Schede sulla questione tragicomica dal Castelvetro al Pallavicino

The central text for any argument on the question of late–sixteenth– and early–seventeenth–century tragicomedy in Italy is without a doubt Guarini’s «Il Pastor Fido», a work that both occasioned one of the two most famous debates of the late sixteenth century (the other, of course, was that over Tasso’s poem), and also had the effect of coagulating tensions, reflections and experimentation with the aim of bridging the gap between the “regular” theatrical genres inherited by the Classical and Classicistic Tradition, and staging requirements of the contemporary age.
But, however central the controversy around «Il Pastor Fido» might have been, it did not exhaust the question of tragicomedy, and it continued on a terrain that was already sensitive to the question. It also extended to circles not directly involved in it, as we can see from the reactions ranging from the “neutral” recognition of this «genus mixtum», made by Castelvetro with his customary rationalism, to Viperano’s limiting (though not wholly non–problematic) reasoning on it; from the defensive use Orazio Ariosto made of it, to the cautiously welcoming, or wholly positive solutions advanced, significantly, by some of the major exponents of the Society of Jesus, such as Fathers Delrio, Galluzzi, Donati and Pallavicino.
The two types of tragicomedy that were defined corresponded respectively to the blend of the “high” pastoral line in the style of Tasso and Guarini, and the all–embracing performativity of the «Gran Theatro del Mondo», and both were to produce results in the creation of new theatrical forms in Europe.
In the mid–eighteenth century Quadrio distinguished these two typologies and grouped them within a single, elastic framework that was not divided into rigid categories (as is only right for organisms that are complex by nature), consisting of the tragicomic macro–genre. In this, he demonstrated above all a clear, and now settled, awareness of their existence and characteristics: the concrete, productive result of an experimental season whose “excesses” were now a thing of the past, partly as a natural effect of the change in the historical–cultural climate, but whose ingenious achievements were still very much part of the present.