[In the essay below, Henke examines the relationship between Battista Guarini's tragicomic theory and Shakespeare's drama, particularly focusing on The Winter's Tale.]

Genre concepts significantly affect our understanding of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. The play not only repeatedly calls attention to itself as fiction, but its tripartite tragical-pastoral-comical arrangement focuses our attention on three important dramatic genres of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the dialogic relationships between them. In Pericles, Shakespeare emphasizes the romance source by dramatizing John Gower and narrative itself, the radical of presentation most congenial to romance. “Romance” also aptly describes the story of The Winter's Tale: a more schematic, typological presentation of character than obtains in the tragedies, the (apparent) suspension of the laws of cause and effect, marvelous recognitions over large expanses of space and time, and an overall trajectory from woe to weal. But Shakespeare takes the romance material available to him in Robert Greene's Pandosto and separates it into the three dramatic genres that constituted an important new Renaissance form, the avant-garde Italian pastoral tragicomedy. The non-dramatic term ‘romance,’ used first in the late nineteenth-century by Edward Dowden in what we would now call a modal sense to convey the serene, beneficent attitude of the last plays,¹ neither gets to the quick of The Winter's Tale as experienced by the theater audience nor speaks to our increasing sense of the conflicts between comic and tragic and pastoral visions in the play. ‘Tragicomedy,’ understood in the historical context of late Cinquecento dramatic theory and practice, better explains the dramaturgy (involving the transposition from romance story to staged play) and audience experience (mediated by genre concepts) of The Winter's Tale.

At the time of the composition of The Winter's Tale, few other Renaissance kinds had received so much recent theoretical and practical attention as had the controversial genre of Italian tragicomedy. In an acrimonious quarrel that eventually produced five documents between them, Battista Guarini defended and Giason Denores challenged the feasibility of tragicomic and pastoral drama.² Taken together, Guarini's responses to Denores reveal one of the most detailed and sophisticated dramaturgies in Renaissance drama, one acutely conscious of the ways in which genre signals mediate between playwright and audience by organizing various systems of signification, creating horizons of expectations, and eliciting various rhetorical effects in the audience. In the course of the entire quarrel, Guarini considers the technology of dramatic composition; the style, tone, set, action, and characters of his mixed genre; and its rhetorical performances. Although Guarini says that pastoral is incidental, not essential to tragicomedy, his account of the many ways in which pastoral may function as a bridge between tragedy and comedy is richly suggestive for The Winter's Tale as well as for Cymbeline and The Tempest. The middle style of pastoral, its flexible emotional register, the capacity of the pastoral set to range from the pleasance of the meadow to the harshness of the selva (forest) or mountains, its typical actions, and the indeterminacy of social status in bucolic literature, all make it possible for pastoral to function both as a “theater” of genre experimentation and as a means of transforming tragedy into comedy. The tensions and potential harmonies between tragedy, comedy, and pastoral become the material of tragicomedy, which stages debate and interaction between its constituent kinds.

Interest in the latest theatrical theories and experiments was far from beneath Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare's direct knowledge of the drama of Tasso and Guarini can be demonstrated (and, through Marston and Fletcher, his indirect awareness of theories of tragicomedy), the most convincing evidence of international cross-fertilization can be mustered from a comparative examination of the Italian and Shakespearean plays themselves, which demonstrates the persistent appearance of common theatrical structures: character typology, topoi, actions, and genre systems.³ In particular, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest share with the late Cinquecento Italian hybrids a high degree of generic self-consciousness and a similar genre system constituted by tragedy, comedy, and pastoral. Although Shakespeare's direct knowledge of tragicomic theory was probably scanty, the Italian dramaturgical theory is so closely tied to actual theatrical practice that it should illuminate the “unwritten poetics” operative in Shakespeare's work, a work that shares with the late Cinquecento Italian drama similar generic alignments and some of the same dramaturgical strategies.⁴

The contexts in which the Italian and Shakespearean plays were performed reveal other important analogies. Although the differences between the situations of Guarini's amateur courtly theater and Shakespeare's professional, largely popular theater are more striking than the similarities, the new sophisticated audience of the Blackfriars theater, which most critics agree exerted some influence on the last plays of Shakespeare, resembles the kinds of learned audiences out of which the generically self-conscious form of Italian tragicomedy emerged: it is an audience of high “dramatic competence” that would have recognized, more quickly than the Globe theatergoers, the codes of genre variously manipulated in the last plays.⁵ To a greater degree than the outdoor Globe, the intimate, candlelit Blackfriars theater would have accommodated the fine nuancing of style and emotion upon which, as we shall see, Guarinian tragicomedy is based.⁶ Furthermore, the courtly Guarini's attempt to appropriate but severely control the bawdy popular theatrical energies of the newly emerging professional theater can be contrasted with the professional actor-playwright-shareholder Shakespeare's more fluid blending of learned and popular strains in plays performed at the Globe, the Blackfriars, and the court. Denores justifiably associates Guarini's generic experiments with those of the emerging commedia dell’ arte, a theater from which Guarini was anxious to distance himself but which shared many of his assumptions about the flexible combinatory nature of genre. A professional actor himself, Shakespeare shared none of Guarini's disdain for the mercenary theater. But the fact that each of the commedia-like entertainers of the last plays—Stephano, Trinculo, and especially Autolycus—are chastened and diminished at the end of the play may reflect the changing and uncertain status of popular entertainment in the new environment of the Blackfriars and the Stuart court. In both Guarinian and late Shakespearean tragicomedy, the extremes of tragic horror and comic bawdry are “tempered” (this is Guarini's term), and the fortunes of the marginal figures are rendered particularly precarious.

