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Page 10 of 14
Article Outline
Introduction; Life; Publication; The Comedies; The History Plays; The Tragedies; The Late Plays; Late Collaborations; Literary Qualities of the Plays; The Sonnets; Shakespeare Texts and Scholarship; Literary Reputation
Shakespeare’s last tragedies, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens, both set in classical times, were written in 1607 and 1608 and first published in the 1623 Folio. Because their protagonists appear to lack the emotional greatness or tragic stature of the protagonists of the major tragedies, the two plays have an austerity that has cost them the popularity they may well merit. In Coriolanus Shakespeare adapts Plutarch’s account of the legendary Roman hero Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus to the tragedy of a man who is arrogant and rigid, even in his virtue “too noble for the world.” If Coriolanus in his integrity refuses to curry favor with the populace, he also reveals his contempt for the citizenry. The isolating pride of this great but flawed individual prevents him from finding any comfortable place in the community. Finally, he is banished from Rome, and he seeks revenge against the city. Eventually his wife, mother, and young son are sent to plead with him to spare Rome, an action that reveals the relatedness to his others he would deny. The play powerfully explores the conflicts between public and private life, between personal needs and those of the community, and between the pressures of individual honor and family ties and national ties.
Timon of Athens, written about 1608 and first published in the 1623 Folio, is a bitter play about a character who reacts to the ingratitude he discovers by hating all of humanity. Through his generosity to friends and flatterers, Timon bankrupts himself and then finds these same people unwilling to assist him in his poverty. His withering misanthropy follows. As in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare explores the relationships between financial ties and ties of friendship. Shakespeare probably found some of the material for his play in Plutarch’s Lives, where anecdotes about Timon appear in the life of Marc Antony and the life of the Greek politician and general Alcibiades. He perhaps also found material in a dialogue, Timon, the Man-Hater, by the Greek writer Lucian, which had been adapted into an anonymous English play, Timon, and probably performed around 1602 in one of the London law schools, known as Inns of Court.
Toward the end of his career, Shakespeare created several experimental plays that have become known as tragicomedies or romances. These plays differ considerably from Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, being more radical in their dramatic art and showing greater concern with reconciliation among generations. Yet like the earlier comedies the tragicomedies end happily with reunions or renewal. Typically, virtue is sorely tested in the tragicomedies, but almost miraculously succeeds. Through the intervention of magic and art—or their emotional equivalent, compassion, or their theological equivalent, grace—the spectacular triumph of virtue that marks the ends of these plays suggests redemptive hope for the human condition. In these late plays, the necessity of death and sadness in human existence is recognized but located within larger patterns of harmony that suggest we are “led on by heaven, and crowned with joy at last,” as the epilogue of Pericles proposes.
The romantic tragicomedy Pericles, Prince of Tyre was written in 1607 and 1608 and first published in 1609. It concerns the trials and tribulations of the title character, including the painful loss of his wife and the persecution of his daughter. After many exotic adventures, Pericles is reunited with his loved ones; even his supposedly dead wife is discovered to have been magically preserved. The play’s central themes are characteristic of the late plays. Pericles focuses particularly on the relationship between father and daughter, as do The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Its backdrop of the sea also recalls the setting of The Tempest, while its concern with separation and reunion is reminiscent of The Winter’s Tale. However, Pericles is innocent of any blame for the disruption of his family, unlike Leontes’s estrangement from his wife and daughter in The Winter’s Tale. Although Pericles, Prince of Tyre was a great success in its own time, the play exists only in a somewhat corrupted text. It did not appear in the First Folio, and critics have long debated how much of it Shakespeare actually wrote. Some believe the play was a collaborative effort between Shakespeare and another author, usually thought to be George Wilkins. Pericles is based on a medieval legend, Apollonius, Prince of Tyre, which had many English retellings, from Confessio Amantis (Confessions of a Poet) by John Gower in the late 14th century to a prose novella by Laurence Twine written in the 1570s.
Cymbeline was written about 1610 and first published in the 1623 Folio, where it appears as the last of the tragedies. Like the other late plays, Cymbeline responds to the fashion of the time for colorful plots and theatrical display. It is packed with adventure, plot reversals, and dramatic spectacle, and was perhaps intended to exploit the mechanical resources of Blackfriars, the new indoor theater of Shakespeare’s company. One stage direction instructs that “Jupiter descends in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle he throws a thunderbolt.” This bit of staging was far better suited to the indoor theater than to the Globe, where the play was also performed. The play has three interrelated plots: one concerns Imogen’s love for her husband, Posthumus, and his jealousy; another involves the long-lost sons of King Cymbeline; and the third concerns Britain’s challenge to the power of Rome. The three plots marvelously come together in the play’s astonishing conclusion, as characters move from error to truth, from skepticism to faith, and from hatred to love. Confusion and loss are replaced by clarity and gain, as families and nations are reunited and are again at peace. At the play’s end, the comic order is, as the Soothsayer says, “full accomplished.” King Cymbeline ruled at the time of Jesus Christ’s incarnation. If the Soothsayer’s words seem to the echo Christ’s “consummatum est” (it is finished), it may be because the achievement of harmony in the play offers a secular (worldly) reflection of the patterns of Christian salvation history.
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