ABSTRACT
Medieval and Renaissance tragicomedy characteristically combines ''the danger but not the death" of tragedy and the happy ending of comedy in such a way that tragic and comic effects moderate one another and the audience remains simultaneously aware of both tragic and comic possibilities. However, as Guarini's defmition ofthe genre makes clear, the tragic is subordinated to the comic. The creation of suspense ("its [tragedy's] danger but not its death"), according to Guarini, is modified by an assurance that the play is developing towards a fortunate conclusion ("above all the comic order"). Guarinian tragicomedy allows the audience to participate sympathetically in the characters' sufferings but avoids "disturbing" our feelings by inviting us to anticipate the artifice by which the "feigned difficulty" will be resolved. The audience is invited to view the events of tragicomedy from the perspective of both the characters and the dramatist. 1
Though Guarini's theory draws on neoclassical formulations of tragedy and comedy and was designed to defend the new drama of the sixteenth century, his own II Pastor Fido in particular, the tragicomic dramaturgy available to him, and to the English Renaissance dramatists with whom this and the following two chapters will be chiefly concerned, has its origins in the earliest forms of Christian drama. The Quem Quaeritis itself dramatizes the quintessential tragicomic moment of recognition and reversal that underlies all of medieval religious drama: Christ has risen from the tomb, sorrow is transformed into joy. The pattern of fall and redemption, death and resurrection determines the structure of the medieval mystery (or Corpus Christi) plays and of the saints' plays and moralities as well.2 The same pattern persists in Renaissance drama, too, despite its secular content. The pattern is most distinguishable in tragicomedy, which continues to a greater extent than either tragedy or comedy the medieval metaphysic of good and evil and ofthe individual's place in the universe.
