We are often told that Shakespeare is our contemporary, yet we insist just as often on the Elizabethan quality of his work as it reflects a culture remote from our own. Beginning with this paradox, Howard Felperin explores the question...
If Shakespeare's last plays—Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII—are to be neither debunked nor idealized but taken seriously on their own terms, they must be examined within the traditions and...