Before genre: tragedy in patches in the early English playhouses
Keywords: early modern drama
tragedy
genre
theatre history

This thesis explores early forms of tragedy in the professional English playhouses. Tragedy was predominantly a non-dramatic genre in England and in English for most of the sixteenth century. By the 1590s, popular dramatic tragedy was widespread. This thesis is interested in the period of tragedy’s transition to the stage. It takes as its premise the notion that tragedy was a new and exciting theatrical phenomenon, rather than an established and self-evident dramatic genre, in the context of the 1580s and 1590s playhouses. Tragedy’s routes to the stage were various: classical tragic drama, de casibus poems, and prose and verse tragical tales all influenced the forms of tragedy that emerged in the popular theatres. As recent criticism has demonstrated, dramatic genres in the early period of professional English drama were more mutable and indeterminate than either twentieth-century scholarship or the later output of the playhouses themselves registers. This thesis considers the variety and fluidity of early English dramatic tragedy against this generically flexible backdrop.
To consider tragedy in the early years of professional English drama as something other than a fully-fledged dramatic genre, this thesis takes up the concept of the “play patch”. Recent theatre history has demonstrated that early modern plays were textual patchworks, written in and preserved as pieces: whole acts and scenes of plays could be written out of order and by different playwrights, and prologues, epilogues and songs often existed only on separate sheets of paper, instead of being copied into consolidated scripts. While the play-patch has been theorised as a primarily material phenomenon in early modern scholarship, this thesis contends that plays of the period were patchworks conceptually and imaginatively as well. Specifically, it argues that tragedy emerged onto the professional English stage in and as patches. It demonstrates that “tragedy”, in early modern theatrical parlance, could refer to a part of a play only, as well as to a play in its entirety, and it shows that this notion of tragedy as a piece or part was also manifested structurally in plays themselves.
By focusing its analysis on four different types of play patch, this thesis highlights the simultaneous prominence and formlessness of tragedy in the 1580s and early 1590s playhouses. Examining episodic de casibus-style tragedies, tragic inset plays, and metadramatic framing texts, it shows the extent to which plays of the period advertised and foregrounded their experiments in bringing tragedy to the English stage. At the same time, it demonstrates that these were, precisely, experiments. Episodic and inset tragedies which flaunt their tragic identities also reveal the uncertainty of the relationship between “tragedy” and “play”, while the interventions of that indispensable comic play patch – the clown – in tragic drama show that tragedy’s position in English theatrical culture was far from established in the period.
In scholarship, and especially early modern scholarship, tragedy’s status as dramatic genre is often approached as a transhistorical given. This thesis offers an understanding of tragedy in the early English playhouses which unlearns this basic assumption.