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Learning from the Apocrypha: A Peculiarity of Shakespeare’s Comic Endings

ABSTRACT The 1610 Additions to Mucedorus end the action with the promise of a feast and of revelation to characters in the play of information about it that they currently lack. Such foreshadowing of imagined post-performance dialogue in which members of the dramatis personae are brought to the same level of awareness as the audience about the plot in which they have participated is a feature of almost all Shakespeare’s comedies. It is rare among other early modern playwrights. Bertrand Evans did not mention it in his influential exploration of Shakespeare’s use of “discrepant awareness”. The present paper surveys Shakespeare’s instances of projected offstage narratives in which characters compare their roles in the happy outcome and notes how the phenomenon develops until it gives added resonance to the conclusions of the late romances, such as The Winter’s Tale.