Most Anglo-American critics who have examined the relation of Guarini's tragicomic theory to Shakespeare's drama have limited their reading of Guarini to Il pastor fido and an abridged translation of the last of the five documents in the Guarini-Denores quarrel, the Compendio della poesia tragicomica.⁷ Critics tend even to repeat the same passage in which Guarini enumerates the rules for the composition of tragicomedy.⁸ Because it lacks the tension of debate (Denores was dead by the time of its composition), the Compendio is in many ways the least interesting of the five documents. We need to consider the four earlier documents—Denores' Discorso, Guarini's first Verato, Denores' Apologia, and Guarini's second Verato—in order to understand more about Guarinian tragicomic dramaturgy. With the formulas and rules of the Compendio, Guarini parades his Aristotelian orthodoxy before his neo-classical critics. The arc of the entire debate, however, suggests a more capacious, innovative genre and dramaturgy than has often been associated with Guarini. Via the dramaturgical idea of tragicomedy to be explored in these pages which can generate several kinds of tragicomedies, it is possible (and fruitful) to compare late Cinquecento pastoral tragicomedy with English experiments unlike it externally—experiments that we consider to be rather more dramatically successful.

Both Guarini and Denores are extremely self-conscious of generic codes and of the signifying and performative capacities of genre. Although they may disagree with the meaning or function of a given genre, Guarini and Denores share the assumption that literary genres are not just sets of rules but powerful and effective semiotic systems that produce certain effects upon their readers or audiences. Considering poetry to derive its principles from ethics, Denores claims that his three canonical genres—tragedy, comedy, and epic—are inherently political and concentrates on the didactic effects of poetry. Epic, according to Denores, presents images of virtue and teaches the nature of monarchy; tragedy warns against the dangers of tyranny and is governed by the principles of oligarchy; comedy is regulated by the principles of democracy and is designed to “disponergli alla vita populare” (“prepare [man] for democratic life” [Discorso II, 155-56]).⁹ In contesting Denores' claim that pastoral is of no moral utility for city dwellers, Guarini does appear to make didactic claims for the genre: pastoral can depict the better nature of man, free from the corruption of city or court. Usually, however, Guarini counters Denores' didacticism with an audience-centered rhetorical notion of genre that stresses the role of the emotions. For Guarini, poetry is a branch not of politics or civil philosophy but of rhetoric and cannot be said to have a primarily didactic function. Tragedy and comedy as well as other kinds of poetry may, however, indirectly adapt their audiences to the habit of virtue by their purgative, emotional capacities.¹⁰ The tragic purgation of fear, for example, does not eradicate fear but adjusts and moderates it. The fear of the “morte dell’animâ” (“death of the soul”) produced by tragedy checks an excessive fear of bodily death (I Verato II, 251). The laughter and relaxation of comedy frees its audiences from melancholy and thus disposes them to the duties of public life (I Verato II, 262). The “instrumental,” or formal end of drama is to elicit delight by verisimilar and lively imitation; its “architectonic” or final end is to purge the audience of melancholy (the end of comedy and, according to Guarini, tragicomedy) or to purge the audience of pity and fear (the end of tragedy; I Verato II, 247). The differences, however, between Guarini and Denores may obscure what as a working hypothesis they share: an audience-centered theory of genre by which genres signify, create horizons of expectations, and affect their audiences in didactic or emotional ways.

An individual genre, then, constitutes for these theorists a distinctive semiotic framework (comprehensible by a reasonably competent audience) and performs a discreet rhetorical (be it didactic or emotional) operation. Furthermore, as in a linguistic system, a genre acquires meaning in relation to other genres as part of a genre system. Guarini defends a much more extensive genre system than Denores' ternary epic-tragedy-comedy both in his account of ancient genres (the dithyramb, argues Guarini, was a distinctive genre [II Verato III, 57-70]) and in the new, modern genres he is willing to allow.¹¹ If genres were forms by which one organized experience, “moderns” like Guarini believed that new genres like tragicomedy were needed to account for increasingly diverse and complicated experience even as the book revolution produced new texts and explorers discovered new lands.¹² Mixed genres, in particular, constituted the nova reperta of literature according to the principle that “a large, inclusive utterance may require mixture of the kinds.”¹³ Now even in the reduced genre system of Denores we can see that genre systems provoke comparisons between genres: epic, tragedy, and comedy, for Denores, generate different political comparisons, based as they are on different forms of government (Discorso II, 155-57). To combine various genres in one work, as Guarini proposes, allows one genre to be viewed from the perspective of another; tragedy, for example, can be gauged from the perspective of pastoral. If genres constituted different interpretive frames on the world, mixed genres enabled “dialogues,” as it were, between genres and the different points of view they represent. Several late Cinquecento and Jacobean plays, in fact, began with actual debates between figures representing “Tragedy” and “Comedy,” and Guarini's own Il pastor fido begins with what amounts to a debate between tragic Seneca and comic Terence.¹⁴

The frequently excerpted passages from the Compendio appear to fix the genre by rules and definitions, but a reading of the two Verati reveals Guarini's openness to a great range of hybrid possibilities worthy of Polonius' notorious list. (Denores, indeed, taunts Guarini with Polonian litanies of dramatic hybrids [Discorso II, 348-49].) The amount of “tragicity” or “comicity” in a given play, in Guarini's view, can be adjusted according to an almost infinitely variable spectrum: “nella Tragedia il terrore più e men temperato costitiusce i gradi del più, e meno Tragico; così il riso, più e meno dissoluto fa la favola più, e men Comica” (“in tragedy, terror that is more and less tempered constitutes degrees of more and less tragic quality; similarly laughter that is more and less dissolute renders the play more and less comic” [I Verato II, 260-61]). If the Aristotelian tradition establishes the emotions as a centrally defining feature of genre (pity, fear, etc.), such emotional nuancing as Guarini proposes can hypothetically generate an almost infinite number of genres. Furthermore, Guarini argues that new audiences shape the creation of new genres. Generic flexibility arises out of the need to respond to the changing nature of audiences: “E questa è la vera cagione delle differenze, e dei gradi, che sono nelle favole più, e men Tragiche, perciocchè i poeti vedendo i gusti diversi degli ascoltanti, alcuna volta componevano favole co’l fin lieto per rimettere in parte quella acrimonia” (“And this is the true reason for the differences and the degrees of more tragic and less tragic plays, because the poets, seeing the various tastes of their audiences, sometimes wrote plays with a happy ending in order to make them less harsh” [I Verato II, 260]). Now the mutual responsivity of genre and audience characterized, as Denores was quick to point out, the emerging and suspect commedia dell’ arte; the comici were selling theatrical wares to the public, and the public responded to variety and mixture. Throughout the Discorso and Apologia Denores attempts to condemn Guarini's generic experimentation by associating it with the genre mixtures of the commedia dell’arte. Guarini, of course, vehemently rejected such company. As learned comici themselves did under attack from post-Tridentine ecclesiastics, Guarini claimed for his art a high degree of authorial control. According to Guarini, the playwright creates new genres like tragicomedy by combining existing genres in various ways just as the metallurgist produces new compounds, as the painter mixes new colors from his palette, or as the politician or political philosopher creates a republic of mixed constitution such as Venice (II Verato III, 158-65). Such assertion of authorial control, however, may register Guarini's anxiety (and Denores' belief) that he has unleashed a Pandora's box of dramatic experimentation.

