The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances

Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest—three of Shakespeare’s final plays diverge from Shakepeare’s usual standards. Generically, stylistically, and dramatically, they each embrace hauntingly familiarShakespearean themes and incidents. However, with comic devices colliding with tragic passions, mimetic actions that give way to spectacle, and drama that yields to narrative, everything Shakespearean has undergone a puzzling transformation. Barbara A. Mowat argues that when a dramatist selects a genre, a theatrical style, a narrative or dramatic mode, he is consciously choosing a way of creating a certain kind of experience. Thus, by confronting the comic form with the tragic, the realistic with the artificial, the dramatic with the narrative, Shakespeare makes meaning in a new way. He creates a kind of play that frees romance from the traditional bounds of his early dramas.

Barbara A. Mowat is director of research emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library, consulting editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and editor (with Paul Werstine) of the Folger Library Shakespeare editions.