Early Comedy

Abstract

Abstract Thepreceding chapter argues that Elizabethan drama was directed away from shapeless ‘mongrel’ mixtures of rustic humour and tyrannical violence by the revolutionary examples of Tamburlaine and The Spanish Tragedy with their ‘stately’ modes of poetry, coherent structures, and ‘astonishing’ emotions, but that the natural mongrelism of a popular theatre gradually absorbed the innovations. It would be wrong, however, to think of this absorption as simply a relapse; self-consciousness about the genres being drawn on provided some degree of control over the mixture, so that the mixing became in the end the measure of a sophisticated and novel art form in which comedy and tragedy not only contrasted with one another but collaborated as variant aspects of a unified and realistic vision. This was not (as in Italy) a matter of theoretical debate but of practical necessity. The generic demands of tragedy and comedy had no simple or necessary affinity to the kinds of stories that audiences liked to hear and dramatists therefore had to tell. No such symmetry was available as appears, for example, between the forms and the restricted subject matter of Aeschylus and Sophocles. The popular ‘romantic’ stories of love and fortune cut completely across the boundaries of genre as traditionally conceived (tragedy as ‘the falls of princes’, for example) and were thus equally open to comic, tragic, or historical treatment. Nearly all the authors we have to deal with wrote in more than one genre.