The Winter's Tale: New Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford World's Classics) by William Shakespeare

'It is required You do awake your faith' Variously seen as a romance, a comedy, and a tragic fairytale, The Winter's Tale is a radical experiment with genre, character, and storytelling towards the end of Shakespeare's career as a playwright. Addressing key cultural, religious, and theatrical contexts, this edition's introduction explores the play's preoccupation with fiction and game-play, its fraught representation of misogyny and female agency, its foregrounding of nonhuman objects, animals and creatures (toys, spiders, bears, flowers, ghosts, statues), and its provocations on different kinds of faith and magical thinking. The introduction emphasises what was and is startlingly new and urgent about the play, in the early seventeenth century and in our own historical moment. But it also attends to the play's retrospective impulses as a work that looks back, achingly, at 'old tales' on the stage and beyond. The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare's works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition Read more