R. S. White is Australian Professorial Fellow, Emeritus Winthrop Professor of English at The University of Western Australia, and Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100-1800. Among his other books are Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (1996), Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (2008), Pacifism in English Poetry: Minstrels of Peace (2008) and John Keats: A Literary Life (2010) which has been reissued in paperback. He is a past President of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association and a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy.

Dr White examines the ways in which Shakespeare uses formal conventions from romance throughout his writing career, especially in giving formal completion to a play without forfeiting the 'open-ended' sense of life's complexity. In his romantic comedies these conventions are modified to imply that the cosy womb of marriage is not the end of lovers' lives; in the 'problem' comedies they are used to challenge the artifice of the comic ending; in some tragedies they are used to provide an ideal of fulfilment which has been destroyed by the tragic events - and in the last plays or 'romances' they are used to invoke the full sense of life's continuing comprehensiveness.

Preface
1. The sense of an ending in Elizabethan romance
2. The sense of an ending in early Elizabethan romantic comedy
3. Shakespeare's mature romantic comedies
4. The 'problem' comedies
5. Romance in the Tragedies
6. Shakespeare's romances: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale
7. The Tempest
Conclusion
Appendix: Elizabethan romance and stage comedy - historical survey
Notes
Index