Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Aristotle and Tragicomedy
- 2 The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini's Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601
- 3 Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia Dell'arte
- 4 The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain
- 5 Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
- 6 In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
- 7 Taking Pericles Seriously
- 8 ‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
- 9 Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
- 10 Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger's The Renegado
- 11 Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
- 12 ‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
7 - Taking Pericles Seriously
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Aristotle and Tragicomedy
- 2 The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini's Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601
- 3 Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia Dell'arte
- 4 The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain
- 5 Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
- 6 In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
- 7 Taking Pericles Seriously
- 8 ‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
- 9 Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
- 10 Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger's The Renegado
- 11 Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
- 12 ‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
Every literary work changes the genres it relates to.
SOMETIME in the early winter months of 1609 two young men must have had a rather unhappy and worried conversation. Perhaps for mutual support both emotional and physical they had it in the bed they so famously shared – as it was no doubt cold, and the conversation was largely about failure. As the new year began Francis Beaumont (b. circa 1585) was about twenty-four; his good friend and collaborator John Fletcher (b.1579) was turning thirty. They had worked hard since coming to London and had already written, separately and together, at least four and possibly as many as six plays, all for children's companies: certainly The Woman Hater (1606), The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), Cupid's Revenge (1607–08), and The Faithful Shepherdess (1608–09), and perhaps also The Scornful Lady and The Coxcomb.
But prospects were very bleak. First of all, their two most brilliant and individualistic plays, The Knight of the Burning Pestle and The Faithful Shepherdess, had notoriously failed. Next, they were losing their institutional outlets. Paul's Boys, which had produced The Woman Hater, had closed in 1606; the variously titled Blackfriars' Boys, who had produced The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Cupid's Revenge, and The Faithful Shepherdess, by March 1608 had finally overreached themselves in performing satire, leading the king to swear that ‘they should never play more, but should first begg their bred’.
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- Information
- Early Modern Tragicomedy , pp. 101 - 114Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007