Abstract
This chapter explores how Shakespeare’s romances interrogate the familiar socioeconomic problem of the heiress by turning to another kind of ‘norm’—the lost-child plot from Roman new comedy. In the romances, this dramatic convention enables Shakespeare to stage a comforting resolution to the problem posed by the female heir: the lost-child plot performatively mitigates the wandering represented by the heiress, thereby assuaging cultural concerns about loss of lineage through dramaturgical means. In showcasing the productive multivocality of the normative, Shakespeare’s romances are ultimately less interested in dramatizing how legal norms might be overturned than they are in staging how those norms are creatively sustained and redefined.
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I would like to thank Rory Loughnane and Edel Semple for their very helpful feedback on this essay.
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Dowd, M.M. (2019). ‘So like an old tale’: Staging Inheritance and the Lost Child in Shakespeare’s Romances. In: Loughnane, R., Semple, E. (eds) Staged Normality in Shakespeare's England. Palgrave Shakespeare Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00892-5_8
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