Performing The Winter’s Tale in ‘the Open’
Abstract The fifth chapter pursues the bear in The Winter’s Tale back to the Arctic to expose the involvement of the Jacobean state and theatre industry in the global fur trade. Whereas theatre historians police boundaries in seeking to determine whether Renaissance drama featured ‘real’ bears, Shak...
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| Format: | Book Part |
| Language: | English |
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Oxford University PressOxford
2023
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| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192866639.003.0006 https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/58070449/oso-9780192866639-chapter-6.pdf |
| Summary: | Abstract The fifth chapter pursues the bear in The Winter’s Tale back to the Arctic to expose the involvement of the Jacobean state and theatre industry in the global fur trade. Whereas theatre historians police boundaries in seeking to determine whether Renaissance drama featured ‘real’ bears, Shakespeare’s romance revels in the indistinction promoted by animal studies. The chapter discovers another important humanimal hybrid in Shakespeare’s representation of Hermione as an ermine, a creature emblematic of the wintery north and queenly chastity. Leontes’s sexual jealousy is symptomatic of an adult male desire to control nature, but the play prescribes an antidote in rural girlhood, idealizing the upbringing of James’s daughter as a feral princess and milkmaid, turning to pastoral romance to model a more benign relationship to the natural world than that exhibited by menageries and Skinners’ pageants, which naturalized royal and mercantile dominion over the icy north and its fur-bearers. |
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