This 1982 book examines The Winter's Tale in performance from Jacobean England to the twentieth century.

The Newly Revised Signet Classic Shakespeare Series The work of the world’s greatest dramatist edited by outstanding scholars The Winter’s Tale Unique Features of the Signet Classic Shakespeare •An extensive overview of Shakespeare’s life, world, and theater by the general editor of the Signet Classic Shakespeare series, Sylvan Barnet •Special introduction to the play by the editor, Frank Kermode, Fellow of the British Academy •Source from which Shakespeare derived The Winter’s Tale—a generous selection from Robert Greene’s Pandosto •Dramatic criticism from the past and present: commentaries by Simon Forman, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, E.M.W. Tillyard, G. Wilson Knight, Carol Thomas Neely, and Coppelia Kahn •A comprehensive stage and screen history of notable productions of The Winter’s Tale, then and now •Text, notes, and commentaries printed in the clearest, most readable type •Up-to-date list of recommended readings

A collection that includes a lengthy introduction describing historical trends in critical interpretations and theatrical performances of Shakespeare's play; 20 essays on the play, including two written especially for this volume (by Maurice Hunt and David Bergeron).

This book examines Shakespeare's response in his late plays to the challenge of making romance stories believable through theatrical representation and the kind of experience the late plays in performance seek to create for their spectators. Taking The Winter's Tale as a case study, the book's central chapters demonstrate how Shakespeare tests and transforms the techniques to create the sweeping, restorative transformations of individuals and communities that are central to both earlier dramatic romances and Shakespeare's own romance experiments. The book's three other chapters address the methodologies for study of spectator's experience through a dramatic text, the history of dramatic romance to 1610, and Shakespeare's further experiments with the staging of romance after The Winter's Tale.-

Shakespeare and the Royal Actor argues that members of the royal family have identified with Shakespearean figures at various times in modern history to assert the continuity, legitimacy, and national identity of the royal line. It provides an account of the relationship between the Shakespearean afterlife and the royal family through the lens of a broadly conceived theatre history suggesting that these two hegemonic institutions had a mutually sustaining relationship from the accession of George III in 1760 to that of Elizabeth II in 1952. Identifications with Shakespearean figures have been deployed to assert the Englishness of a dynasty with strong familial links to Germany and to cultivate a sense of continuity from the more autocratic Plantagenet, Tudor, and Stuart monarchs informing Shakespeare's drama to the increasingly ceremonial monarchs of the modern period. The book is driven by new archival research in the Royal Collection and Royal Archives. It reads these archives critically, asking how different forms of royal and Shakespearean performance are remembered in the material holdings of royal institutions.

The idea of Shakespearean genius and sublimity is usually understood to be a product of the Romantic period, promulgated by poets such as Coleridge and Byron who promoted Shakespeare as the supreme example of literary genius and creative imagination. However, the picture looks very different when viewed from the perspective of the myriad theater directors, actors, poets, political philosophers, gallery owners, and other professionals in the nineteenth century who turned to Shakespeare to advance their own political, artistic, or commercial interests. Often, as in John Kemble’s staging of The Winter’s Tale at Drury Lane or John Boydell’s marketing of paintings in his Shakespeare Gallery, Shakespeare provided a literal platform on which both artists and entrepreneurs could strive to influence cultural tastes and points of view. At other times, Romantic writers found in Shakespeare’s works a set of rhetorical and theatrical tools through which to form their own public personae, both poetic and political. Women writers in particular often adapted Shakespeare to express their own political and social concerns. Taken together, all of these critical and aesthetic responses attest to the remarkable malleability of the Shakespearean corpus in the Romantic period. As the contributors show, Romantic writers of all persuasions”Whig and Tory, male and female, intellectual and commercial”found in Shakespeare a powerful medium through which to claim authority for their particular interests.

This 1996 book traces Dickens' interest in Shakespeare through his own reading and performance and through theatrical, literary and artistic sources.