12

JAN ETTE DILLO N

Shakespeare’s tragicomedies

‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ (The Winter’s Tale, 3.3.57). This is one of the most
famous stage directions in Shakespeare. It makes us laugh, while at the same
time giving us a sense of puzzlement and wonder. What did that moment
really feel like for early modern audiences at the Globe or Blackfriars? Was
it a real bear or a man in a bear suit?1 Was it comic? Scary? Weird? Or all
of these at once? We may begin by exploring something of the particular
quality of Shakespeare’s late plays through this stage direction and the rest
of the scene that follows it in The Winter’s Tale. Antigonus, who is the man
pursued by a bear, has just laid down a baby, Leontes’ child Perdita, whose
life he has saved against Leontes’ command. Her name tells us she is lost;
yet her survival here as Antigonus himself meets violent death is a miracle.
A shepherd comes on, finds the baby and ‘take[s] it up for pity’ (3.3.72–3);
at which point his son comes on, amazed by the dark side of this wonder: ‘I
have seen two such sights, by sea and by land! But I am not to say it is a
sea, for it is now the sky. Betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a
bodkin’s point’ (3.3.79–81). Why does Shakespeare give the shepherd’s son
all these words to say that he has seen something amazing? All he is saying,
in fact, is that the sea meets the sky at the horizon, which is as ordinary and
predictable an observation as can be. And yet in context the words seem
to take on an emblematic quality, because they speak of two radically dif-
ferent things coming together, and of the way this can seem both natural
and miraculous. The astounded shepherd’s son thus becomes an unwitting
mouthpiece for a statement that sums up tragicomedy as a genre, through
the coming together, the collision even, of tragedy and comedy.
The two things the shepherd’s son has seen by sea and land are the ship-
wreck and the bear eating Antigonus, and his story brings together the cries
of both the shipwrecked souls and Antigonus, as well as the roaring of the
sea and of the bear: ‘first, how the poor souls roared, and the sea mocked
them, and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him, both
roaring louder than the sea or weather’ (3.3.91–4). The tone of this is hard

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to judge: it somehow sounds both innocent and callous. Even more difficult
in tone, however, is the son’s response to his father’s question of when this
happened: ‘Now, now. I have not winked since I saw these sights. The men
are not yet cold under water, nor the bear half dined on the gentleman.
He’s at it now’ (3.3.96–8). The idea that the bear is still ‘at it now’, and
indeed the very terminology of ‘dini[ng] on the gentleman’, is simultane-
ously horrifying, grotesque and ludicrous. An audience barely knows how
to respond, until the shepherd himself dispels that vision of what is offstage
with a reminder of the heart-warming sight that is onstage, and in terms
that again emphasize the coming together of like with unlike, of birth with
death: ‘Heavy matters, heavy matters. But look thee here, boy. Now bless
thyself. Thou metst with things dying, I with things new-born. Here’s a sight
for thee’ (3.3.103–5). This is again an epiphanic moment, representing the
classic tragicomic move from death to life.2

Tragicomedy
As the title of this chapter makes clear, there is no real critical consensus on
what generic name to give to the group of Shakespeare’s late plays compris-
ing Pericles, Cymbeline, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. Approaches that
concentrate on their tragicomic aspect usually cite definitions of tragicom-
edy originating with either the Italian poet and dramatist Battista Guarini or
his English follower, John Fletcher. Guarini, whose play Il Pastor Fido was
first printed in 1590 and translated into English in 1602, defined tragicom-
edy as ‘mixed … not so grand that it rises to the tragic nor so humble that
it approaches the comic’.3 Fletcher, whose play The Faithful Shepherdess
(1608) was an adaptation of Guarini’s, wrote that ‘A tragicomedy is not so
called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which
is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to
make it no comedy’.4
Though these definitions have an obvious bearing on Shakespeare’s late
plays, they make problematic starting-points for a discussion of them. Already,
from our brief look at The Winter’s Tale, we can see that it does not ‘want
deaths’. Nor is Antigonus’ death the only one in the play, which also sets a
son who dies against the daughter who miraculously lives. Chronology is an
issue too. Shakespeare’s Pericles may well predate The Faithful Shepherdess
by a year or so; the term ‘tragicomedy’ in English was in use from at least
Sidney’s deploring of ‘mongrel tragic-comedy’ in his Apology for Poetry (cir-
culating in manuscript from the early 1580s);5 and the word ‘tragicomical’
is recorded from 1567. Nor was the concept of tragicomedy in England
prior to Fletcher a matter of pure theory. Already by the 1560s plays such

