Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Raiding the nest: a company biography
- 2 ‘Proper gallants wordes’: comedy and the theatre audience
- 3 ‘Grief, and joy, so suddenly commixt’: company politics and the development of tragicomedy
- 4 ‘Ieronimo in Decimo sexto’: tragedy and the text
- Conclusion
- Appendix A The Chapel/Queen's Revels repertory (Summary)
- Appendix B The Chapel/Queen's Revels repertory (Data and analysis)
- Appendix C Biographical summary
- Appendix D Actor lists
- Appendix E Court and touring performances, 1600–13
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘Grief, and joy, so suddenly commixt’: company politics and the development of tragicomedy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Raiding the nest: a company biography
- 2 ‘Proper gallants wordes’: comedy and the theatre audience
- 3 ‘Grief, and joy, so suddenly commixt’: company politics and the development of tragicomedy
- 4 ‘Ieronimo in Decimo sexto’: tragedy and the text
- Conclusion
- Appendix A The Chapel/Queen's Revels repertory (Summary)
- Appendix B The Chapel/Queen's Revels repertory (Data and analysis)
- Appendix C Biographical summary
- Appendix D Actor lists
- Appendix E Court and touring performances, 1600–13
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I am told that what we are about to see is neither comedy nor tragedy, but a mixture of both. And that's a jolly good opportunity for you, parents included, to keep your wits about you so as to tell the one from the other. In those parts that are funny, and in those parts only, I shall expect you to laugh. And in other parts, the reverse. And intelligently.
‘A tragie-comedie’, writes John Fletcher, ‘is not so called in respect of mirth and killing but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie.’ These remarks have haunted critical writing on seventeenth-century tragicomedy. The Faithful Shepherdess apparently flopped in its first production by the Children of the Queen's Revels around 1608, but Fletcher went on to write some of the most successful tragicomedies of the century, and tragicomedy concurrently became the preeminent dramatic genre in the Jacobean and Caroline theatres. His comments on the form of The Faithful Shepherdess have therefore been applied to the full range of tragicomic plays produced in the London theatres. Seventeenth-century tragicomedy does not, however, have its origin in The Faithful Shepherdess alone. Fletcher's address ‘To the Reader’ was written in relation to The Faithful Shepherdess, not to tragicomedy as a genre, and in response to a specific situation: the play's theatrical failure.
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- Information
- Children of the Queen's RevelsA Jacobean Theatre Repertory, pp. 96 - 133Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005