Genre Decorum as Precondition of Renaissance Genre-Bending

Early modern arguments by Giason Denores, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and others for genre integrity and against genre mixing are worth examining on their own terms. For one thing, the claim for genre integrity was often accompanied by a fierce belief in the political relevance of dramatic genres to which we today would be very sympathetic. Moreover, many early modern approaches to mixed genres, such as Battista Guarini’s argument for tragicomedy on the basis of both his play Il pastor fido and a series of theoretical treatises he wrote against his antagonist Giason Denores, actually depended upon the principle of genre integrity. Early modern tragicomedy, as articulated by Guarini and as practised by Shakespeare in his late plays, was designed not to contrast unstably comedic and tragedic effects and perspectives, unlike Beckett’s modern tragicomedy Waiting for Godot, for example, but to fashion its own, aesthetically unified form under the aegis of mixture.