Between Page And Stage: The Issue Of Verisimilitude In The Winter's Tale

The Winter's Tale,one of Shakespeare's late plays,begins with a domestic tragedy and ends in a reunion.Shakespeare adapts the story from Robert Greene's pastoral romance,Pandosto: The Triumph of Time.As its title indicates,the play's style resembles a fairytale.In fact,the play's overall style of non-verisimilitude has been a matter of controversy ever since it came out in the early seventeenth century.This thesis revisits this debate and ventures to bring some new perspective.Existing literature can be roughly divided into two sides.One side,represented by the neoclassicists,criticizes the play's lack of verisimilitude,pointing out that Leontes' s jealousy is ungrounded and difficult to relate to,and that plot devices like the bear and Hermione's resurrection are hard to make believe on stage.The other side defends such non-verisimilitude as a style that Shakespeare intends,maintaining that implausibility is not a flaw when the play follows nonrealistic genre traditions like romance or pastoral drama.This thesis finds a gap between the two opposing viewpoints: the playtext does intend non-verisimilitude,but some questions in this regard remain answered: How does individual implausibility form the overall non-verisimilitude? Are these plot devices necessarily difficult for physical representation? What aesthetic outcome does this play's non-verisimilitude offer its spectator?To answer these questions,this thesis addresses the issue of verisimilitude in The Winter's Tale from three angles: Shakespeare's adaptation of its source text,stage renderings of the play,and its formal aesthetics.Based on the concerns of existing literature,this thesis breaks down verisimilitude in the play into three categories: psychological verisimilitude,theatrical coherence,and representability.Borrowing Mikhail Bakhtin's theorization on Greek romance's generic features,this thesis begins with a detailed analysis of Shakespeare's adaptation,arguing that the playwright structures the play with basic settings borrowed from Greene's story and further strengthens its implausibility by reducing the psychological depth and complexity of characters,as well as introducing greater theatrical incoherence and supernatural elements.Then,by analyzing how the three categories of non-verisimilitude have been realized in a few contemporary British productions of The Winter's Tale,this thesis maintains that although the play frustrates a rational understanding of unnatural elements like Leontes' s jealousy,its implausible narrative nevertheless opens up a space for various interpretations and stage representations.Productions discussed in this thesis involve efforts to narrow down the theatrical incoherence of the play,usually involving thematic innovations in staging.Lastly,focusing on dehierarchization,ekphrasis,and play-within-a-play in the original playtext,the thesis argues that non-verisimilitude in the play presents an aesthetic that showcases the playwright's artistic self-consciousness and at the same time actively engages the spectator.Through these attempts,this thesis discusses how nonverisimilitude is formed on page,how the implausible elements have been physically rendered on stage,and what comes out of the interaction between the play's implausibility and its audiences,whether they are flipping through the pages,or sitting in the auditorium.