Winter's Tale
"Neither comedy nor tragedy, The Winter's tale contains elements of each genre, and defies easy classification. It experiments, like many of Shakespeare's late plays, with different styles and tones, and draws on a wide range of sources and inspirations. Full of mysteries and miracles, grief and dark humour, this strange play has fascinated critics and theatregoers for centuries. Theatrical and cinematic productions have tried to capture the range of interpretations and staging possibilities presented by The Winter's Tale, and the introduction to this edition explores the play's long history in performance and in criticism. Illustrations and extended notes interleaved throughout the text discuss the echoes of religious, scientific, and mythological texts found in the play."--Publisher description.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
4people
2018–2022years
40% recommend60% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- In no particular order, except that #1 is #1.
1. Adventures of Huckelberry Finn
2. Little, Big
3. Winter's Tale
4. Titus Groan
5. Gormenghast
6. Titus Alone
7. Dune
8. The manuscript found in saragossa
9. The Three Musketeers
10. A Scanner Darkly
11. The Man in the High Castle
12. Do Androids dream of Electronic Sheep
13. Ubik
14. Valis, basically almost every book by Phil Dick.
15. Life on the Mississippi.
16. The Garden of Forking Paths
17. Dhalgren
18. The Gods of Pegāna, basically all the fantasy work of Dunsany.
19. The Lathe of Heaven. Anything by LeGuin.
20. Their Eyes Were Watching God
21. The Master and Margarita
22. The Gulag Archipelago
- As an aside, “Exeunt, followed by a bear” from The Winter’s Tale was probably one of the greatest stage directions in English literature.
One point worth mentioning is that Shakespeare was not particularly high literature for his time: these were plays written for the 17th century theatre-goers to enjoy. And they had plenty of risqué one-liners: http://mentalfloss.com/article/54442/10-shakespeares-best-di... has a list. That said, Shakespeare at his best easily outdid his peers — his tragedies particularly, although they aren’t particularly historically accurate.
I suspect some of Asimov’s and particularly Stephen King’s works will be “classics” in 500 years time.
- Shakespeare had some plays that had at least tragic elements--Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale. Maybe The Tempest.--with happy or happyish endings. But he mostly didn't do "Hollywood Endings" on his tragedies. So the something may simply have been "great source material but that ending has to go."
- Yes. Of those 4, only The Tempest is top-drawer Shakespeare although, to be honest, The Winter's Tale is the only one of the other three I've actually read/seen performed.
The Tempest--which is one of my favorites--was one of his very last plays and certainly his last great one; it's hard not to see the ending, e.g. the breaking of the staff, as symbolic in a way that his other play conclusions were not.
>his most widely regarded plays
I guess I agree. Comedy doesn't get a lot of love at the Oscars either. I certainly appreciate plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream. But I have admit a lot of the gender-switching and mistaken identities in many of his comedies tend to blend together for me after a while.
- It's derived from one of Shakespeare's less popular plays, Winter's Tale, which contains the amusing stage direction "Exit, pursued by a bear."[1] (Apologies if you knew this, sincerity via text is hard)
Their actual headline/url seems to be "Technology startups are headed for a fall," which is less fun.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter%27s_Tale#The_Bear
