The Winter's Tale and the Oracle of the Law

ELH ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 557-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Lee Strain
Keyword(s):  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Law

scholarly journals The Law as Presented in the Polish Renditions of William Shakespeare’s "The Winter’s Tale"

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (XXIII) ◽  
pp. 259-278
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Jaworska-Biskup
Keyword(s):  
Legal Language ◽  
Source Text ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
The Law ◽  
Target Culture

This paper addresses the topic of the law and legal vocabulary in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and its Polish translations. Focus has been directed towards the trial scene of Hermione, one of the major characters of this play. By comparing the Polish renditions of the scene against the English original, the article attempts to present how Polish translators have reflected on the law as presented by Shakespeare and whether they have managed to recreate the law-embedded images and reconstruct the legal language of the source text in the target culture.

The Winter’s Tale and the Oracle of the Law

2018 ◽  
pp. 171-198
Author(s):  
Virginia Lee Strain
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Legal Process ◽  
The Winter's Tale ◽  
Winter's Tale ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Measure For Measure ◽  
The Law

This last chapter shifts focus from the representation of local governance to the representation of national law and politics in another Shakespeare play. While the reform of justice in Measure for Measure results from the Provost and Duke’s labour-intensive and improvisational interventions in the lives of subjects and in the legal process, justice in The Winter’s Tale is restored through the more careful observance of the boundaries between legal and political power. Chapter 5 examines the character of the ‘oracle of the law’ within legal and literary writings contemporaneous with The Winter’s Tale. The legal-political connotations of ‘oracle’ facilitate a new reading of play, in which Apollo’s supernatural oracle evokes human judicial figures. While Apollo’s oracle makes only a brief appearance in the trial scene, nevertheless its influence pulses throughout the play via its representatives, Camillo and Paulina, whose strategies and counsel ultimately ensure that the oracular prophecy is fulfilled. Through these human oracles, as well, the play is infused with the explosive tensions between the sovereign and the judiciary in early seventeenth-century England, through which the King’s prerogative and the jurisdictions of courts came into question.

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.

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