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. |
From inside the book
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... enact a realm of human experience which can be said to be “beyond tragedy.” Customarily tragedy has been regarded as the be-all and end-all of human and dramatic experience. Whether one argues that tragedy deals with “boundary ...
... enacts a movement beyond tragedy by first positing the existence either of tragedy or of an event with tragic potential, and then moving beyond it to unfold a process of destiny which culminates with a providential experience, of one ...
... enacts a second chance whereby the characters' tragic past is incorporated into a redeemed present beyond tragedy. And Henry VIII, which I shall argue is basically a romance, begins with the potentially tragic deaths of Buckingham ...
... project a realm of human and dramatic experience beyond tragedy, even as they draw from Shakespeare's prior tragedies to enact such a unique experience. TWO Tragedy and the Intimations of Romance Many critics have BEYONDTRAGEDY 11.
... enacts and entraps Gloucester in another version of nothing: Gloucester. What paper were you reading? Edmund. Nothing, my lord. Gloucester. No? What needed then that terrible dispatch of it into your pocket? The quality of nothing hath ...
Contents
1 | |
12 | |
Pericles and the Conventions of Romance | 34 |
Cymbeline and the Parody of Romance | 49 |
The Issues of The Winters Tale | 69 |
Prosperos Art and the Descent of Romance | 92 |
History Romance and Henry VIII | 118 |
NOTES | 141 |
INDEX | 149 |
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Beyond Tragedy: Structure and Experience in Shakespeare's Romances Robert W. Uphaus Limited preview - 2021 |