AS WAS SO often the case with debates over new literary works in sixteenth-century Italy, the dispute over Battista Guarini's Il pastor fido (1581) engaged its participants in reflection on both the details of the text, and broader literary theory. Criticism of the two most widely debated works of narrative poetry of the period, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata, for instance, had provoked discussion of broader questions over the validity of their respective genres, their moral utility, the role of pleasure in the reader's experience, and the appropriateness of their linguistic style. At stake in this criticism, and always made explicit, were theoretical issues of considerable complexity, and about which agreement was often hard to reach: no easy distinction can be drawn between theoretical reflection and literary criticism as applied to individual texts in the Cinquecento (indeed, it is unlikely that such a distinction can be drawn in any context). Yet at the same time as literary theory was being transformed by the the late fifteenth-century rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics, and its transmission, which gathered pace around the middle of the Cinquecento, literary practice was challenging the categories and precepts which that text seemed to offer. It was not only new works which presented problems. Dante's Commedia already constituted such a challenge. Its genre in particular was problematic to Renaissance readers. Dante's decision to describe his work as a ‘comedy’ seemed to sit awkwardly with accepted understandings of the term: it mixed linguistic styles, where comedy was supposed to be in a low style; it was not performed; it dealt with the actions of characters from a wide range of social backgrounds.