Literary Mirrors of Aristocratic Performance: Readers and Audiences of The Faerie Queene and The Winter’s Tale

act 3, scene 2, of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale ends with Leontes’s terrible recognition of what his jealous imagination has cost him, and it also initiates the play’s movement into the world of fairy tale. The 2011 Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by David Farr included a dramatic demonstration of this shift: the towering bookshelves that had flanked the stage as part of a realistic regal dining hall in the first half of the play came crashing down as the ruined Leontes (played by Greg Hicks) exited, and the fallen bookshelves, together with the piles of spilled books, remained onstage for the rest of the play, physically emphasizing the fictional composition of everything taking place. The green world in which much of the play’s second half takes place was strewn with book pages at intermission, and the fictionality of the setting was further emphasized by using book pages as the material for the leaves of trees, for the costumes of the satyrs, and for the lifesize puppet of the famous bear. These staging choices underscored an important theme of the play: the fanciful, extravagant artfulness that makes possible the improbable recovery of both Perdita and Hermione.