‘A tragie-comedie’, writes John Fletcher, ‘is not so called in respect of mirth and killing but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie.’ These remarks have haunted critical writing on seventeenth-century tragicomedy. The Faithful Shepherdess apparently flopped in its first production by the Children of the Queen's Revels around 1608, but Fletcher went on to write some of the most successful tragicomedies of the century, and tragicomedy concurrently became the preeminent dramatic genre in the Jacobean and Caroline theatres. His comments on the form of The Faithful Shepherdess have therefore been applied to the full range of tragicomic plays produced in the London theatres. Seventeenth-century tragicomedy does not, however, have its origin in The Faithful Shepherdess alone. Fletcher's address ‘To the Reader’ was written in relation to The Faithful Shepherdess, not to tragicomedy as a genre, and in response to a specific situation: the play's theatrical failure.