Romance on the Early Modern Stage

English Expansion Before and After Shakespeare

Cyrus Mulready

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137322708
• eBook ISBN: 9781137322715
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria europea

What is dramatic romance? Scholars have long turned to Shakespeare's biography to answer this question, marking his 'late plays' as the beginning and end of the dramatic romance. This book identifies an earlier history for this genre, revealing how stage romances imaginatively expanded audience interest in England's emerging global economy.

1

Romancing Shakespeare

Fredric Jameson’s influential study of the romance genre, “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism” (The Political Unconscious), opens with an epigraph from The Winter’s Tale: “O, she’s warm! / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (5.3.109–11).¹ The speech belongs to Leontes, and it comes at the moment he embraces his revivified wife Hermione, whom both the king and audience had previously imagined dead. The magical return of Hermione bodies forth Jameson’s argument that romance wends its way through literary history, dialectically altering its forms and modes as it reanimates in varying social circumstances. Such a narrative of romance’s development would include “its brief moment on the stage in the twilight of Shakespearean spectacle before being revived in romanticism . . . ” (136).² Jameson’s choice of The Winter’s Tale for his epigraph thus reveals the now definitive association between “Shakespeare” and “Romance” in our critical vocabulary. He never needs to elaborate on or contextualize this quotation. It is assumed that the reader knows that The Winter’s Tale is romance—one of those plays from “the twilight of Shakespearean spectacle.”

The wistful tone of his phrase clashes with Jameson’s overarching and foundational project to “invent a new, historically reflexive, way of using categories, such as those of genre” (107). Jameson is not alone in leaving the category of “romance” in Shakespeare unquestioned. Helen Cooper, in The English Romance in Time, her magisterial study of the romance genre in English literature, sets even more emphasis on Shakespeare’s “last plays,” marking “the death of Shakespeare” in her subtitle as the very endpoint of the romance tradition. She calls Shakespeare’s “own last plays . . . almost the final works to profit from the power of those endlessly transforming traditions” (23). Even in these most probing historical examinations of the genre, dramatic romances remain where they have been since the late nineteenth century, encompassed by Shakespeare’s poetic life story.

This chapter explores the foundations of that critical terminology and its continued influence on dramatic study today. As several scholars have acknowledged, Edward Dowden was the first to apply the term “romance” to the last plays of Shakespeare. But Dowden’s contribution to our understanding of genre and the Shakespearean canon extends beyond merely giving a new name to these plays. His project was more probing, and significantly amplified, as I will argue, the Romantic Shakespeare criticism heralded earlier in the century by Coleridge and others. It is this broader project, with all of its attendant problems and controversies, which influences and obscures Shakespearean genre criticism to this day. Shakespeare’s “romances,” as they were originally conceived, constituted a restrictive category, a unique expression of a singular artistic mind. Intended only to pattern Shakespeare’s internal genius, this view of genre was fundamentally ahistorical.

Uncovering this story of the dramatic romance’s origins in psychological and philosophical romantic criticism will serve to properly contextualize the emergence of the category. But I will also use the recognition of Dowden’s romances as a point of contrast to the proliferative versions of “romance” that circulated before the nineteenth century. Dowden’s conception of “romance” severed the meaning of the word from its earlier signification: the erring narratives, exotic locales, foreign conquests, and alinear developments that characterized the genre for centuries. Thus, instead of abandoning the term, I seek in the course of this chapter to restore the meanings that it held before Dowden. Rather than an innovation in Shakespeare, this understanding of romance connects the Renaissance stage to a rich cultural history that has been lost.

The “late plays”: Edward Dowden’s generic chronology and the “Romances”

We take it for granted today that Shakespeare had a “career,” a story that allows us to map the development of his plays alongside his progress from Stratford to London and back: from rough-and-tumble “early comedies” like Comedy of Errors to the “maturity” expressed in The Tempest or The Winter’s Tale.³ Along with the enduring vogue of Shakespearean biography, this narrative is represented and preserved in the way that we structure the canon. In their Textual Companion to the Oxford Shakespeare (1987), Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor explain their reasons for organizing the plays according to putative dates of composition: “If one does not know the order of composition of an author’s works, one cannot form any notion of his artistic development; if one has no notion of his artistic development, it becomes fatally easy to acquire the notion that (artistically) he did not develop, but instead sprang, like Athena, full-grown from the forehead of the nearest available muse”(36). Though Wells and Taylor marshal their logic in the cause of ostensibly twentieth-century critical concerns (subverting the conception of Shakespearean genius), their language is strikingly similar to that of Dowden. “The most fruitful method of studying the works of Shakspere [sic],” Dowden wrote in his Shakespeare Primer, “is that which views them in the chronological order of their production. We thus learn something about their origin, their connection one with another, and their relation to the mind of their creator, as that mind passed from its early promise to its rich maturity and fulfillment” (32). It is a testament to the quiet but enduring influence of Dowden that the Norton and the Riverside Shakespeare, standard texts in the American classroom, continue to observe Dowden’s four genres of the Shakespearean canon.⁴

