Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Old and New Comedy
- An Approach to Shakespearian Comedy
- Shakespeare, Molière, and the Comedy of Ambiguity
- Comic Structure and Tonal Manipulation in Shakespeare and Some Modern Plays
- Laughing with the Audience: ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and the Popular Tradition
- Shakespearian and Jonsonian Comedy
- Two Magian Comedies: ‘The Tempest’ and ‘The Alchemist’
- ‘Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget’: Transformation in ‘Pericles’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’
- The Words of Mercury
- Why Does it End Well? Helena, Bertram, and The Sonnets
- Some Dramatic Techniques in ‘The Winter’s Tale’
- Clemency, Will, and Just Cause in ‘Julius Caesar’
- Thomas Bull and other ‘English Instrumentalists’ in Denmark in the 1580s
- Shakespeare in the Early Sydney Theatre
- The Reason Why: The Royal Shakespeare Season 1968
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate Section
Some Dramatic Techniques in ‘The Winter’s Tale’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2007
- Frontmatter
- Old and New Comedy
- An Approach to Shakespearian Comedy
- Shakespeare, Molière, and the Comedy of Ambiguity
- Comic Structure and Tonal Manipulation in Shakespeare and Some Modern Plays
- Laughing with the Audience: ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ and the Popular Tradition
- Shakespearian and Jonsonian Comedy
- Two Magian Comedies: ‘The Tempest’ and ‘The Alchemist’
- ‘Thou that beget’st him that did thee beget’: Transformation in ‘Pericles’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’
- The Words of Mercury
- Why Does it End Well? Helena, Bertram, and The Sonnets
- Some Dramatic Techniques in ‘The Winter’s Tale’
- Clemency, Will, and Just Cause in ‘Julius Caesar’
- Thomas Bull and other ‘English Instrumentalists’ in Denmark in the 1580s
- Shakespeare in the Early Sydney Theatre
- The Reason Why: The Royal Shakespeare Season 1968
- The Year's Contributions to Shakespearian Study 1 Critical Studies
- 2 Shakespeare’s Life, Times and Stage
- 3 Textual Studies
- Index
- Plate Section
Summary
This discussion might well be entitled ‘Three Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter’s Tale’, were I not anxious to avoid the implication that it offers only half the value already provided by Nevill Coghill in Shakespeare Survey 11. I hope instead to offer an analysis which, building upon Coghill’s insights, goes beyond them to call particular attention to the way in which Shakespeare, thus late in his career, had learned both to trust his actors and to manipulate audience response.
A beginning playwright is apt to think almost entirely in terms of putting necessary information into his lines. In setting the bare Elizabethan stage, no other course is open to him:
These are the city gates, the gates of Roan...
(i Henry VI, iii, ii, i)Under this thick-grown brake we'll shroud ourselves...
(3 Henry VI, iii, i, 1)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Shakespeare Survey , pp. 93 - 108Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1970