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 Shakespeare’s tragicomedies

as Damon and Pythias (1564–5) and Apius and Virginia (c. 1567) had been
defined as ‘tragical comed[ies]’. Furthermore, if we apply the definitions of
Fletcher and Guarini to Shakespeare’s plays, we find that they fit plays writ-
ten considerably earlier than either Pericles or The Faithful Shepherdess, or
even than the English translation of Il Pastor Fido (1602).6 Tragedy seems
narrowly avoided, for example, in The Merchant of Venice (1596–7) and
Much Ado About Nothing (1598). Indeed, in that both these plays ‘want
deaths’ but ‘bring some near it’, they arguably fit Fletcher’s definition of
tragicomedy better than the later group. Shakespeare’s fellow-actors, John
Heminges and Henry Condell, classified Cymbeline as a tragedy when they
included it in the First Folio.

Romance
So tragicomedy as a category does not define this group in a way that dis-
tinguishes them generically from all Shakespeare’s other plays. What, then,
are the distinguishing features of these plays that both bring them together
as a group and differentiate them from earlier tragicomic forms? Part of
the answer is ‘romance’: the kind of plot that included lost children, mis-
taken identity, gods and prophecies and miraculous reunion. Ben Jonson,
Shakespeare’s contemporary, had various contemptuous phrases for this
form of writing: he called Pericles a ‘mouldy tale’; he poured scorn on ‘Tales,
Tempests, and such-like drolleries’; and he was self-congratulatory about
his own refusal to ‘make nature afraid in his plays’.7 But the tradition ran
long and deep in English writing, which in turn drew on classical Greek
comedy and romance, often via French and Italian intermediary sources.
English plays had long drawn on romance traditions for plot material;
even religious drama in the form of miracle plays had affiliations to secular
romance; and some of Shakespeare’s most famous and respected contempo-
raries, such as Sidney and Spenser, had displayed a strong preference for it in
non-dramatic poetry during the closing decades of the sixteenth century. In
introducing the fourteenth-century poet John Gower as a choric figure into
Pericles Shakespeare was acknowledging the ancient roots of this tradition
in English writing.
Even the category of romance, however, first used by Edward Dowden
to group the four late plays in 1875, does not quite single out these plays
against any others in the Shakespearian canon.8 Many earlier comedies
have elements of romance: The Comedy of Errors (1594) reunites lost chil-
dren and their parents; a god descends in As You Like It (1599); and mis-
taken identity is a recurrent comic motif. Yet the combination of romantic
elements and tragicomic structure together does go some way to identify

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and differentiate the grouping. Having said that, romance also pulls against
the way tragicomedy is developing in the seventeenth century by effectively
banning satire, which was becoming associated with tragicomedy. Two
companies were especially known for producing tragicomic plays in the
early seventeenth century: the King’s Men and the Children of the Queen’s
Revels. As Lucy Munro’s recent study of the Queen’s Revels Children high-
lights, satire is the hallmark of their style, and some of the tragicomedy
performed by the King’s Men, notably Fletcher’s, shares this same satiric
perspective. Shakespeare’s tragicomedy differs from them in its refusal of
satire. Though it produces moments that hover around the grotesque or
burlesque and take risks with tone, it pulls back from the cynical world-
view of satire.
The description of Antigonus being eaten by a bear, as we have seen, is
brought away from potential burlesque and back to romance by the shepherd’s
turn towards the abandoned baby; and other moments that seem to be simi-
larly heading towards the anti-romance of parody are also arrested rather than
developed. The moment when Innogen discovers the headless Cloten lying
next to her and mistakes it for her beloved husband, Posthumus, is one such
moment. Early modern and contemporary audiences alike must surely cringe
as Innogen first touches the body of her clownish step-brother, then claims to
recognize each of his limbs one by one, and finally falls upon him in a mis-
taken embrace (Cymbeline, 4.2.295–332). But the martial entry of the Romans
swiftly cuts across it with serious matter, and it is here that the soothsayer tells
of the vision which, fulfilled, is to become the apotheosis of the play:

