Foakes - Shakespeare The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays: from satire to celebration

Routledge Library Editions

SHAKESPEARE

Routledge Library Editions Shakespeare

First published in 1971

Reprinted in 2005 by
Routledge
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Transferred to Digital Printing 2008

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1971 R A Foakes

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Shakespeare
ISBN 0-415-35287-8
ISBN 0-415-33086-6 (set)

Miniset: Critical Studies

Series: Routledge Library Editions Shakespeare

Shakespeare

the dark comedies to the last
plays: from satire to celebration

R. A. Foakes

London Routledge & Kegan Paul

First published in 1971
by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.
Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane
London EC4V 5EL
Printed in Great Britain by
T. and A. Constable Ltd., Edinburgh
Set in 11 on 12 pt. Times New Roman
R. A. Foakes 1971
No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without permission from
the publisher, except for the quotation
of brief passages in criticism

ISBN 7100 6963 4

Contents

This study falls into three sections, but is concerned primarily with Shakespeare's development towards and achievement in his last plays. The middle section, on satire and tragedy, provides a bridge between the other two, and is limited in scope to what is essential to the argument. This part could have been developed at much greater length, and I have considered some of the issues raised in it elsewhere, especially in an essay, Tragedy at the Children's Theatres after 1600: A Challenge to the Adult Stage, printed in The Elizabethan Theatre II, edited by David Galloway (1970), pp. 3759.

It would be impossible to record all influences on me, and all my debts, and in the course of the book I have referred only to what is immediately relevant. I would, however, like to express my gratitude to Paula Neuss and to Michael Hatta-way who helped me greatly with their advice.

I am grateful to Messrs Faber & Faber Ltd and to Random House Inc., New York for permission to quote Muse des Beaux Arts from W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems 19271957.

R. A. F.

Some years ago, when I was editing King Henry VIII, I was inclined to accept the conventional treatment of Shakespeare's last plays as myths or symbolic patterns,

By far the biggest and most influential school of criticism we have to consider is a school of many sects. Its members are united in the belief that the Romances are written in a form of other-speaking, and must be translated before their significance can be understood. There is little point at this stage in the waning of the century in speaking once more of the tremendous impact of anthropology and comparative religion on criticism, but it must be said that interest in the last plays would have been a shadow of what it has been in fact, if vegetation rites and royal deaths and resurrections, and the symbolic patterns in which the inner realities of human experience display themselves, had been less enthusiastically received into the small-talk of the age.

A stress on ideas and themes tends to lead our attention away from the plays as drama; and much criticism of them is written as if it were commenting on the ideas in a rather difficult novel, or describing a pattern of symbols.