The debate between Perdita and Polixenes about the merits of beautiful, but unnaturally crossbred flowers condenses Shakespeare's discussion on man-made art and God-made nature (represented by physical, ecological Nature as well as the characters'...

Act IV, Scene IV, of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale marks a shift away from the Sicilian, courtly world that dominates the previous three acts and much of Act IV. The chaos and disorder resulting from court happenings, Hermione's apparent...

The opening act of The Winter's Tale is atypical among Shakespeare's late romances. Cymbeline, The Tempest, Pericles, King Lear, and Othello all open by unfolding the plays' major, and most dramatic, crises. The Winter's Tale, however, offers the...

The trial of Hermione (Act III, Scene 2), Queen of Sicily is the pivotal moment in William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It effectively closes the tragic chapter of the play, making way for the short comedy that follows. It sets up the...

In Shakespeare’s <i>Winter’s Tale</i>, the “death” of Hermione catalyzes the narrative development. Quantitatively, she plays little role beyond the first three acts, but the play revolves and eventually unites around her. It is,...

It is easy to accuse Shakespeare of absurdity and shapelessness in The Winter’s Tale, because, as a play, it shifts between genres (tragedy and comedy) and certain events are beyond reality. However, The Winter’s Tale is a work of art, and a...

Two similarly flawed notions of love are presented in Shakespeare’s plays Titus Andronicus (TA) and The Winter’s Tale (TWT). Both are rooted in differing degrees of misogyny, yet diverge significantly in their overarching objective. The model of...

In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare carries his characters from a court setting in Sicilia to a rural area in Bohemia, and then reconciles the plot in the original court. This play incorporates a pastoral theme by showing the role of providence...

Florizel and Perdita are depicted in The Winter’s Tale as the epitome of young love. Whilst the majority of the play is surrounded by heartache, pessimism and paranoia, Florizel and Perdita’s relationship serves as a reminder of hope and happiness...

When a transcript of Cardenio emerged and was soon labeled one of Shakespeare’s “lost plays,” several critics and scholars nodded their heads in a unified disagreement while others became instantly interested in analyzing its contents. Throughout...

Many of Shakespeare’s plays contain the structural and symbolic elements of mythology. The inheritance of mythological conventions, which shall be explored in this essay, create an effect that is ritualistic and leads to Nietzsche’s observation of...

The utilisation of time and place is of great consequence in the late plays, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale. In the former, Shakespeare creates unity of both time and place in order to explore his central concerns, whereas the latter is...

Explore the relationship between fathers and sons, or fathers and daughters, in two of the plays we have studied. Freud hypothesized that, “The earliest affection of the girl-child is lavished on the father”[1] Shakespeare seems to explore the...

In The Winter’s Tale, by William Shakespeare, the concept of ‘faith’, both in a religious and social sense, plays a pivotal role in the interactions between major figures in the play, and which underpins and re-affirms the consistent theme of...

In 1611, William Shakespeare, tired of convention and determined to write a play that was both new and bold, wrote A Winter’s Tale. Today the show is most famous not for its dialogue or story, but for a single stage direction in Act III Scene iii...

Paulina’s participation in The Winter’s Tale offers a strong sense of feminism to the play, as her outstanding character stands out to men with high power like Leontes and she is the only character in the play that is not afraid to stand up for...

William Shakespeare’s vast collection of plays can generally be categorized by genre: his plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Hamlet are considered tragedies, while Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are considered comedies. One...

Immediately after learning of her husband’s imminent deposement, the Queen likens the abdication of King Richard II to the exile of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. “What Eve, what serpent hath suggested thee / [t]o make a second fall of...

Many tragic villains throughout a scope of tragedies have left audiences debating whether they were truly in the wrong, writers often introduce an ambiguity to their plays, novels or poems to allow the audience to debate the morality of the play....

The idea that the pride displayed by tragic heroes elevates them rather than diminishes them can be proven in relation to Shakespeare’s “Richard II” and Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby.” In both texts the protagonists display a great deal of pride...

William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard II, first published in a quarto edition in 1597, is the first in a sequence of four history plays known as the second tetrology, which deal with the early phases of a power struggle between the...

How valid is the distinction between history and tragedy in Richard II?

An attempt to sort Shakespeare's plays into neat categories may appear to have its benefits when striving to understand his work, but even a superficial reading of Richard II...

Shakespeare's genius in character and plot development is exemplified in two of his most complex history plays, Richard II and Henry IV, Part I. With these sequential plays, Shakespeare vividly develops characters and sets up complicated plots by...

Richard II, like most of Shakespeare's history plays (though, notably, unlike his comedies and tragedies), establishes a theatrical world dominated by men and masculinity. Female characters are few, and those that appear on the stage tend to say...