The Staging of Romance in Late Shakespeare: Text and Theatrical Technique (review)

Christopher Cobb’s interesting and tightly focused book is a detailed analysis of The Winter’s Tale that develops its account of the play into larger contexts of before and after, in Shakespearean and other versions of stage romance. The heart of the book is Cobb’s intense response to the central play and to what he takes to be its implications for the ideal relation romance imagines between dramatic action and its audience. These implications are then projected in two directions: backward, to locate Shakespeare’s work as a development in response to particular currents in the history of English Renaissance stage romance, and forward, to Shakespeare’s own final plays, after The Winter’s Tale. The key play emerges as not just an instance of Shakespeare’s general technique, but as a “breakthrough” play in which certain problems besetting contemporary romance are solved in an exemplary manner. The history of romance is disclosed in this account as for the most part driven by an internal development of dramaturgical techniques in relation to an ethical goal Cobb takes as constitutive of the whole mode.

The central claim grounding Cobb’s book is that romance is a form that seeks, by staging the fortunes of heroic virtue, to elicit in audiences a desire to emulate the work of that virtue in social transformation and in the furthering of what he cites Brecht as calling “life together in society.” This is a brave prospect, relating the experience of art directly to the taste and impetus for social action in its consumers. It has, of course, well-established precedents in the period, as Cobb points out, such as Philip Sidney’s vision of the education of Cyrus. The heroism of romantic action, along these lines, is not so much rhetorically as mimetically, even inspirationally, suasive. Through a process Cobb comes to call a “transfer of sensibility,” protagonists communicate to spectators, both onstage and off, the affirmative power of their virtue, and induce them to act in turn both on behalf of that virtue and in its image. It is the trial of virtue in achieving this “opening” of its audience to “transformation,” against misfortune, malice, or cynicism, that constitutes the history both of the individual stage action and of the dramatic genre. Shakespeare’s return to romance late in his career thus represents a strong recovery of the mode through the solution or banishment of problems that, like the sorrows of its heroes, had beset it in the intervening years. Like Hermione’s statue, romance is restored to life and motion, the stronger if also the warier for its journey. Cobb’s argument is, in effect, a romance of romance.

The Winter’s Tale forms the specimen case of Shakespeare’s—and, one gets the impression, his time’s—achievement in romance as Cobb defines it. Of the six chapters, three concern themselves directly with close reading of the play as it develops opportunities for characters and spectators to act on and influence one another. Leontes, for instance, possessed of the certainty of a “tragic” view of human helplessness in the face of humoral determinism, attempts to enforce this view on Camillo, who responds with the openness to uncertainty and flexibility that is, for Cobb, one of the hallmarks of romantic sensibility (one wonders whether Pyrrhonian skepticism, with its suspension of investment, is therefore a form or attendant of romance). The further action of the play consists then of a struggle between the two poles of tragic closure and romance openness, both on stage and in the relations between stage action and audience experience. At first Leontes’ vision triumphs, closing off Hermione’s virtue from active power by various means. But the second half of the play counters these means specifically, reopening audience and characters to the possibility of change and new action, allowing Hermione to return to a world already transformed to receive her.

Breaking into the...