Romances
James was writing as a late nineteenth-century novelist. Not so very many years before this, in the 1870s, another Victorian, Edward Dowden, was the first to designate Shakespeare`s Last Plays as `Romances`. By then the word had acquired a lot of semantically blurred luggage since the time it simply meant a tale in a vernacular Romantic language--`Isn`t it romantic?` is not the sort of question worth going into here. The Elizabethans and Jacobeans used the word of stories but not of dramas. Shakespeare never used the word at all--not of plays, not of anything.

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