shakespearean romance, tragicomedy, and the jacobean theater

This period in Shakespeare's career is marked by dramatic change and upheaval in theatrical attitudes, as well as in every sphere of private, public, and social life.  In 1607 Shakespeare was forty-three years old, the author of twenty-nine plays, and very prosperous.  But the London theatrical world was in flux.  With the rising tide of Puritanism, the middle classes were beginning to desert the theaters, and the acting companies were forced to depend more and more upon the patronage of the gentry.  The acquisition of the second Blackfriars allowed the King's Men to focus plays specifically toward the tastes of an increasingly sophisticated clientele.  Even so, these plays appealed to the tastes and interests of all sorts of audiences beyond the private, or "coterie," theaters.

On 18 September 1602 the visiting Duke of Stettin-Pomerania saw a performance at the Blackfriars, noting the strangeness of what the regular audience took for granted:  "Whoever wishes to see one of their performances must give as much as eight shillings of our coinage;  and yet there are always a good many people present, and even many respectable women. . . .  They act all their plays by [artificial] light, which produces a great effect.  For a whole hour before the play begins, one listens to a delightful instrumental concert."  Four features of the material theater are significant in this eye-witness account:  (1) the greater cost of admission;  (2) the "respectability" of the audience;  (3) elaborate use of candelabra, hoisted on pulleys above the stage for lighting;  (4) the increased use of music.  The physical nature of the Blackfriars and other enclosed acting spaces also influenced how Shakespeare and his contemporaries wrote their plays:  For example, with an audience closer to the stage and better acoustics (no open space through which sound can dissipate), fewer "declamatory" speeches are seen, and opportunities for writing more "realistic," intimate exchanges between characters were now available.

Romance

In addition to exhibiting combinations of the features of tragicomedy, theatrical romance, as in The Tempest, shows an almost "novelistic" blending of some form of the medieval romance-quest.  Commonly, romance refers to works with extravagant characters, remote and exotic places, highly exciting and heroic events, passionate love, or mysterious or supernatural experiences.  In another and more sophisticated sense, romance refers to works relatively free of the more restrictive aspects of realistic verisimilitude and expressive of profound, transcendent, or idealistic truths.  The theatrical "world" of each of Shakespeare's "serene romances" is one in which ordinary "reality" does not obtain; rather, we should use M.  H.  Abrams's good term heterocosm in speaking of these worlds which operate in terms of their own interior logic.

Tragicomedy

In English dramatic history the term is usually employed to designate the particular kind of play developed by Beaumont and Fletcher about 1610, a type of which Philaster is typical.  Fletcher defines the genre in his "To the Reader," from The Faithful Shepherdess:  "A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants [lacks] deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people, with such kind of trouble as no life be question'd;  so that a god is as lawful in this [tragicomedy] as in a tragedy, and mean [lower-class] people as in a comedy."

Some characteristics:  Improbable plot; unnatural situations; characters of high social class, usually of the nobility; love as the central interest, pure love and gross love often being contrasted; highly complicated plot; rapid action; contrasts of deep villainy and exalted virtue; saving of hero and heroine in the nick of time; penitent villain; disguises; surprises; jealousy; treachery; intrigue; enveloping action of war or rebellion.  Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale are examples from this genre.

Perhaps a better term by which to designate Shakespeare's final plays might be "romantic tragicomedies."  They have occasioned an enormous amount of critical interest of late.  The low end of that has been to see the romances as "experiments"; most scholars, however, find that they are much more than this.  G. Wilson Knight, for example, views the last plays as allegories of "great creating nature" and "myths of immortality."  He considers the argument on grafting in The Winter's Tale (4.4) a "microcosm of the whole play."  Most recent criticism centers on the themes of time, growth, decay, and regeneration.