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Shakespearean Romance
By Howard Felperin PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1972 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06230-3
CHAPTER 1
Golden-Tongued Romance
O golden-tongued Romance with serene lute! Fair plumed Syren! Queen of far away! Leave melodizing on this wintry day, Shut up thine olden pages, and be mute. — Keats
Jupiter's words in the last act of Cymbeline — "Whom best I love I cross; to make my gift, / The more delay'd, delighted" — sum up not only the fortunes of the principals within Shakespeare's final romances but the fortunes of the plays themselves. Critical and theatrical recognition of Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Temfest, and Henry VIII as a distinguished and wholly Shakespearean group, though long delayed, has not been denied. More has been written on them in the past three and a half decades than over the previous three and a half centuries. This rebirth of interest has been aided by the reaction of modern textual criticism against the nineteenth-century custom of dividing Shakespeare's plays on little more than instinct among other playwrights — each of the last plays has at some time been denied in part to Shakespeare. Meanwhile stage revivals have multiplied. What Bernard Shaw wrote of Cymbeline in 1896, that it "is absolutely unactable and unutterable in the modern theatre, where a direct illusion of reality is aimed at," no longer holds true. Now that the naturalism of Ibsen and Stanislavsky has faded from the scene, the contemporary theater can approximate more closely than ever before the condition of the unlocalized stage within which the romances were first successfully mounted. Their revival may owe something as well to the congeniality with the spirit of romance and capacity for magic and spectacle of our own visual media — television and the movies. But whatever has conditioned or caused it, the fact is that the fortunes of Shakespearean romance are rapidly coming full circle.
Yet even though studies of the romances are beginning to catch up with the output of the rest of the Shakespeare industry, nothing like general agreement yet exists over their nature and significance. Many of the problems that have beset modern reinterpretation and revaluation of these plays remain to be solved:
Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, with (sometimes) Pericles and (sometimes) Henry VIII as outriders, form a group with similar characteristics, incidents, and endings. They seem more closely related than any other group of Shakespeare's plays. What they have in common makes them startlingly different from the plays which go before them. They are, moreover, written at the close of the author's writing career. So there is something of a mystery to be solved. The mystery is all the more interesting because the change in character appears to be a change away from the control and concentration which Shakespeare had achieved in the great tragedies. Construction and characterization seem to show not greater artistic maturity, but less. ... The question, "Why should Shakespeare turn to writing these plays?" is inextricably entwined with the question, "What is the significance of these plays?" For some, the first question has been much more absorbing than the second, and, indeed, the second has only troubled them as a means of answering the first.
There are still other unanswered questions. What is the relation between the romances and the preceding tragedies? Is there really a sharp break between them, as was once thought, or are the romances in some sense continuous with the tragedies, as is now generally believed? If the latter, in what sense? What is the relation between the early romantic comedies and the final romances to which they seem so near and yet so far? What has each of these groups to do with the "dark" or "problem" comedies, written in between and based on similar materials? What do the last plays have in common with the other great romances and romantic epics of the English Renaissance, the Arcadia, The Faerie Queene, and even Paradise Lost? And not the least mysterious of mysteries that surround the last plays although it is an historical one: Why have they been held in relative disfavor ever since the early seventeenth century when they were among the more popular of Shakespeare's works?
