Thinking about genre: seldom pure and never simple

I've been chewing over some thoughts on genre since reading this post by hawkwing_lb yesterday, although they are riffing off rather than answering the question about 'core genre'.

What I keep coming up with is the issue of what makes a work stand out, rather than just be a bogstandard example of the kind of thing that it is (and I am including litfic here as a genre, having read a significant amount of really forgettable litfic in my day).

One of the things has to be, what does it bring to the basic ingredients? Two articles in today's Guardian made me consider the genre of revenge tragedy, which was big around the turn of the C16th and C17th, some examples of which are still staged today. In fact one of these articles is about a current flurry of productions of plays by Webster, Middleton, Ford. The other is an interview with Stephen Moffat in which he claims that 'In Shakespeare's day, you probably expected to see a play once or twice in your life'.

To which I reflected, from the perspective of a rather Mr Brooke feeling that at one time I read a good deal about the Jacobean theatre, that if you were in London at the time and had no moral objections to the theatre and the time and relatively small amount of money to spare, you could actually go to quite a lot of plays. And, okay, this did not apply in other parts of the UK and there is a scene in How Green Was My Valley in which a touring company come to the Valleys some time in the rather fuzzy historical epoch Llewellyn depicts (if you ever read the sequels the whole thing appears to be an entire parallel universe in which time runs differently, or at least the narrator is unnaturally longlived) and it's a huge cultural shock.

But if you went to the theatre in early C17th London you would be seeing a lot of revenge tragedies, most of which have fallen off the radar and extremely seldom get produced (in my day I have scored some productions of really obscure Jacobean plays, and even then they tend to be by writers at least known for some other work).

What did the playwrights of the works that have survived bring to the basic mix?

A further question that arises for me, is whether these were as popular in their day as some of the forgotten examples. ('OMG, Shakespeare's Hamlet! why doesn't he get on with the butchery already? and Webster? The Duchess of Malfi? dullsville, a complete yawn.')

Similarly with e.g. detective novels of the so-called 'Golden Age'. Which, considering, made me wonder if aficionados of the genre in the 1930s were massively put out by Gaudy Night, which contravenes a significant number of conventions (is it a spoiler to mention, no murder?)

Another thought was the extent to which examples of any genre are unlikely to exist in an entirely pure form - even some of the drier puzzle mysteries of the interwar era tend to include a romance somewhere in the plot, not to mention the amount of sff which incorporates elements of mystery, noir thriller, romance, comedy of manners, etc etc etc.

It's not as though works that deploy entire standard and conventional tropes of the kind of genre they're written within can't be good, but I'm not persuaded that it is simply those tropes that matter, and there has to be something else in the mix, whether it's characterisation, genuinely witty badinage between characters, or well-built interesting world. (There may even somewhere be - a black swan analogue - 'actually readable and interesting sensitive male coming of age novel'.)