ABSTRACT
Shakespeare is arguably the first poet of the modern individual for whom death is an epistemological impasse that creates a fissure at the center of his being. In addition to registering cultural sea-changes, Shakespeare's plays encode his own changing attitude to death through his life. The sense of death as an undiscovered country can be connected to critics like Dowden, who used the generic term "Romance" to describe Shakespeare's late plays. Matter and spirit, female and male are inextricably combined within the soul of Shakespeare's drama and in seeking to know each other they bring about death and transformation. The statue's coming to life has a naturalistic explanation, as if to express Shakespeare's new-found modesty about the power of his art to defy death, a theme he took up again in The Tempest. Fukuyama said, “The traumatic events of the twentieth century formed the backdrop to a profound intellectual crisis as well.
