All’s well that ends well: Shakespeare’s Romances as restoratives

This essay was first published online at thespellofwakinghours in December 2013.

Thou met’st with things dying,
I with things newborn.

Old Shepherd, The Winter’s Tale (III.3)

I.

Of the four genres that Shakespeare’s plays can be broken into, it is the final group that is perhaps the most maligned and misunderstood. Yet it is this very same group that perhaps holds the keys to unlocking the humanism at the heart of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. These four plays, the ‘Romances’ – comprising Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest – are generally believed to have been written between 1608 and 1612. When viewed together, they form a valediction to one of the most consistently human and moving bodies of work in the modern-English literature canon, and are characterised by their almost fairytale-like plots and structures, and almost-absurdly contrived turns of events that carry them from one incredible scene to the next. Read as a progressive series of Chinese boxes, this quartet (or quintet, as I shall suggest) forms a coda to the plays, poems and sonnets that have come before them. There is a restoration of balance at their heart, a distinct sense of regaining an inherent aesthetic equilibrium, one that sets out to right wrongs; like Prospero at the conclusion of The Tempest, they seem to be asking readers and audiences alike, “As you from crimes would pardon’d be, Let your indulgence set me free.”

Pericles

Bell Shakespeare, 2009

Photo by Wendy McDougall for Bell Shakespeare.

Wearing its collaboration with percussion group TaikOz on its sleeve, John Bell’s production of Pericles was a whirl of colour and rhythm, full of the ebb and flow or the ocean, bound within a dream of a Japanese fable. From old Gower’s couplet-rhymed prologue and interludes to the raucous and unsettling humour of the brothel scene, to its wonder-upon-wonder conclusion, Julie Lynch’s costumes and set were drenched with an oceanic aesthetic, crowned by the haunting shipwreck scene. If memory serves, this was the first Bell Shakespeare production I saw and still that shipwreck haunts me. It was so simple, so poetic, so visually compelling and clever that you couldn’t help but watch in awe. And while I might not remember much else of the production, I have no doubt the image of Marcus Graham’s Pericles drowning will stay with me for a long time yet.