I

Genre is both one of the oldest and the most slippery of literary historical concepts: the names of kinds are at once self-evident, even self-defining, at the same time that their specific content is always shifting as new works appear and as old works move from one category to another. Polonius’ description of the players’ repertory and qualifications trades on both of these characteristics in his invocation of historical genres and a series of increasingly large hybrids. Even his use of Seneca and Plautus points to a theory of genre as defined by major practitioners. In the contemporary book shop, library, or theatre, genre presents itself as given, a set of categories that have clear if, paradoxically, not always well-defined boundaries demar-cating real, substantial distinctions between kinds of books. It is a critical commonplace that early modern drama is free with generic mixing and innovation, while at the same time critics deploy traditional terms to mark kind off from kind. This book is concerned with developing an historical account of generic mixing and innovation that does not proceed from category to expression, but places what genres do before what they are.

Noting that genre is one of the oldest fields of inquiry in literary studies is hardly an astonishing claim; indeed, it is almost obligatory in any work that deals with questions of genre. In fact, if there exists a genre of “genre criticism,” such statements are a central marker of participation in it. We can look to Aristotle's Poetics as one of the originary texts in a long series of arguments about form. Writers from Horace through the Renaissance and beyond have taken up the question of how to understand the “kinds” of literature from positions ranging from the rigidly prescriptive to the merely descriptive to the wholly dismissive. It could be asked, given this long history, what the purpose of another investigation of generic change might be. The bulk of my answer to that question lies in the chapters that follow but this introduction offers some initial justifications for this project.