Last night the very gods showed me a vision –

…
I saw Jove’s bird, the Roman eagle, winged
From the spongy south to this part of the west,
There vanish’d in the sunbeams …
(4.2.348–52)

The soothsayer reads the meaning of this to be that the Roman army will be
successful; but in fact the descent of Jupiter in the play heralds a sequence
that marks out the fulfilment of another prophecy. While Posthumus lies on
the ground, visually echoing the supine bodies of the scene above (where
Innogen sleeps and Cloten lies dead), he has a vision that culminates in Jupiter
descending on an eagle to literally lay the truth on Posthumus’ breast. On
waking, Posthumus reads the true prophecy that foresees his reconciliation
with Innogen as the jointing of a lopped branch onto the old stock of the
tree. Posthumus, unlike the soothsayer, does not try to unravel its meaning,
but simply recognizes its likeness to his life (5.5.241–3). Typically for these

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 Shakespeare’s tragicomedies

plays, true reconciliation is epiphanic and imagistic, seeming to stop time. As

Innogen embraces him, Posthumus speaks briefly, echoing the terms of the
tablet of truth: ‘Hang there like fruit, my soul, / Till the tree die’ (5.6.263–4).
Thus the parodic moment of Innogen’s misrecognition leads directly into the
visionary path towards true recognition and reconciliation.

The gods
The role of the gods in these plays brings them together as a group and
distinguishes them to some degree from Shakespeare’s other plays. Though
the god Hymen descends in As You Like It, as noted above, that moment is
interestingly different from the descent of Jupiter in Cymbeline. Above all,
Hymen’s descent is confirmatory and celebratory, not interventionist. By
the time Hymen enters, with ‘Still music’ (As You Like It, 5.4.97), Rosalind
has already resolved most of the difficulties and prepared the ground for
this climactic set of unions. Indeed, even though Hymen enters singing
with Rosalind and Celia, it is again Rosalind who begins the speeches that
script coming together (‘To you I give myself …’ 5.4.106), and Hymen has
to silence her in order to take on the role of celebrant: ‘Peace, ho, I bar
confusion. / ’Tis I must make conclusion / Of these most strange events’
(5.4.114–16).
In Cymbeline, by contrast, Posthumus is imprisoned and despairing at the
point where Jupiter appears, and Jupiter’s role is decisive: ‘He shall be lord
of Lady Innogen, / And happier much by his affliction made’ (5.5.201–2).
Diana’s appearance in a dream to Pericles is decisive, like Jupiter’s, bringing
a clear instruction designed to bring about reunion:
My temple stands in Ephesus. Hie thee thither,
And do upon mine altar sacrifice.
There when my maiden priests are met together,
At large discourse thy fortunes in this wise:
With a full voice before the people all,
Reveal how thou at sea didst lose thy wife.
To mourn thy crosses, with thy daughter’s, call
And give them repetition to the life.
Perform my bidding, or thou liv’st in woe;
Do’t, and rest happy, by my silver bow.
Awake, and tell thy dream.
(21.225–35)

The gods speak even more decisively, at a much earlier point, and with nega-
tive impact, in The Winter’s Tale, and it is Leontes’ refusal to accept their

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word that sets near-tragedy in motion. The oracle pronounces Hermione

chaste; Leontes simply dismisses this statement as ‘mere falsehood’ (3.2.139);
and the result is the immediate death of his son. Leontes recognizes this as a
punishment from the gods: ‘Apollo’s angry, and the heavens themselves / Do
strike at my injustice’ (3.2.143–4).
The Tempest has similarities with all three other late plays and with As
You Like It. When the gods descend to bless the union of Ferdinand and
Miranda, their appearance, like Hymen’s, seems affirmative, but with one
important difference: they are explicitly summoned by Prospero. Indeed,
they may not even be gods at all, but rather mere effects of Prospero’s magic.
In speaking to Ariel, Prospero describes the vision of the gods he is about to
summon as ‘Some vanity of mine art’ (4.1.41).
In all four plays the descent of gods allows for some spectacular stage
effects, and the influence of court masque on these late plays is widely rec-
ognized. Court entertainment had always had the resource and potential for
highly elaborate staging, and Henry VIII had spent lavishly on costumes,
props and effects for masques and disguisings. Royal entries, such as coro-
nation processions and receptions of visiting monarchs, had used descent
machinery since at least the fourteenth century, and Henslowe had installed
a descent mechanism at the Rose in 1595, so the technology for such effects
had long been in place.9 Elizabeth, who was more concerned to save money
than to spend it, relied routinely on playing companies like the Chamberlain’s
Men to entertain the court. From 1603, however, when James VI of Scotland
acceded to the English throne, taking the Chamberlain’s Men directly into
his service as the King’s Men, the Twelfth Night masque again became a
highlight of the court year, and money was poured into creating ever more
astounding spectacles. Here is just one example of the kinds of effect Inigo
Jones was developing in the early years of James’ reign. Ben Jonson, who
wrote the text for The Masque of Queens, describes how the scene moves
from a witches’ dance to the House of Fame:

