Thinking Point
	How does an understanding of the development of theatre genres inform your own reading of Shakespeare’s work?

While the plays overall confirm the generic divisions laid out by the Folio table of contents, it is clear even from my brief review that there was considerable commerce between those subcultures of comedy, history, and tragedy. For one thing, the stories audiences liked, romances in particular, did not necessarily accord neatly with tragic or comic paradigms. For another, viewers liked variety in their theatrical entertainment. The mixture of kings and clowns, hornpipes and funerals, that Sidney deplored in his Apology went back to the medieval drama and would continue long after Sidney's death. Several of the Folio designations are problematic. May we not consider Richard II and Richard III as tragedies, labelled as such in their quarto publications and the latter even in its Folio heading, praised as such by Meres, and certainly akin to the other tragedies in their single-figure, rise-and-fall structure? Do the Roman plays, especially Julius Caesar and Coriolanus, not have as much in common with the histories' preoccupation with struggles for power and issues of state as with the tragedies' more personal emphasis? Source material seems to have determined placement in both these instances, English as opposed to Roman history. Does source material also account for a more notable anomaly, Cymbeline listed among the tragedies? Comedic in structure and concluding in happy reconciliation rather than death, Cymbeline is nevertheless based on the same body of legendary British history that lies behind Fletcher's Tragedy of Bonduca and Shakespeare's own King Lear. Troilus and Cressida, which Heminges and Condell placed with the tragedies but earlier was promoted as a comedy in the printer's advertisement to the 1609 quarto, presents another generic puzzle, compounded for readers of the Folio because the copy was apparently cleared for publication so late in the printing process that the play is placed ambiguously between the histories and tragedies, with a separate set of signatures unconnected to either sequence, and is omitted entirely from the table of contents. Should we see it as a tragedy (so designated in its Folio heading and running titles) because, like Cymbeline, it is based on legendary history? And indeed, unlike Cymbeline, has a heroic war as its framework and ends with the death of a major warrior? Or should we accept the 1609 label of comedy because the play systematically deflates those towering figures and debunks their idealized causes? The question is still with us three centuries later: in the first two generations after World War II, editions of Shakespeare's complete works that organize the plays generically usually place Troilus with the tragedies, but recently it appears more often among the comedies.

Both Troilus and Cymbeline are best seen as generic experiments, in the context of changes in theatrical fashion as the seventeenth century began. The history play in its later manifestations (Edward IV, Jane Shore) was veering into romance and folk comedy. In comedy, the new prominence of the boys' companies fostered a taste for modes that made use of the child actors' wit and quickness but made fewer demands on them in the way of emotional depth: the satiric comedy in which Jonson and Marston led the way and the city comedy exemplified by Middleton--its scene bourgeois, competitive, money-driven London, its staple action trickery. Shakespeare did not pursue the citizen comedy line--The Merry Wives of Windsor has an English setting and middle-class characters who perpetrate various deceptions but money is hardly central and the play is too genially romantic to foreshadow the harsher tone of Middleton and the 'Ho' plays. Troilus, however, in its pervasive spirit of detached parody, is somewhat akin to the 'comical satires' written for the boy actors.

More recent critics, whether viewing Troilus as ironic tragedy or as satiric comedy, have largely followed the lead of the late nineteenth-century critic F. S. Boas (in his book Shakspere and his Predecessors, 1896, ch. 13) in grouping it with two other Shakespeare plays of the early 1600s, Measure for Measure and All's Well That Ends Well. These 'problem plays' (Boas's label gestured at social-issue drama in the manner of Ibsen while reformulating the problems in ethical terms) share a grittiness not apparent in Shakespeare's earlier comedy, addressing deep-rooted perversions in both individuals and societies resistant to the magico-metamorphic strategies that heretofore had produced satisfying comic conclusions. The harsh imperatives of class division and rampant sexual appetite invoked by these experimental plays push uneasily against the fairy-tale devices that move their plots forward and supposedly resolve them.

Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University Libraries

William Shakespeare [William D'Avenant], The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island. A Comedy, London: Printed by J. M. for Henry Herringman, 1670, Bequest of Mollie Harris Samuels.

As for Cymbeline, though this crowded play incorporates some tragic features, it has deeper affinities with two other late plays, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, and with another not included in the First Folio but usually ascribed at least in part to Shakespeare, Pericles. The plays in this mode were responding in some degree to recent developments on the theatre scene, the popularity of masques at court and the availability of a new indoor acting space at Blackfriars, more intimate than the Globe. Often designated as romances--another nineteenth-century category, this one devised by Edward Dowden in his book Shakespere: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art (1899, pp. x-xi)--they may be thought of either as a subset of comedy in that they achieve a final harmony, or as merger of tragedy and comedy in that this reconciliatory phase comes only after prolonged evil and suffering. If they are part of the same generic adventure that produced Measure for Measure and All's Well that Ends Well, Shakespeare now finds a way of holding in solution the diversity of tone and action whose clash made those earlier Jacobean comedies problematic, returning to the romantic narratives he had drawn on in some earlier comedies but with additional emphasis on the peculiar features of the romance mode. His plots in these late plays are episodic in structure and vastly extended in time and space. The larger view that results generates a perception of time different from that in earlier comedy as well as that in the histories and the tragedies: whether or not actually personified as in The Winter's Tale, time is shown as shaped and patterned, its past disorder made meaningful by present retributions or fulfilments. This evolving larger vision creates a certain distance between audience and stage action which is increased by the conscious fictionality of that action, its improbabilities and miraculous turns of event, including manifestations of the divine, and by the recurrent narrator figures like Gower in Pericles and Time in The Winter's Tale who 'tell' the drama at key points. In terms of Marianne Moore's celebrated definition of poetry (Selected Poems, 1935), where she calls poets to present 'imaginary gardens with real toads in them', Shakespeare in the romances accentuates the imaginary quality of his gardens in order to contain very real toads. It is in that realness, that grounding of extreme emotions and actions in a comprehensible internal psychology, that Shakespeare's last plays diverge most markedly from the contemporary tragicomedies of Beaumont and Fletcher which they resemble in surface characteristics.

Generic traditions in Shakespeare's time, often blending and always evolving, nevertheless served as guides: to playwrights in developing their material, to audiences and readers in understanding the plays they produced. In addition to the internal genre indicators discussed in this chapter, spectators at the theatres were directed in their reactions by the look of the stage itself, hung with black for a tragedy and perhaps with some other colour for non-tragic drama (for an example see the opening line of I Henry VI and A Warning for Fair Women, Induction, A3). In Shakespeare's hands, genre conventions provided shape rather than limitation, in musical terms a kind of ground on which--and sometimes against which--he played the individual descant of each play.