Introduction

Abstract

For some time now it has been recognised that the four plays (excluding Henry VIII) which Shakespeare wrote towards the end of his career as a dramatist — Pericles (1607–8), Cymbeline (1609–10), The Winter’s Tale (1611) and The Tempest (1611) form a relatively homogeneous group. In each of them Shakespeare shows a strong interest in the relations between parents and children and makes use of plots which involve loss and finding again, division and reconciliation, destruction and renewal. For this reason they might be regarded as tragi-comedies, though the term has associations with the artificially strained sensationalism of Beaumont and Fletcher which are inappropriate to the organic nature of Shakespeare’s combining of tragedy and comedy, above all in The Winter’s Tale. As an experienced man of the theatre, and one who strove to please his audience ‘every day’ [Twelfth Night, v i 394], it is reasonable to suppose that he might have been responding to a taste for dramatic piquancy that seems to have characterised a sophisticated section of the early-seventeenth-century theatre public, and this may well have chimed in with the opportunities offered the King’s Men (the company for which Shakespeare was resident playwright) by their recent acquisition of an indoor theatre at Blackfriars.