scholarly journals Griselda’s Afterlife, or the Relationship between Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale and the Tale of Magic

Text Matters ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 334-352
Author(s):  
Andrzej Wicher
Keyword(s):  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Tragic Hero ◽  
The Relationship

Some influence of Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale, also known as the story of the patient Griselda, on Shakespeare, and particularly on The Winter’s Tale, has long been recognized. It seems, however, that the matter deserves further attention because the echoes of The Clerk’s Tale seem scattered among a number of Shakespeare’s plays, especially the later ones. The experimental nature of this phenomenon consists in the fact that Griselda-like characters do not strike the reader, especially perhaps the Renaissance reader, as good protagonists of a tragedy, or even a problem comedy. The Aristotelian conception of the tragic hero does not seem to fit Griselda because there is no “tragic fault” in her: she is completely innocent. It was thus a bold decision on the part of Shakespeare to use this archetype as a corner stone of at least some of his plays.

Yves Bonnefoy and Shakespeare as a French Poet

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efraín Kristal
Keyword(s):  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Poetic Voice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Great Poet ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Poetic Vision ◽  
Yves Bonnefoy

Yves Bonnefoy is a key figure in the French literary reception of Shakespeare. This essay explores his interpretations and translations of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, informed by his own poetic vision, anchored in a literary tradition whose high points include Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Bonnefoy argues that Shakespeare finds his poetic voice after experimenting with the sonnet—a genre Bonnefoy considers staid and prone to cliché when Shakespeare took it up. For Bonnefoy Shakespeare begins to come alive as a great poet in As you Like It and Romeo and Juliet; and his supreme achievement is The Winter’s Tale, a play which encompasses the scope of the entire oeuvre and resolves some underlying concerns of the major tragedies while offering a refined appraisal of the relationship between art, nature, and existence apposite to Bonnefoy’s own views about poetry.

Shakespeare and the Three Bears

2011 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick de Somogyi
Keyword(s):  
Professional Life ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Relationship

Recent researchers into the documentary evidence of Shakespeare's professional life as a writer–performer have understandably restricted themselves to his human fellows and rivals. But on Bankside in the 1590s bear-baiting vied for popularity with theatre, and in this article, Nick de Somogyi seeks to correct a long-standing error of naming among the celebrity fighting bears of Paris Garden – stabled some hundred yards west of the Globe. Scholars are agreed that the careers of George Stone, Harry Hunks, and the great Sackerson competed for attention with the dramatist's own. But while Sackerson's is the only contemporary name Shakespeare ever dropped in his plays, and while George Stone probably expired in the same season as witnessed the premiere of Macbeth, it is argued here that the only scholarly basis for the existence of ‘the famous Harry Hunks’ lies in the erratic contemporary punctuation of a single poem. A Contributing Editor to NTQ, Nick de Somogyi gained his PhD at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and is now an independent scholar and textual consultant. He was the founder editor of the Globe Quartos series for Nick Hern Books, and The Winter's Tale, the eighteenth play in his Shakespeare Folios series (with Simon Trussler) appeared in early 2011. He curated three successive exhibitions at Shakespeare's Globe (2003–5), contributed to the National Portrait Gallery's Searching for Shakespeare exhibition (2006), and is the author of Shakespeare's Theatre of War (1998) and Shakespeare on Theatre (2011). This is the first in a series of pieces on the relationship between playhouse and beargarden he is currently researching.

Shakespearean Melancholy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. F. Bernard
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Core ◽  
Robert Burton

What’s so funny about melancholy? Iconic as Hamlet is, Shakespearean comedy showcases an extraordinary reliance on melancholy that ultimately reminds us of the porous demarcation between laughter and sorrow. This richly contextualized study of Shakespeare’s comic engagement with sadness contends that the playwright rethinks melancholy through comic theatre and, conversely, re-theorizes comedy through melancholy. In fashioning his own comic interpretation of the humour, Shakespeare distils an impressive array of philosophical discourses on the matter, from Aristotle to Robert Burton, and as a result, transforms the theoretical afterlife of both notions. The book suggests that the deceptively potent sorrow at the core of plays such as The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, or The Winter’s Tale influences modern accounts of melancholia elaborated by Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, and others. What’s so funny about melancholy in Shakespearean comedy? It might just be its reminder that, behind roaring laughter, one inevitably finds the subtle pangs of melancholy.

