SOURCE: Davidson, Clifford. “The Iconography of Illusion and Truth in The Winter's Tale.” In Shakespeare and the Arts, edited by Cecile Williamson Cary and Henry S. Limouze, pp. 73-91. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982.

In the following excerpt, originally delivered as a lecture at the Ohio Shakespeare Conference in Dayton, 1981, Davidson discusses the symbolic significance of visual effects in a series of episodes in The Winter's Tale, including the display of male friendship, the onset of Leontes's jealousy, the trial scene, the storm on the shore of Bohemia, the sheep-shearing scene, and the transformation of Hermione.

The spectacle of Shakespeare's drama on stage in his own time made use of scenes which carefully balanced meanings and mirrored human actions or frailties in a theater which was, as Glynne Wickham has suggested, “emblematic” rather than illusionistic in the sense of “seeming to stimulate actuality.”¹ To be sure...