WHEN The Renegado was first published in 1630, it was advertised on its title page as ‘A Tragicomædie’. Since the play was evidently printed under Massinger's close supervision, and since the dramatist's formative professional years had been spent as the collaborator and protegé of the pioneer of English tragicomedy, John Fletcher, the descriptor must have been carefully chosen. Taking his cue from the theory and practice of the genre's Italian progenitor, Giambattista Guarini, Fletcher had done more than anyone in the English theatre to establish the status of tragicomedy as a legitimate ‘third kind’, distinguished from the ‘mongrel’ gallimaufries denounced by neo-classicists like Sir Philip Sidney. In his well-known epistle ‘To the Reader’ of The Faithful Shepherdess, Fletcher had briefly paraphrased Guarini's defence of the new genre in The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, giving the Italian's elaborate neo-Aristotelian arguments a markedly pragmatic twist. Where Guarini had devoted a good deal of his treatise to the ‘architectonic end’ of tragicomedy, adapting Aristotle's idea of tragic catharsis to fit a genre that aimed, like comedy, ‘to purge the mind from the evil affection of melancholy’, Fletcher concentrated almost exclusively on what Guarini called its ‘instrumental end’, underlining the way in which tragicomedy absorbed elements of tragic plotting and characterisation to produce an authentically mixed form: insisting that ‘a God is as lawful in this as in a tragedie, and mean people as in a comedie’.