This side of Coventry

[ron_drummond]

"This temporal, intergenerational logic may be understood structurally. The Winter's Tale perhaps represents the paradigmatic case. Although in Shakespeare's career comedy precedes tragedy, in this play it is the other way around. The first three acts revive Othello, the fourth As You Like It. A generation passes between these two movements of the plot. In other words, courtly tragedy is ultimately set in the past, so that its crimes and errors can be redeemed by pastoral comedy, peopled with the rural lower classes, located in the present. The rebirth, recognition, and reconciliation of Act 5 are made possible by the preceding sequence. One kind of variation on this pattern appears in both Cymbeline and The Tempest. The represented action is confined to the present, but part of what happens in Cymbeline and all of what happens in The Tempest depend on events as remote as those of the opening acts of The Winter's Tale. In all three instances, the potentially tragic moment is located at the birth or during the very early childhood of the youths who, now on the verge of adulthood, will prove crucial to the transcendence of tragedy."
-- Walter Cohen, "Shakespearean Romance"