READING TRAGICOMEDY

Tragicomic genres from the 1650s can be seen as reworking Caroline models, and such generic familiarity has led critics to understand them as consisting dominantly of royalist plays by royalists. Tragicomedy was, indeed, like tragedy, invoked by contemporaries as a pattern for events: texts using the title or genre of tragicomedy play on that sense and work to reproduce feelings about it in their audience. Yet the tragicomedies of the 1650s present not solely what in Restoration tragicomedy Nancy Klein Maguire describes as an ‘analysis of the psychic forces which impelled the mid-century generation of Royalists’, though that is part of what they do. Nor, taken as a short period, do they demonstrate the ‘generic evolution’ Laura Brown discusses. Rather, the form in the 1650s offered writers a complex discursive space for debate within inevitably compromised royalisms against the unresolved context of the Commonwealth and Protectorate.

In the 1650s tragicomedy (loosely defined) implied the text's use of a shape of crisis followed by a restoration, combined with self-conscious applicability to contemporary events leading to an interpretation of history through literary structures and vice versa. As a genre, tragicomedy invites mixed responses from the spectator or reader. However, to see such texts as solely symptomatic of a ‘royalist’ state of mind would naturalise the form to a problematic degree; it is as sophisticated and critical as the author and audience, certainly as complex as other dramatic genres from the 1650s.