The most important interaction in Guarinian tragicomedy occurs between pastoral and tragedy. In order to establish a more flexible and interactive genre system, it is crucial for Guarini to demonstrate points of contact between the traditionally low genre of pastoral and the higher genres of tragedy and epic just as Tasso and many other late Cinquecento playwrights had done.¹⁵ For Denores, pastoral is a genre that cannot traffic with tragedy or epic. It is a humble, homogeneous, and circumscribed genre, pure in its portrayal of virtuous shepherds, not subject to the principles of civic and moral philosophy as are his three principal politically based kinds (Discorso II, 201-02). Citing many examples of high action and tragic experience in non-dramatic pastoral literature, Guarini argues that shepherds are capable of tragic errors and vulnerable to tragic suffering (I Verato II, 293). In its style, emotions, set, actions, and social organization, Guarini's pastoral is much more capacious than the soft pastoral of Denores and is thus comparable to the pastoral of Shakespeare's last plays.

“Happy is your grace,” says Amiens to the exiled Duke Senior of As You Like It, “That can translate the stubbornness of fortune / Into so quiet and so sweet a style” (II.i.18-20).¹⁶ Now the harshly pastoral winter and rough weather described in As You Like It elsewhere takes the form, in King Lear, of actual tragic experience. King Lear even repeats the images and language of Duke Senior's speech: Gloucester's “I see it feelingly” (IV.vi. 147) echoes Duke Senior's “feelingly persuade” (I.i.11). According to Amiens, however, Duke Senior's sweet pastoral style transforms potentially tragic pain. So it is in Guarini's dramaturgy: the sweet (dolce) style proper but not unique to the pastoral mode tempers tragic experience. As Guarini puts it, “il dolce … tempera quella grandezza, e sublimità, che è propria del puro Tragico” (“the sweet style tempers that grandeur and sublimity which are proper to the pure tragic style” [I Verato II, 274]). One literary kind, then, interacts with and transforms another. If the principle of generic decorum attaches a style to a genre, Guarini establishes a middle style for his hybrid, created by the careful mixing of the “politô,” or polished style, and the “grave,” or solemn style. For Guarini, the extreme “dimessô” (low) and the “magnificô” (magnificent) styles cannot be mixed together, as they were in the commedia dell’ arte hybrids from which he was so concerned to distance himself (II Verato II, 274). But unlike what Guarini perceived (incorrectly) as the random stylistic juxtapositions of the mercenary theater, the technically sophisticated playwright of tragicomedy, in his view, consciously and carefully creates his style. As long as one avoids extreme mixtures, however, the playwright can create almost infinite stylistic gradations “a uso non di campane, ma di corde musicali” (“in the manner not of bells, but of musical chords” [II Verato III, 226]), or as the painter mixes colors and creates shades of difference. Tragicomic dramaturgy, then, explores various and finely nuanced shades of style.

According to Guarini, the emotional tonalities of pastoral temper the extremes of tragedy and generate a range of emotional experience as broad as the range of style. With dramatic genres, in the tradition of Aristotle, partially defined by the kinds of emotion they elicit in the audience, Guarini explores new emotional terrain for his genre. If the violence of tragic actions elicits terror and if the buffooneries of the emerging professional comedy generate dissolute relaxation, Guarini explores shades of feeling between terror and laughter. Tragicomic dramaturgy explores this intermediate tonal range in several ways. First of all, the passive suffering of pastoral figures in the face of meteorological, occupational, political, and amatory misfortunes elicits the emotion of pity without extreme terror—the right kind of emotion for the new genre, according to Guarini. The shepherd of pastoral is not essential to tragicomedy but can stand as a representative figure for the new hybrid because his strength relative to his world is inferior to figures of epic or tragedy. In most versions of Renaissance pastoral the shepherd's or countryman's strength consists in his passive endurance—as Denores puts it, the capacity “tollerar le fatiche con pacienza, il sofferrir il caldo, ed il freddo” (“to tolerate hard labor with patience, to endure heat and cold” [Apologia II, 364]). Secondly, the playwright elicits intermediate tragicomic emotion by carefully controlling and diminishing terror. Whereas, in the Compendio, Guarini proscribes any version of terror for his hybrid, in the Verati he accepts a greater complexity in the way the playwright may exploit terror: “E siccome ogni cosa terribile non purga il terrore … così ogni rassomiglianza del terribile non produce Tragedia, s’ella non vien condotta con l’altre necessarie parti, che ci concorrono” (“And just as every terrible thing does not purge terror … so every likeness of the terrible does not produce tragedy, if it is not accompanied by the other necessary and converging parts” [I Verato II, 259]). Like Prospero manipulating his audience with the terror of an illusory storm, the tragicomic playwright produces “rassomiglianze del terribile,” simulacra of terror, often diminished for being framed by the awareness of illusion. For Guarini, tragicomedy mutes terror because it contains a higher degree of fictionality than does tragedy: “Dunque la verità, che aiuta il verisimile, s’appartiene al poema Tragico, se noi crediamo ad Aristotile, e non al Tragicomico, che non ha bisogno di storia, per formar la sua favola, ma se la finge esso a suo modo, e talora con nomi noti, e talora con finti, secondo che più gli piace” (“Therefore truth, which contributes to the verisimilar, belongs to the tragic poem, if we believe Aristotle, and not to the tragicomic poem, which has no need of history to formulate its story but rather fabricates its story in its own way, sometimes with familiar names and sometimes with fictional names, according to its pleasure” [II Verato III, 189]). Late Cinquecento tragicomedies frequently stage fictional deaths that are meant to transform the internal audience of the play. In Tasso's Aminta, the false deaths of Aminta and Silvia are not gratuitously theatrical but are important for the rhetorical effects elicited in the lovers. In The Winter's Tale, Paulina stages the fictional “death” and “resurrection” of Hermione in order to transform her audience Leontes. The oneiric fictions of Il pastor fido, other Italian pastoral tragicomedies, and The Winter's Tale also diminish tragic terror. Denores argues that terror admits of no degree and claims that the terror induced by dreams is inferior to real terror. For Guarini, however, the terror of dreams constitutes a unique, diminished emotion appropriate for the new genre (II Verato III, 190-92). The terror of Montano's dream in Il pastor fido I.iv is tempered by a comforting prophecy.¹⁷ In The Winter's Tale, the dream that Antigonus recounts before he relinquishes Perdita on the Bohemian sea coast similarly tempers terror with hope (The Winter's Tale III.iii.15-41).

