SOURCE: Richards, Jennifer. “Social Decorum in The Winter's Tale.” In Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings, edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, pp. 75-91. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.
In the following essay, Richards maintains that a principal motivating factor in Leontes's paranoid jealousy is his anxiety about social status. The critic examines a number of Renaissance courtesy treatises to show that Shakespeare adroitly recreated a dialectical Jacobean relationship between courtly and common attitudes in The Winter's Tale.
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