Wonder in 'Pericles', 'Cymbeline', 'The Winter's Tale', and 'The Tempest': A critical inquiry (William Shakespeare)

The human capacity for wonder exerts a considerable fascination over Shakespeare throughout his career, but most especially in his last plays, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest. These last plays, characterized by impossible to believe plots and saturated as they are with many references to wonder, awe, marveling, and miracles, provide a unique opportunity to examine Shakespeare's understanding of wonder in the latest phase of his development as a thinker and artist.; This study offers inductive, textual analyses of each of the late romances, all of which address the central questions: What is wonder, according to Shakespeare? What elicits it, and to which faculty in the person is it most powerfully ordered?; In each analysis, the focus falls upon protagonists who themselves experience wonder, or over whom other protagonists—and the audience itself—wonder. In the Pericles chapter, the focus is thus upon King Pericles and his daughter, Marina, but also includes analysis of the role of John Gower, who guides the imagination of the audience on a journey of wonder analogous to Pericles'. In the Cymbeline chapter, the focus falls upon Posthumus, who is first presented as a false wonder in act one, but who then becomes an authentic object of wonder by the play's end. In the Winter's Tale chapter, analysis centers on the intriguing figure of Autolycus and his experience of “the notable passion of wonder”—an experience culminating in the weighty final question posed to him: “'Thou wilt amend thy life?” Finally, the chapter on The Tempest scrutinizes the character of Prospero, and shows how his mysterious art is deliberately and provocatively presented as an art of wonder.; Having made careful, textual analyses of each of the plays, the dissertation then synthesizes the findings in the conclusion, which considers what the plays, taken as an ensemble, reveal as the fundamental character and end of Shakespearean wonder. In this conclusion, Shakespeare's sense of the relationship between wonder, truth, conscience and liberty is probed.