Winter's Tale Research Articles

Youth in Cities: A Cross-National Perspective

Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 14 No. 2 (2004) ISSN: 1546-2250 Youth in Cities: A Cross-National Perspective Tienda, Marta and Wilson, William Julius (2002). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press; 302 pages. $21.99. ISBN 0521005817. I would there were no age between ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. (William Shakespeare, The Winters Tale, Act III: Scene iii) Youth “hanging out” and the fear it evokes are not a new phenomena. Shakespeare's lament mirrors much of contemporary discourse on the idleness and deviancy of youth “out of control” in the streets. In the current “fear of crime” climate and the subsequent fragmentation of the public sphere, evidence suggests that young people are being extradited to the margins of our public spaces. LoukataitouSideris (1996) suggests the current fragmentation of the public sphere is caused by fear, suspicion, tension and conflict between social groups, and is resulting in an attempt to segregate space in terms of legitimate and illegitimate user groups. According to James, Prout and Jenks (1998) the emerging hierarchy of spatial access and restricted spatial mobility in relation to public space is a global phenomenon appearing in late modernity and is based on categories such as class, ethnicity and age. The means for segregating space in late modernity has been through the introduction of a number of regulatory technologies. These technologies are present in public space in the form of hardware such as surveillance cameras and policy such as “move-on” laws. In Australia alone anecdotal evidence suggests that a quarter of a million surveillance cameras now exist in public space (exact numbers aren't available because many are privately owned and unrecorded in any form of register). Other regulatory practices and policies aimed at 344 discouraging illegitimate use of public space by loitering youth include security guards in shopping malls, curfews, and moveon or anti-congregation legislation. Current research emerging in the late twentieth century on “young people in urban environments” has vividly documented young people being positioned as “intruders” or illegitimate users of public spaces (Chawla 2002, Malone and Hasluck 1998, Malone and Hasluck 2002, Percy-Smith 1998, Sibley 1995, Valentine 1996). According to this body of research, young people positioned as the “other” in our cities are being portrayed through media and policing campaigns as deviant and barbaric- a threat to social order (Malone and Hasluck 1998, Sibley 1995, Valentine 1996). The “public” becomes the adult world constructed for certain types of behaviors and activities. Yet rushing headlong through the life course, young people often sit uncomfortably somewhere in-between a childinnocent , pure and in need of adult covering, to being an adult- stable, autonomous and actualized into their selfhood. I was reminded of this ambiguous state of being youth very clearly some years ago when I took a group of challenging “atrisk ” young adolescents from the working-class side of town on a bus trip into the green lush streetscapes of middle suburbia. The trip was a fact-finding mission for an urban renewal project we were conducting with them. Midway through our guided tour we stopped at a park to have an “ordered” lunch break. In this particular park was a children’s adventure playground- rather a rare commodity in Australian society- and we had planned to show this to the young people as an example of a child-designed space in the city. But much to our surprise before we had even unwrapped our sandwiches, the 60-odd youth had bolted and invaded the playground. For over an hour these tough street wise kids with a whole lot of attitude were squealing with childlike delight and fervently rushing from tree house, to trampoline, to flying fox, to gokart and back again. After an hour and some time prying them from the playground equipment they brushed down their 345 oversized pants, sneaked of to the bushes for a smoke and reboarded the bus in surly silence. This state of ambiguity is very confusing for adults– who want to name and order the development of the child through adolescent to adulthood...

:Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey

The essays contained in this volume help trace the course of Shakespeare criticism during the latter half of the twentieth century, as emphasis on critical interpretation experienced a number of significant shifts. Genre studies, textual analyses, and feminist approaches are all represented here, along with three new essays never before published on the 'Winter's Tale' and the 'Taming of the Shrew'.

