Romance presupposes the reality of the supernatural. It therefore doesn’t flourish in periods where the supernatural is under attack or when its non-existence is widely assumed. We will look at the opposition to the supernatural during the Enlightenment and in the twentieth century. More recently, the rise of ‘fantasy fiction’ the popularity of The Lord of the Rings and of TV series such as ‘Vikings’ are among many cultural manifestations of a reawakened appetite for the supernatural. In early modern England, scepticism about ghosts, witches, angels and God were possible, of course; but the culture was generally disposed to a vigorous belief in them all.
Shakespeare’s Romances arose from his own preoccupations, clearly, but the prose fiction of the day belonged largely to the category of romance. In such an environment, Shakespeare seems to have recognized a central problem. We have direct access to the material world, but not to any world we think of as transcending it. Yet he had become indirectly acquainted—through Spenser and Seneca among other authors—with a range of ideas we call ‘neo-platonic’. According to these, our ordinary modes of perception rest upon intuitions of beauty, justice and the divine. Thus in the romances he consistently explores the presence of the supernatural in relation to topics which are irreducibly physical: incest, murder, court-intrigue, prostitution, abuse of power and suchlike. He also manages to subject colonialism and the class-system to stringent but delicate analysis while remaining absorbed in the contemplation of love and goodness.
In the midst of all these issues, of such pressing interest to us, it is easy to let the poetry drop out of consideration. In these classes we will be closely attentive throughout to matters of style and text and to what makes Shakespeare a magisterial poet.
