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.

Researchers should cite this work as follows:

• Cooley, R. W., (2025), "Speech Versus Spectacle: Autolycus, Class and Containment in The Winter's Tale", HSSCommons: (DOI: )

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1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Cooley, Ronald W. "Speech Versus Spectacle: Autolycus, Class and Containment in The Winter's Tale." Renaissance and Reformation 33 (3): 2010. 5-23. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v33i3.11356. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.