Shakespeare's Late Plays Tragicomedy And Romances Notes

ROMANCE, LATE PLAYS, TRAGICOMEDY SHAKESPEARE = End of career 1610 after 30 plays = After 1599 became interested in tragedies / mixing genres e.g earlier comedies have darker potentially tragic themes and endings are less happy = He enlarged ideas the audience might be exposed to in series of philosophical romances - Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest JAMES AS NEW KING = 1603 James 1 came to throne after 5 years of parliamentary debate - no surprise its arrival found itself so well explored upn the stage = Decline of revenge tragedy + replacement of one regeneration through love, mercy + forgiveness occurred in first decade of James reign = REVEL'S OFFICE ? used to ensure that such expression as was given in plays was kept brouadly in line with gov. policy = such matters were of interest to KJ is proved by his attitude both to performance + publication of Chapman's Biron plays + his termination of the lease of the Blackfriars to the Children of the Revels in 1608 = Mutliple instances of commissioning, or at least the suggestion of themes which is treated on stage would received royal approval. o Hamlet thought it natural enough to ask players from Wittenberg to put on a play for his own ends = At the same time S is composing + pondering antithetical contrast between either tragic / tragicomic treatment of KL, James himself expressed the possibility of explicitly contrast between the two: "The Almight..will.. put it in his Magesties heart to make such a conclusion of this tragedie to the Traitors, but Tragicomdie to the King and all his trew subjects" = THEREFORE = Origins of drift towards tragicomedy can be seen in the political consciousness of the British peoples saved from foreign invasion and civil war by the peaceful accession of James I in 1603, by the timely discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, and the final ratifi-- cation of the Union of the two Crowns by Act of Parliament in 1608 = J claimed to have delivered subjects from doubts about sucession + from deep--rooted feares of war, foreign + domestic - brought immediate gift of peace + prospect of plenty in its wake - merger of Scotland + England offered them not only domestic security but aggrandizement abroad o GREAT BRITIAN - starts to be used from this point FIRST SPEECH TO PARLIAMENT 1604 : "as it was first settled and united in him, so is it now reunited and confirmed in me, being justly and lineally descended not only of that happy conjuction, bot of both branches thereof many times before. But the Union of these two princely houses is nothing comparable to the Union of two ancienn and famous kingdoms, which is the other inward peace annexed to my Person" = Gave poets + playwrights cue that they needed to provide British people with a messianic vision eclipsing that which their predecessors had chosen to associate with the House of Tudor which opened the way to the vogue of tradi--comedy at court + in private theatre. = His projetion of peace provided poets with three key images o 1) "I am Husband and the whole isle is my lawful wife (Winter's Tale) o 2) " I am the Head and it is my body" - (Coriolanus) 3) "I am the Shepherd and it is all my Flocke" (Winter's Tale) 1603 =Daniels' "Panygericke Congratulatory "(1603) 1604 = Jonson, Dekker + Middleton + Webster prepared a spectacular pagent for James' arrival in London on themes of Peace, Plenty + regenerative Power 1605 Anthony Munday deployed same story both at greater length + more graphically in popular iconography for the firs tLord Mayor's Show of the new reign - "The Triumph's of Reunied Britanio GUN POWER PLOT = J said "three wonderful, or rather miraculous events" o The cruelty of the plot itself, to kill not only the king but his wife and whole state in general o Fact that the conspirators were unknown to James, nor were they victims of some injustice / disgrace for which they could seek revenge, only motive was religion o The discovery of the plot Third event which as James said served to translate "this tragedy to the traitors into Tragicomedy to the King and all his trewe subjects" Immediate response of dramatise was to "the tragedy of the traitor" = Macheth + Jonson's Cataline o Fleance's escape becomes much more than a generalized compli-- ment to the House of Stuart: as a tangential reference to James's own escape and that of the Princess Elizabeth from the powder--treason, the whole of Macbeth provides a useful example of Shakespeare's oblique method of treating topical events. o = = = = = = Macbeth's crime in murdering Duncan passes, in the imagery of the play's language, beyond regicide to deicide, and that Scotland, like Hell, has to be harrowed before it can be cleansed of a monster comparable with Lucifer and Herod in his tyrannical ambition and depravity GENRE / THEMES = In KL = antithesis between tragicomic conclusion of the old play + the tragic conclusion of the new version = ambiguous intentions = History + story of KL already existed in Eliz theatre in form of tragicomedy yet S elected to transform it into tragedy = Still wider context of KL = stretches back to Trojan Brutus + division of kingdom between his three sons + forward to King Gorboduc who repeated this folly with disastrous results. = ALL THREE linked with Merlin's prophecies of a 2nd Brutus to restore in the fullness of time to return to New Troy + reunite the kingdoms = Figure already been identified in James by Daniel, Dekker + Munday in poems + pageants before Shakespeare turned his attention to Lear Story = SEE ALSO: o Faerie Queen 1590 contains Cordelia, who dies from hanging as in KL o Higgin's A Mirror for Magistrates 1574 o The Malcontent by Marston (1604) o Arcadia (1580--90) = Gloucester subplot o Montaigies Essays (Trans.1603) = Intriguing that S retained something of the tragic--comic quality of both the old play + prophecy in reuniting Lear with Cordelia, only to dismiss it in reverting to the original source of the whole story ? Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regun Britannie (1136c) in bringing catastrophes to both of them = When KL was written, James had 3 children, duke of Cornwall, duke of Albany + Princess Elizabeth but S distances these correspondences between the royal family and his characters by setting play in an pre Christian world 

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