When Lope de Vega writes of having composed plays ‘sin el arte’ [without art] or ‘contra el arte’ [against art] (Arte nuevo, lines 16, 135) it is not, he claims, because he is ignorant of the classical precepts to which he refers, but because he cannot survive as a dramatist without the approval of his audience. The public's less educated majority (the ‘vulgo’), he avers, has become accustomed to a monstrous variety within a play. Whilst such variety may be undesirable because it is disorderly in aesthetic terms, it can at least claim a certain beauty in its proximity to ‘naturaleza’ [nature] (line 179), since life itself is varied. Lope's attitude to contemporary drama, as to many things, is calculatedly ambivalent: his academic audience — the Arte nuevo is written as a speech to Academy members — can sense both a staged frustration that one can no longer write pure comedy or pure tragedy, and a boldness in his assumed role of defender of this new hybrid, which the erudite will not deign to support.

But what exactly are the mixed plays which warrant the composition of a new art? In a basic sense the term ‘tragicomedy’ will do to describe them: they are, in Lope's words, ‘lo trágico y lo cómico mezclado, / y Terencio con Séneca’ [the tragic and the comic combined, Terence with Seneca] (lines 174–75). There is not a rigid separation of the high-born from lesser mortals, as a classical ‘art’ would require from tragedy and comedy; the stakes to be played for are not consistently either very great or fairly insignificant; the ending is no longer either calamitous or just happy; the movement of the play is neither uniformly from calm to turbulence nor in the opposite direction; the didactic norms of encouraging the rejection or embracing of a certain approach to life are muddied; the rigid distinction between the origins of the two genres in history or in fiction is dissolved; and high and low styles are mixed.