SOURCE: "Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter's Tale 4.3," in Shakespeare Studies: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews, Vol. XXII, 1994, pp. 58-76.

In the essay that follows, originally presented at the Shakespeare Association of America in 1991, Mowat explores act four, scene three of The Winter's Tale—where Autolycus is introduced—as a dramatic moment in which the surface context and its "infracontexts" create a number of tensions that establish Autolycus as a rogue character.

As I look at a particular intertextual moment in The Winter's Tale (the scene in which we meet Autolycus), I begin by assuming that the first printing of the play in the 1623 Shakespeare First Folio is a "text"—that is, dialogue initially crafted as a script for performance but nevertheless preserved for us as printed symbols, inked pages. I also assume that this moment of Autolycus's appearance...