Essay on Critical Analysis of The Winter's Tale is published for informational purposes only. The free papers are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a quality Essay on Essay on Critical Analysis of The Winter's Tale at affordable prices please use our essay writing services offered by EssayEmpire.

In his overview of the critical response historically to The Winter's Tale, in the Arden edition of the play, J. H. P. Pafford cites early rejections. John Dryden wrote, in 1672, in the essay, ''Defense of the Epilogue,'' that The Winter's Tale was ''made up of some ridiculous and incoherent story,'' that it was ''either grounded on impossibilities, or at least so meanly written, that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment.'' In 1753, Charlotte Lennox wrote in Shakespeare Illustrated that ''the paltry Story on which it is founded . . . [is] much less absurd and ridiculous.'' William Warburton, in a letter to David Garrick, congratulating him on his adaptation of the play, called The Winter's Tale ''a monstrous composition.''

By the time Coleridge wrote about it in 1813, critics' perceptions of TheWinter'sTale had undergone a sea change. Coleridge admired Shakespeare's presentation of jealousy ''as a vice of the mind,'' and the psychological penetration that allowed Shakespeare to have Leontes express his jealousy through ''a soliloquy in the mask of dialogue.'' In 1817, despite his faulting Shakespeare for such ''slips or blemishes'' as introducing the figure of Time to bridge a sixteen year gap, or having Antigonus land on the seacoast of Bohemia--in actuality, land-locked Bohemia has no seacoast--William Hazlitt praised Shakespeare for the depth and truthfulness of his characters and for how suitable for acting the play is. This is a rare tribute among nineteenth century critics in their consideration of the stageworthiness of Shakespeare's plays. The plays were generally considered better for reading than for seeing. In 1832, Anna Brownell Jameson, in Characteristics of Women, praised Shakespeare's ability to embody psychological characteristics in human form in her perceptive analysis of Hermione:

The character of Hermione exhibits . . . dignity without pride, love without passion, and tenderness without weakness . . . . [T]o delineate such a character in the poetical form, to develop it through the medium of action and dialogue, without the aid of description to preserve its tranquil, mild and serious beauty, its unimpassioned dignity, and at the same time keep the strongest hold upon our sympathy and our imagination and out of this exterior calm, produce the most profound pathos, the most vivid impression of life and internal power: it is this which renders the character of Hermione one of Shakespeare's masterpieces.

By the end of the nineteenth century, Earnest Dowden's view that The Winter's Tale is a great and serene work of Shakespeare's mellow last years had become the dominant view of the play, even after it was attacked in 1904 by Lytton Strachey. While twentieth-century critics rejected the sentimental subjectivity in Dowden's account, or in A. C. Swinburne's similarly tender-hearted reading, neither did they accept Strachey's condemnation of the play, as Pafford summarizes it, as the grotesque and ugly work of a Shakespeare who had become bored with his art. Twentieth century critics have generally endorsed F. R. Leavis's judgment, passed in his essay written in 1952, ''The Criticism of Shakespeare's Late Plays,'' that The Winter's Tale is a masterpiece and have attended to varying forms of close analysis offering Christian and secular readings of the play founded on analyses of structure, imagery, verse patterns and language, or character. Roy Battenhouse, for example, in his introduction to a selection of essays on The Winter's Tale in Shakespeare's Christian Dimension observes the parodic reflection of Leontes in Autolycus.

Just as Leontes called out for help from Hermione, who in stooping to help him got robbed by him of her purse (her good name and her baby), so Autolycus robs the naive shepherd. Autolycus goes on to parallel Leontes in many more ways--for instance, by peddling his trumperies to gullible ears as Leontes peddles to courtiers his trumped up nothings, and by singing of tumbling with doxies like a Leontes fantasizing about a ''hobbyhorse'' wife.

By the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty first century, The Winter's Tale has established its place among Shakespeare's masterpieces. In pursuit of discovering greater keys to its unity and its complex meanings, its details are being considered, whether through the study of the varied use of the word ''bear,'' as in Maurice Hunt's essay, ''Bearing Hence,'' or by suggesting new emendations of puzzling lines in the First Folio as in Susan Bruce's reading of the ''Final Exchange'' between Leontes and Mamillius, or in Martine Van Elk's study of the models of courtly speech designed for women in the Renaissance, or Mark Fortier's study of infanticide in early seventeenth-century England.

Bibliography:

Battenhouse, Roy, ed., ''The Winter's Tale: Comment,'' in Shakespeare's Christian Dimension, Indiana University Press, 1994, pp. 233.

Bruce, Susan, ''Mamillius and Leontes: Their Final Exchange,'' ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, Vol. 16, No. 3, Summer 2003, pp. 9-12.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, ''Notes on The Winter's Tale and Othello, in Four Centuries of Shakespearean Criticism, edited by J. Frank Kermode, Discuss Books, 1965, pp. 290-91.

Evans, Bertrand, ''A Lasting Storm: The Planetary Romances,'' in Shakespeare's Comedies, Clarendon Press, 1960, pp. 296.

Fortier, Mark, ''Married with Children: The Winter's Tale and Social History; or Infanticide in Earlier Seventeenth-Century England,'' Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History, Vol. 57, No. 4, Dec. 1996, pp. 579-603.

Goodman, Paul, The Structure of Literature, University of Chicago Press, 1962, p. 41.

Hazlitt, William, The Winter's Tale, in Characters in Shakespeare's Plays, 1817.

Hunt, Maurice, '''Bearing Hence' Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale'' in SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 44, No. 2, Spring 2004, pp. 333-46.

Jameson, Anna Brownell, Characteristics Of Women, 1832.

Leavis, F. R., ''The Criticism of Shakespeare's Late Plays,'' in Shakespeare Criticism, edited by Anne Ridler,Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 139.

Montaigne, Michel de, The Complete Essays of Montaigne,translated by Donald M. Frame, Stanford UniversityPress, 1982, p. 141.

Pafford, J. H. P., The Winter's Tale, in The ArdenShakespeare, Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1963.

Shakespeare, William, The Winter's Tale, edited by Frank Kermode,Signet Classic, 1963.

Van Elk, Martine, '''Our Praises Are Our Wages': Courtly Exchange, Social Mobility, and Female Speech in The Winter's Tale,'' in Philological Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 4, Fall 2000, pp. 429-57.

Free essays are not written to satisfy your specific instructions. You can order a term paper, research paper or custom TOPIC at our site which offers professional essay writing services. Get your high quality custom paper at relatively cheap prices. EssayEmpire is the best solution for those who seek help in essay writing related to TOPIC and other relevant topics.