The Winter's Tale: Features of the Pastoral

Exploring the Features of Pastoral Literature

Having studied Shakespeare’s “tragicomedy”, The Winter’s Tale, I listened to Melvyn Bragg’s podcast ‘In Our Time: Pastoral Literature’ to provide some contextual background as to why Shakespeare’s injection of the features of the pastoral is so integral to the depictions of Perdita’s life as a shepherdess (primarily explored in Act Four). Whilst the supposed first written documentations of pastoral literature date back to Theocritus in the third century, its characteristics became a popular form of genre for the Renaissance writer, and so I thought it would be interesting to explore the contrasts between the urbanised aristrocacy that authorative figures such as Leontes and Polixenes are exposed to, with the liberated setting where characters like the Shepherd and the Clown are introduced. Below are some key findings I noted from the podcast, which I will use to then analyse the features of the Pastoral in a future essay-based post.