FRENCH tragicomedy is a strange fish. If its impact were to be measured by the number of seventeenth-century tragicomedies which are still performed today, one could only conclude, to continue the angling metaphor, that tragicomedy is the one that got away. After all, the only tragicomedy from the period which everybody knows about, Corneille's Le Cid, suffered the indignity (or should it be dignity?) of being renamed a tragedy by Corneille himself a number of years after the first performance. Yet, to assess tragicomedy on these terms alone would seriously underestimate the importance of the role it played in the development of drama and indeed in the many debates between ancients and moderns over the course of the seventeenth century. At a time when French drama was being discussed and theorised as never before, tragicomedy was by far the most popular genre. Between 1628 and 1634, for example, fifty tragicomedies were published, whereas only sixteen comedies and a mere ten tragedies appeared in that time. Moreover, the heyday of French tragicomedy, the 1630s, coincides precisely with some fundamental changes within French culture, with the furious debates which raged around Le Cid, known as the Querelle du Cid, and of course the founding of the Académie Française. Whenever tragicomedy was discussed then and indeed when it is still analysed now by many critics, questions of regularity remain an ongoing concern in France which do not seem to intrude quite so incessantly into debates on the theatre in other countries.