ABSTRACT
Until recently Renaissance drama was seen as reaching its height in the era of Shakespeare’s great tragedies and then falling off into increasing decadence until the wars of the mid-century forced the closing of the theatres in 1642. M. C. Bradbrook, for example, espoused this view and located the inauguration of this decadence in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. In their works she saw ‘a taste for the more extraordinary sexual themes (rape, impotence, incest) combined with the blurring of the aesthetic difference between tragedy and comedy and the moral distinction between right and wrong’ (Bradbrook 1935 p.243). To Bradbrook this blurring of boundaries between categories that should have remained discrete is naturally linked to moral decrepitude and lack of value. Bradbrook’s location of decadence in Beaumont and Fletcher points to generic hierarchies that inform her criticism, for Fletcher developed and defined the tragicomic mode and, as Gordon McMullen and Jonathan Hope point out, remained highly influential in the development of this so-called ‘mongrel’ genre during the seventeenth century (McMullen and Hope 1992 p.2). McMullen and Hope’s convincing call for a revaluation of this genre as energetic and innovative rather than decadent indicates a change of direction in recent attitudes towards Renaissance drama, but not all new work in the Renaissance can be regarded as dispelling the implicit hierarchies that informed earlier criticism such as Bradbrook’s.
