Word: tales
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Shakespeare wrote a tragedy, Coriolanus. There followed a group of four plays--Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest--which constituted a novel genre, the tragicomic romance. Henry VIII. also of lesser quality, reverted to the history genre; and Shakespeare concluded by writing a part of The Two Noble Kinsmen...
Furthermore, as I indicated in reviewing the previous production of The Winter's Tale mounted in 1958 by the American Shakespeare Theater, the central tetralogies of both men show many thematic and other relationships, and both reflect a shift from conventional Probabilities to incongruities and implausibilities. In confronting the four Beethoven pieces and the four Shakespeare plays, we find, on the one hand, more that is meditative, philosophical and allusive, and, on the other, more that is naive, childlike or grotesque. This is not the place to pursue the matter at length, but it remains curious and noteworthy that...
...Winter's Tale, with which the AST completes this summer's repertory, has often been scored for its anachronisms and factual slips. Shakespeare set the play in the times of ancient Greece, yet its tone is clearly Christian, including even a reference to Whitsunday. Hermione claims her father was Emperor of Russia, when there was then no such thing. A famous 16th-century Italian sculptor is cited by name. Shakespeare confused the oracle of Apollo at Delphi with the one on the island of Deios, and provided Bohemia with a seacoast it has never enjoyed. On top of that...
...time gap in The Winter's Tale is necessary. Whereas the tragedies focus on the fail from prosperity, this play and the other romances emphasize the stage of rebirth, regeneration or recreation that is part of the full cyclical pattern--and this demands plenty of time. We also must not look here for the gradual development we find in the tragedies; we are obliged to make many assumptions, and to look upon the characters more as allegorical representations than as traditional dramatic personages. Any winter's tale, after all, is at heart a fairy tale to be related around...
...structure of The Winter's Tale is not bipartite, as usually maintained, but tripartite, a fine example of the Hegelian dialectic. In the first three acts we have a thesis: the chill, sterile, tragic life of Leontes's middle-aged court in Sicilia. In the fourth act, we have the antithesis: the pastoral and exuberant life of the young commoners in Bohemia. The fifth act brings us a synthesis, in which the two components are brought into mellow harmony with each other...