"How the Fishes Live in the Sea": Shakespeare's Daughters and the Market of Romance
When William Shakespeare’s late romances were originally staged in London, seventeenth-century playgoers would have encountered a dramatic genre intertwined with global intrigue and fantastical, even fairy-tale elements. These plays, however, are also deeply invested in the changing economic landscape of the City of London: a city on the tail-end of a waning feudal order and developing increasingly capitalistic systems to reflect its new worldwide role as a primary center of trade. Although critics have traditionally gravitated toward their generic and theatrical contemporaries, this thesis proposes a critical shift to Shakespeare’s final plays for a fuller look at the ways in which Shakespeare engaged dramatically with London’s political economy and the cultural anxieties that surrounded it. In Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, this thesis argues, the figure of the daughter is the nexus for such discourses: Marina, Imogen, and Miranda each enact and embody an early modern London’s conflicting understandings and reactions to the cultural shifts this dynamic economy brought with it. In Pericles, Shakespeare fuses romance with the genre of choice of his fellow playwrights, the city comedy, and as such uses Marina as his means to critique a burgeoning London commercialism. Through Cymbeline’s Imogen, Shakespeare conveys a somewhat rose-colored glance on a feudal order in the wilderness of Wales that drastically contrasts from the play’s version of Rome, itself highly redolent of early modern London. With The Tempest, finally, Shakespeare uses the union of Miranda and Ferdinand to expose the measures through which this English market economy sought to capitalize off of and commodify the institution of marriage.
Drama, early modern literature, Economics, romance, Shakespeare, Theater
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