ABSTRACT
The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoralcomical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the liberty, these are the only men. (Hamlet 2.2.392-8)1
When Polonius, as Louise George Clubb has argued in this volume and elsewhere,2 here reflects Shakespeare’s awareness of the contrast between scripted five-act plays (the law of writ) and improvised performances (the liberty), his style confirms his message. On the one hand, he knows how humanist literary production worked. Ancient drama, and primarily the Latin plays of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca as well as a body of neo-Aristotelian theory, provided to early-modern European dramatists both theoretical rules of ‘writ’ and a genre system that was fundamentally binary but could also provide, at least to theoretically aware dramatists like Giraldi Cinthio and Ben Jonson, hints of a hybrid genre (and thus a tripartite genre system) in the ancient satyr play.3 Rules of writ such as the unities (‘scene individable’) could be honoured in the observance (The Comedy of Errors) or in the breach, as Shakespeare usually did. Genres could remain relatively pure, as in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men not long before Hamlet. Or they could be hybridized, as in the tragical-pastoral-comical Winter’s Tale, or, in some fashion, as in most of Shakespeare’s plays. As theorist, Polonius knows the ‘writ’, which could both be understood in a narrow sense (e.g., the unities) and a wider sense: the
University Press, 1989). 3 Giraldi loosely based his satyr play Egle on the ancient satyr play, particularly the
only extant example of Euripides The Cyclops. See Carla Molinari (ed.), Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio, Egle, Lettera sovra il comporre le satire atte alla scena, favola pastorale (Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1985). In the frontispiece to his 1616 Works, Jonson places an allegorical figure representing ‘Tragicomoedia’ along with figures for tragedy and comedy.
humanist literary tradition that could choose to follow or to jettison rules such as the unities, justifying either path by ‘Aristotelian’ principles.4