All of these problems are aspects of a more fundamental and abiding problem, one that confronts not only students of Shakespeare but students of literature: what are we to make of romance as a literary genre? How seriously is it to be taken in the first place, and on what terms are we to take it seriously? For romance, though it is as ancient and enduring an offspring of the human imagination as tragedy, comedy, or satire, has traditionally been eyed askance by critics, suspected of being somehow illegitimate — owing perhaps to its very popularity in every age and culture — and has received less than its share of sympathetic and thoughtful regard. The history of criticism of Shakespeare's last plays is in effect a record of response (most often of unexamined and antipathetic response) to their peculiarly romantic character, to the features that distinguish them as a group and link them with romance tradition. Until very recently indeed, the prevailing modern approach has been to seek the significance of the romances not in their manifest genre and their relation to it but in something latent or reflected in them: ancient mystery-rites (mainly The Tem-pest); the myths and rituals of comparative anthropology (mainly The Winter's Tale); the doctrines of Christianity (all the last plays); and the spiritual biography of their author. While attempting to establish the seriousness of the romances, such approaches actually call it in question by locating it in something other than the plays themselves and outside their authentic critical context — in something remote, in something universal, in something lofty, in something mysterious, but always in something else. In the deathless words (slightly rephrased) of a modern subspecies of romance, a soap opera about the quest of a girl from a small mining town in the west for happiness in the big city, can a tale of long-lost children and star-crossed lovers, of shipwreck and reunion, be taken seriously in and for itself? "To criticize the last plays in terms of the formal requirements of romance, and the emotional response of the audience," writes Philip Edwards, "seems to me a very strenuous task considering the temptations we are exposed to of taking short cuts to Shakespeare's vision. But it is probably the only way of not falsifying those moments in these fantastic plays when Shakespeare's verse rarefies the air and we know perfectly well that something important is being said." Just so. Any attempt to come to grips with the romances, to pluck out the heart of their mystery, must sooner or later come to terms with romance.
Coming to terms with romance is a difficult task, precisely because romance, of all imaginative modes, is the most fundamental, universal, and heterogeneous. For whatever reasons poets write, the act of poesis is the making of a world by its very nature different from the one the poet inhabits, just as the act of reading, for whatever reasons we do it, transports us out of ourselves, out of the here and now of our existence and into a world elsewhere. To the extent that all literary experience involves a journey into another world inherently removed from present time and place, all literature is fundamentally romantic. As Don Quixote pointed out to the Canon, the Iliad must be deemed a lie if Amadis of Gaul is. In romance proper, with its cultivation of faraway places and legendary times, the process by which all literature works is given its head, allowed its fullest and freest operation. But because romance is least inhibited or guarded about doing what other modes do, it is also most open to charges of escapism from philosophical quarters that think they know where "reality" lies. Such systems of thought as the Platonic, the Puritan, the Baconian, the Freudian, and the Marxist share a built-in mistrust of poesis; yet each has nonetheless generated its own "ur-fantasies" and official myths — the Utopia, the pilgrim's progress, science fiction, the family romance, socialist realism — romances all. Defenses of poetry like Sidney's or Shelley's are at base defenses of romance against parochial demands for "relevance" and tendentious definitions of the "real," of the autonomy of the imagination against the special interest groups within culture who would bind it to their own service.
Not only does the action of romance, with its tendency to sprawl across continents and take years to accomplish, transcend considerations of time and place, but so does the mode itself. There are fallow periods and fallow cultures for tragedy, comedy, and satire, but romance seems to flourish in all ages and societies. When romance was dislodged from the playhouse during the seventeenth century by the comedy of manners, it did not freeze to death but found new auspices in narrative prose and verse, opera and musical comedy, homes it had known from the beginning. Although we associate classical Greece with epic, tragedy, and comedy, it is actually the birthplace of romance in all its subsequent forms. The Odyssey is not only an epic but the first romance. Euripides is known mainly for his tragedies, but his Ion, Helen, and Iphigenia in Tauris are really the first romantic comedies. Longus's Daphnis and Chloe inaugurates a tradition of erotic idylls in prose extending through the popular Paul et Virginie (one of the romances read by Emma Bovary) to the sensationally popular Love Story, in which (for the few who have not read it) a young aristocrat makes love and plays hockey in the pastoral groves of Harvard away from parental tyranny and social pressures until he discovers, like many a previous swain, that et in Arcadia, ego.
