ABSTRACT
Staging Early Modern Romance aims to reconsider Shakespeare’s late plays, commonly termed “romances,” in relation to the prose and verse “romances,” or narratives, on which they draw. Specifi cally, the editors hope it will do so in such a way as to undo the interpretative stasis and subordination of the vernacular texts of prose and verse narrative known to modern critics as romance. It seems an inescapable paradox of our times that Shakespeare’s transcendence will continue to operate at the level of marketing, and hence be reaffi rmed, even or especially when the scholarly purpose of the publication is to challenge it. However that may be, the stated purpose of this collection of essays is to relocate Shakespeare’s late plays within ‘‘the forests of romance from which these plays were cultivated” (Henderson and Siemon 220), rather than treat those forests as inert matter, without any dynamic formal and cultural impact on the plays, the mere “narrative and dramatic sources” of Bullough’s indispensable collection.
