SOURCE: Platt, Peter G. “Reason Diminished: Wonder in The Winter's Tale.” In Reason Diminished: Shakespeare and the Marvelous, pp. 153-68. Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Platt examines the philosophical opposition of rationality and wonder in The Winter's Tale.

The Winter's Tale provides us with the purest example of a Shakespearean “dramatics” of wonder, for in it Shakespeare confronts the potential epistemological tyranny of the rational and posits the marvelous as a means of overcoming this powerful force. At the same time that he examines these philosophical issues through his dramatic art, Shakespeare raises aesthetic questions by unmasking this art as the play unfolds. Thus, while Howard Felperin is certainly correct to point out that nowhere else in Shakespeare is the power of art—which is closely linked to wonder in this play—“seen as wholly positive,”¹ Shakespeare also interrogates the role that this...