ABSTRACT
Many modern literary critics, building on the influential work of Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson, use the word broadly to represent some basic aspect of the human appetite for narrative. This chapter proposes two new lenses through which to examine Shakespearean romance: the familiar topos of shipwreck and the broad framework of ecological thinking. It also proposes that Shakespearean romance can be defined through its structural combination of the hoary old melodramatic trope of shipwreck and a self-reflexive literary system that connect to modern ecology. The heroes of romance have more modest roles than those of tragedy or history. Furthermore, the nostalgic narrative habits of these plays, the way in which they reprise Shakespeare’s career from Romeo and Juliet to King Lear, suggest a principle of literary creation broadly analogous to ecology’s feedback loops. The basic narrative template on which Shakespeare’s last plays build is ancient narrative romance, as it was transmitted through Elizabethan literary culture.