Untimely Monuments: Stoicism, History, and the Problem of Utility in The Winter's Tale and Pericles

Untimely Monuments: Stoicism, History, and the Problem of Utility in The Winter's Tale and Pericles

“No Settled Senses of the World Can Match the Pleasure of That Madness”: The Politics of Unreason in The Winter's Tale

“No Settled Senses of the World Can Match the Pleasure of That Madness”: The Politics of Unreason in <i>The Winter's Tale</i>

Press Censorship in Jacobean England by Cyndia Susan Clegg (review)

960 Reviews the essence of 'romanticism' and its katharsis as a form of transformation and reintegration . Jonsonian 'old' comedy won the field, and city comedy became its slightly more civilized sister. Both poets continued needling each other on these matters of 'poetics' after 1602 (e.g. in Pericles, Winter's Tale, and Tempest). Bednarz, to my view, underestimates the necessity of rethinking the position of the poet in the context of the growth of commercial theatre. Jonson made the case, along lines set out by Sidney, for the artist's autonomy and the poet's moral responsibility. He does not claim to be the only monarch in poetry. He wanted poets to speak their mind regardless of 'time, place, or opinion', in the tradition of the ancients. Marston's and Shakespeare's counter-case, that the aim of art is the consumer's pleasure, is rather poor. The two views are and must be complementary, so that plays 'as you like it' are stopped from aesthetic ifnot moral deterioration by authors who dare say 'by God 'tis good and if you like it,you may'. Jonson deserves more respect. Not only did he write some of the best comedies in English, but without his 'arrogant claims' for stage plays as serious poetry, the Shakespeare folio might never have been there to compare them with. Bednarz reminds us that the Poets' War was no nineteenth-century fiction. Yet he tries too hard to confine itin time and scope, makes too much ofa 'formal debate' out of it, and clings to a nineteenth-century view of personal portrayal, where it would have sufficed to point out that the poets continually needled each other, and that the vogue of verse satire influenced this habit. The evidence does not allow for much more. University of Utrecht Henk Gras Press Censorship in Jacobean England. By Cyndia Susan Clegg. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xi + 286 pp. ?40; $59.95. ISBN 0-521-78243-0. Censorship has become such a site of contention in studies of the early seventeenth century largely because it has become one of the dominant tropes through which we read political culture. Revisionists in the 1970s began an assault on a Whig model of repressive state censorship that aimed to silence all dissent to argue for a state that lacked the political will and effective mechanisms of control to impose a programmatic censorship. Instead the internal market of the book trade more often motivated press control, and the rare occasions of print censorship were not the result of a wider ideological agenda but were isolated events determined by local interests. Cyndia Susan Clegg's Press Censorship inJacobean England is both part of and strives to look beyond a revisionist model. Her aim is to draw attention to the varied, contradictory, and competing interests informing censorship practices, how they are shaped locally by economic, religious, and political events, and, following on from the work of An? thony Milton, to demonstrate the way that censorship practices were appropriated by competing interest groups. Clegg criticizes previous studies of censorship for not sufficientlydistinguishing between different monarchs. While James inherited the mechanisms put in place by the Elizabethan government for controlling the press, detailed in Clegg's earlier study Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), the practice of censorship under his rule differed significantly from the more unified Elizabethan style of political censorship. The Calvinist households of the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, and the Bishop of London, John King, effectivelycontrolled ecclesiastical authorization in the early years of James's reign, and their interests and those of the Crown did not necessarily coincide. The argument unfolds through a series of careful and detailed case studies. She develops Kevin Sharpe's work on James I to argue forthe King's ceremonial and propagandist MLR, 98.4, 2003 961 use of censorship to act out royal power within a national and, more importantly, international context. This very public mode of censorship contrasts with the King's 'secretive' use of censorship in matters that touched on his personal honour. His style of personal censorship becomes a model for acts of individual and...

Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' and 'King Lear' by Leon Harold Craig (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 745 not surprising given the threat of civil unrest in the years of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis. Political topicality is evident in all these rewritings of Shakespeare's plays, including Shadwell's The History of Timon ofAthens, theMan-Hater, Ravenscroft 's Titus Andronicus, Otway's The History and Fall of Caius Marius, and Tate's notorious adaptation of King Lear. But even if the preoccupations revealed by these plays are of a more serious nature, they share an important trait with the plays of the 1660s: their verbal 'depictive power' (p. 140) is reinforced by effectivetheatrical images, as the detailed stage directions employed by Restoration adapters indicate. This study analyses a range of primary and secondary material from different perspectives: a rigorous linguistic scrutiny of the play-texts is accompanied by the insertion of Restoration dramatists' and commentators' views on such plays. Attention is also devoted to the plays' critical history. This approach allows Murray to demon? strate that Shakespeare's Restoration adaptations deserve to be treated as literary and theatrical achievements in their own right, rather than being compared unfavourably (as they traditionally have) with the original texts. University of Reading Michela Calore Of Philosophers and Kings: Political Philosophy in Shakespeare's 'Macbeth' and 'King Lear'. By Leon Harold Craig. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2001. xi + 4o6pp. $70; ?50. ISBN 0-8020-357 i-x. Of Philosophers and Kings combines relatively unproblematic contentions, commonplaces even, with a range of wholly untenable views. Only a reviewer, I suspect, will be subjected to the trials of reading this book in its entirety: for reasons known only to the writer and publisher, 268 pages of digressive text are accompanied by an addi? tional 124 pages of endnotes consisting, in the main, of lengthy quotations from 'the opinions of a select group of scholars, many from an earlier generation' (pp. 11-12). Focusing primarily on Macbeth and King Lear, but with three shorter discussions of Othello, The Winter's Tale, and Measure for Measure, Craig sets out to demonstrate that 'Shakespeare is as great a philosopher as he is a poet' (p. 4). For the reader (Craig is unabashed by this anachronistic category, and has little interest in the verbal text as a medium of performance), the task is one of 'figuring out the plot' with the aim of 'seeing what is really going on and why' (pp. 15-16). The reward will be a 'clear and accurate idea of human nature' as one grasps the 'inner rationale' ofthe plays (p. 17). Craig is hostile towards what he dismisses as narrow, institutional senses ofphilosophy, part of his anxiety about the critical theory he constantly snipes at, settling fora catchall definition that all but makes the word redundant: it is 'nothing more nor less than the rigorous, persistent, thus usually systematic employment of one's natural powers to resolve one's puzzlement' (p. 18). What this amounts to in practice is a reading of the plays that confirms essentialist, neo-conservative beliefs in oppressive cate? gories such as 'truth' and 'nature' as they constitute and protect institutions such as 'marriage' and the 'family'. There is a bewildering intellectual naivety: 'to understand Macbeth', Craig insists, 'to understand it as its author understood it,one must practice [. . .] philosophy' (p. 31) and gain access to 'certain truly timeless questions' (p. 110). Macbeth 'shows not only how invaluable can be a philosopher's understanding of politics', but the relevance to people's lives of 'several of the most challenging meta? physical and cosmological questions'. In King Lear, we see 'philosophy itself arising out of man's [sie] confrontation with Nature' (p. 17). Assertion rather than argument is the style in a book whose energy for lapidary observations rarely diminishes. That Macbeth dramatizes, in part, 'how not to succeed in establishing oneself as a new prince' (p. 34) is hardly open to question, nor is the proximity of Machiavelli to all 746 Reviews this; and Craig explores, interestingly enough, the characters of Rosse and Lenox to suggest that 'Machiavellians' do 'not all get their just come-uppance'. 'Lenox's Machiavellian duplicity', however, is in the 'service of...

'... the Country must diminish ': Jacobean London and the Production of Pastoral Space in The Winter's Tale

The City of London underwent enormous geographic and demographic expansion in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By 1603, London had become a suburban metropolis, spreading well beyond the ancient walls into surrounding countryside. This expansion was a cause of great anxiety for local authorities and created an ambivalent cultural space which challenged traditional distinctions between 'city' and 'country'. The Winter's Tale (1610) seems to reproduce this collapse in spatial relations, presenting a pastoral vision that has confounded many readers. Earlier modes of pastoral romance offer a clear separation of city and rural locations, whereby the latter performs a recuperative function within the drama. In The Winter's Tale , this kind of pastoral geography is offered, but simultaneously rejected. The rural world of Bohemia is an ambivalent synthesis of city and country. Much like the extra-mural areas of London, it is a location in which conflicts are sustained and intensified, rather than resolved.

Reconsidering the Tragic Aspects of Leontes: Death and Laughter in The Winter's Tale

Reconsidering the Tragic Aspects of Leontes: Death and Laughter in <i>The Winter's Tale</i>

Of philosophers and kings: political philosophy in Shakespeare's Macbeth and King Lear

