Romance and Anti-Romance in Shakespeare's The Tempest

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Romance and Anti-Romance in The Tempest

The specific genre classification that one may give to a piece such as The Tempest is often thought to be highly confusing. This is because so many of the qualities of a romance and a realism can be applied to it's words and actions, but at the same time pull away from the very sense of the genre that it is trying to achieve. A romance has many specific qualities, most of which rely on the fancy and imagination of the viewer or the reader. In some circles, it is even known as escapist. Not to the extreme of escapist drama, but certainly free from the boundaries of the mortal world as we know it.

In reading the critical essay entitled "The Tempest as Romance and Anti-Romance by Richard Hillman," I found many important points arguing both for and against the idea that it is a romance. He states quite plainly at the beginning that in any romance audiences expect to move and travel widely to exotic places, different times, and widely throughout the realm of imagination. In his opinion, The Tempest takes these principles farther than any previous works in order to destroy them (Hillman 141). In other words, Shakespeare goes to immense trouble to simply set us up for a great fall. The elements that produce fantasy in this work and make it known that it is a specific genre basically prove to be as insubstantial as Prospero's spirit actors. Hillman claims that these elements can simply vanish into thin air and leave quite disturbing resonances with the audiences after their departure. The Tempest is certainly a play of confinements, contortions, and problems (Hillman 142), that much is fairly obvious from the beginning. The island itself is exotic and fantastic in the beginning, pr...

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...Restoration Tragicomedy." ELH 51.3 (Fall 1984): 447-64.

Eichner, Hans. "The Rise of Modern Science and the Genesis of Romanticism." PMLA 97 (1982): 8-30.

Hillman, Richard The Tempest as Romance and Anti-Romance Shakespeare Quarterly. 34 (1983), 426-432.

Langley, Michael. The Appropriation of the Tempest, 1700-1800." Shakespeare Survey 43 (1990): 99-109.

Maguire, Nancy Klein. Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660-1671. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992.

Nicoll, Allardyce. Dryden as an Adapter of Shakespeare. London: Shakespeare Society, 1922.

Palmer, D.J. Shakespeare's Later Comedies: An Anthology of Modern Criticism. Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971.

Peterson, Douglas L. Time, Tide, and Tempest Berkeley: U of California P, 1970. 1-103.

Spencer, Christopher, Shakespeare: Dream and Tempest. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1965. 109-99.

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