CRITICS SEEM largely to agree that the problems involved in calling the group of plays in the Shakespeare canon from Pericles to The Two Noble Kinsmen ‘tragicomedies’ or ‘romances’ are sufficiently substantial that it is best to avoid doing so altogether. Both terms are seen as too limiting and exclusive adequately to embrace the plays' extraordinary generic dependencies and possibilities. There are exceptions, though. Alison Thorne's recent ‘New Case-book’, for instance, in calling the plays ‘Shakespeare's Romances’, sustains the legacy of E.C. Pettet, Northrop Frye, Stanley Wells, Howard Felperin, Robert Uphaus and others who have championed ‘romance’, though she is careful to qualify the term and acknowledge the issues in her helpful introduction. There is also Barbara Mowat who, despite having spent the first section of her essay on the last plays in Richard Dutton and Jean Howard's Companion to Shakespeare's Works explaining why neither of the terms ‘romance’ or ‘tragicomedy’ is adequate, in fact goes on to provide the most convincing recent analysis of the plays as romances by offering a detailed demonstration of their roots in the kind of sixteenth-century dramatic romance that had notoriously frustrated Philip Sidney yet was visibly still alive and well on the Jacobean stage in the shape of Mucedorus, an old play which was revived in 1606 and again in 1610 in time to provide an impetus for late Shakespeare.

But Diana Childress's 1974 essay ‘Are Shakespeare's Last Plays Really Romances?’ marks the moment after which such arguments must necessarily seem, to some extent at least, defensive.