Variously seen as a romance, a comedy, and a tragic fairytale, The Winter's Tale is a radical experiment with genre, character, and storytelling towards the end of Shakespeare's career as a playwright. Addressing key cultural, religious, and theatrical contexts, this edition's introduction explores the play's preoccupation with fiction and game-play, its fraught representation of misogyny and female agency, its foregrounding of nonhuman objects, animals and creatures (toys, spiders, bears, flowers, ghosts, statues), and its provocations on different kinds of faith and magical thinking. The introduction emphasises what was and is startlingly new and urgent about the play, in the early seventeenth century and in our own historical moment. But it also attends to the play's retrospective impulses as a work that looks back, achingly, at 'old tales' on the stage and beyond.

The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare's works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, these volumes offer readers the latest thinking on the authentic texts (collated from all surviving original versions of Shakespeare's work) alongside innovative introductions from leading scholars. The texts are accompanied by a comprehensive set of critical apparatus to give readers the best resources to help understand and enjoy Shakespeare's work.

ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.