In the two Verati, Guarini proposes for the third genre a generically flexible set capable of depicting experience of a greater range than that normally associated with the pleasance of the pastoral greensward. The pastoral set, as described by Sebastiano Serlio in De Architettura (and as realized in many late Cinquecento pastorals), can include not only pleasant meadows and woods, but also mountains, rocks, deserts, and dark, labyrinthine woods reminiscent of the landscapes of Dante and Ariosto.¹⁸ For the titular heroine in Giovanni Battista Leoni's Roselmina, favola tragisatiricomica (1595) who wanders through Ireland, it is the confusion and discomfort of the selva (forest) and not the pleasance of the prato (meadow) that marks the landscape: “queste strane habitazioni di fiere e di gente selvaggia” (“these strange dwellings of beasts and savage people” [I.i]).¹⁹ At the beginning of Il pastor fido, Guarini's Arcadia suffers from a Sophoclean blight. The generically liminal pastoral set of The Winter's Tale III.iii—the stark, stormy Bohemian sea-coast in which men are mauled by bears and “things new born” are discovered—is then very like the late Cinquecento pastoral set in the polyvalence of its generic codes.

The “scena satyrica” as described by Sebastiano Serlio adds to its natural elements temples which incorporate the columns, marble, and classical sculpture of the court-based scenic architecture of tragedy (II Verato III, 268-71). Anticipating the expected objection of Denores that the inclusion of such architecture constitutes a monstrous pastiche of different genres, Guarini argues for the possibility of shifting elements of one genre onto another generic frame. Whereas the royal palaces and sumptuous edifices of tragedy signal the splendor and ambition of courtly life, pastoral transforms classical magnificence into a religious decorum—in Guarini's imagination, shepherds built temples not for ostentation, but for primarily religious reasons. The most significant counterpoint to Leontes' court tragedy of Acts I-III, the description by Cleomenes and Dion of the solemn temple and reverent religious ceremony they had witnessed on the “fertile” and “sweet” isle (sic) of Delphos, can then be understood in terms of the communicative power of place codes in tragicomic dramaturgy. The account of the temple lends a religious, reverent cast to the high decorum and prefigures the play's movement from tragedy to pastoral to what the Italians would call commedia grave. One could plausibly argue that, more so than the psychologically realistic development of character, the generically coded set itself (largely verbally invoked in Shakespeare's theater) performs the transformative work of the The Winter's Tale.

Guarini's pastoral transforms tragic actions. Insisting, against Denores, that tragedy tells not just the political stories of the falls of tyrants (the narrowest, most conventional Renaissance notion of tragedy), but the unfortunate stories of misaligned, often incestuous eros, Guarini establishes points of contact between tragedy and pastoral. Pastoral, whose precedent in the classical genre system as the “third genre” which Cinquecento theorists thought to be the libidinous satyr play, charts the eventually felicitous realignment of erotic energies. As is the case in the paradigmatic Oedipus the King, at the beginning of Il pastor fido unhappy eros has cast a blight on the land. Lucrina's rejection of Aminta has led to his suicide and the yearly sacrifice due to Diana. It is the new generation of lovers, Amarilli, Mirtillo, Silvio, and Dorinda, who must transform potentially tragic eros, reforming the erotic energies into a comic outcome. For Guarini, tragicomedy contains potential tragedy (“[tragedia] in potenza”) but does not actualize tragedy (“non [tragedia] in atto” [II Verato III, 184]). Both Il pastor fido and its precursor Aminta present the rhetoric and possibility of tragedy (frequent references to pity and fear, the continual possibility of suicide, violence, and death) only to deflect towards tragicomedy. The new generation of lovers recapitulates but reforms the tragic eros of the earlier generation. Silvio begins the play casting himself as a hero in the high style of epic or tragedy, quoting Hippolytus from Seneca's Phaedra, and referring to the heroic itinerary of his ancestor Hercules as a generic paradigm (I.i). The play forces him, however to modulate in respect to both genre and gender. In the play's opening debate, Linco argues to Silvio that the genre-flexible Hercules also dressed in women's clothes and worked at the loom. Silvio's transformative moment comes to be not his slaying of the boar but his falling in love with Dorinda. Similarly, The Winter's Tale's Florizel and Perdita, as the new generation, reprise and revise the actions of the previous generation, which had produced tragic issue.

