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This chapter is devoted to the Spanish and French plays that adapted the story of Cardenio for the stage and coped with the same difficulties faced by Fletcher and Shakespeare (if they are the authors of the play performed at the English Court in 1613): i.e., how to transform the narrative structure of the fortunes and misfortunes of the four Cervantes lovers into a dramatic plot, and to decide if Don Quixote and Sancho must or must not be present in a tragicomedy devoted to Cardenio, Luscinda, Fernando, and Dorotea. The chapter analyses Guillén de Castro and Pichou’s answers to these challenges focussing on specific scenes, especially the embarrassing scene of the marriage between Luscinda and Fernando, both already engaged and married elsewhere by an exchange of vows.

This chapter provides an introduction to Pericles and the Shakespeare canon. Pericles, it is widely agreed, is the first of Shakespeare's ‘last plays’, that highly distinctive group of romances and tragicomedies. However, it was omitted from the First Folio collection of his plays assembled by his friends and fellow actors after his death and published in 1623. The very gateway to the final period of Shakespeare's playwrighting career is thus obstructed by thorny problems of text and authorship. Investigation of the authorship of Pericles can scarcely be disentangled from broader issues concerning the Shakespeare canon as a whole and the methods by which it is most convincingly to be defined. T.S. Eliot held that ‘the full meaning of any one’ of Shakespeare's plays ‘is not in itself alone, but in that play in the order in which it was written, in its relation to all of Shakespeare's other plays’.

This chapter discusses Greene's two long pastoral fictions, Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon. These texts bear an intriguing relationship to Sidney's Old Arcadia (c.1580), then only circulating in manuscript, and the chapter includes a discussion of the likely relationship of the texts. But Greene had many other literary influences, including William Warner and Lyly's drama. While continuing to hone his skills in tragicomedy, Greene increasingly used his sources and influences to satirical effect. In Pandosto Greene created a sensational incest narrative, which he effectively rewrote in Menaphon as comedy. The pastoral landscape Greene depicted in the latter text is full of literary comparisons, including the tale of Troy, and his personae seem intensely aware of the need to discover their literary identity.

This chapter attempts to link the tale of Cupid and Psyche with drama. It shows that Apuleius includes both comic and tragic elements in the same plot, and by doing so directs his readers’ sympathies in different directions. The alignment of Psyche with tragic heroines allows the reader to feel her sufferings with her, but at the end the marriage and the birth of her child is the just reward of a sympathetic character in comedy. Venus becomes less terrifying once she drops the attitude of the vengeful deity in order to scold like a common matron and aligns herself with comic stereotypes. Cupid’s passivity is more easily understood as that of the comic adulescens, and the sisters of Psyche, too, gain from theatrical characterization.

The introduction draws on theories of genre and existing work in early modern law and literature to define the attributes and explain the significance of theaters of pardoning. Demonstrating the surprisingly significant number of seventeenth-century English plays that end with pardons, the introduction identifies these forms of tragicomedy as theaters of pardoning. It also emphasizes how the historical interrelations among the institutions and actors of law, drama, and politics in seventeenth-century England brought conceptions of pardoning from theater to law court to palace and back.

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure was staged before King James I in 1604 and could have provided a model of mercy for his response to the infamous Gunpowder Plot—Guy Fawkes’s attempt along with other Catholics to demolish the Houses of Parliament. Instead, James’s response to the plot adopted another kind of tragicomic form, that associated with John of Patmos’s Revelation. Before the age of twenty, James had penned a Paraphrase upon the Reuelation and his contemporaries often interpreted the Book of Revelation as a kind of tragicomedy. Yet this variety of tragicomedy did not end happily for everyone—only for the elect, including James himself.

Greek tragedy and comedy re-emerge in late sixteenth-century Crete, now based on Renaissance neo-classical prescriptions. Besides ‘pure’ examples of the genres we also find a tragedia di lieto fine (the biblical drama Abraham’s Sacrifice) and a pastoral idyll with a tragic outcome (The Shepherdess), while Kornaros’ verse romance Erotokritos plays with the possibility of a tragic ending before settling for the outcome proper to romance. This intermingling of the tragic and the comic – of tears and laughter – is common in Cretan Renaissance literature, and most fully realised in the new hybrid genre of tragicommedia pastorale, which seems to have been popular in Crete around 1600. Taking Panoria by Georgios Chortatsis as its main textual focus, this chapter explores the interaction of tears and laughter both at a textual level and in plot structure. While the theoretical bases of tragicomedy, as propounded by Guarini, clearly underpin works like Panoria, in the case of works belonging to other genres other factors are involved: Petrarchising tropes, which are common in Cretan literature, and the antithetical structures characteristic of the folk tradition. Panoria, set on Mount Ida, is thoroughly Cretan and at the same time thoroughly imbued with late-Renaissance poetics.

This chapter offers a reading of Khaled Hosseini's 2007 novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, an account of the complicated political and diplomatic history of Afghanistan. The novel chronicles the tumultuous lives and relationship of two Afghan women, Mariam and Laila, and highlights the violence experienced by women like them in the country. Hosseini brilliantly interweaves tragicomedy with the tragic plot of Mariam's hard life and hard death.

Chapter 4 argues that techniques of illustrating early modern plays were designed to correspond to the effects those same plays were said to have had in performance. It studies the careful composition of custom-made woodcuts in a trio of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher quartos: The Maid’s Tragedy (1619), A King and No King (1619), and Philaster (1620). These plays cemented Beaumont and Fletcher’s widely acknowledged reputation for creating a pleasurable sense of not-knowing for playgoers through clever plotting. The title-page images present seemingly contradictory but equally viable forecasts of the plays’ endings and enhance readerly uncertainty through visual paradox. By contrast, the engravings made for the 1711 edition of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Works depicted single, isolated moments. In step with the resurgence of neoclassical principles of dramatic decorum in the late seventeenth century, these engravings attempted to unify readers’ attention where the earlier woodcuts had sought to confuse it to pleasing effect.