Speech Versus Spectacle: Autolycus, Class and Containment in <i>The Winter's Tale</i>

Shakespeare's Winter's Tale is a play in which theatrical spectacle triumphs over speech, as stage action obscures the incoherence of verbal representation. This paper identifies Autolycus as a composite of Jacobean anxieties about the sources of social instability, and explores his place in this dramatic process. The spectacular techniques of containment that reconcile all the other characters do not quite work on the sturdy rogue. He embodies the failure of Jacobean England's historical attempt, and the play's dramatic attempt, to assimilate those it has defined as unassimilable.