Hope in Shakespeare's late pieces: the case of The Winter's Tale

Abstract

The Winter´s Tale is one of Shakespeare's late pieces which poses questions that inquire into the political and aesthetic conditions of the early modern period. In the winter of the revolutionary momentum of the English Renaissance, this play, by means of the character of Hermione, recovers the value of secularised rhetoric as a political tool to act upon reality and exposes the limits of Humanism as an avantgarde, whose tenets, in some cases, prove to be idealist expressions, as exemplified by her husband Leontes. This process is staged as a threat to her life, though she does not submit to a tragic destiny; instead, she manages to reappear at the end of the play in the shape of a statue that becomes alive. Thus, her possibility of intervening in her context is reborn. Hermione's return is then an instance of hope understood as a form of resistance to a tragic denouement, now linked to art, which absorbs the critical function attributed to politics: in a context in which Humanism is in retreat, the female character starts to use the language of suggestion to relate to others and the world around her, preserving such language from a merely instrumental use.