Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Aristotle and Tragicomedy
- 2 The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini's Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601
- 3 Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia Dell'arte
- 4 The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain
- 5 Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
- 6 In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
- 7 Taking Pericles Seriously
- 8 ‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
- 9 Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
- 10 Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger's The Renegado
- 11 Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
- 12 ‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
8 - ‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 Aristotle and Tragicomedy
- 2 The Difficult Emergence of Pastoral Tragicomedy: Guarini's Il pastor fido and its Critical Reception in Italy, 1586–1601
- 3 Transporting Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and the Magical Pastoral of the Commedia Dell'arte
- 4 The Minotaur of the Stage: Tragicomedy in Spain
- 5 Highly Irregular: Defining Tragicomedy in Seventeenth-Century France
- 6 In Lieu of Democracy, or How Not To Lose Your Head: Theatre and Authority in Renaissance England
- 7 Taking Pericles Seriously
- 8 ‘The Neutral Term’?: Shakespearean Tragicomedy and the Idea of the ‘Late Play’
- 9 Shakespeare by the Numbers: On the Linguistic Texture of the Late Plays
- 10 Turn and Counterturn: Merchanting, Apostasy and Tragicomic Form in Massinger's The Renegado
- 11 Dublin Tragicomedy and London Stages
- 12 ‘Betwixt Both’: Sketching the Borders of Seventeenth-Century Tragicomedy
- Index
- Studies in Renaissance Literature
Summary
CRITICS SEEM largely to agree that the problems involved in calling the group of plays in the Shakespeare canon from Pericles to The Two Noble Kinsmen ‘tragicomedies’ or ‘romances’ are sufficiently substantial that it is best to avoid doing so altogether. Both terms are seen as too limiting and exclusive adequately to embrace the plays' extraordinary generic dependencies and possibilities. There are exceptions, though. Alison Thorne's recent ‘New Case-book’, for instance, in calling the plays ‘Shakespeare's Romances’, sustains the legacy of E.C. Pettet, Northrop Frye, Stanley Wells, Howard Felperin, Robert Uphaus and others who have championed ‘romance’, though she is careful to qualify the term and acknowledge the issues in her helpful introduction. There is also Barbara Mowat who, despite having spent the first section of her essay on the last plays in Richard Dutton and Jean Howard's Companion to Shakespeare's Works explaining why neither of the terms ‘romance’ or ‘tragicomedy’ is adequate, in fact goes on to provide the most convincing recent analysis of the plays as romances by offering a detailed demonstration of their roots in the kind of sixteenth-century dramatic romance that had notoriously frustrated Philip Sidney yet was visibly still alive and well on the Jacobean stage in the shape of Mucedorus, an old play which was revived in 1606 and again in 1610 in time to provide an impetus for late Shakespeare.
But Diana Childress's 1974 essay ‘Are Shakespeare's Last Plays Really Romances?’ marks the moment after which such arguments must necessarily seem, to some extent at least, defensive.
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- Information
- Early Modern Tragicomedy , pp. 115 - 132Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007