But, as Barbara Mowat has also argued, it was not always the case that the “Romances,” “late plays,” or “last plays” were so self-evidently aligned (129–30). The First Folio included only three of these plays, and grouped them within its “Catalogue’s” tripartite structure: The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest with the comedies, and Cymbeline with the tragedies. Until its publication in the second issue of the Third Folio (1664), Pericles circulated only in quarto editions.⁵ Later in the seventeenth century, dramatic chronicler Gerard Langbaine offered an even more variegated characterization for the plays in this group in his 1691 Account of the English Dramatick Poets. The Tempest remains a comedy, and Cymbeline a tragedy (though Langbaine notes its partial source in Boccaccio). But Pericles is a “History,” and The Winter’s Tale a “Tragicomedy” (455–66). When Dowden began his project of realigning the Shakespearean canon, he had almost no critical precedent for separating out these particular plays into a separate, rational category.

In his Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875), Dowden crafted an understanding of Shakespeare’s plays that relied on two key and related principles: first, that Shakespeare’s “organic” development as a “human” could be traced through the growth of his “art,” and second, that an artistic career has a trajectory, a teleology, that can help explain both the artist and his artifacts.⁶ “In such a study as this,” Dowden wrote, “we endeavour to pass through the creation of the artist to the mind of the creator” (3). He further explains:

The essential prerequisite of such a study was a scheme of the chronological succession of Shakspere’s plays which could be accepted as trustworthy in the main. But for such a study it is fortunately not necessary that we should in every case determine how play followed play. It would be for many reasons be important and interesting to ascertain the date at which each work of Shakspere came into existence; but as a fact this has not been accomplished, and we may safely say that it never will be accomplished. (Mind and Art 378)

Mowat has usefully shown the influence of the chronologies created by his contemporaries in the New Shakespeare Society’s metrical analysis projects—the process by which they sought to construct a definitive chronology for the plays based on the internal evidence provided by alterations in rhyme and meter (130). But Dowden strikes a note of ambivalence in this passage about the assuredness of these labors. He insists upon the importance in finding the succession “not of Shakspere’s plays, but of Shakspere’s chief visions of truth, his most intense moments of inspiration, his greater discoveries about human life” (Mind and Art 378). The only complete chronology, he argues, is the one that marks both biographical and psychological development:

We do not now place “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “The Tempest” side by side as Shakespere’s plays of fairyland. We know that a long interval of time lies between the two, and that they resemble one another in superficial or accidental circumstances, they must differ to the whole extent of the difference between the youthful Shakspere, and the mature, experienced, fully-developed man. (Mind and Art 7)

It is significant that Dowden groups his plays based on psychological categories rather than “accidental” or arbitrary taxonomies (Comedies, or even “plays of fairyland”). The plays had to be assigned to categories that coincided with the periods of Shakespeare’s life, but also reflected on the development of the artist’s mind.

Although he never cites him in these passages on chronology and genre, Dowden carried on a method of generic classification practiced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge earlier in the century. Dowden praised Coleridge for ushering in “a new era in the criticism of Shakespeare . . . the criticism of genius, of reverence, and of love” (Shakspere,163) Dowden also admired Coleridge because he “conceived of Shakespeare’s work as a whole; he observed the fruit as it hung in living beauty on the tree” (Introduction, 102). Like Dowden, Coleridge questioned the ordering of Shakespeare’s works on the “external” evidence of independent historical analysis. Coleridge thus challenged the models of editors such as Edmond Malone, and privileged instead, as one reporter of his lectures put it, “a psychological, rather than a historical mode of reasoning” (2:67). Coleridge attempted several different schemas and progressions for Shakespeare’s plays, each of which somehow mapped the playwright’s psychological growth.⁷ In his Literary Remains, for instance, he separates out Troilus and Cressida, Cymbeline, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, and Taming of the Shrew into the third period or “class” in Shakespeare’s progression, commenting that they represent “a greater energy—not merely of poetry, but—of all the world of thought, yet still with some of the growing pains, and the awkwardness of growth” (1:212).⁸

