Shakespeare’s Late Work, and: The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare: Text and Theatrical Technique (review)

Two new books, Shakespeare’s Late Work by Raphael Lyne and The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare by Christopher J. Cobb, are principally formalist studies wedded to traditionalist assumptions. Lyne’s monograph is part of the Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, the purpose of which is “to provide students and teachers with short books on important aspects of Shakespearean criticism” (back jacket). Shakespeare’s Late Work offers a relaxed, entertaining overview, as Lyne nimbly canvasses the dominant formal and thematic features of Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Rather than devote a chapter to each play, Lyne explores the topics of spectacle, redemption, repaired families, restored monarchs, collaborative authorship, and comic antecedents. His tone is temperate and remote and his commentary loose and associative, rather than rigorously developmental—possibly limiting the book’s utility as a teaching tool.

A gifted close reader and theme hunter, Lyne has no grand thesis to propound and offers little that is new in his ambling analysis—perhaps unsurprising in a book aimed at the nonspecialist. Indeed, his principal take on the plays is squarely traditional and idealist: “The romances find hope and consolation in the mercy and grace of God, in the value of family bonds, in the security and rightness of royal power and the political status quo, and in the effectiveness and truth of dramatic representation” (7). Lyne takes pains, however, to read against the grain of his own conservative reading, locating a subversive irony within the plays at odds with their idealized denouements. In his introduction, Lyne works to situate this irony within a philosophical tradition, raising expectations that he will apply the concept systematically in his analysis.

In practice, however, “irony” becomes merely a catchall for whatever incongruity or disjunction strikes Lyne’s fancy, and the arbitrariness of his choices is sometimes confounding. Indeed, one problem with the book is that although better examples might be found, he ponders “subversions” that seem insubstantial or impertinent. In considering the plays’ quasi-religious salvific devices, for instance, Lyne points to passages in Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale that figure grace as heavenly rain and then, as evidence of the plays’ contrarian undertow, finds the same image secularized and undermined in The Tempest, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen. Such a supple close reading is impressive but clearly fails to identify, within a single play, an antiromantic strain strong enough to subvert idealization.

Another limitation of Lyne’s study is its estrangement from poststructuralist criticism. He rarely mentions theory-driven discourse, and when he does the results are not always instructive. For instance, he reduces psychoanalytic criticism to naïve efforts to put Shakespeare—and his characters—on the psychiatrist’s couch. Such an antiquated critique leaves Lyne looking strangely out of touch with contemporary scholarship. Grappling with postmodern commentary and the challenge it offers traditionalist critics—or simply summarizing its contributions to the plays’ critical history—would have increased the currency and relevance of Lyne’s book and expanded its pedagogic value.

Unlike Lyne, Cobb has a case to make, one rooted even more emphatically in traditionalist paradigms and one that would consequently benefit even more from addressing critical trends inhospitable to it. Like critics of the 1970s, Cobb examines the romances’ reach for transcendence and, drawing on Sir Philip Sidney’s notion of art as morally edifying, argues for their transformative power. According to Cobb, who might be called a “New Idealist,” the goal of romance from its earliest Elizabethan emanations was to create a more perfect world, to inspire spectators to lead more elevated lives by offering images of heroic virtue convincing enough to invite empathy and emulation.

In an early chapter, Cobb deftly and...