Description: Palfrey presents a new vision of character, metaphor, and politics in late Shakespeare. Closely analyzing Shakespeare's use of language and genre, he shows how the plays revamp theatrical decorums. The plays are not courtly, sober, and escapist, as their reputation suggests; rather, they are peculiarly sensitive to the turbulent, unfinished quality of Shakespeare's historical moment. In both court and wilderness, Shakespeare analyzes the violence of authority, the tensions in language, and the origin and prospects of both. Palfrey argues against a conventional sense of the plays' movement towards divinely sanctioned closure; mischief, irony, polysemy remain; romance's political problems are competitive, multiple, and tumescently unpredictable.
Review Quotes: "Among the most significant books of the year....With every phrase, sentence, paragraph, the writer conveys a mysterious grasp of an aesthetics beyond the power of word to express....Indispensable for its subject."--Studies in English Literature
"Palfrey's nuanced, historically and theoretically informed reading presents Shakespeare's romances as complex, multivocal, open-ended reflections of their troubled political times....Succeeds unequivocally in offering a powerful corrective to the prevailing reading of Shakespeare's romances."--Sixteenth Century Journal"Presents valuable insights into the undercurrent of turbulence and discord that informs these romantic plays."--Choice