Tag Archives: The Winter’s Tale

Introduction:

Sanders Portrait of William Shakespeare

In accordance with the heightened complexity in the structure of Shakespeare’s later plays, the rhetoric and verse forms grow more dense. The intertwining thematic and formal constructions visible throughout his body of work become knotted and subtly layered.

One such instance of this mode of high-wrought writing meeting structural experimentation in the later works of Shakespeare is The Winter’s Tale. Its narrative twists (and, indeed, genre twists) set the stage for dialogue pregnant with verbal and dramatic irony.

Careful attention to a particular passage and to the relationship between that passage and the entire play can yield a vivid portrait of how the play’s thematic concerns are woven into every moment. The passage near the beginning of The Winter’s Tale wherein Hermione convinces Polixenes to stay in Sicily is a potent example of this. In this scene, the play’s concerns with authoritative testimony and with gendered power structures belie the facade of courtly playfulness. These areas of interest, though never explicitly confronted, are present in the passage’s musicality, rhythm, diction, and rhetoric.

There is a confluence in the dialogue formed by the rhetorical flux of femininity, power, youth, and virtue and the ironic metrical disharmony of the dialogue’s participants which situates the scene as an introduction to The Winter’s Tale‘s comedy with hints of its imminent tragedy.

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