James was writing as a late nineteenth-century novelist. Not so very many years before this, in the 1870s, another Victorian, Edward Dowden, was the first to designate Shakespeare's Last Plays as 'Romances'. By then the word had acquired a lot of semantically blurred luggage since the time it simply meant a tale in a vernacular Romantic language--'Isn't it romantic?' is not the sort of question worth going into here. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans used the word of stories but not of dramas. Shakespeare never used the word at all--not of plays, not of anything.
William Shakespeare's last four plays carry us across space and time-from classical antiquity to Roman Britain to pagan Sicily to a remote island-and they move as well into a wilder geography of the imagination, one dominated by the wondrous and fantastical, and by reconciliation and renewal. Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are famously fraught with shipwrecks and adventures, magic and disguise, speaking statues and ethereal spirits, tragic deceptions and moving reunions, and they number among the most enduringly delightful of Shakespeare's works. The texts of the plays, authoritatively edited by Sylvan Barnet, are supplemented here with textual notes, a bibliography, a detailed chronology of Shakespeare's life and times, and a substantial introduction in which acclaimed scholar Tony Tanner discusses each play individually and in the context of Shakespeare's oeuvre.
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William Shakespeare's last four plays carry us across space and time-from classical antiquity to Roman Britain to pagan Sicily to a remote island-and they move as well into a wilder geography of the imagination, one dominated by the wondrous and fantastical, and by reconciliation and renewal. Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest are famously fraught with shipwrecks and adventures, magic and disguise, speaking statues and ethereal spirits, tragic deceptions and moving reunions, and they number among the most enduringly delightful of Shakespeare's works. The texts of the plays, authoritatively edited by Sylvan Barnet, are supplemented here with textual notes, a bibliography, a detailed chronology of Shakespeare's life and times, and a substantial introduction in which acclaimed scholar Tony Tanner discusses each play individually and in the context of Shakespeare's oeuvre.
Hinweis: Dieser Artikel kann nur an eine deutsche Lieferadresse ausgeliefert werden.