Overview

The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's most perfectly realized tragicomedy, as notable for its tragic intensity as for its comic grace and, throughout, for the richness and complexity of its poetry. It concludes, moreover, with the most daring and moving reconciliation scene in all Shakespeare's plays. Though the title may suggest an escapist fantasy, recent criticism has seen in the play a profoundly realistic psychology and a powerful commentary on the violence implicit in family relationships and deep, longlasting friendships. Stephen Orgel's edition considers the play in relation to Renaissance conceptions of both dramatic genre and the family, traced the changing critical and theatrical attitudes towards it, and places its psychological and dramatic conflicts within the Jacobean cultural and political context. The commentary pays special attention to the play's linguistic complexity, and the edition also includes a complete reprint of Shakespeare's source, Pandosto, by Robert Greene.

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9780198129493

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Reviews

a valuable edition of 'The Winter's Tale'...His accounts of language and of motivation are particularly illuminating and level-headed. - The Review of English Studies, Vol. 49, No. 194, 1998. `a valuable edition of The Winter's Tale ... this is a well-focused and helpful edition.' Paul Hammond, Review of English Studies

One of Shakespeare's more problematic romances gets a picture-book treatment in Coville's new rendition. Jealous King Leontes suspects without reason that his wife and best friend are having an affair. Despite the protests of his most trusted advisors, he sentences his wife to death and demands that her newborn babe be cast into the wilderness. There the child is discovered by a kindly shepherd and raised as a peasant until the day a wayfaring prince falls in love with her. In true Shakespearean fashion, all works out well in the end with true identities discovered, families reunited and multiple weddings to boot. For a tale of suspected infidelity and death, author and artist do as much as they can for what boils down to a fairly adult story. Some judicious editing of the text would not have been out of place - the character of Autolycus weighs down an otherwise succinct narrative. Yet the cleverly selected direct quotes and theatrical watercolor and gouache images make this a more than adequate companion to the original play. (Picture book/play. 7-10) (Kirkus Reviews)

a valuable edition of 'The Winter's Tale'...His accounts of language and of motivation are particularly illuminating and level-headed. - The Review of English Studies, Vol. 49, No. 194, 1998. `a valuable edition of The Winter's Tale ... this is a well-focused and helpful edition.' Paul Hammond, Review of English Studies

a valuable edition of 'The Winter's Tale'...His accounts of language and of motivation are particularly illuminating and level-headed. - The Review of English Studies, Vol. 49, No. 194, 1998. a valuable edition of The Winter's Tale ... this is a well-focused and helpful edition. Paul Hammond, Review of English Studies

Author Information

Stephen Orgel is Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Humanities at Stanford University.

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