Rehearsing Happiness: Shakespearean Romance

Rehearsing Happiness: Shakespearean Romance

James Simpson (Harvard University)

• Wednesday 4 March, 4.00-5:30pm
• 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne

Abstract

After immersion in tragedy of new and different kinds between 1600-1606, Shakespeare did something deeply counter-intuitive: he reopened sources of comedic joy from earlier in his career to compose a sequence of happily-ending plays: Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest. He wrote, in sum, a sustained series of romances. Insofar as they are romances, they point to a fundamental, pre-modern generic continuity with an earlier set of plays, the so-called “comedies,” especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595), As You Like It (1599-1600), and Twelfth Night (1601), from before the tragic phase of Shakespeare’s career. Those earlier plays are preparations for the plays known as “romances,” just as Pericles is a preparative of sorts. I devote zdiscussion in the first section of the present paper to the theme of rehearsal for happiness in the co-called “comedies,” and in particular in As You Like It, before turning to Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1607) as a generic preparative for happiness against all the odds.

James Simpson

James Simpson was educated at the University of Melbourne, with further degrees from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Research Professor of English at Harvard University, and formerly Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. His more recent books are Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition (Harvard University Press, 2010); Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, co-edited by Brian Cummings (Oxford University Press, 2010); Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism (Harvard University Press, 2019); and The Oxford Chaucer, co-edited with Christopher Cannon (Oxford University Press, 2024).