HISTORICAL PRECURSORS, I: Ancient Tragicomedy and Pastoral Plays

Although the division between tragedy and comedy has been recognized since antiquity, the boundary between the two genres has historically been a porous one. This chapter establishes the prehistory of the generic combination that has become a hallmark of the absurd by tracing the intersections of tragedy and comedy that occurred throughout the ancient and early modern periods. While Plato’s integration of genres remains hypothetical, Aristotle in Poetics, despite articulating the discrete elements that characterize tragedy and comedy, ultimately collapses their distinction. Such generic rapprochement becomes more explicit in Plautus’ Amphitryon, which contains the first known use of the term “tragicomedy,” and the satyr play, whose rustic settings would later find an analogue in the pastoral works of Theocritus, Virgil, and Longus. Pastoral and tragicomedy would more fully merge in the early modern era as typified by the dramatic and theoretical writings of Cinthio, Tasso, and Guarini from Italy and Puttenham, Sidney, Daniel, Fletcher, Shakespeare, and Jonson from England, all of which situate generic syntheses in a bucolic locus. But despite sharing a setting and formal classification, the differences between the works in this corpus illustrate the broader early modern debate surrounding the proper fusion of tragedy and comedy; a discourse is evinced today in the theater of the absurd.