297 A Hermaphrodite? Lope de Vega and the Controversy of Tragicomedy SOFIE KLUGE I n his Tablas poéticas (1617), Francisco de Cascales notoriously called the contemporary Spanish plays hermafroditos and monstruous de la poesía, indicating that they were neither tragedies nor comedies in the Aristotelian sense, but a mixture of both dramatic genres. Since antiq- uity, traditional dramatic theory had treated the tragic and the comic separately, largely on thematic grounds (if a play showed persons of high rank, it was a tragedy; if it showed persons of low rank or common people, it was a comedy; if it involved death and suffering, it was a tragedy; if it didn’t, it was a comedy). With the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics in the fifteenth century, this view found new, irrefutable evidence. Yet a practice of mixing the genres was simultaneously emerging in Spain, witnessing its full bloom with the dramatic production of Lope de Vega, whom Cascales probably had in mind when he coined his famous metaphor. Lope and the dramatists of his “school” (such as Montalbán, Luis Vélez de Guevara, and Tirso de Molina) were admitting persons of high rank (gods and kings) into plays that otherwise had to be considered com- edies, as well as persons of low rank (clowns) into tragedies. Moreover, they mixed the traditional attributes of the characters, creating chimeras, 1 and readily transgressed the so-called Aristotelian doctrine of the dra- matic unities. 2 The incorporation of the post-Aristotelian phenomenon of tragi- comedy into the traditional system of literary genres represented an obvious problem to contemporary critics and theorists. Although some did meet the dramatic innovations of the period with considerable hos- tility, 3 the Spanish critics were, in fact, not as hostile to the monstrous hybrids of the native dramatists as Cascales’ words would have us believe,