SOURCE: Loewenstein, Joseph. “Guarini and the Presence of Genre.” In Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics, edited by Nancy Klein Maguire, pp. 33-55. New York: AMS Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Loewenstein discusses the relationship of the tragicomedic genre to the pastoral mode as perceived in Guarini's Il pastor fido.

Only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name.

Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations¹

The famous title page of Jonson's Works (1616), a representation of Tragicomoedia, is both inappropriate and telling.

It is telling for it raises central issues for a critical study of both Renaissance tragicomedy, in particular, and of Renaissance ideas of genre, in general. The arch on which the figure of Tragicomedy stands analyzes her nature: she is flanked by a satyr and a shepherd, which indicates the persistent if apparently peculiar alliance between this new genre and the pastoral...