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"Beware of Trusting Feigned Beggars Or Fawning Fellows"

其他書名	Autolycus, Dramatic Form, and Reading Practices in The Winter's Tale
出版	University of California, Davis, 2009
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=my7zjwEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋After being introduced at the beginning of Act IV, notorious troublemaker Autolycus seems destined to play an important role in the plot of William Shakespeare's The winter's tale. Instead, he is removed from the conclusion play altogether. His is the errant plot: a plot defined by delay and repetition with no discernible reason for its beginning or end. Since Autolycus does not participate in the conclusion, his scenes in the play are linked only to one another, and they delay the resolution of the central plot. Autolycus's disappearance is not the only unusual aspect of the plot structure of The winter's tale: the play does not conclude after Act III with Mamillius' death, Perdita's abandonment, Hermione's reported death, and Leontes grieving, but instead continues to pursue this seemingly hopeless situation. To do so, the plot must move across space, time, and genre; making it an experimental plot. Thus far, no one has considered the fact that Autolycus's role in the plot and the play's unusual resolution might be related. I argue that the plot structure actually needs Autolycus's errant plot in order to fully resolve. The "slide / O'er sixteen years" ushered in by the chorus Time at the beginning of Act IV interrupts the chain of logic connecting events to their outcomes and creates a dilatory space for the play to return to the traumas of the first three Acts and attempt to work through them toward a new conclusion. If the play is to return to the Leontes plotline, then the conflicts created by Leontes must find some type of resolution. Thus, "working through" means that the audience's desire for the end translates into a desire for the conflicts to be resolved. The desire for resolution is in conflict with the believability of the plot events; if the resolution is not entirely believable, then the meaning of the play is also compromised. My investigation begins by examining the link between Leontes and Autolycus and then presents a scene-by-scene analysis of Autolycus's interaction with the plot. I conclude by analyzing the return of Hermione and the social and cultural implications of the play's conclusion