The Winter’s Tale
William Shakespeare
Frances E. Dolan (Editor)
ISBN 9780143131748
eISBN 9781101161845
ASIN B06XVWVTXZ
Five years back I started reading Shakespeare again, as my children were being introduced to it in High school. Then three years ago my son who is now 17 found he had a love for the Bard and for his plays, much as I did at that age. We had been sticking to the Oxford School Shakespeare editions as those were the versions they were reading in school, but my son decided to collect these Pelican editions because they are all available as individual volumes. We loved that the Pelican has the complete works of Shakespeare in individual volumes, and we have been picking those up to read, he gets the physical and I grab the eBooks. I loved that there are eBooks for all volumes in this series, because of a dual form of dyslexia. This year we picked up tickets for three Shakespeare plays at The Stratford Festival, including this play, we did three of the Bards plays there last year and year before as well.
The Pelican Classics were among my favourite editions of the plays when I was a youth myself. I often hunted used bookstores for the hard cover edition. I think the last time I read this would have been about 35-40 years ago. And even though I have not yet seen a production it came back fairly quickly. The description of this edition states:
“The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With definitive texts and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.”
Based on the commonly accepted chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays this usually ranked as the ante-antepenultimate or the fourth from last written believed to have been written in 1610-1611. The sections in this volume prior to the text of the play are:
Publisher’s Note
The Theatrical World
The Texts of Shakespeare
Introduction
Note on the Text
The publishers note states:
“Certain textual features of the new Pelican Shakespeare should be particularly noted. All lines are numbered that contain a word, phrase, or allusion explained in the glossarial notes. In addition, for convenience, every tenth line is also numbered, in italics when no annotation is indicated. The intrusive and often inaccurate place headings inserted by early editors are omitted (as has become standard practice), but for the convenience of those who miss them, an indication of locale now appears as the first item in the annotation of each scene.
In the interest of both elegance and utility, each speech prefix is set in a separate line when the speakers’ lines are in verse, except when those words form the second half of a verse line. Thus the verse form of the speech is kept visually intact. What is printed as verse and what is printed as prose has, in general, the authority of the original texts. Departures from the original texts in this regard have the authority only of editorial tradition and the judgment of the Pelican editors; and, in a few instances, are admittedly arbitrary.”
And the introduction begins with:
“THE WINTER’S TALE IS ONE of Shakespeare’s last plays. First performed early in 1611, it was written then or shortly before. In it, we encounter many types familiar from Shakespeare’s earlier works: the jealous husband, the falsely accused wife, the female confidante, the true friend, the loyal servant whose integrity is such that he can disobey a wrongheaded master, the cross-dressed heroine, and the beleaguered lovers. Indeed, Shakespeare seems to sample his career in this play, replaying favorite themes and recombining reliable characters and conflicts. Yet the play also includes a host of surprises. Some, such as a Bohemian seacoast, Shakespeare borrows from his source, Robert Greene’s prose romance Pandosto, which was first published in 1588, but had gone through many editions by the time Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare also borrows most of the characters and the basic situation from Greene; in shaping the character of Autolycus, he may also have drawn on Greene’s and Thomas Harman’s pamphlet accounts of vagrant criminals in contemporary England. The range of materials on which Shakespeare seems to have drawn in composing The Winter’s Tale suggests the richness and hybridity of this play, which owes debts to the magical transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the generous sense of possibility in prose romances, to folktales about abandoned princesses, to brief, cheap accounts of murdered babies dumped in London privies, to elaborate masques performed at court, and to street entertainers. Figures of myth, history, the imagination, and contemporary popular culture share the stage. For instance, Autolycus, cavorting and picking pockets amidst the shepherds of pastoral fantasy, is a figure from London street life - from the underworld, not the green world.”
The introduction concludes with:
“The Winter’s Tale can be viewed as a revision of Othello, for in it a similar conflict and cast find comic rather than tragic resolution. The wrongly accused wife is vindicated and restored; the outspoken woman does not die; the hero learns and grows, rather than killing himself. Why can this play work out so much better than Othello does? Genre, of course. But the question of genre is connected to the grace that pervades the play, for it is grace that lifts the doom and opens up the horizons of a dark, cramped, cold, tragic world. Time is also crucial to the difference in genre. While the time frame of Othello is sharply compressed, leaving no time for reflection or doubt, the “wide gap of time” here expands possibilities. The duration in the play also makes it possible to conjoin the generational concerns of both tragedy and comedy. Shakespearean comedy generally attends to marriageable young people as they define their identities and make matches. Their parents are sometimes obstacles, but most often irrelevant. Shakespearean tragedy often considers conflicts between the generations, as well as the ways in which parental grievances and failures haunt and blight the next generation. In The Winter’s Tale, we are invited to care equally about the marriageable young people, and their estranged parents, about how parental mistakes shape children’s options, but also how children can make “old hearts fresh” (I.1.38).
In fact, the two generations, and the two plots, are not neatly separate. When Leontes, upon meeting Perdita and Florizel, claims that he “lost a couple” like them, he refers, of course, to his own lost children; Florizel and Mamillius were only a month apart in age (V.1.132-34). But given that we are told that Perdita resembles her mother, and Florizel his father, Polixenes, Leontes also faces the images of the wife and friend he lost so many years ago. The strangers from far away turn out to be his own daughter and the son of his best friend. The promise of the future is an image of the past.”
This play comprises 5 acts and a total of 15 scenes, but the story spans many years, 16 years in fact. With a dual form of dyslexia I greatly prefer eBooks. I do so because I can change the colour of the page and the font, and also change the font. I really wish that with eBooks of plays such as this one that there would be 2 copies of the play. One completely unadorned, no footnotes or end notes. And the other with the usual accompanying notes. I want a reader’s edition of the play to just be able to read it. Second if that is not to happen, I wish the notes were at the end of the act or even the end of the whole play. But that is just a personal preference. The Pelican Classics were originally published between 1956 and 1967. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare was first published in 1969. With this edition having copyright dates of 1956, 1971, 1999, and 2017. Making it one of the most currently revised that I have read. I believe the Pelican is one of the few editions to have released all 38 plays and the volume of Sonnets, as separate editions. Some other academic publishers limited to specific popular editions, and even then have not released eBooks of them all. (OUP School Shakespeare less than half have eBook editions) As such I am thankful that all 39 volumes from this series are available and available digitally.
I am glad I picked this up to read with my son before going to see a performance we both finished it just days before attending. It reminded me how much I loved these editions when I was young and we have started collecting the eBook versions now. If you are looking for a good copy of the play to read or study I can easily recommend this edition.
Other Posts Related to Shakespeare:
Reviews of Stratford Shakespeare Productions:
Richard III – 2022
Hamlet – 2022
King Lear – 2023
Goblin MacBeth - 2023
Romeo & Juliette – 2024
Cymbeline – 2024
Twelfth Night – 2024
Reviews of Shakespeare Movies:
Cymbeline – 2014
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