A Tale of Sprights and Goblins

Abstract

CCORDING to E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale resembles an entire Aeschylean trilogy packed into one play, with both destruction and new creation presented full view of the audience. In seeing the play as a compressed trilogy, Professor Tillyard dealt in a new way with a problem long discussed by critics of The Winter's Tale: the problem of the play's awkward dramatic structure and its consequent lack of tonal unity. Readily admitting that the play is composite in form and tone, he found the first part seriously tragic and saw in the second good earthy comedy and regeneration. Many had felt that the play was first tragic, then comic. Professor Tillyard insisted that, since the vision ideally includes both destruction and reconciliation, the composite form and shifting tone of The Winter's Tale are but signs of its greatness and of the breadth of Shakespeare's vision.' This view of The Winter's Tale as expanded tragedy is an attractive one. It lends significance to the play by attaching it to the great tragedies; it answers critics of the Lytton Strachey school, who see Shakespeare in his last years as a bored, disgusted old man with dimming poetic vision and failing powers; and it seems to explain away that dramatic anomaly: the casual yoking of tragedy and comedy. It holds special attractions for those critics who view the play as dramatized allegory or symbol, and who interpret it in terms of