Seeing the Spider: The Jealous Rage of Exchange in The Winter’s Tale and Othello

• Authors: Innes Paul

Abstracts

EN

A venerable critical tradition has long flavoured the reception of Shakespeare’s plays with psychology. Characters are read as real people, and as a consequence, the plays are analysed from the starting point of an individual character’s inward personality. However, this literary reading of the plays fails to take into account not only the performance of character on the Renaissance stage but also the theatrical culture that predetermines forms of characterisation for that audience. The playing of roles within this drama needs to be continually re-investigated, and in the case of The Winter’s Tale and Othello, fully reimagined. The conventional ascription of the plot development entirely to the jealousy of both Leontes and Othello can accordingly be reworked. The modern obsession with psychology obscures a field of semantic forces that goes well beyond the purview of any individual to a social encoding of possible behaviours. This restores multiple potentialities to the plays in performance, freeing them from a narrow insistence that meaning is rooted entirely in the individual. This in turn provides a context for deeper analysis of gender roles and how they intersect with the impetus generated by patriarchal modes of inheritance.

Keywords

EN

William Shakespeare; The Winter’s Tale; Othello; social encoding of behaviour; gender roles

• Publisher: Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw
• Journal: Anglica. An International Journal of English Studies
• Year: 2016
• Issue: 25/3
• Pages: 69-80

Contributors

author

Innes Paul

• University of Gloucestershire

References

• Breitenberg, Mark. 1996. Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Dorsch, T. S., ed. 1963. Aristotle, Horace, Longinus: Classical Literary Criticism Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
• Hawkes. Terence. 1992. Meaning by Shakespeare. Routledge: London and New York.
• Jardine, Lisa. 1996. Reading Shakespeare Historically. Routledge: London and New York.
• Sinfield, Alan. 1992. Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Palfrey, Simon. 1999. Late Shakespeare: A New World of Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Richards, Jennifer. 1999. “Social Decorum in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare’s Late Plays: New Readings. Ed. Jennifer Richards and James Knowles. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
• Shakespeare, William. 1997. Othello. Ed. E.A.J. Honigmann. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
• Shakespeare, William. 2010. The Winter’s Tale. Ed. John Pitcher. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
• Weimann, Robert. 2000. Author’s Pen and Actor’s Voice: Playing and Writing in Shakespeare’s Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Worthen, W.B. 1997. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.