The Winter's Tale ─ Texts and Contexts

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.