Beyond Tragedy: Structure and Experience in Shakespeare's RomancesIn this compact, yet comprehensive exploration of Shakespeare's romances, Robert W. Uphaus suggests that the romances bring us to a realm of human and dramatic experience that is "beyond tragedy." The inexorable movement of tragedy toward death and a final close is absorbed in romance by a further movement in which death can lead to renewed life, characters can experience a second time of joy and peace, and the audience's conventional expectations about reality and literature are challenged and enlarged. In the late tragedies of King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, Uphaus finds the tragic structure augmented by elements that will later contribute to the form of the romances. Turning then to the romances themselves, he sees these plays as forming a profession in which Pericles is a brilliant outline of the conventions of romance and Cymbeline is romance taken to its dramatic limits, in fact to the point of parody. Through his fresh and provocative readings of the plays we experience anew the delight of Shakespearean romance and glimpse the world of renewal at its heart. |
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... defines the magnitude, meaning, and value of life. When Wallace Stevens writes that “death is the mother of beauty,” or Emily Dickinson says that “after great pain a formal feeling comes,” they are both suggesting the essence of tragedy ...
... defines life's significance at the same time that it represents the loss of life's significance. The tragic protagonist, such as King Lear, dies into life (“we came crying hither”), even as he lives into death. The tragic conclusion of ...
... defines romance as “a mode of exhibiting the action of magical and moral laws in a version of human life so selective as to obscure, for the special purpose of concentrating attention on these laws, the fact that in reality their force ...
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Contents
1 | |
Tragedy and the Intimations of Romance | 12 |
Pericles and the Conventions of Romance | 34 |
Cymbeline and the Parody of Romance | 49 |
The Issues of The Winters Tale | 69 |
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Beyond Tragedy: Structure and Experience in Shakespeare's Romances Robert W. Uphaus Limited preview - 2021 |