Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: A Meeting of the Petty Gods : Elizabethan Entertainments and The Winter's Tale

The Winter’s Tale looks forward and backward, continually exploring how the past both nurtures and shadows the present.  In its famous sheep-shearing festival scene, the play confronts aesthetic, cultural, and political shadows of its own past by conjuring the specter of Queen Elizabeth’s pastoral entertainments.  In its festival act, The Winter’s Tale invokes the dead Queen in order to both celebrate the enduring symbolic identity created by the Elizabethan entertainments, and lament the loss of her physical presence, and with it a unique means of dramatic creation.

Claire Falck is an Assistant Professor of English at Rowan University.  She has published articles in Studies in English Literature and The John Donne Journal, and her current work focuses on the intersection of visual culture, religious practice, and generic experimentation in early modern English literature.