This innovative work argues that Shakespeare was as great a philosopher as he was a poet, and that his greatness as a poet derived even more from his power as a thinker than from his genius for linguistic expression. Accordingly, Leon Craig's interpretation of the plays - focusing primarily on Macbeth and King Lear, but including extensive comments on Othello, The Winter's Tale, and Measure for Measure - are intended to demonstrate what can be gained from reading Shakespeare 'philosophically.' Shakespeare, Craig argues, had a persistent fascination with the relationship between politics and philosophy, and even more precisely, with the idea of a philosophical ruler. Macbeth and King Lear are given detailed exposition for the special light they cast on tensions between philosophy and politics, knowledge and power. They show how the pursuit of an adequate understanding of certain practical issues - transient yet recurring - necessarily leads to considerations that far transcend the particular circumstances in which these practical problems arise. Metaphysics, cosmology, and man's confrontation with nature, were made dramatically manifest by Shakespeare to challenge and promote philosophic activity among his audience and readers. Unconventional in its approach, but working within the tradition of such critics as Allan Bloom and Harry Jaffa, Craig's book makes a substantial contribution to understanding the general principles of Shakespearean drama.

Reviews Plays: The Winter's Tale

Reviews Plays: The Winter's Tale

Soft Touch: On the Renaissance Staging and Meaning of the "Noli me tangere" Icon

In a brief article called `Do Not Embrace Me' as Icon published in the December 1988 issue of Notes and Queries, argue that Viola's admonition to her newly recovered twin Sebastian in act 5.1.251 of Twelfth Night alludes to the episode in John 20:11-17 where Mary Magdalen, in search of the crucified body of Christ, mistakes the resurrected Christ for the gardener. (1) During a short catechism, Jesus implies the inappropriateness of Mary's tears with the question that, just before, the angels attending the tomb have posed to her: Woman, why weepest thou? When Christ calls her by name, she recognizes him as Rabboni (Master), and he immediately warns her, Touch (Noli tangere) because, he says, I am not yet ascended to my Father. He instructs her to find the disciples and inform them that she has seen Christ resurrected. Viola's words to Sebastian include several features of this biblical passage. At first, Viola and Sebastian not recognize one another. They catechize one another, almost absurdly, about parentage and birthmarks to establish who they are. Most telling, once Cesario has been identified as Viola, she forbids Sebastian to touch her until her female identity has been fully restored: If nothing lets to make us happy both Than this my masculine usurp'd attire, Do not embrace till each circumstance Of place, time, fortune, cohere and jump That am Viola which to confirm, I'll bring you to a captain in this town, Where lie my maiden weeds; by whose gentle help was preserv'd to serve this noble count. (5.1.249-56) (2) In a subsequent essay, Yu Jin Ko, taking the allusion in Viola's speech to Christ's Noli tangere for granted, refers to Violas do not embrace me as a gesture of that qualifies as internal stage direction. (3) For Ko, Viola's delay of Sebastian's embrace works into the play's larger concern with longing, and Ko elaborates on many instances in the play when desire dies just as it is achieved. Ko's reading ultimately focuses on Viola's repulse of Sebastian's embrace but not on the two other parallels between the passages: the matter of mistaken identity and the questioning between parties. The result is an engaging interpretation of the play but an incomplete study of an embedded stage direction that, shall argue, is richly informed by its medieval dramatic history and by contemporary Northern Renaissance images of the Noli tangere icon. Close examination of these associations also suggests that the icon lies embedded at the close of The Winter's Tale. The Noli tangere icon appears in European liturgical drama as early as the twelfth century, where it is part of the Type III Visitatio sepulchri, in which the three Marys and the disciples Peter and John visit Christ's tomb, only to find it empty. The icon persists in the Towneley mystery cycle, where it is included as part of the Resurrection play, as well as in the Digby manuscript's Mary Magdalen, a saint play. It also forms part of the Resurrection play in two manuscripts of the Chester mystery cycle, (4) appears in the N-Town cycle, and was likely a feature of the Coventry pageants, which the Cappers' took over from the Weavers' in 1531, although this and other probable inclusions are now lost. (5) Dramatic records from Coventry suggest that the hortulanus scene from John's Gospel remained part of the performance until 1579, when the plays were suppressed. (6) The records also list costumes, properties, wigs, and the like throughout much of the sixteenth century for the three Marys and, in particular, a costume identified in an inventory as mary maudlyns goune remaining as late as 1591. (7) That the icon provided a source of continuous cultural interest in sixteenth-century Northern European--an interest that bridged the Reformation--is attested by the numerous Northern Renaissance popular prints of the subject, most of them by Protestant artists. …

Shakespeare and Eastern Europe (review)