In the heat of their dance, on the sudden, was heard a sound of loud music, as if
many instruments had made one blast; with which not only the hags themselves
but the hell into which they ran quite vanished and the whole face of the scene
altered, scarce suffering the memory of any such thing. But in the place of it,
appeared a glorious and magnificent building figuring the House of Fame, in the
upper part of which were discovered the twelve masquers sitting upon a throne
triumphal erected in form of a pyramid and circled with all store of light.10

In creating spectacles such as the descent of Jupiter on an eagle or the

vanishing banquet in The Tempest, therefore, Shakespeare was bringing to
popular audiences a taste of the latest fashion in court performance.

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 Shakespeare’s tragicomedies

Spectacle in stillness
Yet these plays also bring to the fore stage effects which are simultaneously
inspired by masque yet antithetical to its values. Their revelatory moments
are by no means all dominated by stage machinery and special effects. One of
the characteristic features of the late plays is the creation of held tableaux, of
spell-binding moments that engage the audience’s gaze and attention in a very
intense way without any recourse to mechanical spectacle. These moments
are created almost entirely by actors’ bodies used in particular ways in the
stage space of the Globe or Blackfriars. When Prospero ‘discovers Ferdinand
and Miranda, playing at chess’ (The Tempest, 5.1.174) he may be pulling
back a curtain in front of the discovery space at the rear centre of the stage,
so that the framing of a stage within a stage works in conjunction with the
still bodies of Ferdinand and Miranda to construct the lovers as an emblem-
atic tableau. Even more simply, when Prospero solemnly abjures his ‘rough
magic’, it is the actor’s command of the space and the powerfully assertive
and lyrical language he utters that primarily create the tableau effect (5.1.50).
In addition, the props of staff and book, and the ‘solemn music’ that follows,
underline the sense that this is a moment of epiphany (5.1.58).
‘Solemn’ or ‘soft’ music are frequent accompaniments at such moments,
sometimes substituting for speech and giving the moment a prolonged sense
of stillness that seems to take it out of time. Pericles is especially full of
dumb-shows, the effect of which is cumulative. There is no space here to
examine this feature of the play very fully, but we may look selectively at the
extended final sequence, beginning with Pericles’ mourning of his seemingly
dead daughter, Marina.

Enter Pericles, at one door with all his train, Cleon and Dionyza [in mourn-
ing garments] at the other. Cleon [draws the curtain and] shows Pericles the
tomb, whereat Pericles makes lamentation, puts on sack-cloth, and in a mighty
passion departs. (Pericles, 18.23)

The tableau of Pericles wasting away with grief, ‘undecent nails on his
fingers, and attired in sack-cloth’ is re-presented in Scene 21, and he is
described there as one who has become nothing but an unmoving and silent
tableau: ‘A man who for this three months hath not spoken / To anyone,
nor taken sustenance / But to prorogue his grief’ (21.18–20). Marina, not
known to be his daughter, is brought to him as one likely to be a healing
presence, and she sings to him, bringing him to speech after long silence.
An initially halting and arhythmic dialogue gradually becomes more lyrical
as recognition slowly comes closer, and Marina’s past is recalled as a silent
tableau that parallels Pericles’ own:

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 Janette Dillon

She would never tell

Her parentage. Being demanded that,
She would sit still and weep.
(21.175–7)

At the same time, the quality of Pericles’ own stillness is changing:

O Helicanus, strike me, honoured sir,
Give me a gash, put me to present pain,
Lest this great sea of joys rushing upon me
O’erbear the shores of my mortality
And drown me with their sweetness!
(21.178–82)