For Guarini, the social and political range of shepherds allows pastoral to function as a bridge between comedy and tragedy. Guarini usually understands pastoral as what we would call a mode, not a genre; pastoral is used adjectivally, as in “pastoral tragicomedy,” and means that shepherds are the principal actors. A pastoral play is a “favola di pastori in forma o Comica o Tragica o Tragicomica” (“a story of shepherds in the form of comedy or tragedy or tragicomedy” [II Verato III, 265]). Like Denores in his discussion of the politics of the various genres, many Cinquecento theorists interpreted Aristotle's remark that “[comedy] sets out to represent men as worse than they are, [tragedy] as better”²⁰ in a social, not moral sense. Guarini shared Denores' assumption about the social referentiality of genre, but the more complicated genre system he proposes, in which the politics of pastoral plays a significant role, corresponds to more complicated political structures than those treated by Denores. Tragicomedy, argues Guarini, is like the Venetian republic of his day, a capacious, mixed form that synthesizes the apparently contradictory forms of democracy and oligarchy (II Verato III, 159-65). Guarini's tragicomedy, in the mode of pastoral, can respond to both oligarchic (tragic) and democratic (comic) claims because there is social difference in his Arcadia. Unlike Denores, Guarini distinguishes between shepherds and farmers, the latter with a more uniformly low social status. Among shepherds, there are not only servants but also owners (padroni) whose responsibility over their flock and their inferiors could represent the responsibilities of the Renaissance ruler. Shepherds, Guarini points out, have been priests and prophets, as in the Bible, and by what William Empson calls the fiction of a “beautiful relation between rich and poor,” disguised courtiers.²¹ The dramatized failures and successes of the courtiers Florizel, Polixenes, and Camillo, who cross social boundaries by disguising themselves as shepherds, Autolycus' social baiting of the naive shepherds after he suddenly receives Florizel's clothes, and the social passage of The Winter's Tale's shepherds to gentlemanly status (with a kind of revenge on the social vagabond Autolycus) in the final, synthetic part of the play should all be seen in the social-dramaturgical context of Italian pastoral tragicomedy.

The frequently noted fictional self-awareness of The Winter's Tale includes the consciousness of dramatic genre produced by the tripartite structure—an awareness of kind reminiscent of Guarinian tragicomedy. Shakespeare's analysis of the Greene romance story into the three genres of Italian tragicomedy yields a fundamentally comparative play. If Renaissance genres could provide interpretive perspectives on the world,²²The Winter's Tale invites its audiences to consider, for example, tragic problems of state and sexuality from a pastoral point of view. With place an important constituent element of Renaissance dramatic genres, the play generates comparisons by changing places (as the Italian tragicomedies normally do not do) and thus genres. The play begins in a court that soon becomes claustrophobically tragic, narratively evokes the serene, beneficent “isle” of Delphos in tonal opposition to Leontes' tragedy, moves to the generically liminal and pivotal “sea coast” of Bohemia, shifts to the less terrifying but not escapist greensward next to the shepherd's cottage for the long pastoral scene, and ends in a Sicilia transformed into comedy less festive than grave, solemnized by echoes of the masque in Paulina's “chapel.” The notorious geographical errors for the two important places alternative to the Sicilian court—the “isle” of Delphos and the “seacoast” of Bohemia—might be thought to reflect less Shakespeare's carelessness than their status as places of the imagination—“landscapes of the mind”²³ that transform the original tragedy for both the internal and external audience.

Rosalie L. Colie has argued that the Polixenes-Perdita debate regarding natural purity and artificial mixture addresses the same issues taken up in the continental debate, with Polixenes (ironically) taking the Guarinian, and Perdita (against her wishes) assuming the Denorian points of view.²⁴ It is not only Florizel the gentler scion and Perdita the apparently wilder stock that must be joined to restore the Bohemia-Sicilia bond but also the various genres and points of view in the play that must be mixed, with pastoral playing an important mediatory role. The purity and isolation of something like Denorian pastoral is invoked by Polixenes shortly before the tragedy begins; it is far less capacious and variegated than the pastoral actually enacted later on in the play:

                                       
Pol. We were, fair queen,
Two lads that thought there was no more behind,
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal.
We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ th’
sun,
And bleat the one at th’other: what we chang’d
Was innocence for innocence: we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d
That any did. Had we pursu’d that life,
And our weak spirits ne’er been higher rear’d
With stronger blood, we should have answer’d heaven
Boldly ‘not guilty’, the imposition clear’d
Hereditary ours.

(I.ii.62-65, 67-75)²⁵

With Denores and against Guarini, Polixenes remembers a pastoral of complete innocence, altogether bounded from the world of city and court and unable to converse with the “stronger blood” of sexuality and its potentially tragic consequences.²⁶ The purity of such soft pastoral yields, as its dark side, the pure tragedy of jealousy, conspiracy, and revenge that Leontes—Othello without need of a Iago—attempts to impose on his court.

Paulina soon opposes Leontes' pure tragedy. She resembles the Guarinian tragicomic playwright in her use of a variety of genre-like rhetorical strategies aimed at transforming Leontes, her audience. Paulina opposes Leontes' tragic projections with biting satiric language and with the less dangerous perspective of comic typology, attempting to cast Leontes into the role of a comic tyrant and Antigonus into that of a hen-pecked husband.²⁷ When, like Creon of Antigone, Leontes disobeys the oracle and completes the externalization of a tragedy which began as fantastical and unreal (I.ii.138-46), Paulina becomes, at III.ii.175-202, a tragic nuncio delivering a highly rhetorical (but none the less effective) account of Hermione's “death.” Paulina's “tragedy” is important not for its referential content (which is false) but for the emotional effect that her speech immediately elicits in Leontes in the manner of Guarinian tragicomedy. She stages Leontes' sixteen-year penitence. Finally, adjusting herself and her audience to a very different generic decorum in Act V, Paulina carefully prepares and moves her audience (principally Leontes) in the solemn masque-like statue scene in her “chapel.”

