VII.

The Late Plays

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.

A.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

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.

B.

Cymbeline

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.

C.

The Winter’s Tale

The Winter’s Tale was written about 1610 and published for the first time in the 1623 Folio. In The Winter’s Tale, as in Cymbeline, characters suffer great loss and pain and families are driven apart, but by the end most of what has been lost has been regained. This poignant romance revolves around the estrangement of Leontes, King of Sicilia, from his wife and daughter. In a sudden fit of jealousy Leontes becomes convinced that his wife, Hermione, has been conducting an affair with his friend Polixenes. Believing the daughter she bears is not his own, he orders the child to be abandoned abroad. The first three acts deal with Leontes’s jealousy, his persecution of Hermione, the death of his son, Mamillius, the loss of his daughter, Perdita, and the recognition of his error and subsequent repentance. In the middle of the play a speech by Time marks the change of fortunes that lead to the reconciliation and renewal of the final scene, with its spectacular revelation that Hermione, long thought dead, in fact still lives. Shakespeare borrowed the plot for The Winter’s Tale from Pandosto, the Triumph of Time (1588), a romance in prose by English writer Robert Greene.

D.

The Tempest

The Tempest, perhaps the most successful of the tragicomedies, was written about 1611 and published for the first time in the 1623 Folio. The play’s resolution suggests the beneficial effects of the union of wisdom and power. In this play Prospero is deprived of his dukedom by his brother and banished to an island. But he defeats his usurping brother by employing magical powers and furthering a love match between his daughter and the son of the king of Naples. At the play’s conclusion, Prospero surrenders his magical powers. In this surrender some critics have seen Shakespeare’s own relinquishment of the magic of the theater. In spite of the appealing sentimentality of this idea, The Tempest was not Shakespeare’s last play, and it is worth remembering that Prospero gives up his magic only to return to the responsibilities of rule he had previously ignored.

The Tempest is without doubt reflective in tone, especially on the end of life, in its concerns with remembrance and forgiveness, the loss and limitation of power, and the need for the reconciliation of the past, present, and future.