Shakespeare Studies: What's New?
Shakespeare Studies Links
Early Mod Research Links
OTHER ENGLISH LIT LINKS
Study Guide: The Winter's Tale
Shakespeare’s late plays are difficult to classify — they combine elements of his tragedies and comedies. They share with the comedies an interest in love, wordplay, and reconciliation. They share with the tragedies a view of the world as a flawed, maybe even evil place, and a view of human nature as equally flawed and arbitrary.
Critics most frequently
call these plays romances, or sometimes tragicomedies. They are called
romances because they often contain elements of magic or the supernatural. Like
the histories, they often span large periods of time (in the case of The
Winter’s Tale, over 16 years) and (like Antony and Cleopatra or
Othello) several widely-spaced locations.
In Shakespeare’s romances, the greatest themes are not so much love or power — they are concerned more with the human capacity for wonder, imagination, cruelty, and forgiveness. The Winter’s Tale is concerned not only with the tragic themes of family betrayal, jealousy, and kingship, but also concerns itself more broadly with the multiple meanings of Time. In this play, Time is both destroyer and healer; human emotions in this play are often reactions to either longing for the past or fear of the future. The supernatural elements in the play — in this case, the importance of dream-messages, including one from the Delphic Oracle — call our attention to those aspects of the human psyche that are especially mysterious or intimate — namely, our feelings about family, about loyalty, and about the inevitable cycles of birth and death.
The Winter's Tale also offers an interrogation of the pastoral ideal -- Like As You Like It, it features nobles playing at being shepherds, engaged in philosophical conversations with "real" shepherds. But the innocent pastoral values of this play are less innocent than in Shakespeare's romantic comedy -- this time, the dangers posed by nature are real and come to life on stage. And the elements of romantic disguise are potentially much more harmful.
Like Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale's title announces its concern with the cycle of the year, rituals, birth, death, and fertility. I offer a discussion of Shakespeare's dramatic depiction of the religious and rural festivals in my article, "Shakespeare's Folklore and the English Holiday Cycle," which originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy Magazine (August 2003). For our class purposes, one thing we will consider is the ways in which Shakespeare seems to be especially concerned with the consequences of broken or perverted rituals -- and this can apply to all the plays we have read this semester.
Class terms for study:
Liminal Space
Pagan/Christian
Art
Play-Acting
Bear-Baiting
Magic
Love
“Plague of Love”
Healing
Family
Time -- Unities
Reputation
Helpful Study Questions from SparkNotes.com
1. Discuss and analyze Leontes' jealousy.
2. Discuss the changes in mood, plot and imagery that occur between Act I-III and Act IV-V.
3. Discuss the resurrection scene. Is the apparent miracle real?
4. Discuss the role of setting in the play.
5. Analyze the character of Autolycus, and discuss his role in the play.
6. Analyze the character of Perdita, and her relationship to nature.
7. Discuss the role of divine intervention in the play, especially the miracle scene and the Delphic Oracle.
8. Discuss the role of women in the play, and their relationships with their husbands/lovers.
9. Analyze the character of Camillo. What is his function in the play?
10. Would you categorize The Winter's Tale with Shakespeare's comedies, or his tragedies? Some scholars have grouped it with The Tempest, Pericles, and Cymbeline as a "romance." Would you agree with this grouping? Why or why not?
