Lifelikeness in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

We look forward to welcoming Professor Katharine Craik (Oxford Brookes University) to discuss 'Lifelikeness in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale'.

Who is really there, and how do we know that they are so? Shakespeare often summons absent, remembered or imagined people into lively presence: unborn children spring into being, lost or forgotten voices are recovered, and the dead are quickened. Like many early modern writers, Shakespeare was working with classical rhetorical figures such as energeia and hypotyposis which were designed to conjure people up, through language, as though they were alive. He worked these figures into his poetry and drama, engaging with one particular aspect of Renaissance aesthetics: the phenomenon of ‘liveliness’ which brings people surprisingly and vividly into presence. But rather than following the standard rules of mimesis, where art reflects life, Shakespeare’s lifelike people instead challenge, disturb and re-imagine natural life, fostering unusual kinds of self-reflection and raising new and unforeseen possibilities for engagement with others. In his late play The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare probes the boundaries between life and art, reality and unreality, presence and absence, the quick and the dead.

This seminar will be chaired by Mackenzie Scott.