Introduction Take notice, that the Decree of the President of Uzbekistan of 3 October, 2019, No. Dp-5843 “On measures to radically enhance the personnel policy

The past – Romantic and Victorian eras

Today, scholars use the term romance to describe three of Shakespeare’s plays. The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale were designated comedies in the First Folio, and the third, Cymbeline, was originally designated a tragedy. Two plays that scholars believe Shakespeare co-wrote, Pericles and The Two Noble Kinsmen, are also generally classified as romances. All of the plays now classified as romances come from the end of Shakespeare’s career. Following the composition of several of his most famous tragedies, Shakespeare returned to the genre of comedy. But the comedies he penned in his final years as a playwright were marked by significant variations in tone as well as elements of mysticism and magic. These deviations provide the basis for these plays’ recent reclassification as romances.
Scholars have primarily adopted the term “romance” to account for the way Shakespeare’s late plays blend elements of comedy and tragedy. Some of Shakespeare’s earlier comedies exhibit plot devices that could just as well belong in tragedies, but the tone of those plays remains relatively lighthearted. For instance, both Othello and A Midsummer Night’s Dream open with conflicts between fathers and daughters about preferred suitors. But whereas the overall tone of Othello is defined by cynicism, suspicion, jealousy, and rage, in Midsummer fairy magic leads to a forest romp that’s amusing despite being full of conflict. By contrast, the romances tend to follow comedic conventions, while also exhibiting a darkness of tone more characteristic of tragedy. Consider The Tempest. The early modern classification of this play as a comedy derives from the fact that the play’s various conflicts resolve in a happy ending and the promise of a future marriage between Ferdinand and Miranda. Yet the play also features tragic elements. The threat of death hovers over much of the action in the play, starting with the catastrophic tempest. The play includes two subplots involving plans to assassinate Alonso and Prospero, and these plans echo the original plot against Prospero’s life in Milan years before the events at hand.
In addition to the blending of comedy and tragedy, the romances also introduce elements of magic and mysticism that did not previously play a major role in Shakespeare’s plays—except, of course, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But in contrast to the amusingly disruptive fairy magic in Midsummer, the kind of magic Shakespeare employs in the late plays has a darker tone, as when Prospero uses his magic to act out a sustained revenge plot. Even more important than explicit magic, however, is Shakespeare’s conjuring of a kind of mysticism in which highly unrealistic and sometimes overcrowded plots yield improbably happy endings. Both The Tempest and Cymbeline have a variety of plots and subplots that all seem like they will lead to violence and discord, yet somehow resolve with peace. Other magical and mystical elements in Shakespeare’s romances include a scene at the end of The Winter’s Tale where the statue of the long-dead Hermione comes to life, as well as the appearances of the Roman god Jupiter in Cymbeline and the angel Ariel in The Tempest.
In the first decade of his career as a poet and dramatist, Shakespeare penned 154 sonnets. These sonnets appeared together for the first time in 1609 in a complete edition published by Thomas Thorpe. In Thorpe’s edition, the first 126 sonnets describe a passionate relationship between the poet and a young man known as the “fair youth.” The next 26 sonnets focus on the poet’s relationship with a mysterious “dark lady.” The last two sonnets have no obvious relation to the rest of the sequence, since they are adaptations of Greek poems. Scholars have long debated various aspects of the sonnets, including the proper sequence of the sonnets, which Shakespeare himself never confirmed. But the most frequent debates about the sonnets remain linked to questions of sexuality. Scholars have mined the sonnets to learn about Shakespeare’s sexuality, speculating about whether the homosexual and heterosexual relationships are autobiographical in nature.
Shakespeare’s sonnets represent a marked departure from previous sonnet sequences. The sonnet form had been popular since the fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch published a long sequence of poems, mostly sonnets, on the theme of the poet’s love for a woman named Laura. Though influenced by Petrarch, Shakespeare departed from the older model. For one thing, he used an altered form of the Petrarchan sonnet. Both the Petrarchan and the Elizabethan sonnet forms comprised 14 lines, but those lines were grouped differently. Whereas the Petrarchan sonnet was grouped into two main sections known as an octave and a sestet, the Elizabethan sonnet was grouped into three quatrains and a final couplet. The Elizabethan sonnet allowed for a greater degree of complexity, since the structure of the sonnet itself involved more parts and hence enabled the development of clustered images and ideas. Shakespeare capitalized on the more complex structure of the later sonnet form to expand the emotional and psychological range of the traditional sonnet sequence. Whereas sonnet sequences traditionally featured a poet either wooing a woman of great beauty and virtue or else lamenting her coldness or lack of affection, Shakespeare explored complex erotic relationships with members of both sexes.
uring his lifetime Shakespeare’s fame as a poet equaled and perhaps outstripped his fame as a playwright. His most popular poem was Venus and Adonis. It was reprinted nine times in his lifetime, and there are more surviving contemporary references to Venus and Adonis than to any of Shakespeare’s plays. The poem was most likely written in 1592, when London’s theaters were closed due to an outbreak of plague, and it was first published in 1593. Venus and Adonis was published with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton in which Shakespeare promised to follow up this light-hearted and erotic poem with a “graver labor.” This almost certainly refers to The Rape of Lucrece, which was published a year later, in 1594, and which was also dedicated to the Earl of Southampton. The Rape of Lucrece was almost as popular as the earlier poem, going through at least six editions in Shakespeare’s lifetime. The poem is a “graver labor” than Venus and Adonis because it is neither humorous nor erotic, and it tackles troubling moral and political themes. However, like Venus and Adonis, Lucrece is also interested in the uncontrollable power of desire. Both poems were written in iambic pentameter.

Venus and Adonis retells an ancient Mediterranean myth about a beautiful boy, Adonis, who has no interest in love or sex and spends all his time hunting instead. Venus, the goddess of sexual love, falls in love with Adonis at first sight, and spends most of the poem trying to seduce him, or at least to prevent him from leaving. At the end of the poem, Adonis is killed by a boar while hunting, and Venus transforms his body into a flower to remember him. Venus and Adonis is primarily an erotic poem that focuses on the uncontrollable power of sexual desire. Venus plays the role of aggressive seducer, which in Elizabethan England was reserved for male lovers. Adonis only speaks a fraction of the poem’s lines, and when he does speak, he tries to convince Venus he’s too young to love her, and is only interested in hunting: “‘I know not love,’ quoth he, ‘nor will not know it, / Unless it be a boar, and then I chase it.’” Venus seems to not care about Adonis’s indifference, and because she is a goddess, she has the physical capacity to restrain him easily. The effect is comic, but Venus’s aggressive sexuality challenges conventional Elizabethan ideas about gender.