Russ McDonald (The Bedford Companion
to Shakespeare):
As a distinctive kind of comedy, romance arrives at a happy ending by an unusually perilous route. As our sense of the term implies, the action usually involves amorous desire and fulfillment, but the essential characteristic of romance is an adventure story. Etymologically the word derives from the same root that gives us both the French and German words for “novel,” roman. The main characters must endure a series of hazards and trials that lead ultimately to success and reward. The form is given to extremes, for the ending is not only happy but joyous, even revelatory, and the progression to that ending is much more arduous than in traditional comedy. In other words, the fundamentally comic shape of the action is darkly colored by tragic concerns and perceptions: the marriage or reunion that ends the play is preceded in the middle by some form of catastrophe, either death or some similarly grave loss.
Hallet Smith (The Riverside Shakespeare):
The question “What is natural?” is an important concern in King Lear, and Shakespeare continues to develop the interest in his later romances, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. “Nothing natural I ever saw so noble,” says Miranda on her first view of Ferdinand. But the word natural had many meanings in Shakespeare’s English. … But nature, in medieval and Renaissance thought, was defined by the old word kind, and this included human nature. Human nature was (and is) notoriously capable of the most noble and most despicable behavior.
The play is unusual among the works of Shakespeare in that it follows the unities of time and place; only the early Comedy of Errors is as compact. Neoclassical critics like Sir Philip Sidney and Ben Johnson insisted that a play should cover an action not longer than one day and preferably shorter, and should be set in a single place.
Stephen Greenblatt (The Norton Shakespeare):
Shakespeare’s contemporaries were fascinated by the figure of the magus, the great magician who by dint of deep learning, ascetic discipline, and patient skill could command the secret forces of the natural and supernatural world. … The magus, cloaked in a robe covered with mysterious symbols, pronounced his occult charms, called forth spirits, and ranged in his imagination through the heavens and the earth, conjoining contemplative wisdom with virtuous action in order to confer great benefits upon his age. But there was a shiver of fear mingled with the popular admiration: when the person in Shakespeare’s time most widely identified as a magus, the wizard John Dee, was away from his house, his library, one of the greatest private collections of books in England, was set on fire and burned to the ground.
Horace Howard Furness (A New Variorum Edition
of Shakespeare: The Tempest, first published in 1892):
In Caliban it is that Shakespeare has risen, I think, to the very height of creative power, and, by making what is absolutely unnatural thoroughly natural and consistent, has accomplished the impossible. Merely as a work of art, Caliban takes precedence, I think, even of Ariel.
Moreover, had there lurked for Caliban no gentle feeling whatsoever in Shakespeare’s heart, never would he have given us, I think, such a picture as this of the deformed slave’s childlike simplicity. It is this human and poetical side of Caliban’s character, to which, as I venture to think, we have paid hardly sufficient attention, and which the general and abhorrent repulsiveness of his nature causes us to overlook.
What Befell Her till Her Marriage
Translated into English by Horace Howard Furness in 1892. The Fair Sidea was first published posthumously in Germany in 1618. Jacob Ayrer died in 1605.