Ready Reference
	Genre Genre is a French word that means "kind" or "type"; it is used in many disciplines to refer to the various categories in which works are classified, for example, whether a piece of writing is a drama, novel, or short story, or whether a painting is a landscape or portrait. Genre classifications can be purely formal (whether a poem is an ode or a sonnet), or they can be made according to other categories, like theme or setting. For example, the pastoral can include any work whose setting is rural, regardless of other formal characteristics. Thus, John Milton's elegy Lycidas, the Greek romance Daphnis and Chloë, and the medieval English drama The Second Shepherd's Play all qualify as pastorals. Full Entry Reproduced with permission from The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English, edited by Ian Ousby. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988, 1993. All Rights Reserved.

However long familiar, the genres of comedy and tragedy were usually theorized during this period in a reductive, schematic way. While Aristotle's thoughts on tragedy received extensive Renaissance commentary, especially on the Continent, the dominant influences on dramatic genre theory were not the Poetics but certain later codifications of generic difference: 'De tragoedia et comoedia', made up of two late fourth-century essays by the grammarians Donatus and Evanthius and widely circulated in editions of the plays of Terence used in Renaissance schools and universities, and a similar treatise by another early grammarian, Diomedes. Conflating their several pronouncements produces a series of rudimentary oppositions between the comic and the tragic. Comedies take their plots from fiction, tragedies from history. Comedy involves men of middling estate; its perils are small-scale, its outcomes peaceful. In tragedy, 'omnia contra', the persons and issues are exalted and they end unhappily. Comedy, beginning in turmoil but ending in harmony, celebrates life; but tragedy's course from prosperity to calamity expresses rejection of life. English Renaissance writers when addressing dramatic genre repeat these schematic oppositions again and again without doing much to advance or refine them. The notion of drama, particularly comedy, as ethical instructor was especially useful to writers trying to defend the English stage against the persistent attacks of moralists (for example Thomas Lodge in his Reply to Gosson and Thomas Heywood in An Apology for Actors), and to Sir Philip Sidney defending imaginative literature in general in An Apology for Poetry.

Sir Phillip Sidney in An Apology for Poetry; or, The Defence of Poetry (ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, 1965, p. 117) advances in support of comedy the definition then ascribed to Cicero by imitating 'the common errors of our life' and inviting reactions of scorn and ridicule, comedy teaches us what not to do. In fact, this works better as a debating point than as a gloss on actual comedies of the 1580s when Sidney was writing, or on those Shakespeare wrote in the following two decades. Indeed, by deploring the recalcitrance of 'naughty play-makers and stage-keepers' even while praising comedy's proper social aim, Sidney himself tacitly recognizes a large gap between theory and practice. Farces and romantic fantasies hardly mirrored everyday life, and the driving impulse of most comedies was not to punish error but to entertain. Nor is there any evidence supporting Sidney's parallel didactic claim for tragedy, that watching the downfall of unjust rulers made kings fear to be tyrants. Other aspects of the grammarians' generic paradigms, however, can in spite of their limitations be more usefully pursued in the actual dramatic practice of those Elizabethan plays that have survived (many were never printed, or no copy now exists), which in turn may fill out those laconic formulas and uncover their implications.

What is implied by the most basic distinction of all, that comedy ends happily and tragedy unhappily? Since all plots involve threats and dangers, the assumption is that while in tragedies these threats are fulfilled, in comedies they may be evaded. Evanthius characterizes the dangers of comedy as small in scale compared to those of tragedy, but Shakespeare's comic protagonists regularly face alienation, abandonment, and death. What makes the difference is not less serious perils but the operation of a kind of 'evitability' principle whereby shifts and stratagems and sheer good luck break the chain of causality that seemed headed for certain catastrophe. Portia finds a hole in Venetian law through which Antonio may escape without paying his pound of flesh (The Merchant of Venice); Dogberry's watchmen accidentally uncover the villainy of Don John and deliver Hero from disgrace and death (Much Ado about Nothing). Reality itself, seemingly fixed, turns out in the comic world to be both mutable and malleable. In As You Like It a chance meeting with a hermit results in the sudden conversion of the tyrant Duke Frederick, who then easily gives back the throne he usurped from his brother; Oberon's magic redirects Demetrius' love from Hermia to Helena so that the lovers of A Midsummer Night's Dream may be tidily paired. In tragedy, on the other hand, the causal chain unwinds inexorably towards destruction, cutting off alternative possibilities of escape or potential new beginnings. In King Lear the army led by Cordelia that seemed to promise deliverance is defeated; and in a final shocking blow even the refounded relationship of father and daughter is cut off by Cordelia's murder. In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony is cornered in Egypt, loses his last battle, and can find himself again only by dying.