The Winter's Tale | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 42 pages of analysis & critique of The Winter's Tale.
This section contains 12,233 words
(approx. 41 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Ruth Nevo

SOURCE: "Delusions and Dreams: The Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare's Other Language, Methuen, 1987, pp. 95-129.

In the following essay, Nevo contends that, while the traditional dramatic unities are flouted in The Winter's Tale, fantasy shapes the drama's two interrelated plots around a pair of dreams, "where one represents a terror inelecutably realized and the other a restitutive wish-fulfillment."

Death, as we all know, is not something to be looked at in the face.

(J.-B. Pontalis)

In The Winter's Tale the once mandatory dramatic "unities"—time, place, action and motivation tumble to the ground like a house of cards. Constructed out of two antithetical parts, in two different geographical locations, it is halved in the centre by a "wide gap of time" and propelled into action by an unmotivated outburst of ruinous rage. Among other notorious oddities, such as the bear-infested but nonexistent sea-coast of Bohemia, there is a...

(read more)

This section contains 12,233 words
(approx. 41 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Ruth Nevo
Copyrights
Gale
Ruth Nevo from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.