Segal's Love Story, the latest romance, like Homer's Odyssey, the first, suggests by its title a characteristic feature of the entire mode. But even though all romance is in some sense or on some level a love story and an odyssey, the varieties of loving and questing it can accommodate are wide indeed, everything from the passionate Liebestod of Wagner's Tristan to the exalted communion of his Parsifal, from the tireless geographical wandering of Ibsen's Peer Gynt to the short climb toward rebirth of his When We Dead Awaken. (The temporal and physical limitations of the theatre have always held a special challenge for romance.) Perhaps the common denominator of romance in all its manifestations, however, is that it is a "success story." Although that term is associated with the ethos of primitive American capitalism celebrated in the novels of Horatio Alger — such titles as Adrift in New York and The World Before Him proclaim their generic affiliation — it also describes the careers of countless earlier heroes of romance: Moses, King Arthur, King Horn, Havelock the Dane, George a Greene, the Fair Maid of the West, to name but a few. In their rise from "rags to riches," from obscurity to preeminence within their societies, all are variations on the myth of the birth of the hero familiar in folk tale, fairy tale, and the "tall story," as the parallel careers of St. George, Cinderella, and Paul Bunyan illustrate. The last instance suggests that romance is always in some sense a tall story in that its plots are often hard to believe and its characters tend to be larger than life, qualifications that help distinguish it from comedy. Whatever else it may be, then, romance is a success story in which difficulties of any number of kinds are overcome, and a tall story in which they are overcome against impossible odds or by miraculous means.
But given these common denominators, it is apparent even from these few examples that the romance mode consists of a number of related yet distinct historical developments, at least three of which converge in Shakespearean romance, the goal of our quest. One is classical romance, a group of third-century prose narratives that includes Longus's Daphnis and Chloe, Heliodorus' Aethiopica, Achilles Tatius' Clitophon and Leucippe, and Xenophon's Ephesiaca. Although Orsino in Twelfth Night seems to have read the Aethiopica, it is impossible to say which or how many of the Greek romances Shakespeare knew at firsthand, but all of them (except the Ephesiaca, which was known in Italy but not in England) were translated into English in the late sixteenth century, and related stories, such as Apollonius of Tyre, were known and retold throughout the Middle Ages. They certainly left their mark, however, on the Elizabethan prose romances of Sidney, Lyly, Greene, and Lodge, which provide Shakespeare with several of his romantic plots. Daphnis and Chloe, with its contrast of court and country, urbanity and innocence, and nurture and nature, is the locus classicus of the characteristic features of pastoral romance, and to that extent lies behind Shakespeare's As You Like It as well as Sidney's Arcadia. Greek romance deals with the hardships of separated lovers, is replete with storms, shipwrecks, pirates, and savage beasts, covers many countries and many years, and concludes with virtue preserved, nobility discovered, and lovers reunited in improbable recognition scenes. Their recognitions usually come about through the chance working of fortune, but sometimes, as in the Ephesiaca, through the revealed providence of a benevolent deity. Obviously Greek romance forms part of the background of "old tales" to which Paulina compares the action of The Winter's Tale, and against which all the final romances take shape. But its influence remains, I for one believe, vague and elusive, even in his recognition scenes a matter of general similarities of incident and situation.
The same can be said of another strain of romance available to Shakespeare, the chivalric romance of the Middle Ages. Again it is impossible to say precisely which or how many English and continental romances Shakespeare knew, but it is certain that he alludes in Henry VIII (not without skepticism) to the heroic glorifications of Bevis of Hampton and Sir Guy of Warwick; that he consulted Chaucer and Gower on occasion; and that Malory's Morte Darthur was among the most popular books of sixteenth-century England. Because medieval romance is heterogeneous even by romantic standards, it is difficult to extrapolate from it a typical plot structure inclusive enough to satisfy all its students and exclusive enough to be of some use. It seems fair to say, however, that the most common plot structure of chivalric romance is the one adopted for parody by Chaucer in Sir Thopas, Cervantes in Don Quixote, and Beaumont in The Knight of the Burning Pestle: that of the roman d'aventure. A young knight launches out into a fabulous landscape and performs a series of heroic exploits, often undertaken in the name of an idealized mistress and often of an increasingly demanding nature. Frequently the hero is on a specific quest, the successful completion of which depends upon his ability to measure up to an ideal of conduct — in Chrétien's Lancelot, if we read that work without a sense of irony, the ideal is the self-abasement of courtly love; in several of the Grail romances, it is the Christian ideal of contemptus mundi. Chivalric romance was clearly of more direct use to Spenser than to Shakespeare, but its values and ideals are expounded and sometimes embodied by many of the latter's romantic lovers, notably by that perfect, gentle knight Sir Eglamour in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the plots of all his comedies and romances at some level illustrate the ennobling power of romantic love.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shakespearean Romance by Howard Felperin. Copyright © 1972 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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