The culmination of the sequence, when Pericles finally accepts the kneeling
Marina as his daughter, brings music that only Pericles can hear:
pericles But what music?
helicanus My lord, I hear none.
pericles None? The music of the spheres! List, my Marina.
lysimachus [aside to the others] It is not good to cross him. Give him
way.
pericles Rar’st sounds. Do ye not hear?
lysimachus Music, my lord?
pericles I hear most heav’nly music!
It raps me unto list’ning, and thick slumber
Hangs upon mine eyelids. Let me rest. (21.213–21)
[He sleeps]
Editors vary as to where they script stage directions for music to play;
but the absence of stage directions here from the quarto text of 1609 sug-
gests that Pericles may have no audible music at all at this point, merely
silence.
The final sequence of The Winter’s Tale, in which the seeming statue of
Hermione comes to life, culminates in music to ‘awake’ Hermione (5.3.98),
but first explicitly scripts silence, as Paulina tells Leontes: ‘I like your
silence; it the more shows off / Your wonder’ (5.3.21–2). And the reunion
of Innogen and Posthumus clearly scripts a silence which Cymbeline finally
interrupts:
posthumus Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die.
cymbeline [to Innogen] How now, my flesh, my child?
What, mak’st thou me a dullard in this act?
Wilt thou not speak to me? (Cymbeline, 5.6.263–6)

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 Shakespeare’s tragicomedies

Lyric mode
The pointing of these tableaux with music, silence and intensely poignant
speech is indicative of a pervasive lyrical texture to the plays. This is partly
a matter of language; partly a matter of music and song; and partly a mat-
ter of setting. Lyrical language is evident much more widely than merely in
these moments of tableaux. We might quote speech upon speech to make this
point, but perhaps one of the most memorably lyrical is Caliban’s account of
the island in The Tempest:
Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked
I cried to dream again.
(3.2.130–8)

Its lyricism stands out in the memory for two reasons: because it is spoken
by a brutish creature and because its subject is the mysterious musicality of
the island. Even more telling, perhaps, in relation to tragicomic form, is the
paradoxical lyricism of Caliban’s description of how he first learned lan-
guage. It is embedded in contraries, beginning with the totally banal: ‘I must
eat my dinner’, continuing with piercing and rhythmic sweetness:
This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,
Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
Water with berries in’t, and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night; and then I lov’d thee,
And showed thee all the qualities o’the’isle,
The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile –

and cutting suddenly to vitriolic abuse:

Cursed be I that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you;
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king, and here you sty me
In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me
The rest o’th’ island. (1.2.335–47)

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Elsewhere in the late plays, as here, language is as mixed in mode as is genre.

Lyrical simplicity contrasts with different kinds of opposite: violence; banal-
ity; and knotty complexity.
Song, though very often present in Shakespeare’s plays across the whole
period of his writing, has a resonant and often symbolic quality in these late
plays. Not only the words of Ariel’s song, ‘Full Fathom Five’, for example,
but also the way Ferdinand hears it, make the case for this peculiar reso-
nance. The song itself is very brief, but looks forward as well as back in the
play, to transformations, healing and enrichment yet to come, as well as to
losses and changes past:
Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.
(1.2.400–6)

Even more enchanting and strange, however, is Ferdinand’s attempt to

articulate the inexplicable way he ‘hears’ this music:
Where should this music be? I’th’ air or th’earth?
It sounds no more; and sure it waits upon
Some god o’th’ island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the King my father’s wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air. Thence I have followed it –
Or it hath drawn me rather. But ’tis gone.
No, it begins again.
(1.2.391–9)

The Kneehigh production of Cymbeline in 2006 built on and extended this

pervasive texture of music and song, but none of the company’s additions
could match the sheer beauty of the famous dirge ‘Fear no more the heat o’
the sun’, sung over an Innogen thought, as she herself thought Posthumus,
to be dead (4.2.259–82).

