Romance Plays: Reflections
Participant Lesley Saunders reflects on the course Shakespeare and Euripides: Romance Plays which ran in January-February 2026, taught by Fred Parker and Jan Parker, University of Cambridge.
The course sounded as if it was tailor-made for someone like me, with a background in Classics and the Greek tragedians, as well as an abiding interest in the late plays of Shakespeare, which despite their fairy-tale appearance are deeply enigmatic and more than mildly disturbing.
Trudi Tate hosted the six online sessions with charm and efficiency, and introduced us to the lecturers Fred Parker and Jan Parker, whose deep familiarity with their subject matter gave us safe passage through the wrong turnings and revelations of each of the plays. Fred explored the themes that connect Shakespeare’s Pericles, All’s Well That Ends Well and The Tempest; Jan introduced us to the context and significance of Euripides’ Alkestis and Ion, and retold Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in the light of the foregoing discussions. Each lecture lasted about an hour, after which we all took a short break and returned for a collective conversation. This is an engaging format, in which the lectures gave participants sufficient material and argument to enable us to have a lively, informed and inclusive exchange.
The main idea I took from the course is something like this: that human beings are always telling a story about their lives, if only unconsciously. We may find ourselves in the midst of anguish, guilt and hopelessness, and so the story as we often tell it takes the form of tragedy, with bad decisions leading to downfall and the ruin of everything we loved and took for granted. As we know, Shakespeare produced some deeply moving tragedies that end in spiritual and actual death from which there is no coming back. And then he wrote the so-called Romance plays.
Fred Parker narrated, with a consummate story-teller’s gift of his own, how in these dramas the wrong turnings and downfall are partially recovered, albeit only over a long time and possibly with a period of inactivity and withdrawal by the protagonist. Eventually there is some form of revelation, followed by reconciliation and restoration – a grace which is not earned or even deserved, but given, frequently through the intervention of a female character (for example, Marina in Pericles, Paulina in The Winter’s Tale).
Some of these plays look like a re-writing of an earlier tragedy, as if Shakespeare wanted to experiment with a more open-ended account of the things that really matter in human lives: love and work, to put it Freudianly. The teller wants to tell the story of loss differently, with a less conclusive ending. A key point, I think, is that the misdeeds are the actions of the protagonist (as in tragedy), whereas the turn-around or reconciliation comes about through anything other than the protagonist’s intentions – that is, through chance or coincidence.
The grief is as profound as in the tragedies, but life insists on being lived anyway, with as yet unforeseeable gifts to bestow. The condition seems to be that the protagonist must relinquish everything that gave his former life its meaning (as Prospero cedes his magical powers at the end of The Tempest). This leads to (self-)recognition, although not complete resolution.
The irresolution, the psychological darkness, that inhabits each of these late plays seems to me to be particularly evident in All’s Well That Ends Well. In the discussion, I wanted to play devil’s advocate and argue that the very premise of the play feels unstable, because what Helena expresses is not real love – she talks about her feelings but not about Bertram as an actual person with lovable qualities (which indeed he does not have). Her healing of the King is basically a means to an end; and she then – by using another woman – deceives Bertram into having sex with her and impregnating her. Then she fakes her own death. It feels extreme, and not at all a triumph of the feminine, in the way we might justifiably construe The Winter’s Tale. So for me Lafew’s throwaway comment about being Cressid’s uncle (Act 2, scene 1) stirs up uncomfortable echoes of Pandar in Troilus and Cressida … I wonder if there is something equally cynical about All’s Well?
Jan Parker showed us how Euripides’ plays present challenges not only of interpretation but also of understanding a context very different from our own. As I read them, his plays are about something other than personalities and the development of character. Like Aeschylus and Sophocles, Euripides was interested in the unfolding of events, the unintended consequences of some previous action when another set of actions intervenes. He seems particularly concerned with what human characters do, are capable of doing, when fate in the form of gods or chance collides with established social norms. What binds and civilises society include the rules of guest / host relations (Alkestis), patrilinear kinship and social identity (Ion) and oath-taking (Medeia).
Women are the weak points in such arrangements, because of (a) their exclusion from patriarchal systems (b) their supposed emotional lability, both of which render them susceptible to irruptions from irrational forces. They are both victims and transgressors. But this also gives them a paradoxical strength: once they have stepped, or been pushed, outside the bounds of society, they acquire a certain freedom to become agentic. In the dramas, their agency takes the form of an act that violates expectations (for example, when Kreousa reveals a long-held shameful secret).
At the end of Alkestis, the impossible has just happened; but I wonder if Euripides might be suggesting, not that death can literally be cheated, but that the devastation of grief, once all the various social and familial duties and rituals have been observed and enacted (including being witnessed by us as audience), can be outlived? So I think the play is the dramatist’s way of asking us to reflect on what is owed to whom and why, particularly in relation to marriage, family, friendship, hospitality, and burial of the dead.
I wish we had had time to discuss Medeia, which in my view is primarily a play about the binding solemnity of oaths and the consequences of breaking them – and such a difficult play for modern audiences to receive. I’ve seen productions which completely alter the ending, leaving Medeia utterly broken after murdering her children, as if we do not have the psychological wherewithal to accept her miraculous escape to Athens to start a new life.
None of these plays gives up its secrets easily; but the attempt to hold our own inquisitive conversations with them is more than worth the effort.
Lesley Saunders
www.lesleysaunders.org.uk
24 February 2026
