Text 1: Critic Hartley argues that Shakespeare's late romances — Pericles, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest — represent a genuine spiritual development. The plays' improbable reconciliations and miraculous restorations, she contends, express an aging author's hard- won faith that loss can be redeemed and time reversed.
Text 2: Critic Kuznetsov takes the same plays as evidence of something quite different. Their improbabilities, he argues, are not signs of faith but of artistic exhaustion: an aging dramatist relying on stage machinery and fairy-tale conventions because the searching realism of the great tragedies had become too costly to sustain. The plays, in his reading, console rather than redeem.
Based on the texts, the authors most clearly disagree about
- A
whether the late romances feature improbable reconciliations.
- B
whether Shakespeare wrote the late romances.
- Ccheck_circle
whether the improbable elements reflect spiritual growth or artistic retreat.
- D
whether Shakespeare wrote tragedies.
Explanation
Both critics accept authorship and the presence of improbable plot elements. They disagree on what those elements signify — spiritual development or artistic retreat. C captures this interpretive conflict.