The Winter's Tale (Vol. 45) - Dreams
DREAMS
Ruth Nevo (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: "Delusions and Dreams: The Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare's Other Language, Methuen, 1987, pp. 95-129.
[In the following essay, Nevo contends that, while the traditional dramatic unities are flouted in The Winter's Tale, fantasy shapes the drama's two interrelated plots around a pair of dreams, "where one represents a terror inelecutably realized and the other a restitutive wish-fulfillment."]
Death, as we all know, is not something to be looked at in the face.
(J.-B. Pontalis)
In The Winter's Tale the once mandatory dramatic "unities"—time, place, action and motivation tumble to the ground like a house of cards. Constructed out of two antithetical parts, in two different geographical locations, it is halved in the centre by a "wide gap of time" and propelled into action by an unmotivated outburst of...
[The entire page is 19706 words long]
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