The Winter’s Tale: A Critical Reader

An international group of scholars reappraise The Winter’s Tale through a series of research essays covering performance history, critical history, and new interpretations.

Navigating the play’s fluctuating genre conventions, onstage spectacle and leaps across time, scholars consider how eco-materiality, radical hospitality, childhood, gender, and critical race studies shape contemporary understandings and staging of a play that defies easy definition.

By charting these changing interpretive trends, readers are introduced to a rich body of scholarship which shows how the play can be used to confront the experiences of those marginalized by race, age, gender, and nationality, to place fresh attention on the economic and material structures that define the dramatic plot of the play. As The Winter’s Tale’s depictions of patriarchal violence, vulnerability, economic disparity, border crossings and exploitation continue to draw attention, this guide serves as an invaluable resource for scholars, students and audiences alike. Complete with pedagogical tools including resources and strategies for approaching the play in the classroom, this Critical Reader is an essential collection of scholarship on one of Shakespeare’s most audacious experiments.

Todd Andrew Borlik is Reader in Renaissance Drama at the University of Huddersfield, UK.

Peter Kirwan is Associate Professor of Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University, USA.