210Comparative Drama The LongestDay, and later in Tora, Tora, Tora. I notice also how fully this history of interaction between Yiddish and English yielded experiences and situations that are now applicable in many multicultural circumstances in which two or more languages are involved. Television series have even begun including Spanish dialogue. One must be grateful for the dedicated scholarship ofthis work. My father, a Yiddish actor, died before Berkowitz was born. In his adulthood, the Yiddish theater diminished radically, and he could do nothing to stop this change. He had no idea that there were young people who would discover the value ofthis rich, active aspect of modern Jewish cultural life. There are now several works in English and in Yiddish, as Berkowitz details in his notes and bibliography, thatwill provide guidance to those interested in enlarging the scholarly identity oftheYiddish theater, theYiddish language, the processes ofsecularization without ethical degeneration, and the social vitality ofpopular theater. David Bleich University ofRochester Zdenëk Stííbrny. Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. Oxford and NewYork: OxfordUniversityPress,2000.Pp.xix+ 176. $55.00. The present volume, part ofthe Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, offers a concise and valuable reminder of the Bard's importance for Eastern Europe and Russia but goes further in demonstrating the return obligations ofWestern theater to Slavic responses. Zdenëk Stííbrny, Emeritus Professor in Prague's Charles University, is equally comfortable and well equipped to handle the broad array of theatrical traditions that are involved and to provide an enjoyable excursion across borders and through the years ofShakespeare's influence. The inevitable reiterations oflong-known truths unavoidable in summary accounts ofthis sort are kept to a minimum once we get past the opening brief, ifstill tedious discussion ofEast European history. Stnbrny quicklylivens things up by introducingthe immortal persona ofPickleherring, clown intermediary of performances put on by English players touring the continent as far as Poland. Pickleherring, Stííbrny points out, performed the same function as Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, for he served up song, dance, and sometimes bawdy asides to liven up the audience. In a number ofearly adaptations played on the continent , individual scenes from Shakespeare's workswere adapted for Pickleherring farces, or Pickleherringwas introduced willy nilly into Shakespeare's plays, some- Reviews211 times in radical disjunction with the original text's meaning. Pickleherring reached Russia along with Shakespeare's works. Early committed fans ofShakespeare includedAlexander Sumarokov, Catherine II, Nikolai Karamzin, and, most tellingly, Alexander Pushkin. Sumarokov was moved by his neoclassical sensibilities to try to improve his source, and although his adaptation of Hamlet showed considerable skill in the use of alexandrines and observance ofthe unities, this type ofrefinement ultimately did an injustice to the Bard's broader genius. Catherine II did better, Stfibrny notes, to the point of repairing parts ofthe hasty plotting of The Merry Wives ofWindsor in her 1786 adaptation, a keen satire of Russian mores. Karamzin's reading of Shakespeare and his version of Julius Caesar is of interest chiefly for their influence on Alexander Pushkin and particularly the master Russian play, Boris Godunov. Stfibrny, neatly summarizing Pushkin's debt and his originality, does justice to both as well as to the Shakespeare connections of CountNulin, The Stone Guest, The Covetous Knight, and Angelo. He also describes Mikhail Lermontov's obligations (more tenuous than Pushkin's) in Masquerade, Vissarion Belinsky's Hamletessay and its origins in German philosophy,Turgenev's well-known piece on Hamlet and Don Quixote as lasting human (read: particularly Russian) types, and Turgenev's own prose, including the powerful tale"King Learofthe Steppes." Shakespeare was almost as basic as Harold Bloom imagined for Dostoevsky and Chekhov, although Stïforay's account makes clear that Chekhov's greater engagement with theater shows more explicit attachments in the episodes, characters , and language of all his major plays. For contrast, we are also offered a reviewofTolstoy's notorious repudiation of Shakespeare, followed closely by those of George Bernard Shaw and George Orwell. In this as in other cases in which Shakespeare is criticized, a particular advantage of the study is that it gives as full and honest an appraisal as in the instances ofthe more worshipful responses. One can also appreciate Stribrny...

