SOURCE: "'Since First We Were Dissevered': Trust and Autonomy in Shakespearean Tragedy and Romance," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, edited by Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélla Kahn, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, pp.150-69.

In the following essay, Wheeler explores the psychological polarities associated with seeking self-fulfillment in Shakespeare's late tragedies and romances.

In the earlier phases of his career, Shakespeare writes interchangeably—perhaps often simultaneously—comedies, history plays, three widely divergent tragedies, and narrative and lyric poetry.¹ But in the later phases, the last two of Dowden's four periods, Shakespeare tends to write within the inclusive framework of a single, exceptionally flexible genre: tragedy from Hamlet to Coriolanus, and then, with some overlap, the late romances.² In this paper I will try to identify polarized trends in Shakespeare's development, separated by generic distinctions in the earlier work, which confront each other in the drama of...