Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Scott F. Crider

Critical Essay by Scott F. Crider

SOURCE: “Weeping in the Upper World: The Orphic Frame in 5.3 of The Winter's Tale and the Archive of Poetry,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 32, No. 2, Spring, 1999, pp. 153-72.

In the essay below, Crider contends that the “mythic” and “theatrical” readings of Hermione are not mutually exclusive—that Hermione can be read as being both “dead and alive”—and provides textual evidence for both readings by examining Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

                                                             When there is poetry, it is Orpheus singing.

—Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus (1.5)

It is now a critical commonplace that Hermione is merely pretending to be a statue in the last act of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and that, as a consequence, there is no actual animation represented there. As Stephen Orgel explains in his introduction to the Oxford edition of the play, “Hermione is not, after all, a statue” (60). The evidence of the play,...
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