:Shakespeare on Love and Friendship

No-one can make us love love as much as Shakespeare, and no-one can make us despair of it as effectively as he does. William Shakespeare is the only classical author to remain widely popular - not only in America but throughout the world - and Allan Bloom argues that this is because no other writer holds up a truer mirror to human nature. Unlike the Romantics and other moderns, Shakespeare has no project for the betterment or salvation of mankind - his poetry simply gives us eyes to see what is there. In particular, we see the full variety of erotic connections, from the star-crossed devotions of and Juliet to the failed romance of and to the problematic friendship of Falstaff and Hal. This volume includes essays on five plays, Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra, Measure for Measure, Troilus and Cressida and Winter's Tale, and within these Bloom meditates on Shakespeare's work as a whole. He also draws on his formidable knowledge of Plato, Rousseau and others to bring both ancients and moderns into the conversation. The result is a truly synoptic treatment of eros, not only a philosophical reflection on Shakespeare, but a survey of the human spirit and its tendency to seek what Bloom calls the connectedness of love and friendship. These highly original interpretations of the plays convey a deep respect for their author and a deep conviction that we still have much to learn from him. In Bloom's view, we live in a love-impoverished age; he asks us to turn once more to Shakespeare because the playwright gives us a rich version of what is permanent in human nature without sharing our contemporary assumptions about erotic love.

“Exit, pursued by a bear”: Maternal Imagery in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

“Exit, pursued by a bear”: Maternal Imagery in Shakespeare's <i>The Winter's Tale</i>

Garrick's Version: the production of “perdita”

Mary Robinson's stage career was extremely short-lived, even for a woman whose talents and life itself were cut tragically short. Only the nickname “Perdita” attached itself as a lasting public memorial to her, resurfacing as the authorial signature to her posthumous autobiographical Memoirs a full century after her death. Paradoxically, “Perdita” flourished less as a vehicle or mask for her own self-promotion and protection than as a sentimental gloss on David Garrick's Drury Lane production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, and moreover, as a sycophantic gesture to Hanoverian royalty, her untrustworthy patrons. he article sets out to trace the inner history of Robinson's donning of the nickname when it was opportune to her performance of metropolitan high fashion, and her self-reinvention as she matured her grasp of its implications.

"He Something Seems Unsettled": Melancholy, Jealousy, and Subjective Temporality in "The Winter's Tale"

Previous articleNext article No Access"He Something Seems Unsettled": Melancholy, Jealousy, and Subjective Temporality in "The Winter's Tale"DAVID HOUSTON WOODDAVID HOUSTON WOOD Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 312002Performing Affect Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/rd.31.41917370 Views: 44Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright © 2002 Northwestern University PressPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Caroline Bicks Fear of the Queen’s Speed: Trauma and Departure in The Winter’s Tale, Humanities 11, no.66 (Dec 2022): 156.https://doi.org/10.3390/h11060156David Houston Wood “[A] Deathful Suck”1, Prose Studies 28, no.22 (Aug 2006): 150–167.https://doi.org/10.1080/01440350600784636

"Everybody's Shakespeare": Representative Genres and John Boydell's "Winter's Tale"

