The Reading Room

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12:14 AM

Q: Any inspiration for the statue revival scene in Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale"?

Shakespeare's "problem play" The Winter's Tale is largely inspired by Robert Greene's Pandosto written a few decades earlier. One of the major differences between Pandosto and The Winter's Tale is in the ending between the jealous king and his wife accused of adultery. In Pandosto, the wife (Bell...

5 hours later…

Bookworm

5:29 AM

Q: Insight into a Book Similar to "To steal an ancient melody"

I am looking for a book such as the title "To Steal an Ancient Melody", or a book that uses the phrase "To steal an ancient melody". I am interested to see the story as it discusses what befalls the individual that steals the ancient melody. The book is along the lines of "The Bards Tale," except...

book-collecting

4 hours later…

Tsundoku

9:26 AM

@Bookworm The label "problem play" has been applied to many Shakespeare plays, it seems. For some scholars, the problem plays were All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida, but there seems to be no agreed upon definition.

Rand al'Thor

9:45 AM

I've seen lists of Shakespeare plays that are divided into Comedies, Tragedies, Histories, and Romances, where presumably Romance ~ "problem play", things like The Winter's Tale that are so hard to classify into comedy or tragedy.

I guess there's no single agreed-upon classification. Even Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra are sometimes listed as histories and sometimes as tragedies.

Napoleon Wilson

Especially when a lot of classic tragedies are set against a historical background anyway, the setting and the tone would be rather orthogonal categories.

4 hours later…

Tsundoku

2:18 PM

As far as I know, The Winter's Tale is a comedy from a renaissance point of view; it has a happy end. Comedy didn't mean that you were laughing all the time. And tragedy didn't meant that there could be no humour.

When All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida were categorised as problem plays in the late 19th century, I think this had little to do with genre classifications and more with Victorian prudishness. The first two plays both feature a "bed trick"; Troilus and Cressida has a pandar named Pandarus as one of its characters.

If I remember correctly Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, written for children in the early 19th century, completely emasculated those plays.

4 hours later…

North Læraðr

6:21 PM

Lol Korean Folk tales started yesterday

I’m volunteering nearly everyday

Anything I missed?

Tsundoku

Oh, hi @NorthLæraðr!. No, there aren't any questions yet about Korean folk tales.

North Læraðr

7:19 PM

Hmm

1 hour later…

Bookworm

8:29 PM

I’m looking for more devices similar to the palantir in lord of the rings? Specifically, devices that allow characters to see things or insights otherwise not possible? The device can be from other genres as well, doesn’t necessarily have to be fantasy.

the-lord-of-the-rings metafiction

1 hour later…

Bookworm

9:41 PM

Q: Literary allusions in Catch 22

What are the various literary allusions in Catch-22? While reading I recognized Shakespeare’s Shylock’s (from Merchant of Venice) Speech on “equality” and a few lines on Abbott and Costello but was shocked to find out they were elements of Tom and Jerry, the Goons as well as Dostoyevsky and Kafka...