Settings
Settings contribute to the lyrical quality of these plays, but they also make
a more complex and wide-ranging contribution than this and serve to mark
important distinctions between these plays, as well as some elements in

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 Shakespeare’s tragicomedies

common. The island setting of The Tempest provides the most consistently
lyrical environment, as Caliban’s description above emphasizes. It is not
merely pastoral, but also magical and inherently musical. This could not be
said of any of the other plays in this group, where pastoral usually has a part
to play, but where its part can be more or less extended and lighter or darker.
In all these other three plays, there are important shifts of location, linked
to a change in both plot direction and mood. The Tempest, unusually for
Shakespeare, observes the unities of time and place by occupying a fictional
period of a few hours in a single location. Its shift of location, framed as it
is by a past and future in Naples, is merely implied.
In The Winter’s Tale, the scene where the shepherds find Leontes’ aban-
doned daughter marks the shift of location from the court of Sicily to the
imaginary seashore of Bohemia. The place-names are evocative and roman-
tic, not based on any real reference to the countries concerned. As critics
have often noted since, Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic) has no
seashore. But the move from the increasingly dark and poisonous world of
Leontes’ court to ‘the white sheet bleaching on the hedge’ (4.3.5) and the
harvest home of a simple country life is necessary in order for the plot to
turn around and the move towards reconciliation and forgiveness to begin.
So too is the long gap in time between Acts 3 and 4, a strategy wholly
opposite to that of the unities that structure The Tempest, and the butt of
Jonson’s jokes.11 The distinction between the two worlds, however, is nei-
ther simple nor total. The seeming idyll of Bohemian rural life also includes
the rogue peddler Autolycus, who merrily cuts the purses of the innocent
country-dwellers as they buy his goods and terrifies the shepherds with an
extended fantasy of the punishments that await them:
He has a son, who shall be flayed alive, then ’nointed over with honey, set
on the head of a wasps’ nest, then stand till he be three-quarters-and-a-dram
dead, then recovered again with aqua-vitae, or some other hot infusion, then,
raw as he is, and in the hottest day prognostication proclaims, shall he be set
against a brick wall, the sun looking with a southward eye upon him, where
he is to behold him with flies blown to death.
(The Winter’s Tale 4.4.758–65)

Even country lives are tainted by fear, corruption and deceit. It is Autolycus
who sings the song that celebrates ‘the white sheet bleaching on the hedge’.
Similarly Wales, in Cymbeline, though a place of refuge from the wicked
court, is also wild and fearful. The young princes, brought up in this wilder-
ness far from court, combine gentleness with roughness:
They are as gentle
As zephyrs blowing below the violet,

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 Janette Dillon

Not wagging his sweet head; and yet as rough,

Their royal blood enchafed, as the rud’st wind
That by the top doth take the mountain pine
And make him stoop to th’ vale.
(4.2.172–7)

Their life has sweetness and nobility, but their cave-dwelling is ‘pinch-
ing’ and often ‘freezing’ (3.3.38–9). Innogen sets out for it as a ‘blessed’
place, wondering ‘how Wales was made so happy’ as to own the ‘haven’
(Milford Haven) that will receive her beloved Posthumus, but the letter
from Posthumus that invites her to follow him there is in fact designed to
create the opportunity for Pisanio to kill her.
Pericles moves restlessly from one location to another, ranging over
Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus and Mytilene. Each journey
holds out the possibility of happiness or rest, but the threat of corruption
or distress regularly contests that outcome. There is no binary opposition of
court and country, but instead a peripatetic structure that emphasizes the
idea of life as a journey and recalls the shape of medieval romance more
strongly than does any of the other three plays in this group. Thaisa’s death
takes place at sea, as the journey moves from one place to another; and, if
there is a parallel in this play to the seeming idyll of the natural or magical
world, it is the briefly represented Ephesus, where Thaisa’s coffin washes up
and the physician Cerimon uses his skills to enable her to ‘blow / Into life’s
flow’r again’ (13.92–3).

Realism and romance

A world where the seeming dead come back to life and where physicians,
magicians and resourceful women are all represented as having the power to
avert tragedy may seem to be a world where romance, with all its implica-
tions of fantasy and implausibility, truly holds sway. Yet these plays are also
grounded in the real world in important ways. All share some interest in
political questions of rule, in the rights and duties of rulers and subjects and
the possibility of resistance, and all, though they may resolve difficulties in
fantastical ways, take a hard look at the difficulties themselves first.
The image of the state is present and insistent from the opening scene of
The Tempest. Despite the heightened realism of its staging (the stage direc-
tion has the mariners enter ‘wet’ (1.1.46)), the ship would almost certainly
also have been read allegorically by an early modern audience as a ship of
state. Certainly it presents conflicted relations between different levels of
social hierarchy. The aristocrats attempt to tell the sailors their business and
the Boatswain roughly orders them to stay below and stop interfering with

