its sixteenth-century meaning: a play which contained both tragic and comic elements. Dramatists were obviously aware of the genre in its newer, more formal sense, but were curiously reluctant to claim that this was what they were writing.’ And she continues: ‘De facto tragicomedy might be written for both popular and courtly audiences, but it appears that to use the term was to make a social as well as an aesthetic statement. What it meant, above all, was a play whose source might be Greek romance or Italian pastoral, but whose immediate context was the court and its circle of gentlemen amateurs.’¹⁵ It would appear thus that in ‘To the Reader’ Fletcher is writing about ‘pastoral tragicomedy’, a form derived substantially from Guarini and Italian tradition, and not the mixed-mood form derived from predominantly Spanish romance with which we tend to associate him (the form which Madeleine Doran revealingly referred to as ‘the-Beaumont-and-Fletcher-sort-of-thing’).¹⁶

Recent work on Fletcher’s context sheds further light on The Faithful Shepherdess, making it possible to see quite different motivations from the presumed promotion of this form of Italianate pastoral tragicomedy for a select courtly or gentry audience.¹⁷ There is an irritatingly unspecific reference to the writer’s possible future plans in the dedicatory verse to Sir Walter Aston which is part of the Faithful Shepherdess apparatus:

And when I sing againe as who can tell

My next devotion to that holy well,

Your goodnesse to the muses shall be all,

Able to make a worke Heroyicall.

If ‘Heroyicall’ writing is the next stage in, or after, Fletcher’s pastoral project, then it is a pattern redolent of the strategies of Jacobethanism. It is perhaps worth observing that, in terms of publication date, The Faithful Shepherdess is bracketed by two other ‘pastoral tragicomedies’, The Queen’s Arcadia of 1606 and Hymen’s Triumph of 1615, both written by Samuel Daniel. No plays are specificall...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: The Politics of Tragicomedy, 1610–50
• 2 ‘What Cares These Roarers for the Name of King?’: Language and Utopia in the Tempest
• 3 ‘The Agent for his Master’: Political Service and Professional Liberty in Cymbeline
• 4 Topicality or Politics? The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1613–34
• 5 ‘A Maidenhead, Amintor, at my Yeares’: Chastity and Tragicomedy in the Fletcher Plays
• 6 Prerevolutionary Drama
• 7 ‘God Help the Poor: The Rich Can Shift’: The World Upside-Down and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre
• 8 Late Jonson
• 9 She That Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture
• Index