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This thesis explores the intersection between the study of Shakespearean drama and the theory and practice of early modern dramatic genres. It reassesses the significance of tragedy and the idea of the tragic within three separate yet related generic frames: tragedy, history, and tragicomedy. Behind this research lies the fundamental question of how newly emerging dramatic genres allow Shakespeare to explore tragedy within different aesthetic and dramatic contexts, and of how they allow his writing to move beyond tragedy. The thesis begins by looking at Shakespeare’s deployment of the complex trope of “nothing”. “Nothing” as a rhetorical trope and metaphysical idea appears across many of the tragedies, often becoming a focal point for the dramatic representation of scepticism, loss and nihilism. The trope is often associated with the space of the theatre, and sometimes with the dramaturgy of tragedy itself. However, it is also deployed within the histories and tragicomedies at certain moments which might equally be called tragic. “Nothing” therefore provides a starting-point for thinking about how the genres of history and tragicomedy engage with tragedy. Part I focuses on tragedy, including extended readings of Timon of Athens and King Lear. It explores Shakespearean drama as a response to the pressures of the early modern cultural preoccupation with, and anxiety about, scepticism. Stanley Cavell and other critics of early modern dramatic scepticism have tended to locate this engagement with scepticism within tragedy. However, this section shows that the same sceptical problematic is addressed across Shakespearean dramatic genres, with very different results. It then explores why scepticism should display a particular affinity for tragedy as a dramatic genre. Part II focuses on history, with particular reference to Richard II and Henry V. The trope of “nothing” is used as a starting-point to explore the intersection between Shakespearean history and tragedy. Engaging with Walter Benjamin’s theory of baroque tragedy as Trauerspiel (mourning-plays) rooted in history, it argues that Trauerspiel provides a useful generic framework against which to consider the mournful aesthetic of Shakespeare’s histories. Part III focuses on early modern tragicomedy and The Winter’s Tale, asking how Shakespeare achieves the transition from tragedy to tragicomedy in his later writing. It explores tragicomedy’s background on the early modern stage in theory and practice, paying particular attention to Guarini’s theory that pastoral tragicomedy frees its hearers from melancholy, and to the legacy of medieval religious drama and its engagement with faith and belief. Returning to the trope of “nothing”, this section shows that The Winter’s Tale addresses the same sceptical problematic as the earlier tragedies. Arguing that scepticism opens up a space for tragedy and nihilism in the first half of The Winter’s Tale, it demonstrates that Shakespeare finds in the genre of tragicomedy an aesthetic and dramatic form which allows him to move through, and beyond, the claims of tragedy.

Peacock, Down is about family cruelty and shame. It is about the patterns we inherit, and how we perpetuate or break free of them. It is also a comic novel. Set smack in the middle of their darkest days, Peacock, Down tracks the Whitridge family amid disintegration and denial, sticking its finger in that comically painful inflection point in every family trajectory: when the children become adults and the adults become children.

En este trabajo se estudian las leyendas y mitos de raigambre helénica incorporados a La Celestina mediante la extensa interpolación realizada en su composición a comienzos del siglo XVI. De este modo, a partir de un análisis del texto de la Tragicomedia, se examinan los principales elementos míticos y legendarios helénicos añadidos en el paso de Comedia a Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea por medio de su ampliación desde XVI hasta XXI actos, junto a otros añadidos y modificaciones. En el análisis se destaca el tópico de la nox longa de Júpiter en La Celestina, ya que representa una propuesta y un análisis novedoso sobre el proceso de alargamiento de los amores y sobre el personaje Sosia, así como sobre la justificación del propio título de Tragicomedia.

This dissertation focuses on the recent popularity of the tragicomedy as a genre for representing queer lives in late-twentieth and twenty-first century America. I argue that the tragicomedy allows for a nuanced portrayal of queer identity because it recognizes the systemic and personal “tragedies” faced by LGBTQ people (discrimination, inadequate legal protection, familial exile, the AIDS epidemic, et cetera), but also acknowledges that even in struggle, in real life and in art, there is humor and comedy. I contend that the contemporary tragicomedy works to depart from the dominant late-nineteenth and twentieth-century trope of queer people as either tragic figures (sick, suicidal, self-loathing) or comedic relief characters by showing complex characters that experience both tragedy and comedy and are themselves both serious and humorous. Building off Verna A. Foster’s 2004 book The Name and Nature of Tragicomedy, I argue that contemporary examples of the tragicomedy share generic characteristics with tragicomedies from previous eras (most notably the Renaissance and modern period), but have also evolved in important ways to work for queer authors. The contemporary tragicomedy, as used by queer authors, mixes comedy and tragedy throughout the text but ultimately ends in “comedy” (meaning the characters survive the tragedies in the text and are optimistic for the future). Through a close reading of Armistead Maupin’s series Tales of the City (1978-2014), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), and Jill Soloway’s television show Transparent, I demonstrate how these contemporary writers disrupt the tragic/comic binary in order to create a text that is closer to lived experience.

The light-hearted pieces with a happy ending produced during the Spanish Golden Age were no longer in accordance to the comedy based on turpitudo et deformitas — which was confined to «entremess». Instead, they offered a new kind of complex humour, which no longer rejected creating empathy with the characters. Despite the claims of some well-known criticism, the tragic and comic universes are radically separated in Calderón. Even though the comic pieces incorporate, in a sort of emulsion, features belonging to the tragic sphere, these are approached from a light-hearted, optimistic and hopeful perspective. This thesis is supported by the analysis of Los empeños de un acaso.