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 Shakespeare’s tragicomedies

the task of keeping the ship afloat. The emblematic quality of the conflict
is acutely focused in the Boatswain’s rhetorical question, referring to the
waves: ‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’ (1.1.15–16).12 As
the play continues, first revealing the history of Prospero’s rule of Milan,
moving on to examine the power relations between Prospero and the full
range of others on the island and creating opportunities for speeches such
as Gonzalo’s imagining of the ideal state, its concern with political realities
cannot be missed.
Cymbeline, overtly located in ancient Britain at a time when James I was
trying to use the name of Britain to force political unity between England
and Scotland, and giving Innogen and Posthumus the names of the wife and
grandfather of Brut, the mythical founder of Britain, is the most overtly top-
ical of these plays.13 Its movement towards peace with the Roman Empire,
furthermore, also allows it to pay homage to James’ pacifist foreign policy
and to flatter his preference for an imperial image of power. James was
known to favour representations of his reign that figured him as a new
Augustus, and quasi-imperial arches built for his postponed coronation
entry into London in 1604 had added a new element to the English tradition
of royal entries. The role of Wales in the play was probably even more spe-
cific to the moment of Cymbeline’s production c. 1610, since James’ eldest
son, Henry, was invested with great ceremonial as Prince of Wales in June
of that year. The play’s topicality, however, does not especially entail a more
realist slant, and its political dimension, such as it is, is more narrative and
allusive than propagandist.
Constance Jordan has argued that Pericles also engages with James’ con-
frontations with parliament over his wish to create the political entity of
Great Britain, but the case is less persuasive than for Cymbeline.14 Pericles,
as the truest inheritor of romance-form among these plays, is also the least
concerned with political questions. This is not to say, however, that it is not
grounded in the real world. Its brothel scene (19) is as gross as anything
Shakespeare ever wrote, and brings the threat of worldly corruption into
shockingly close proximity to the virgin purity of Marina. It is a juxtaposi-
tion akin to Innogen’s encounter with Cloten’s body or Miranda’s memory
of Caliban’s attempted rape, and all three moments are characteristic of
tragicomedy. But in presenting Marina’s purity as triumphant over this bru-
tal encounter, the scene is also reminiscent of the medieval genre of the
saint’s play, which in turn has a natural affinity with romance. The Digby
Mary Magdalen (1480–1520), for example, displays Mary’s sanctity through
an extended journey that has much in common with that of Pericles, and
includes a tavern scene (where Mary succumbs to, rather than resists, the
temptation to lechery), a heathen temple and a storm at sea in which the

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 Janette Dillon

mother dies giving birth and is cast off upon a rock. Paradoxically, however,
it may have been precisely this seemingly apolitical echo of an archaic form
of religious drama that gave the play its strongest political potential at the
time. In 1609–10 it was performed by recusant actors in Yorkshire, almost
certainly highlighting its ties to the old religion with deliberately inflamma-
tory intent.15
The Winter’s Tale, though at first glance seemingly as atopical as Pericles,
presents an unflinching picture of the consequences of absolutism at a time
when King James was locking horns with the English parliament over the
power and status of the monarch. Leontes’ irrational jealousy may seem a
purely personal matter, but as the play progresses and he reaches the point
of openly defying the law, in the form of the oracle, it becomes evident that
when a ruler is the perpetrator of such folly, there are consequences for the
whole country. And this play, though its representation of reconciliation
and forgiveness is perhaps the most magical and overwhelming of all these
late plays, also departs from them in representing deaths that truly are final.
Though Hermione returns and Perdita is found, Mamillius and Antigonus
do not return, and their deaths are not forgotten. As noted above, it is thus
technically not a tragicomedy.16 Yet the breathtaking quality of its return to
comic form at the end is the measure of its real engagement with the form. It
is as though in this play Shakespeare really wants to go as close as he dares
to tragic form in order to see whether he can still make a comic resolution
work. Literal, unresurrected death surely constitutes the hardest and least
romanticized encounter with the real world; but even this, this play seems to
say, can be overcome. This is the ultimate marriage of realism and romance,
and the ultimate test of how far the stage can go to transform audiences’
ways of seeing the world. ‘It is required’, as Paulina says, ‘You do awake
your faith’ (5.3.94–5). The play consciously offers up romance, but invites
us to take it for possibility:
That she is living,
Were it but told you, should be hooted at
Like an old tale. But it appears she lives.
(5.3.116–18)

The echo here of the only scene in which Mamillius plays an active part,
telling old tales to his mother, is not accidental. Mamillius’ line ‘A sad tale’s
best for winter’ (2.1.27) is deliberately written to signify beyond its immedi-
ate context. In recalling it here, the play is gracefully remembering the child
who has to die to bring his father to his senses and seeking to incorporate
his death into the renewal of life now celebrated in this most daring of
tragicomedies.

