The Winter's Tale: Texts and Contexts (Bedford Shakespeare) [Paperback]

William Shakespeare (Author), Mario DiGangi (Editor)

Book Description

Series: Bedford Shakespeare | Publication Date: December 26, 2007

This edition of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale reprints the Bevington edition of the play accompanied by five sets of thematically arranged primary documents and illustrations designed to facilitate many different approaches to Shakespeare. The text includes tracts on childbirth, jealousy, women's speech, rural festivities, and bears; royal proclamations and statutes about vagabonds and peddlers; popular ballads on marriage and monsters; treatises about monarchy, Catholic and Protestant theological debates, farm labor, and art collecting; a transcription of the trial of Anne Boleyn; and accounts of performances of the statue scene since the 19th century. The primary documents contextualize the dramatic genres of romance and tragicomedy; gender and family relations; political authority and resistance; country work and play; and the social, religious, and erotic uses of art.

Editorial Reviews

Review

a valuable edition of 'The Winter's Tale'...His accounts of language and of motivation are particularly illuminating and level-headed. - The Review of English Studies, Vol. 49, No. 194, 1998.

`a valuable edition of The Winter's Tale ... this is a well-focused and helpful edition.' Paul Hammond, Review of English Studies --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Book Description

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's; First Edition edition (December 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312167040
• ISBN-13: 978-0312167042
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #408,354 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Redemptive Tragedy, May 27, 2003

By 

John (United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Winter's Tale (New Folger Library Shakespeare) (Mass Market Paperback)

The Winter's Tale is a lot of things: heart-breaking, exhilerating, funny, beautiful, romantic, profound, etc. Yeah, it's all here. This is one of the bard's best plays, and I can't believe they don't teach this in schools. Of course, the ones they teach are excellent, but I can see high school kids enjoying this one a lot more than some of those others (Othello, King Lear).

The story is, of course, brilliant. King Leontes goes into a jealous rage at the beginning against his wife Hermione. Leontes is very mistaken in his actions, and the result is tragic. Shakespeare picks the story back up sixteen years later with the children, and the story works to a really, really surprising end of bittersweet redemption.

This is one of Shakespeare's bests. The first half is a penetrating and devestating, but the second half shows a capacity for salvation from the depths of despair. Also, this being Shakespeare, the blank verse is gorgeous and the characters are well drawn, and the ending is a surprise unparalleled in the rest of his plays. The Winter's Tale is a truly profound and entertaining read.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars KINDLE VERSION - Don't buy it, February 11, 2011

By 

T. Niccum (Burnsville, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Winter's Tale (Kindle Edition)

THIS REVIEW APPLIES TO THE KINDLE VERSION ONLY

This is another example of lazy publishers dumping text into a Kindle "book" and foisting it on the public without so much as a 10 second skimming of the text to see if it is worthy of release. It isn't. The text of the play is paginated so poorly that footnotes are now interspersed in the text (footnotes are helpful for reading older plays) and line numbers are now embedded in the text and the indication of who is speaking what lines are often jammed together.

As I said before, a supremely lazy effort that makes the kindle and e-book concept look bad.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My personal favorite of Shakespeare's plays, July 21, 2001

By 

Henry Ehrman (NY, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Winter's Tale (The New Penguin Shakespeare) (Paperback)

For me The Winter's Tale is the most satisfying of Shakespeare's plays. And why? It may not be Hamlet for tragedy, it may not be Twelfth Night for comedy -- indeed, perhaps in the great objective sense this is not nearly his best; but as a coherent work this has them all beat. Here we find all sides of Shakespeare's genius on display: Leontes shares his intense sexual jealousy with Othello, and Florizel and Perdita take their light-hearted romantic comedy interplay (complete with disguises and recogntions) from the best of Shakespeare's comedies, before his sense of the romantic soured into the bitter genius of the problem plays. Add that to the eerily lyrical poetry of Act IV, and you've got a masterpiece. The Winter's Tale is laugh-out-loud funny at times; it's ribald; it's profoundly tragic; and in the end, it's a look at the craft of theater, the craft of literature and ultimately the craft of living. Unjustly ignored, The Winter's Tale is easily as good as its immediate successor, The Tempest -- and that's high praise indeed.