Title: Things supernatural and causeless : Shakespearean romance /
Authors: Mincoff, Marco, 1909-1987.
Publisher: University of Delaware Press ; Associated University Presses,
Year: 1992
Subjects: Shakespeare, William, Tragicomedies.; Supernatural in literature; Tragicomedy.
Abstract: After centuries of denigration, Shakespeare's romances, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, came to be seen by many critics as among Shakespeare's most profound works - as extensions of his tragic vision, as experiments in dramatic form, as deeply significant statements about art, about nature, about life. Marco Mincoff's Things Supernatural and Causeless - a work published in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1987, just before his death, but clearly written in the mid-1970s - sets out to show why this evaluation of the romances is wrong and to propose another way of looking at and evaluating Pericles and the plays that followed it. For Mincoff, romance is "an inherently inferior genre" that, no matter what dramatic skills Shakespeare lavished on it, could never yield great drama. He argues that none of the romances has a profound message: whatever meaning one finds in Pericles, for instance, can be found just as readily in Apollonius of Tyre.^
Contents: Introduction -- Pericles, Prince of Tyre -- Cymbeline -- The winter's tale -- The tempest