Romancing Shakespeare

Abstract

Fredric Jameson’s influential study of the romance genre, “Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism” (The Political Unconscious), opens with an epigraph from The Winter’s Tale: “O, she’s warm! / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (5.3.109-11).¹ The speech belongs to Leontes, and it comes at the moment he embraces his revivified wife Hermione, whom both the king and audience had previously imagined dead. The magical return of Hermione bodies forth Jameson’s argument that romance wends its way through literary history, dialectically altering its forms and modes as it reanimates in varying social circumstances. Such a narrative of romance’s development would include “its brief moment on the stage in the twilight of Shakespearean spectacle before being revived in romanticism …” (136).² Jameson’s choice of The Winter’s Tale for his epigraph thus reveals the now definitive association between “Shakespeare” and “Romance” in our ritical vocabulary. He never needs to elaborate on or contextualize this quotation. It is assumed that the reader knows that The Winter’s Tale is romance—one of those plays from “the twilight of Shakespearean spectacle.”