The play of genre in Renaissance tragicomedy

Shakespeare's Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are critical responses to the late Cinquecento idea of tragicomedy, a theatrically and generically self-aware species of Renaissance tragicomedy that enacts dialogues and interactions between tragedy and comedy, with pastoral playing a crucial intermediate role as a space of genre experimentation. As a metageneric form, popular as well as learned Renaissance tragicomedy exploits the various resources of genre: genre codes as powerful semiotic shorthand, genres as mental and attitudinal perspectives on the world, and the emotional responses designed to be elicited by dramatic genre. The point of such self-aware manipulation of genre (which distinguishes Renaissance from medieval tragicomedy) is neither mere virtuosity nor perspectivism but the serious use of genre in order to work out psychological, sexual, and political issues. From Tasso's Aminta to Shakespeare's The Tempest we can observe the conscious deployment of the rhetoric of tragedy and comedy in a pastoral theater. The focus turns from the typical actions associated with comedy or tragedy towards the rhetorical effects of micro-comedies and micro-tragedies upon the audience members internal to the play. Guarinian tragicomedy, the idea of which is not the external form Shakespeare appropriates, is constituted not by a tempered, well blended mixture of tragedy and comedy, but by the process and practice of the constituent genres tempering each other in dialogic interaction. In the generically dizzying, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral Cymbeline, the important moving parts are not individual characters, but larger entities--nations, places, and genres--that are juxtaposed, modified, and rearranged in a complicated process of genre interaction. The pastoral site of the more analytically arranged tragical-pastoral-comical Winter's Tale clarifies the important function, in Shakespeare's last plays, of genre-based places, mental landscapes that allow both the internal and external audiences to replay and revise the original tragedy. As pastoral tragicomedy, the structurally leanest Tempest dramatizes aspects of Renaissance tragicomedy; Prospero's Guarinian project of mixing and tempering tragedy and comedy; both favorable and unfavorable audience responses to Prospero's tragicomedy; and the tensions between learned drama and commedia dell'arte improvisation.