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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... to experiences larger than their own lives and defiant of strictly rational comprehension. For example, Kenneth Semon has observed about Pericles: “Only when one accepts the events without trying to explain BEYONDTRAGEDY 7.
... example of a pattern that prevails in the romances: C. L. Barber points out that the “late romances deal with freeing family ties from the threat of sexual degradation.” Thus Pericles begins with an event of potentially tragic ...
... example of romance's ability to elicit a human and dramatic experience beyond tragedy; for Acts IV and V, through the use of pastoral comedy as well as the reversal of tragic time, modulate the genuine tragedy of Act I–III.ii into the ...
... example, from the very beginning Macbeth presents the audience, as well as Macbeth, with a striking series of equivocations which elicit a need for definition and resolution. These equivocations, though they antedate Macbeth's presence ...
... example, in the very first lines of the play we are told that Lear had “more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall . . . but now in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most.” The act of arbitrary ...
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 |