While the label “romance” was not applied categorically to Shakespeare's late plays until the nineteenth century, the genre was a familiar and popular one. Some modern audiences—like some early modern ones—have found these plays deficient in realism, but, as we will see, what they actually do is shift the “real” to a different plane, one more aligned to dream, fantasy, and psychology, while retaining, at the same time, a topical relationship to historical events in Shakespeare's day.
