Orgel on Getting It and Not Getting It

Someone has said that the job of the critic is to Get It, and the great failure of the critic is Not To Get It. Prof. Stephen Orgel, introducing Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, considers the obstacles that face audiences and critics as they try to figure out just what sort of play it is. The First Folio characterized it as a "comedy." John Dryden considered Winter’s Tale (along with Measure for Measure and Love’s Labour’s Lost) and concluding that these plays

Were either grounded on impossibilities, or at least, so meanly written, that the Comedy neither caus’d you mirth, nor the serious part your concernment.

Later, in the 19^th Century, as Orgel recounts, the Irish critic Edward Dowden found a home for Winter’s Tale (along with Pericles, The Tempest and Cymbeline) as a “romance.”

Orgel observes:

Dowden’s generic ploy undoubtedly enabled criticism to see the interrelations of these four plays more clearly, and probably served to disarm the most obvious rationalistic objections to their action.

Orgel also cautions:

The new genre, however, has proved as obfuscatory as it has been enlightening; various attempts to move beyond the circularity of the definition, refine its terms, establish the genre within a tradition, have revealed a good deal about the history of romance, but perhaps nothing so much as its ultimate inadequacy as a critical category for Shakespearean drama.

Still, as Orgel pithily remarks, “the creation and refinement of artistic categories has been one of the primary functions of criticism …”

Source: Stephen Orgel, ed., in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Winter’s Tale 2-3 (1996).