SOURCE: Joughin, John J. “Shakespeare, Modernity, and the Aesthetic: Art, Truth, and Judgement in The Winter's Tale.” In Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, edited by Hugh Grady, pp. 61-84. London: Routledge, 2000.

In the following essay, Joughin argues that a finer understanding of the role of aesthetics in Shakespeare's plays will serve to increase our understanding of his work in general, and The Winter's Tale in particular.

Any discussion of the literary or artistic merit of Shakespeare's plays is almost bound to arouse suspicion. For most radical critics, aesthetics still tends to be discarded as part of the ‘problem’ rather than part of the ‘solution’, all too reminiscent of a brand of outdated idealism which privileged notions of refined sensibility and the immutability of ‘literary value’. As a consequence, contemporary political and historicist criticism has tended to regard a ‘commitment to the literary’ as ‘one of the...