“From strange to stranger”: The Problem of Romance on the Shakespearean Stage by Aileen Young Liu A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English and the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Jeffrey Knapp, Chair Professor Oliver Arnold Professor David Landreth Professor Timothy Hampton Summer 2018 “From strange to stranger”: The Problem of Romance on the Shakespearean Stage © 2018 by Aileen Young Liu 1 Abstract “From strange to stranger”: The Problem of Romance on the Shakespearean Stage by Aileen Young Liu Doctor of Philosophy in English Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies University of California, Berkeley Professor Jeffrey Knapp, Chair Long scorned for their strange inconsistencies and implausibilities, Shakespeare’s romance plays have enjoyed a robust critical reconsideration in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But in the course of reclaiming Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and The Tempest as significant works of art, this revisionary critical tradition has effaced the very qualities that make these plays so important to our understanding of Shakespeare’s career and to the development of English Renaissance drama: their belatedness and their overt strangeness. While Shakespeare’s earlier plays take pains to integrate and subsume their narrative romance sources into dramatic form, his late romance plays take exactly the opposite approach: they foreground, even exacerbate, the tension between romance and drama. Verisimilitude is a challenge endemic to theater as an embodied medium, but Shakespeare’s romance plays brazenly alert their audiences to the incredible. When a corpse is miraculously revived in Pericles, a bystander muses, “Is not this strange?” When Time comes onstage to skip the plot of The Winter’s Tale ahead by sixteen years, he defensively admits that the audience might view this gap as a “crime” against the dramatic unities. After hearing that three Britons defeated the entire Roman army in Cymbeline, a lord says, “This was strange chance.” After a string of improbable events in The Tempest, Alonso complains that “they strengthen / From strange to stranger.” “From strange to stranger”: The Problem of Romance on the Shakespearean Stage offers a novel perspective on these issues by showing how Shakespeare’s romance plays conscientiously revive a dramatic genre that had fallen into disuse and disrepute as an abjuration of the highly coherent and unified dramaturgy that superseded it. Because of its otherworldliness and endlessness, romance was derided by opponents and defenders of imaginative literature as indecorous, incredible, and idle. When combined with drama, which was considered exceptionally suasive and therefore dangerous, romance seemed to its critics to present more than technical problems; it presented ethical problems as well. Although overwhelmingly popular in the early decades of the English playhouses, romance had largely disappeared from the stage by the 1590s as English drama became more sophisticated, unified, and realistic. 2 Looking at moments in Shakespeare’s romance plays that draw our attention to their generic belatedness and formal strangenesses, this dissertation demonstrates that Shakespeare revives romance as a dramatic genre in order to pose ethical questions about community and representation through apparently technical questions of genre and decorum. I show how Pericles argues for the cultivation of virtue through promiscuous mingling; how The Winter’s Tale pathologizes absolute autonomy—which Sir Philip Sidney famously claims in The Defence of Poesy (1595) for the poet and the poet alone—as destructively tyrannical; and how Cymbeline seeks multiplicity and plurality as an alternative to hegemonic unity to fashion the new British empire in relation to Rome. Finally, I explain why The Tempest ostentatiously employs dramatic strategies for unifying a play, only to conclude with Prospero’s gesture of release. Rejecting sophistication, mastery, and hegemonic unity, Shakespeare embraces romance’s expansiveness of time, place, and action, and opens up drama to become more ethically and aesthetically capacious in its representational possibilities. i And this thinking [poetically], fed by the present, works with the “thought fragments” it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living—as “thought fragments,” as something “rich and strange,” and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene. —Hannah