Roughing it

Hey everyone, so I haven't written an introduction yet, so I just gave you my thesis and then dived into the meat of the essay. It's definitely not polished and still needs support in a lot of places but any commentary/constructive criticism will be appreciated!

In his play, The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare utilizes the duality of time as being simultaneously constraining and liberating.


When Time, the aptly named chorus, begins the fourth act by “sliding o’er” sixteen years of plot, there is a palpable demonstration of both the constraints and liberations of time. The chorus identifies itself to the audience, “I that please some, try all: both joy and terror/Of good and bad”(4:1:1-2). Time defines itself here through binary opposition with the pairs of pleasing and trying, joy and terror, and good and bad, which portray its paradoxical, self-contradictory nature. This mirrors the similarly opposing nature of constraint and liberation, which is embedded within Time’s self-proclaimed contradictions. Being pleased, good, and joy can readily be considered liberations from feelings of anger, pain, and negativity, while being tried, terror, and bad are constraints in one’s ability to experience positive emotions.

Time continues to request the audience’s indulgence as he skips over sixteen years in the lives of the characters, bringing us to a point where Perdita has reached adulthood and Leontes has been pining over his deceased wife for sixteen years. Inarguably, this is a liberation to the plot. Passing over sixteen years allows the story to depict the most engaging and salient aspects of the story without the complicating use of flashback or excessive narration. This flexibility would’ve been amenable to Shakespeare as a producer, as Shakespeare was a business man as well as a writer [Support about Shakespeare’s role as a theater producer/business man]. While studying his plays and reading them lends a perception of Shakespeare’s plays as art and literature, they were also intended as shear forms of entertainment in his time [support about theater in shakespeare’s time/why people went to the theater]. His works were meant to be “crowd pleasers” that could bring in an audience, perpetuate his reputation as a popular playwright, and keep the theaters that performed his work in business. This effort to produce “crowd pleasing” plays is most obviously evidenced in The Winter’s Tale by the bear in act three scene three, which isn’t wholly pertinent to the plot, but is incorporated as an ostentatious element of spectacle. This bear earned the play possibly the most famous stage exit ever written, “Exit, pursued by a bear”(3.3) (…Is there a way to cite stage directions? They don’t have line numbers obviously…). Had Shakespeare not chosen to use an unnatural pattern of time, his goals of creating a widely popular and successful work would’ve been, if not utterly insurmountable, at least acutely arduous.

This isn’t to suggest, of course, that The Winter’s Tale was embraced by everyone in Shakespeare’s time or afterwards. While the play is able to present the most interesting aspects of the story and spectacle through its manipulation of time, it flagrantly disregards Aristotle’s Unities. After studying Ancient Greek and Roman theater, Aristotle established three vital rules that he felt a performance must adhere to in order to be successful: unity of place, unity of action, and unity of time. Specifically, The Winter’s Tale violated Aristotle’s unity of time which stated that the plot of a play must take place in a length of time comparable with the time it took to perform the play. Shortly after Shakespeare’s time, in the beginning of the 18th Century with the Age of Enlightenment, Neoclassicism emerged (though the school of thought wasn’t actually named that until the mid-19th Century). They adopted Aristotle’s unity of time, and produced scathing reviews of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.

One such review was in a biography of Shakespeare’s life written by Nicholas Rowe in 1709 titled Some Account of the Life of William Shakespeare where he states, “If one undertook to examine the greatest part of [Shakespeare’s work] by those Rules which are established by Aristotle, and taken from the model of the Grecian stage, it would be no very hard task to find a great many faults.” Rowe was one of the more forgiving Neoclassicists, continuing to say that while he was appalled by Shakespeare’s inattention to the Unities, he still enjoyed the work holistically on the merits of its entertainment value. A more vehement Neoclassicist, Charles Gildon, expressed his frustration at the violation of the Unities within The Winter’s Tale in an essay he published in 1710, “[The Winter’s Tale] needs no critic, its errors are visible enough, Shakespeare himself was sensible of this grossness of making the play above sixteen years, and therefore brings in Time as a chorus to the fourth act, to excuse the absurdity to which I refer you…” Here Gildon not only voices contempt for Shakespeare’s unorthodox use of time, he also proposes that Shakespeare was quite aware of his own unconventionality.

Gildon's thoughts in this regard are supported by the plethora of Greek allusions throughout the play. The characters repeatedly swear by the Roman God Jove (The Greek God Zues) such as Perdita does when speaking with Floriziel, "Now Jove afford you a cause!" (4.4.19) and Paulina does when pleading with Leontes to accept Perdita as his child, "Look to your babe dear Lord, 'tis yours:/ Jove send her/a better guiding spirit!"(2.3.157-9). TALK ABOUT INVOLVEMENT OF THE ORACLE/FIND QUOTES. In his essay "Look Down and See What Death is Doing: Gods and Greeks in The Winter's Tale," Earl Showerman spoke on the prevalence of Greek and ancient classical themes in The Winter's Tale, "The classical names of the characters, the preeminence of Apollo, the themes of vengeful jealousy with attempted regicide and infanticide, and the mysterious resurrection of Queen Hermione all point to sources from the earlier classical period." Clearly, as evidenced by the abundance of Greek allusions, Shakespeare was familiar with the conventions of Greek theater and with Aristotle's Unities surrounding them. His choice to pass over sixteen years of plot was his conscious choice to "break the rules" established before him. This can be seen as a liberation from the stipulations and guidelines that governed theater in his time - a liberation that gave him the ability to produce a play that was commercially successful. Simultaneously, however, this liberation was accompanied by censure and denouncement from theater and literary theorists and dramatists. Through his atypical utilization of time Shakespeare was simultaneously liberating himself from the accepted theatrical “rules” of the Unities, and constraining his work to the harsh reproach of scholars.