SOURCE: Van Elk, Martine. “‘Our praises are our wages’: Courtly Exchange, Social Mobility, and Female Speech in The Winter's Tale.” Philological Quarterly 79, no. 4 (fall 2000): 429-57.

In the following essay, Van Elk views The Winter's Tale as an example of the “complicated, reciprocal relationship between gender and class” in the Jacobean period.

What happens when a woman speaks at court? Early modern representations of female courtly speech are notoriously fraught with contradiction. In Stefano Guazzo's The Civile Conversation, for instance, the perfect courtier Anniball Magnocavalli describes the speech of the exemplary court lady as follows: “her talke and discourses are so delightfull, that you wyll only then beginne to bee sory, when shee endeth to speake: and wishe that shee woulde bee no more weary to speake, then you are to heare. Yea, shee frameth her jestures so discretely, that in speakyng, shee seemeth to holde her peace, and...