Abstract
If playwrights can represent the events of history, they can also be poets of imagination and possibility and explore the what-if of comedy and romance. Genre allows for variety and explorations of actuality and its supplement. What is real and what is not can be examined from different angles, verisimilitude and the fantastic or improbable. Shakespeare has the ability to explore various forms in poetry and drama. His tragic, historical, and comic muses enabled him to sing an array of actions, characters and thoughts. In each work, Shakespeare brings something new: he is an innovator who draws on the stories and sources of others. He uses a measure of dramatic practice and of poetry to create powerful plays across the genres. What works on stage and on the page might sometimes be different, and it may be this tension that explains why some critics and playgoers have found some of Shakespeare’s romances to be problematic. If we take into consideration the dream world of comedy and romance, the wish fulfillment, the dark sides, the rending and mending of nature as well as the complement of, but sometimes tension between, the play as theatre text and the play as reading text, then some of the gaps and apparent imperfections seem less pressing or dire.
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Notes
Samuel Johnson, General Observations on the Plays of Shakespeare (1756), quoted in James Nosworthy, ed., Cymbeline (1955; London: Methuen, 1966), xl. This paper was originally delivered as the University of Calgary Exchange Lecture in 1985, and thanks to my hosts there. My thanks to the editor for permission to reprint a revised version of “Alienation, Double Signs with a Difference: Conscious Knots in Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale,” CIEFL Bulletin (New Series) 1 (1989): 58–78. Since this paper and article in their earlier forms, other relevant work has appeared. See, for instance, Maurice Hunt, Shakespeare’s Romance of the Word (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1990); Richard Hillman, Intertextuality and Romance in Renaissance Drama: The Staging of Nostalgia (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); Marco Mincoff, Things Supernatural and Causeless: Shakespearean Romance. (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992); T. G. Bishop, Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); Walter S. H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Ralegh to Milton (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), esp. 18–23; Joan Pong Linton, The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Thomas Rist, Shakespeare’s Romances and the Politics of Counter-Reformation (Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1999); Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2000); Michael D. Friedman, “The world must be peopled”: Shakespeare’s Comedies of Forgiveness (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002); Lori H. Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Alex Davis, Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Brewer, 2003); Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Christopher J. Cobb, The Staging of Romance in Later Shakespeare: Text and Theatrical Technique (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007)
Benedict S. Robinson, Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton (New York and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Edwin Wilson, ed., Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s Writings or Plays and Production of Shakespeare (New York: E. P Dutton, 1961), 54, 56. Subsequent references to this volume will be indicated under “Shaw.”
Ibid., 67. See John Sturrock, ed., Structuralism and Since: From Levi Strauss to Derrida (Oxford University Press, 1979), 71
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Frag-ments, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), passim; Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 137.
Judiana Lawrence, “Natural Bonds and Artistic Coherence in the Ending of Cymbeline,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 440–60.
J. H. P. Pafford, ed., The Winter’s Tale (London: Methuen, 1963), xxxviii. All citations and quotations from Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale will be from the Arden editions cited above. References to other Shakespearean plays will be from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (1969; New York: Viking, 1977).
See Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Macmillan, 1982), 1, 12–15.
Nevill Coghill, “Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter’s Tale,” Shakespeare Survey 11 (1958), 31; S. L. Bethell, The Winter’s Tale, A Study (1946), 47, quoted in Coghill, 31; Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson, The Winter’s Tale (1931; Cambridge 1931, 1950), xvi, cited in Coghill, 31.
William Matchett, “Dramatic Techniques in “The Winter’s Tale,’” Shakespeare Survey 22 (1969) 99; see also 93.
Dolora Cunningham, “Wonder and Love in the Romantic Comedies,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (1984): 262–63, 266.
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© 2011 Jonathan Locke Hart
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Hart, J. (2011). Shakespeare’s Romance. In: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118140_9
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