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In late 16th — early 17th centuries, there existed in England rather disorderly notions of the genres of drama. Neo-Classical theories of a genre would quaintly intermix with actual performances that aimed at a very broad audience of people, many of them generally uneducated or even illiterate. Under these circumstances, theatres — and Shakespeare’s theatre in the first place — had to undertake the labor of educating their spectators about the genres and of shaping their expectations. Nurturing the audience’s theatrical taste suited actors well, as they had a free hand to experiment with genre conventionalities, but still to get feedback from theatre-goers. It is only from rare fragments of theoretic genre discussions incorporated into plays that we can judge these practices. One such fragment is the opening scene of the anonymous play "A Warning for Fair Women" (published in 1599, attributed to T. Heywood), featuring personified Tragedy (Melpomene), Comedy, and Historical Chronicle. They discuss the relationships between the genres, and Tragedy promises the spectators a novelty — a "documentary" play about the murder of a rich Londoner. Considering that the play was staged by "Lord Chamberlain’s Men" (Shakespeare’s company), it presents a peculiar conflict of the dramaturgic concepts: Melpomene chases away Comedy and Historical Chronicle from the stage, the genres Shakespeare made himself famous with as a playwright in the 1590s. Along with the action of the first scene, there is a clear mention of a special link between the performance in the genre of tragedy and the black curtain at the performance. It turns out that English actors of the 1590s used certain signs to indicate the genre of the play that the spectators were about to see. It illustrates the fact that, firstly, the spectators of that time were aware of diverse drama genres. And this knowledge was voiced by actors pursuing very practical ends; secondly, the genres in Shakespearean time were very flexible, being formed "on the fly": if the theatre first had to teach its audience the peculiarities of a certain genre, and then the playwrights could exploit the audience's expectations, either complying with them or not in accordance with their own creative goals.

Драматические жанры на сцене шекспировского театра: формирование зрительских ожиданий