Laurence Giavarini's edition and accompanying French translation of Guarini's Compendio della poesia tragicomica will be welcomed by students of early modern poetics and dramatic theory. The last modern edition of the Compendio was published in 1914 in the Scrittori d'Italia series; this is the first French translation. In English, aside from excerpts in anthologies of criticism, the only available translation of the treatise (with several omissions) remains Allan Gilbert's in his Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden, which originally appeared in 1940.

The Compendio was first published in 1601, but some of the arguments it set forth in defense of tragicomedy and of the author's Pastor fido had already appeared in Il Verrato (1588) and Il Verato [sic] Secondo (1593), the two treatises Guarini composed under fictive authorship in response to the objections levelled at the mixed genre and the play in 1586, and then in 1590 by the Paduan professor of moral philosophy Giason Denores. Guarini's Pastor fido, which provoked Denores's censure, was composed between 1580 and 1586, and only first published in 1590. It enjoyed great success and wide circulation as a printed text (nineteen editions before 1602). Nonetheless, attacks against Guarini's tragicomedy did not cease. Faustino Summo's resumption of the quarrel about the play, eventually published in his Discorsi poetici (1600), prompted Guarini to write the Compendio, although he deliberately made his final defense less polemical than the earlier Verati. It was republished in the authorized 1602 edition of the Pastor fido, along with a lengthy set of annotations in which the author also addressed various specific criticisms of his play.

In her introduction Laurence Giavarini provides a detailed account of the long quarrel regarding tragicomedy and the Pastor fido, and of the genesis of the Compendio. She notes that the final treatise has received less attention than the earlier Verati, in part because it is deliberately less polemical than the two prior counterattacks (incidentally, in his survey of the quarrel about tragicomedy Bernard Weinberg does not examine the Compendio since his History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance stops at 1600). She also observes that, when it accompanied the 1602 edition of the Pastor fido, the Compendio was not just a final act of self-legitimation, but was also meant to shape the future reception of the play and contribute to its canonization.

Self-justifying motives had characterized most of the generic codification produced by working writers in the sixteenth century, most notably in G. B. Giraldi's Discorso on comedies and tragedies and the one on the romanzo (both published in 1554), and in Tasso's two sets of Discorsi on the heroic poem. What is striking about the Compendio, in comparison, is the overtness of Guarini's self-justification, made all the more evident by the author's desire to have it accompany the Pastor fido (Giraldi's and Tasso's Discorsi were published quite separately from their poetic compositions).

Guarini is particularly keen to demonstrate that tragicomedy can be “housed” in Aristotle's poetic system even though it is not a genre that existed in ancient times. As Giavarini points out, he can do so because he perceives Aristotle's Poetics as a text that is less prescriptive than descriptive, and thus capacious and open to adaptation. Quite typical is his extensive demonstration of the resemblance between tragicomedy and what Aristotle describes as a tragedy of double structure with a happy ending (Poetics 53 a30–39). Still, Guarini asserts that there are basic generic differences between tragicomedy and tragedy, as well as comedy. One of the most interesting sections of the Compendio is devoted to the different “architectonic” ends of the three genres, which includes a discussion of “catharsis” (223–39) and its moderating effects that remains very convincing. Guarini understands dramatic purgation to be a tempering of the passions (affetti) and tragicomedy's specific end is to “purge the spirits of the ill effect of melancholy” (238) through pleasing imitation. Giavarini offers some useful introductory remarks on Guarini's conception of catharsis, but she should have developed her discussion of its ethico-medical function, especially since, in the Compendio, Guarini omits his earlier insistence on poetry's hedonistic function and seems to dwell more on the ethical benefits of drama's affective power.

For all his effort to accommodate tragicomedy in Aristotle's poetic system, and to show that it conforms to traditional artistic principles, Guarini is a historicist: he sees poetic genres as evolving and growing as they adapt to changing mores, and changing tastes over time. This historicist bias crops up repeatedly in the Compendio, in particular when he shows how much more suitable tragicomedy is to modern times in that it doesn't produce in its auditors the heavy sadness of tragedy or the dissolute laughter of comedy. Indeed, his overall aim is to affirm that, for his culture and time, tragicomedy has to be deemed the very best of dramatic genres. No wonder he attached the Compendio to the definitive 1602 edition of his play.