New Casebook offers a selection of the most lively and innovative contemporary criticism on the four late plays commonly known as Shakespeare's 'Romances': Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. New historicist, Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic perspectives are all represented, alongside other readings that engage with less familiar issues such as nationalism, topography, religious politics and medico-moral discourse. Alison Thorne's introduction explores the much discussed question of how these plays should be classified generically, and traces the recurrence of certain preconceptions and critical stances in the reception of the Romances from the seventeenth century onwards.