In The Winter’s Tale, power, eros, death, the utopian, and the aesthetic are the main themes in play. It begins in a world of amoral and dehumanizing power politics and ends in affirmations of the utopian spirit – while acknowledging the realities of death and suffering. It draws on festival traditions, fairy tales, and ancient issues of resurrection and rebirth in its end and political and psychological issues, as King Leontes becomes a mad tyrant. His madness paradoxically takes an aesthetic form in its (perverse) creativity and reliance on intuitive mental decisions as defined by Kant – thus relating to the aesthetic issues later in the play. The play’s utopian space is a mixed, complicated locus that includes both the utopian and the nonutopian. What makes it a consummate example of Shakespearean metatheater is its investigation of the relations of two concepts of ancient provenance, “art” and “nature,” introduced off-handedly, played with extensively in the second half of the play, and climaxed and thematically resolved in the complex, dissonant unity of the two terms figured when an apparent stone statue of the supposedly dead Queen Hermione is revealed as living flesh.

Chapter Three moves from the front to the middle of the brain, believed to house the rational faculty that assessed forms and ideas, and put them together in novel ways. The chapter explores a persistent early modern connection between fathers, daughters, and the production of new knowledges — one that found expression in the popular emblem of Truth, the daughter of Time (Veritas temporis filia). After analyzing how this figure was used to embody scientific and religious innovation, the chapter then considers the revival of an ancient myth about the potter Dibutades’ daughter, a girl who traces her absent lover’s form and (according to early modern revisions of her story) invents the art of painting. These two daughters help frame the chapter’s analysis of two Shakespearean ones, All’s Well That Ends Well’s orphaned Helen and The Tempest’s island-bound Miranda. After briefly considering how Helen uses her physician-father’s art to produce her own ambitious project, the chapter finishes with a reading of The Tempest. The chapter argues that Miranda’s beating mind challenges her father Prospero’s rough, old art, and that her brainwork signals intellectual progress and the changes, based on observation, that were emerging from new scientific and philosophical ideas.