Leontes' conspiratorial sexual tragedy, then, is not unalterable form but is affected by other genres or points of view in the play. Genres are dialogic and interactive, as Mikhail Bakhtin argues: they are developed in relation and dialogue with other genres.²⁸ Neither the theater audience nor Leontes is bound to any single generic perspective. The complex, fluid generic system of The Winter's Tale tempers the two extremes Guarini was attempting to avoid in tragicomedy: tragic terror, and comic bawdry of the kind practiced by the commedia dell’arte. At the end of the play, Leontes' tragedy is over (though not forgotten), and Autolycus, a figure reminiscent of the itinerant professional entertainer, is a diminished thing.

The most important genre interaction in The Winter's Tale is that between pastoral and tragedy. In its style, emotional tone, symbolism of place, revisionary action, and social politics, the pastoral section of The Winter's Tale provides a reprise of matters that have had tragic issue in the first section and replays them through a different prism. The pastoral of Bohemia is a much tougher, more porous, and more heterogeneous genre than Polixenes' retrospective soft pastoral, and it is one that may converse with tragedy.

The old shepherd's “thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born” announces the pivotal generic shift with a symmetrical balance befitting this tragical-pastoral-comical play. The sea coast of III.iii is especially liminal in regard to genre, well calibrated to intermediate stylistic and emotional registers; it is an eery, deserted place of storms, comically savage beasts,²⁹ and death without terror. The popular, homespun style of the shepherds differs from Guarini's intermediate “sweet” style but follows the idea of Guarinian dramaturgy in that it tempers tragedy. The style of the pastoral speakers places sexuality in a new generic framework. The sight of the infant Perdita signifies illicit sexuality for the old shepherd, as it did for Leontes, but his homely compound formulations reinterpret what had been a horribly particular sin for the Sicilian king into a new perspective, that of comic generality:³⁰

Though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work: they were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here.

(III.iii.72-76)

The style and emotional register of the young clown also adjusts generic decorum in his account of the storm, the wreck, and the mauling of Antigonus. Guarini, we remember, carefully distinguishes observed tragicomic terror from participated tragic terror, whereas Denores argues for only one emotional register. Just as Prospero tempers Miranda's tragically coded reaction to the initial storm in The Tempest (she claims to experience fear and pity for figures of high station),³¹ the clown both registers an Aristotelian response (the poor souls utter a “piteous cry”; Antigonus is a nobleman) and compromises generic purity with the homeliness and humor of words like “corks,” “hogsheads,” and “flap-dragoning.” Every event and speech in the scene mark it as a no man's land between engagement and detachment, a place of diminished terror. Elevated diction, echoes of encounters in the epic underworld (“thrice bow’d before me”), and ritual patterning serve to link Antigonus' strange dream (III.iii.16-41) with epic and tragedy. And yet it is grave and sorrowful, not terrifying like the dreams and apparitions in Richard III, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and other tragedies; tonally it is very like the enabling dream Montano has of his son in Il pastor fido (I.iv), the memory of which at the fateful moment of sacrifice deflects his sacrificial sword (V.v). As Guarini argues against Denores, a dream of a terrifying event need not reproduce terror tout court but can modulate terror into a different emotional and generic register.

The actions of the entire pastoral episode transform the actions of the first section of the play by both resembling them and differing from them. In both the tragic and pastoral sections of the play, dangerous kings, violently disrupting placid situations, break or threaten a male-female bond. Leontes opposes the mixing of Polixenes and Hermione (“To mingle friendship far, is mingling bloods” [I.ii.109]), and Polixenes, despite his official position in the debate, opposes the mixing of the “gentler scion” and the “wilder stock.” Both Paulina and Perdita (“The selfsame sun that shines upon his court / … / Looks on all alike” [IV.iv.445-47]) subversively undermine the kings, at least in word. In both sections Camillo “serves his master's highest interests by betraying him,”³² and the victims of both outbursts must traverse the dangerous but providential sea. However, although Leontes, driven by a misogynist fear of sexual impurity, had desperately wanted Mamillius to be “a copy” (I.ii.119-56), the new generation is not altogether identical to the older generation. Florizel does resemble the older generation in a Denorian pastoral idyllism that hides the dark side of Arcadia. His “Apprehend / Nothing but jollity” (IV.iv.24-25) stands in contrast to Perdita's more realistic reservations about their pastoral disguises, and his confident enlistment of the gods themselves as theatrical-sexual exemplars (IV.iv.24-35) ignores the reality of their rapes. On the other hand, if Leontes had conflated and condemned both sexual and theatrical play (“Go play, boy, play: thy mother plays and I / Play too; but so disgrac’d a part, whose issue / Will hiss me to my grave” [I.ii.187-89]), Florizel with Perdita redeems sexuality and theatricality. After Polixenes discovers him, Florizel first launches into tragic, Lear-like diction inappropriate to the pastoral decorum: “Let nature crush the sides o’ th’ earth together, / And mar the seeds within!” (IV.iv.479-80). More like a “faithful shepherd” than like a tragic hero, however, Florizel shows himself flexible enough to submit to Camillo's plan, trusting the waters of providence and Camillo's vision (IV.iv.548-54) of a comic outcome.

Perdita's debate with Florizel about the viability of his pastoral disguise anticipates the more familiar debate she has with Polixenes about the possibility of mixing a “gentler scion” and a “wilder stock”; these exchanges about the possibility of social mixtures echo the Guarini-Denores debates about the mixture of socially coded genres. In response to Florizel's breezy confidence in the social flexibility of pastoral, by which princes may become shepherds and shepherdesses goddesses, Perdita reaffirms social and generic boundaries:

To me the difference forges dread (your greatness
Hath not been us’d to fear): even now I tremble
To think your father, by some accident
Should pass this way, as you did: O the Fates!
How would he look, to see his work, so noble,
Vilely bound up? What would he say? Or how
Should I, in these my borrowed flaunts, behold
The sternness of his presence?

