Raising the Dead in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest

2009 ◽  
pp. 149-183
Keyword(s):  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Dead

The Return from the Dead

2021 ◽  
pp. 148-175
Author(s):  
Kent Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
The Dead

Chapter 5 argues for the lingering power of medieval values and imaginative forms in their relation to characters who seemingly return from the dead. Criticism has not recognized the extent of this motif in the comedies or the way that it figures in their ongoing actions as well as their endings. Among other values, return from the dead showcases the efficacy of desire on the part of those bereft and the sense of radiant new life that the revenant sometimes acquires. While this motif is usually oriented towards Shakespeare’s late romances, such as Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, it is strikingly pervasive, influential, and mysterious in the earlier comedies, as suggested by revenant characters ranging from Two Gentlemen’s Julia to All’s Well’s Helen. The chapter draws examples extensively from the comedies, including Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night. The motif lends uncanny power, emotional and intellectual depth, and memorability to Shakespearean comedy. It likewise helps us understand the persistence of medieval values into the early modern period.

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.

‘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.

Bringing Back the Dead

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanya Pollard
Keyword(s):  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Happy Ending ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
Apparent Death ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Hybrid Genre ◽  
Female Lament

Chapter 5, “Bringing Back the Dead: Shakespeare’s Alcestis,” argues that, after incorporating Greek tragic women into comedies, Shakespeare increasingly drew on these figures to merge tragic and comic structures in plays featuring miraculous recoveries from apparent deaths. Plays such as Much Ado About Nothing, Pericles, and The Winter’s Tale not only dramatize women’s miraculous return to life from apparent death, but also link these recoveries with the performance of female lament, which elicits sympathies and melts audiences into supportive alliances. Drawing on sources shaped by Greek texts, these plays reconfigure tragedy with a happy ending, a hybrid genre identified with Euripides. In particular, they recreate the ending of Alcestis, in which a grieving man encounters a veiled woman who is eventually revealed to be his lost wife returned from death.

A Nest of Traitors!: What is Paranoia?

Paranoia ◽  
2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Freeman ◽  
Jason Freeman
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
Unborn Child ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
James I ◽  
The Tempest

November 5, 1611. London. At the court of James I, the king and his entourage settle down to enjoy the latest play by celebrated playwright William Shakespeare. The play in question is The Winter’s Tale, one of the clutch of so-called romances—along with Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest—Shakespeare wrote before retiring back to Stratford, where he died in April 1616. Like Shakespeare’s other late plays, The Winter’s Tale offers a startling mixture of styles, oscillating wildly between pastoral comedy and intense psychological drama. It also includes a harrowing portrayal of extreme paranoia. Not that this could be guessed from the gentle opening of the play. Leontes, king of Sicily, is entertaining his childhood friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia. But having been away from home for nine months, Polixenes is anxious to return to Bohemia. Leontes pleads with him to stay, but Polixenes’ mind is made up. Or at least it is until Leontes asks his wife, Hermione, to speak to him. And though we might assume that Leontes will be overjoyed by Polixenes’ change of heart, what we see next couldn’t be more unexpected. Polixenes’ decision plunges Leontes into a savage spiral of paranoia. How was Hermione able to persuade his lifelong friend to stay in Sicily when his own efforts were futile? That’s simple: Hermione and Polixenes are lovers. Polixenes is the father of Hermione’s unborn child. And everyone except Leontes knows it: . . . They’re here with me already; whispering, rounding ‘Sicilia is a so-forth’ Tis far gone When I shall gust it last. . . . What starts off resembling a bizarre attack of jealousy soon develops into much more. Suddenly, and without a shred of evidence, Leontes suspects everyone of plotting against him—including his faithful subject Camillo, whose only crime is the attempt to defend Hermione: . . . What starts off resembling a bizarre attack of jealousy soon develops into much more. Suddenly, and without a shred of evidence, Leontes suspects everyone of plotting against him—including his faithful subject Camillo, whose only crime is the attempt to defend Hermione: . . .

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