Emblems in Shakespeare's Last Plays. This item is unavailable.Emblems in Shakespeare's Last Plays

The purpose of this study is to examine emblems in Shakespeare's last plays--Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest, and Henry VIII. Emblems serve two purposes. First, the structure of emblems contributes to the playwright's experiment with emblematic modes of representation and also depends on the correlational relationship between the picture and the epigram in an emblem. Second, emblems assist the playwright in communicating moral and philosophical ideas to the audience. In the last plays, morals lurk behind allegorical or symbolic emblems. Through emblems the playwright addresses important moral, philosophical, and political questions such as fate and providence, reason and passion, faith, time, and divine right. A full understanding of the last plays as a whole is difficult without a knowledge of emblems in relation to the plays' structures and morals. This study approaches the last plays from this perspective.

Kwang Soon Cho is Associate Professor of English at Ajou University in South Korea.