So let's make a start.

Today is the last lecture in the series,

and I'm going to talk about one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote,

The Winter's Tale.

And as I said last week, the question I think this play wants us to ask is, why?

Having learned to handle the genres of comedy and of tragedy, why then turn to this story

that spans generations and kingdoms and which

requires the apparently clumsy intervention of the figure of time itself to smooth over the cracks?

Why this revisiting of the tropes of, on the one hand, mistaken jealousy, think Othello or Much

Do About Nothing, and pastoral

hyginks think as you like it. Why this catalogue of frankly improbable events which culminate

in a statue stepping down from its pedestal, but which are given quite a boost in the pool

the other one stakes by that most famous of stage directions exit pursued by a bear.

So one answer to why has been to relegate or to ignore the play.

Virtually the same external evidence that the winter's tale is Shakespeare's last play, last sole authored play,

exists as does for The Tempest being Shakespeare's last sole authored play.

They seem to have been written in the same year.

But criticism has widely preferred the melancholic, leave-taking, wise old man stuff of the tempest in the narrative arc of Shakespeare's development

over this bewildering splicing of tragic and comic conventions which seems to allow no such sentimental biographical reading.

What does it mean to call the winter's tale a late play and is that an answer to why why this play

so today i'm going to try and suggest that the intertwined histories of shakespearean performance

and criticism have been trying to answer why the winter's tale and as usual i'm going emphasize, as I have been throughout these lectures, that the play

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