SOURCE: "Affairs of State and French Tragicomedy in the Seventeenth Century," in Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre and Politics, edited by Nancy Klein Maguire, AMS Press, 1987, pp. 177–95.

In the following excerpt, Gethner contends that a political dimension is typically present in seventeenth-century French tragicomedies and is often closely related to other elements of the plot.

The difficulty of providing a comprehensive definition of tragicomedy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has long been recognized. The corpus is so amazingly diverse that one is entitled to wonder whether the authors themselves maintained a consistent view of the genre and whether the audiences, as a new tragicomedy was announced, could accurately predict what they were about to see. Further complicating the process of definition is the fact that the genre underwent evolution in several key respects over the course of its slightly more than one hundred years of existence in...