Truth and utterance in The Winter’s Tale

Summary

With so much attention paid in recent criticism to the larger mythic patterns of the late romances, it is nevertheless true that it is Shakespeare’s actual words, heard from the stage or read in the text, that provide our first access to these plays, and furnish us with their final meanings. So complex and finely tuned is the language of the late Shakespeare, and yet so subtly simple, that it might be likened to a natural element in which we live and breathe for the duration of the play, essential yet unheeded in itself. This is not to ignore such justly famous set pieces as Perdita’s flower speech in The Winter’s Tale or Prospero’s valedictory in The Tempest, but to see these isolated from the verbal context of the play as a whole is to lessen our awareness of both the speech and the play. The same might be said of any literary work which makes serious intellectual and aesthetic claims upon us, yet it is an aspect of the romances which has been somewhat neglected. References to ‘the late style’ have usually drawn attention to its variety, its lack of any single style. It is recognised that in his last plays Shakespeare drew upon all his accumulated poetic resources, but it is also commonly felt that the resultant style is in many places too prolix and diffuse, even given the looser dramatic mode in which he is working. Yet it is of the essence of the late plays that there is no dominant or consistent style.