Bloomsbury Shakespeare's Last Plays (Bloomsbury Academic Collections: English Literary Criticism)

Shakespeare's Last Plays was the first of E. M. W. Tilyard's influential works on Shakespeare. In it, Dr Tilyard argues that the last plays Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest develop patterns found in the earlier works. He shows how Shakespeare intertwines reconciliation (the final phase of the tragedies) with an awareness of possible worlds (where the 'natural' and supernatural have equal status), and concludes that The Tempest, by subordinating his tragic pattern, is his greatest achievement. About the Author E.M.W Tillyard (sometime Master of Jesus College, Cambridge) is renowed for his many works on Shakespeare and Milton. He is credited with having put forward the theory that Elizabethan literature is not representative of a brief period of humanism between two outbreaks of protestantism, but rather representative of a theological bond in England that allowed for a continuation of the Medieval view of World Order