Patrick Carnegy

Raising the dead

issue 25 November 2006

In his late ‘romances’ Shakespeare reaches out for happy endings in which sinners are forgiven and the unjustly dead restored to life. This, plainly enough, is territory more problematic than his worlds of tragedy and comedy. For Cymbeline, the RSC’s Complete Works cycle ordered up a rewrite from the Cornish Kneehigh troupe and for The Tempest exiled Prospero to the Arctic.

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