Arendt, Introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations ii Table of Contents Acknowledgments iii Introduction iv Romance Onstage in Renaissance England viii Solving the ‘Problem’ of Shakespeare’s Romance Plays xi Overview xv Chapter One: “As good as rotten”: The Virtue of Corruption in Pericles 1 “This was a goodly person / Till the disaster”: Textual and Moral Corruption 4 “A lady / Much less in blood than virtue”: Marina in the Brothel 7 “Wholesome iniquity”: Lysimachus in the Brothel 14 “Thou beget’st him that did thee beget”: Incest and Romance 19 Chapter Two: “That wide gap”: Disunified Time in The Winter’s Tale 27 “Methoughts I did recoil / Twenty-three years”: Mingling Times 31 “That wide gap”: Disunified Time 40 “’Tis time; descend; be stone no more”: Hermione’s Return 44 Chapter Three: “The same dead thing alive”: Plural Perspective in Cymbeline 56 “He yokes / A smiling with a sigh”: Mingling Genres 59 “Rather to wonder at the things you hear / Than to work any”: Genre Confusion 66 “This fierce abridgement”: Collective Storytelling 74 “Although the victor, we submit”: Political Multiplicity 84 Chapter Four: “Single I’ll resolve you”: Unities and Endlessness in The Tempest 98 “Which to you shall seem probable”: The Ends of the Unities 102 “Canst thou remember?”: The Unities 107 “I’ll deliver all”: The End 120 Bibliography 130 iii Acknowledgments First, thank you to Jeff Knapp. I have benefitted enormously from his formidable talents as a thinker, writer, and critic. If my prose is tighter and clearer, if my thinking is sharper and more rigorous, it is thanks to him and his tireless commitment to my work. To Oliver Arnold, who opened many doors for me and saw the potential in every one of my half-formed thoughts. He always made me believe I was up to the task at hand. To Dave Landreth, who helped me get the lay of the land of our discipline and of my own research interests. At crucial junctures of my studies at Berkeley, he guided me through. To Tim Hampton, whose class in my first year of graduate school put me in contact with some of the best thinkers of the European Renaissance and some of the best graduate students at Berkeley. Their company I treasure still. Portions of this project were shared with audiences at the Shakespeare Association of America, the Renaissance Society of America, and Bates College; and with the following groups at the University of California at Berkeley: the Designated Emphasis in Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, Berkeley Connect in English, the Medieval and Early Modern Colloquium, and Jeff Knapp’s dissertation group. I am grateful to everyone for their questions, criticisms, and suggestions, which profoundly shaped this project. Many faculty members at Berkeley supported and encouraged my development as a scholar and a teacher. Thank you to Elizabeth Abel, Albert Ascoli, Ivonne del Valle, Eric Falci, Kevis Goodman, Dori Hale, Lyn Hejinian, Steve Justice, Victoria Kahn, David Marno, Scott Saul, Katie Snyder, and James Grantham Turner. Thanks also to Kristen Boye, Kelly Anne Brown, Chris Ott, Linda von Hoene, and Jen Hykes Willson, for supporting and celebrating my professional development at Berkeley and beyond. And to my students at Berkeley, especially the students of English R1B in Spring 2015, Berkeley Connect in 2016–17, and English N117S in Summer 2017, for challenging me to be better than my best and reminding me of what’s important. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have had kind, smart, generous friends and colleagues at Berkeley. Spencer Strub and José Villagrana: the hurlyburly’s done, the battle’s lost and won. Thank you for our fellowship. Linda Louie: your very goodness, and your company, o’erpays all I can do. Thank you for showing us the way. Jeehyun Choi: the readiness is all! Thank you for our nourishing conversations. Thanks also to Brandon Callender, Shannon Chamberlain, Rosalind Diaz, Bernardo Hinojosa, Sarah Johnson, Antonio Juan-Marcos, Mehak Khan, Margaret Kolb, Serena Le, Jen Lorden, Raffi Magarik, Shokoofeh Rajabzadeh, Jonathan Shelley, Jason Treviño, Diana Wise, Wendy Xin, and Sam Zeitlin, for filling my time here with laughter and joy. Finally, thank you to my parents, Ning Li and Zhi Liu, and my sister, Addy Liu. I love you and I hope to make you proud in everything I do. iv / Introduction Introduction HENSLOWE. It’s a crowd-tickler—mistaken identities, a shipwreck, a pirate king, a bit with a dog, and love triumphant.