What injury (short of theatres) did not Boydell's do me with Shakespeare! To have Opie's Shakespeare, Northcote's Shakespeare, light-headed Fuseli's Shakespeare, heavy-headed Romney's Shakespeare, wooden-headed West's (though he did best in Lear), deaf-headed Reynolds's Shakespeare, instead of my, and everybody's Shakespeare. To be tied down to an authentic face of Juliet! To have Imogen's portrait! --Charles Lamb CHARLES LAMB'S PIQUED REMINISCENCE OF THE SHAKESPEARE GALLERY (1789-1805) calls attention to proprietary problems that accompany illustration of literature. (1) In case of John Boydell's scheme for commissioning and exhibiting history paintings based on England's representative poet, these problems took on national significance. Conceived as a for-profit experiment in cultural representation, Gallery-London's premiere exhibition hall in 1790s--took aristocratic ideal of insular family gallery to a wider public. Englishness was now focused on national poet, and traditional image of nationas-patrimony broadened to include anybody with some money and a taste for Shakespeare. But inevitably, as Lamb complains, an exclusionary principle prevailed. One person's Shakespeare was not another's. Middle-class readers were especially invested in a personalized encounter with plays, as Deidre Lynch has argued, finding their own inner regions of selfhood mirrored back to them by characters they read about. (2) Yet in rejecting prevailing tastes for portraiture and theater painting and making history painting vehicle for his popular nationalism, Boydell championed genre of aristocracy over genre of characterization. marriage of art, commerce, and nationalism may have been a stroke of marketing genius, but marriage of democratic and high-aesthetic values was contradictory. Boydell's scheme was an overtly ideological proposition, yet its own politics were strikingly unsettled. ideological contradictions of Boydell enterprise are epitomized by its attenuation of generic difference. For all Gallery's promotion of history painting, insistent shadow-presence of portraiture in its productions reveals how difficult it would be to forge a distinctively national culture from aesthetic values of a propertied class. History painting was said to promote civic virtue, but portraiture was genre for a nation of shopkeepers. Its appeal to private tastes of a new class of art patrons had to be accommodated if Gallery was to succeed as a nationalist project and as a commercial venture. painters of Gallery, ironically, are ones who effected accommodation between civic virtue and private taste, providing aesthetic solutions to problems that Boydell did not foresee. Entrusted with creating a school of history painting that could rekindle feelings of civic virtue, they instead produced naturalistic scenes of private virtue in mixed modes--historical portraits, domestic histories, and fancy pictures--that were better suited to nineteenth-century image of England. The much-envied history painter succeeded as an exponent of civic virtue to extent that he could expand on genre of portraiture, argues Louise Lippincott; the successful history painting 'lived' as closely as possible market life of a portrait. (3) This miscibility of genres was main achievement of Boydell's undertaking. Gallery was a site of aesthetic play, where generic boundaries were actively reconfigured in effort to produce an art--and a public exhibition space--that could be marketed as genuinely national. (4) These dynamics are best studied in historical and textual particulars, rather than in abstractions that for so long have enabled out-of-hand dismissals of Gallery--from romantic-period painter James Northcote, who derided collection as such a collection of slipslop imbecility as it was dreadful to look at, to W. …

Knowledge and Belief in The Winter's Tale

At narrative moment immediately preceding animation of Hermione's statue, Paulina exhorts Leontes, It is requir'd / You do awake your faith.' Faith in what? For Leontes, it is faith in reality of miracles, coming back to life of a queen who has been dead sixteen long years. For William Shakespeare's audience, it is faith tied to willing suspension of disbelief, a readiness to accept that theater is capable of representing just about anything. But it is not only in representational space of theater that dead find themselves coming back to life. Scripture itself purports to offer inerrant accounts of people who have come back from dead: daughter of Shunamite woman in Old Testament book of 2 Kings, Jarius's daughter, Lazarus, and, of course, Christ himself, described typologically as the firstfruits of them that slept.2 The animation of Hermione's statue in The Winter's Tale finds its informing source not only in mythic account of Ovid's perennially popular Pygmalion, but also in stories of resurrection afforded by Scripture. With regard to Bible, one source Shakespeare appears to have had in mind when producing The Winter's Tale is book of 2 Kings. The bear's devouring of Antigonus is Shakespeare's revision of story found in this book, of how prophet Elisha called up a bear to kill off some young kids who had audacity to mock his bald pate.3 The book of 2 Kings also offers following account of miraculous resuscitation that might have constituted a central scriptural source informing Shakespeare's representation of enlivening statue:

Questioning History in Cymbeline

First Folio of William Shakespeare's works misclassifies Cymbeline with vigor, including the play in the table of contents under Tragedies and setting the running title, The Tragedie of Cymbeline, over the play text. Of course, either of the two other kinds of plays listed in the contents, Comedies and Histories, would have made a better match. Cymbeline ends happily, with joyful reunions aplenty, and its setting in the years of Britain's tribute payments to Rome secures its connection to recorded history. Perhaps the play's dual status as comedy and history compelled the Folio editors to throw up their hands in dismay, prompting the perverse classification that reached print in 1623. In the twentieth century, when faced with the fact that Cymnbeline exhibits the characteristics of both history and what has come to be called critics have usually sought to identify the play with its chronological neighbors, Pericles and Winter's Tale, thereby subordinating the extent to which Cymbeline concerns itself with matters historical. Some have dismissed the play's elements outright. For James M. Nosworthy, the play is a pseudo-historical experiment in romance; for Irving Ribner, it qualifies as historical romance, a kind of play for him devoid of real concern and ultimately responsible for the demise of the legitimate history play.' More recent writers have embraced the idea of a sense functioning in this play, but their topical interpretations channel history into contemporary politics; Cymbeline is only insofar as it comments upon (for us) events during Jacobean England.2

Knowledge and Belief in "The Winter's Tale"

Knowledge and Belief in "The Winter's Tale"