(IV.iv.17-24)

Perdita here affirms, as did Denores, the principle of theatrical, social, and sexual difference, in language proper to tragic discourse. The “stern” presence of the superior Polixenes and the awareness of the social differences that not even festival license erases elicit the emotions of tragedy: “dread,” “fear,” and “trembling.” Perdita maintains a horizon of tragic rather than providentially tragicomic expectations with her invocation of the “Fates.” But of course Perdita's own career as a royal foundling as well as the plot and dramaturgy of the entire play affirm not Denores' position in the debate but rather the social fluidity of Guarinian tragicomedy. The theatrical-sexual license of the pastoral festival centers on the freedom to explore various levels of social station; despite her verbal protestations, Perdita does mix with the gentler scion. Autolycus, the real hero of social metamorphosis in Act IV, plays a vagabond writhing in the road and, after the windfall of Florizel's costume, “a most rare courtier.” And Polixenes' royal suspension of the festive license of social disguise delays but does not forestall the marriage of Perdita and Florizel. Although the trick of pastoral romance may reaffirm aristocratic privilege (the shepherdess really has royal blood), the gentling of the shepherds after the first recognition really does constitute a social mixture following the lines of Guarinian dramaturgy. The young shepherd marvels at the new kinship relations of the pastoral-royal family: “I was a gentleman born before my father; for the king's son took me by the hand, and called me brother; and then the two kings called my father brother; and then the prince, my brother, and the princess, my sister, called my father father; and so we wept; and there was the first gentleman-like tears that ever we shed” (V.ii.139-45). The translation of the shepherds from Bohemia to the Sicilian court heightens the generic status of pastoral—the very project of Tasso, Guarini, and other late Cinquecento dramatists. Autolycus, earlier the genius of social transformation in the subversive style of commedia dell’ arte, now is humbled before the new gentlemen. The emotional responses elicited by commedia dell’ arte, the relaxation and the laughter of farce, give way to the pathos-filled tonalities of Guarinian tragicomedy: “gentleman-like tears.” The status of Autolycus is diminished, with the result that not only the extreme of tragic terror but also that of farcical comedy is “tempered.”

In its implicit focus on dramatic genre, its genre dialogism, and its use of pastoral style, tone, set, actions, and social relationships to modify the extremes of tragedy and comedy, The Winter's Tale exemplifies the “unwritten poetics” of tragicomic dramaturgy as most thoroughly articulated by Guarini but also as practiced by many contemporary Italian playwrights. Probably independently of direct influence, The Winter's Tale realizes many of the dramaturgical possibilities articulated in Guarini's work, especially in the two Verati. The relationships between the constituent genres, of course, involves much more conflict in Shakespearean tragicomedy than in Guarinian and in most other late Cinquecento tragicomedy. Although the status of the rough and tumble commedia-like Autolycus diminishes in relation to the newly-gentled shepherds and their more refined sentiments, he resists integration into the new order and maintains strong audience appeal. To “temper” or reformulate tragedy, to begin to heal its wounds, as Shakespeare surely does beginning with the liminal pastoral scene of III.iii, is not to defuse it entirely. The transformative power effected by Hermione's fictional death does not efface the real deaths of Mamillius and Antigonus and the fact that the “wide gap of time” has sadly diminished the royal marriage, rendering Hermione disturbingly silent in the last scene. That Shakespeare handles tragicomic dramaturgy with innovation and complexity, however, is hardly surprising.

Notes

1. Edward Dowden, Shakspere (New York: American Book Company, n.d.), pp. 55-56. For the distinction between mode and genre, see Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genre and Modes (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 106-11.

2. Guarini's extremely popular and influential pastoral tragicomedy, Il pastor fido, was written between 1580 and 1585 and circulated in manuscript before its publication in 1590. In 1586, Giason Denores presented his theories of genre and criticized tragicomedy and pastoral, without explicitly naming Guarini, in his Discorso di Iason Denores intorno à que’ principii, cause, et accrescimenti, che la comedia, la tragedia, et il poema heroico ricevono dalla philosophia morale, e civile, e da’ governatori delle republiche (Padua, 1586). Guarini responded, anonymously, in his Il verrato ovvero difesa di quanto ha scritto M. Giason Denores contra le tragicomedie, et le pastorali, in un suo discorso di poesia (Ferrara, 1588). Denores sallied back in his Apologia contra l’auttor del Verato di Iason De Nores di quanto ha egli detto in un suo discorso delle tragicomedie, e delle pastorali (Padua, 1590). Guarini countered with Il verato secondo ovvero replica dell’ attizzato accademico ferrarese in difesa del pastorfido, completed by 1591 but not published until 1593 (Florence, 1593). Finally, in 1601 Guarini published a work incorporating the major points of his two earlier treatises, the Compendio della poesia tragicomica, tratto dai duo verati, per opera dell’ autore del pastor fido, colla giunta di molte cose spettanti all’ arte (Venice, 1601). A good account of the quarrel has been given by Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1961), II, 1074-1105. The five exchanges of the quarrel, treatises relevant to the quarrel by Angelo Ingegneri, Faustino Summo, Giovani Pietro Malacreta, Paolo Beni, and Giovanni Savio, and Guarini's principal literary works are collected together in a four-volume eighteenth-century edition: Delle opere del cavalier Battista Guarini, ed. Giovanni Alberto Timermani (Verona, 1738). All citations to the documents of the quarrel will refer to this edition; I list the treatise from which the citation is taken, followed by the volume and page reference in the Timermani edition.

3. Recently, the most thorough and convincing comparison of Cinquecento and Shakespearean drama has been made by Louise George Clubb in Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1989). G. K. Hunter has made the best case for the direct influence of Guarini on Shakespeare and Marston in his “Italian Tragicomedy on the English Stage,” Renaissance Drama, 6 (1973), 123-48. Tasso's Aminta and Guarini's Il pastor fido, printed together in London by John Wolfe in 1591, were well known among a select but important circle in London, and verbal echoes of the 1602 “Dymock” translation of Il pastor fido can be found, argues Hunter, in Marston's The Malcontent and in Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure. Several English dramatists contemporary with Shakespeare demonstrated a keen interest in both the theory and practice of the new genre: Samuel Daniel, who attempted a close imitation of Guarini's pastoral tragicomedy in The Queene's Arcadia (1605); John Marston, whose 1604 The Malcontent (entered as “Tragicomoedia” in the Stationer's Register) was appropriated by Shakespeare's company and performed at the Globe; and John Fletcher, new playwright of the King's Men as they began performing plays at the Blackfriars theater, future collaborator with Shakespeare, whose 1609 prologue to The Faithful Shepherdess demonstrates knowledge of Guarini's theories.