Feminist Shakespeares: Adapting Shakespeare for a Modern Audience in the Hogarth Shakespeare Project

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen Etman
Keyword(s):  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Adaptation Theory ◽  
Contemporary Culture ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Female Authors ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Female Characterization

The Hogarth Shakespeare Project presents a way to view Shakespeare’s plays through a different lens. These books allow for a feminist reading of Shakespeare, looking at some of Shakespeare’s ill-treated female characters to construct a new idea of female characterization. Three of the plays adapted, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and The Taming of the Shrew, were adapted by female authors. By investigating how these plays are being adapted for a more contemporary audience, with modern conceptions of feminism and gender roles, we can gain insight as to how these concepts have changed since Shakespeare’s time. By looking at these modern adaptations, we can interrogate how modern audiences as a whole conceptualize and, potentially, idealize Shakespeare, as well as understanding the progression of treatment of women in contemporary culture since Shakespeare’s time. The novels addressed in this project are The Gap of Time by Jeannette Winterson, Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood, and Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler. The project concludes that, of the three, Vinegar Girl does the most effective job addressing the problematic aspects of its adapted play in a new way, distinguishing it from previous adaptations of The Taming of the Shrew. This project also investigates the role that adaptation theory plays in addressing Shakespeare adaptations, particularly the Hogarth Shakespeare Project.

In the Middle of Life

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Moral Repair ◽  
Moral Frameworks ◽  
Moral Time

This chapter explores the specific challenges that cognitive science and social psychology pose to those literary concepts and modes that are grounded in traditional moral understandings of selfhood and action, including integrity of character and notions such as tragic realization and moral repair. Focusing on the concept of moral time, the chapter explores two literary texts in which profound middle-of-life dramas take place: Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. A form of slow psychic time entirely lost to view in recent cognitive science is shown to take place in James’s tale, while The Winter’s Tale insists on the forms of moral and emotional experience that are beyond reflection and explanation. The readings presented are set in relation to key critical debates on the works, to challenge a persistent evasion of moral frameworks in contemporary anti-normative approaches.

‘Time is chasing us’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte Scott
Keyword(s):  
Central Question ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Tempest

Moving into the late plays or romances, Chapter 5 engages the book’s central question: why are children so important and so unique to Shakespeare’s dramatic imagination? Focusing on the extraordinary collection of plays, including The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles, this chapter considers the formative impact of the child on Shakespeare’s stage. Thinking about memory and grief, loss and childhood, the section on The Winter’s Tale attends to the child as a young body but also as an adult’s memory of its former self. The focus in TheTempest is on servitude and teaching and the narratives of love through which parents justify power. In the section on Pericles, the chapter studies anxieties about incest and desire, redemption and hope. In all the plays under discussion here, the child becomes a unique and staggeringly assertive character of redemption as well as loss.

Statues that Move: Vitality Effects in The Winter's Tale

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 299-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. C. Wojciehowski
Keyword(s):  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale

Shakespeare’s Portrayal of a Tyrant

Moreana ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 50 (Number 193- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 40-53
Author(s):  
Peter Milward
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Virgin Mary ◽  
Henry Viii ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sir Walter Raleigh ◽  
The Ideal

The theme of tyranny, so central (as we have seen in two recent issues of Moreana) to the writings and the experience of Thomas More, is hardly less central to the plays and the memory of William Shakespeare. This centrality appears not so much in the plays of his Elizabethan period as in those of the subsequent Jacobean period, especially in the final romances by way of warming up to his presentation of the historical romance of Henry VIII. There, however, the tyranny of the king, though notably emphasized by Sir Walter Raleigh in his contemporaneous History of the World, is strangely muted, as also is his un-Shakespearian character, but it comes out strongly in the two preceding romances of The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, once we read them, as they require us to read them, as “topical allegories”. Then, to the characters of the jealous Leontes and the wrathful Cymbeline, we may add the threatening personality of Antiochus at the beginning of Pericles, as yet another figure (based on a widespread rumour) of the quintessential tyranny of Henry VIII. At the same time, this figure of the victimizer calls to be qualified by the complementary figure of the victim, the heroine in these romances, not only Hermione and Perdita, Thaisa and Marina, and Imogen, but even or especially in Desdemona as victimized by her jealous husband Othello. Then, in the above mentioned “topical allegory” of these Jacobean plays, she stands as well for the ideal of the Virgin Mary as for the memory of Catholic England at the heart of the dramatist.

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