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.

offers canonical and non-canonical examples of early seventeenth-century female voices that call for freedom of speech and resistance to tyranny. Drawn from drama and print culture, authored by men and women, such voices figure the connection between women and political dissent. If Othello’s Emilia and Desdemona use free speech to express their virtue and contest male authority, Paulina in The Winter’s Tale plays the shrew to call out domestic and political tyranny, while Webster’s Duchess of Malfi and Vittoria speak truth to power and Elizabeth Caldwell’s Letter denounces her husband in a display of Protestant religious zeal. Rooting these voices in sixteenth-century female-voiced political and religious dissent, the chapter suggests that representations of the woman as resistant subject could take on a particularly acute political inflection during the early Stuart period.