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 Shakespeare’s tragicomedies

N OTES
1 Teresa Grant, following a suggestion by George F. Reynolds, has argued that
two real polar bear cubs were in theatrical use in 1610–11. See ‘White Bears
in Mucedorus, The Winter’s Tale, and Oberon, The Fairy Prince’, in Notes and
Queries, 48 (2001), 311–13.
2 As Andrew Gurr has shown, furthermore, the shepherd’s words echo Evanthius’
well-known definition of tragedy and comedy: in tragoedia fugienda vita, in
comedia capessanda exprimitur (‘in tragedy the ending of life is expressed, in
comedy, the beginning’). See ‘The Bear, the Statue, and Hysteria in The Winter’s
Tale’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 421.
3 Lucy Munro, citing Guarini’s ‘Compendio’, in Children of the Queen’s Revels: A
Jacobean Theatre Repertory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
p. 105.
4 The Faithful Shepherdess, ed. Florence Ada Kirk (New York: Garland, 1980), To
the Reader, ll. 22–6.
5 An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd (Manchester and New
York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 3rd rev. edn. R. W. Maslen, p.112.
6 Il Pastor Fido was first printed in 1590 and must have been known to some in
England before Edward Dymock translated it in 1602. But 1602 was also a key
moment in terms of the dissemination of the Italian text, since it was published
that year in an edition that included engravings, extensive notes and a treatise on
tragicomedy.
7 ‘Ode to Himself’, in Ian Donaldson (ed.), Poems (London: Oxford University
Press, 1975), p. 355; Bartholomew Fair, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Manchester:
University of Manchester Press, 2000), ‘Induction’, ll. 132–3.
8 Edward Dowden, Shakspere: A Critical Study of His Mind and Art (1875;
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948).
9 See Janette Dillon, ‘Chariots and Cloud Machines: Gods and Goddesses on
Early English Stages’, in Lloyd Edward Kermode, Jason Scott-Warren and
Martine van Elk (eds.), Tudor Drama before Shakespeare 1485–1590: New
Directions for Research, Criticism, and Pedagogy (Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2004), pp. 111–29.
10 Ben Jonson, The Masque of Queens, in Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of
Plays and Entertainments, ed. Arthur Kinney (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 2nd
edn, ll. 358–68.
11 In the Prologue to Every Man in his Humour, written for the revised edition of the
play published in 1616, Jonson made clear his dislike of dramatists who ‘make
a child, now swaddled, to proceed / Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and
weed, / Past threescore years’: Every Man in his Humour, ed. Gabriele Bernhard
Jackson (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969), ll. 7–9; cf. The
Magnetic Lady, ed. Peter Happé (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2000), Act 2, Chorus, ll. 15–17.
12 David Norbrook takes this quotation as the title for his very thoughtful explora-
tion of some of the political nuances of the play: ‘“What Cares These Roarers
for the Name of King?”: Language and Utopia in The Tempest’, in Gordon
McMullan and Jonathan Hope (eds.), The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare
and After (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 21–45.

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 Janette Dillon

13 See Martin Butler (ed.), Cymbeline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2005), p. 37. As Butler points out, Shakespeare drew these names and others in
the play from Holinshed’s account of the founding of Britain.
14 Shakespeare’s Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca, NY and
London: Cornell University Press, 1997), chapter 2.
15 Information about these actors and their repertory comes from a Star Chamber
case brought by a puritan Yorkshireman against his Catholic neighbour, in
whose home the actors performed. See further Suzanne Gossett’s introduction to
her edition of the play (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004), pp. 87–8.
16 It is not the only one of these four plays to represent a death (Cloten dies in
Cymbeline), but the death of innocent characters, and especially the death of a
child, creates a more problematic tone generically than the death of a villain.

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