4. For the concept of “unwritten poetics” and a discussion of the close relationship between theory and practice in the Cinquecento, see Claudio Guillen, Literature as System: Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 107-34.

5. The concept of “dramatic competence” is discussed in Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), pp. 98-99.

6. Harley Granville-Barker has argued that the Blackfriars theater would have encouraged a more refined style of acting than that practiced in the outdoor theaters, by which “sentiment [would] become as telling as passion” (Prefaces to Shakespeare [1930; rpt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1946], I, 470).

7. The standard version of Guarini that many critics use is that of Allan H. Gilbert's abridged translation of the Compendio, found in his Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (1940; rpt. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 504-33. Some useful studies of Guarini and Renaissance English drama are Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955), pp. 34-45; Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1963), pp. 186-215; Arthur C. Kirsch, Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1972), pp. 7-15; Hunter, “Italian Tragicomedy on the English Stage,” pp. 123-48; and David L. Hirst, Tragicomedy (London: Methuen, 1984), pp. 3-8, 18-21. Herrick does use the Timermani edition, although he concentrates on the Compendio and on passages in Gilbert's abridged edition. Some critics, like Kirsch, refer also to Weinberg's many quotations from Guarini, some indeed taken from the Verati. (Weinberg himself has read all of the quarrel documents in detail.) Hirst and Doran do refer to the complete Compendio, which they have consulted in Italian. The excellent essays by John T. Shawcross, Joseph Loewenstein, Barbara A. Mowat, Verna Foster, and James J. Yoch (Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics, ed. Nancy Klein Maguire [New York: AMS Press, 1987]) probably constitute the best recent work on Guarini and tragicomedy, but do not refer to the Verati.

8. The passage most commonly quoted is the following: “He who composes tragicomedy takes from tragedy its great persons but not its great action, its verisimilar plot but not its true one, its movement of the feelings but not its disturbance of them, its pleasure but not its sadness, its danger but not its death; from comedy it takes laughter that is not excessive, modest amusement, feigned difficulty, happy reversal, and above all the comic order of which we shall speak in its place” (Literary Criticism, ed. Gilbert, p. 511).

9. All translations of the Italian texts are my own.

10. Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, II, 658.

11. Denores, of course, could not but acknowledge ancient genres such as pastoral and lyric. Believing, however, that they were not governed by political and philosophical principles, he considered them much less important than the three major genres.

12. For the relationship between new nixed genres and the cultural changes of the sixteenth century, see Rosalie L. Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), pp. 3, 28, 76-102.

13. Ibid., p. 28.

14. Alessandro Piccolomini's L’Ortensio begins with a debate between Comedia and Tragedia (Commedie del Cinquecento, ed. Aldo Borlenghi [Milan: Rizzoli, 1959], pp. 1041-45). A very similar debate begins Sforza Oddi's Prigione d’amore (Il teatro italiano: la commedia del Cinquecento, ed. Guido Davico Bonino [Turin: Einaudi, 1978], pp. 444-48). In England, the popular play Mucedorus, revived in 1610 by The King's Men, begins with a prologue that pits Comedy against Envy, the latter essentially representing tragedy. In the first scene of Il pastor fido, Silvio quotes from Seneca's Phaedra and Linco from Terence's Heauton Timorumenos.

15. Officially, however, Tasso stood on the side of the ancients on the question of genre mixture, for which see the discussion of Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, II, 1077. Concentrating on playwrights other than Tasso and Guarini, Clubb discusses the wide generic range of Cinquecento pastoral (Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time, pp. 153-87).

16. As You Like It, Agnes Latham, ed. (London: Methuen, 1975). I am indebted to Paul Alpers for calling my attention to this passage.

17. All Il pastor fido citations refer to Opere di Battista Guarini, ed. Marziano Guglielminetti (1955; rpt. Turin: UTET, 1971).

18. See Sebastiano Serlio's description of the “scena satyrica” in Il secondo libro, di prospettiva (1545); see I sette libri dell’ architettura (1584; facs. rprt. Bologna: A. Forni, 1978), I, 49^v-51.

19. Roselmina, favola tragisatiricomica (Venice, 1595).

20. Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. W. Hamilton Fyfe, Loeb Classical Library (1927; rpt. London: William Heinemann, 1932), XXIII.11.

21. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935; rpt. New York: New Directions, 1974), p. 11.

22. Colie, The Resources of Kind, pp. 1-31.

23. The phrase is from Richard Cody, The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso's Aminta and Shakespeare's Early Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).

24. Rosalie L. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 275-76.

25. All citations refer to The Winter's Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London: Methuen, 1963).

26. Arguing against Denores' narrow notion of tragedy as exclusively political, Guarini points out the many domestic sexual tragedies in the Greek corpus—e.g., Medea, Hippolytus, Alcestis. See I Verato II, 242.

27. Joan Hartwig makes this point in Shakespeare's Tragicomic Vision (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 105-16.

28. M. M. Bakhtin and P. N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 129-37.

29. In a fascinating analysis of the genre-coded semiotics of animals in Cinquecento pastoral drama, Louise George Clubb argues that the generic ambivalence of the bear makes it appropriate for this liminal scene of the play (Italian Drama in Shakespeare's Time, pp. 140-52).

30. At one point in the tragic section of the play Leontes does, however, interject a note of comic generality that offsets his predominantly tragic rhetoric: “There have been, / (Or I am much deceiv’d) cuckolds ere now …” (I.ii.190-91).

31. Stephen Orgel draws attention to this in his edition of The Tempest (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), p. 102.

32. James Edward Siemon, “‘But it Appears She Lives’; Iteration in The Winter's Tale,” PMLA, 74 (1974), 13.