Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Having Our Will: Imagination in Recent Shakespeare Biographies
- Toward a New Biography of Shakespeare
- Jonson, Shakespeare and the Exorcists
- ‘Lending soft audience to my sweet design’: Shifting Roles and Shifting Readings of Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’
- ‘Armed at point exactly’: The Ghost in Hamlet
- Writing About Motive: Isabella, the Duke and Moral Authority
- Writing Performance: How to Elegize Elizabethan Actors
- Elizabeth Montagu: ‘Shakespear’s poor little Critick’?
- Rewriting Lear’s Untender Daughter: Fanny Price as a Regency Cordelia in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
- The Prequel as Palinode: Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines
- Shakespeare Among the Workers
- Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: Or, her Silence on Master William
- Shakespeare and the Invention of the Epic Theatre: Working with Brecht
- Dramatizing the Dramatist
- Shakespeare in Drama Since 1990: Vanishing Act
- Writing about [Shakespearian] performance
- Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism
- Writing Shakespeare in the Global Economy
- The ‘Complexion’ of Twelfth Night
- Translation as Appropriation: Vassilis Rotas, Shakespeare and Modern Greek
- How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?
- Mistress Tale Porter and the Triumph of Time: Slander and Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale
- Shakespeare Performances in Ireland, 2002–2004
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2004
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 2003
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare in Performance
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Mistress Tale Porter and the Triumph of Time: Slander and Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Having Our Will: Imagination in Recent Shakespeare Biographies
- Toward a New Biography of Shakespeare
- Jonson, Shakespeare and the Exorcists
- ‘Lending soft audience to my sweet design’: Shifting Roles and Shifting Readings of Shakespeare’s ‘A Lover’s Complaint’
- ‘Armed at point exactly’: The Ghost in Hamlet
- Writing About Motive: Isabella, the Duke and Moral Authority
- Writing Performance: How to Elegize Elizabethan Actors
- Elizabeth Montagu: ‘Shakespear’s poor little Critick’?
- Rewriting Lear’s Untender Daughter: Fanny Price as a Regency Cordelia in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park
- The Prequel as Palinode: Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines
- Shakespeare Among the Workers
- Virginia Woolf Reads Shakespeare: Or, her Silence on Master William
- Shakespeare and the Invention of the Epic Theatre: Working with Brecht
- Dramatizing the Dramatist
- Shakespeare in Drama Since 1990: Vanishing Act
- Writing about [Shakespearian] performance
- Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism
- Writing Shakespeare in the Global Economy
- The ‘Complexion’ of Twelfth Night
- Translation as Appropriation: Vassilis Rotas, Shakespeare and Modern Greek
- How Old Were Shakespeare’s Boy Actors?
- Mistress Tale Porter and the Triumph of Time: Slander and Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale
- Shakespeare Performances in Ireland, 2002–2004
- Shakespeare Performances in England, 2004
- Professional Shakespeare Productions in the British Isles January–December 2003
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare in Performance
- 3 Editions and Textual Studies
- Books Received
- Index
Summary
Would some God unveil all lives to us, Slander would retire discomfited to the bottomless pit; for the illumination of truth would be over all.
Lucian, ‘Slander, a Warning’, lines 33–6.The main source for The Winter’s Tale is, as is well known, Robert Greene’s romance Pandosto, first published in 1588. The title page of the first edition of Pandosto reads as follows:
Pandosto. The Triumph of Time. Wherein is discovered by a pleasant History, that although by the means of sinister fortune Truth may be concealed, yet by Time, in spite of fortune, it is most manifestly revealed . . . Temporis filia veritas.
This motto – Truth is the Daughter of Time – had a good deal of cultural currency during the Renaissance, as is sufficiently illustrated by the fact that it forms the basis of important pageants in both Mary’s and Elizabeth’s coronation processions. Importantly for my purposes here it also became associated with the Renaissance allegory of the classical Calumny of Apelles, based on Lucian’s essay on slander cited above. An early and important instance of this association shows up, as Fritz Saxl has shown, in the woodcut of an edition of the Cinque Messe dedicated to Alessandro de Medici by the Venetian publisher Marcolino in 1536. This woodcut bears the legend Veritas Filia Temporis, and shows Truth emerging with the aid of Saturn (as Father Time) from the clouds of obscurity even as she is beaten back by the winged monster identified by Saxl as Calumnia. Geoffrey Whitney, in his sixteenth-century book of emblems, illustrates veritas filia temporis with verses in which Slander is one of the causes of the disappearance of Truth. The motto thus gradually came to be associated specifically with the suppression of truth through slander.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 247 - 259Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005