SOURCE: Viswanathan, S. “Theatricality and Mimesis in The Winter's Tale: The Instance of ‘Taking One by the Hand.’” In Shakespeare in India, edited by S. Nagarajan and S. Viswanathan, pp. 42-52. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1987.

In the following essay, Viswanathan theorizes that in his later plays, particularly The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare was extremely experimental with his theatrical techniques, mixing “self-conscious theatricality” with “convincing verisimilitude.”

A significant feature of the dramaturgy of the later Shakespeare which has come in for a good deal of fruitful attention in recent years is the quality of deliberate dramatic self-consciousness or ‘self-conscious theatricality’ that marks the late tragedies and the last plays, if not some of the problem comedies also. It may be described as a new flowering and pronounced manifestation of, and a further refinement on, the quality of ‘multi-consciousness’ inherent in the English dramatic tradition and this is in ample...