Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Aristotle and Tragicomedy
- 2 The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini's Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601
- 3 Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia Dell'arte
- 4 The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain
- 5 Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
- 6 In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
- 7 Taking Pericles Seriously
- 8 ‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
- 9 Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
- 10 Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger's The Renegado
- 11 Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
- 12 ‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
4 - The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Aristotle and Tragicomedy
- 2 The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini's Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601
- 3 Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia Dell'arte
- 4 The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain
- 5 Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
- 6 In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
- 7 Taking Pericles Seriously
- 8 ‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
- 9 Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
- 10 Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger's The Renegado
- 11 Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
- 12 ‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
TRAGICOMEDY, 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. While this is comprehensible, there are also more confusing references to the same play as both tragedia and tragicomedia. 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 seventeenth-century classification.
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. Lope de Vega responded to his critics in the New Art of Writing Plays in This Age (Arte nuevo de hacer comedias en este tiempo, 1609).
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- Chapter
- Information
- Early Modern Tragicomedy , pp. 59 - 75Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007