In Dowden’s reckoning of Shakespeare’s life, the lusty young poet, newly arrived in London, wrote frolicsome early comedies; in the second period, as Shakespeare “was gaining a sure grasp of the positive facts of life,” he wrote the histories and “the brightest and loveliest comedies”; the middle-aged Shakespeare turned to more reflective and serious tragedies; the older Shakespeare, “in his period of large, serene wisdom” capped his career with “spiritual” and “romantic” plays that culminated with his farewell to the stage, The Tempest (Mind and Art 362, 68, 403). Dowden inserted this last category, the “Romances,” to solve a generic problem created by the chronological organization of the Shakespearean canon. The first edition of Shakespeare’s plays, printed in 1623 under the title Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, was not, as the title suggests, ordered by date of composition, or even performance, as was Ben Jonson’s 1616 Works. If one intended to honor the three genres of the first collected edition of Shakespeare’s works, one had to accept that the Shakespearean career ended with a seeming hodge-podge of genres: two collaborative plays not included in the First Folio (Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen), two plays drawn from the annals of British history, a “tragedy” (Cymbeline) and another collaborative “history” (Henry VIII) and two “comedies” (The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest). Such a conclusion was unacceptable for Dowden, who saw an essentially harmonious generic progression through Shakespeare’s career up to Pericles—from comedy to history and tragedy.

It would seem particularly difficult for Dowden to explain why The Tempest, which he saw as the culmination of the Shakespearean canon, appeared first in the collection under the section of “Comedies,” and Cymbeline, the final play in the Folio collection, was gathered in 1623 with the “Tragedies.” Undaunted in his efforts to create a rational narrative for the canon, Dowden saw the First Folio’s arrangement as “remarkable”: romances were the alpha and omega of the collection, underlining his notion that these plays deserved special attention (Mind and Art 42). “The circumstance may have been a piece of accident; but if so, it was a lucky accident, which suggests that our first and our last impression of Shakspere shall be that of Shakspere in his period of large, serene wisdom, and that in the light of the clear and solemn vision of his closing years all his writings shall be read” (Mind and Art 403). Thus, from their original conception in Dowden, the Romances helped dissolve the divisions of the 1623 collection (or even give that organization a new logic) and brought together a group of plays that, instead of indicating a confused close to the canon, could signal Shakespeare’s “maturity” at the end of his career. Dowden managed to paint a picture of an artistic career that mirrored the rich spiritual life of the author. From its very inception, Dowden’s study of Shakespearean genre was a biographical project, and the romances provided the psycho-generic lynchpin that allowed the development of the canon to coincide with Shakespeare’s life story.

Romance as period term: Coleridge and the “romantic drama or dramatic Romances” of Shakespeare

Beyond the biographical interest that these “late plays” held for Dowden, his choice of the term “Romances” for the last four plays of the canon also derived from the nineteenth-century reframing of Shakespeare as a poet of a “romantic” era. Coleridge called The Tempest “a specimen of the romantic drama,” which he further described as “a drama, the interests of which are independent of all historical facts and associations, and arise from their fitness to that faculty of our nature, the imagination . . . which owns no allegiance to time and place.”⁹ For Coleridge, all of Shakespearean drama was “romantic,” as his assessment of Shakespeare’s plays as “romantic” had less to do with genre than with his interest in creating Shakespeare as the prime mover of a literary historical epoch. “We must find a new word,” Coleridge insisted, “for the plays of Shakespeare” (1:175). Shakespeare was romantic, for Coleridge, because he was not bound to the strictures of classical drama—the unities and rules of decorum that the eighteenth century ascribed to Greek and Latin theory. He argues, “the deviation from the simple forms and unities of the ancient stage is an essential principle and, of course, an appropriate excellence of the romantic” (1:175). Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht identifies this periodizing move with a broader tendency in the early nineteenth century. “By designating their own time as ‘romantic’ with a specific history stretching back to the literary genre of chivalric romances, the poets of the early nineteenth century instituted the Middle Ages . . . as the beginning and high point of a Christian period that was completely different from antiquity and at the end of which the romantics found themselves” (90). Shakespeare’s departure from the codes and practices of ancient drama marked, for Coleridge, an essential division between the classical past and a romantic era that stretched to his present time.

Dowden thus inherited “romance” and “romantic” predominantly as terms associated with a period or movement, rather than a genre. In fact, the great contribution of Dowden was to marry the Coleridgean idea of Shakespeare as the central literary-historical figure in the devel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Romance and the Globe
• 1 Romancing Shakespeare
• 2 “Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other”: Sidney’s Unities and the Staging of Romance
• 3 Imagined Empires: The Cultural Geography of Stage Romance
• 4 Chronicle History, Cosmopolitan Romance: Henry V and the Generic Boundaries of the Second Tetralogy
• 5 Containing Romance and Plotting Empire in The Tempest and Pericles
• 6 Milton’s Imperial Maske: Staging Romance on the Border of Wales
• Coda: Global Romance after Shakespeare
• Appendix: Titles and Dates of Stage Romances
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index