Shakespeare’s Narremes

Summary

In Shakespeare's plays the chief figures are often separated, usually at sea, and united again. In Twelfth Night it is Sebastian and Viola (brother and sister) who are separated by shipwreck; in Pericles it is Pericles and Marina (father and daughter); in The Comedy of Errors it is Aegeon and Aemilia (husband and wife). The separation- and-reunion pattern spans the play, the span varying from days to decades. Variations of the pattern occur in Antony and Cleopatra, King Lear, Much Ado and rather more marginally in Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and in Richard II, again more obviously in Cymbeline, The Tempest and The Winter's Tale. Such recurring patterns of action, place and time we call narremes.

Oddly enough, although the major playwrights of the following centuries hardly use the separation-and-reunion narreme, modern drama still flirts with it: at the end of Arnold Wesker's Roots, for instance, Beatie's friend fails to arrive: the reunion expected but not achieved characterizes the play; the old narreme, in other words, is present but reversed. Another example: at the conclusion of Peter Nichols' Passion Play James says to Eleanor: 'I think we can make a go of it, don't you?' and she answers, 'No'. In the conscious rejection of a reunion of husband and wife, then, the old narreme lives on.