"Ovidean Echoes and Locative Memory in Shakespeare's Winter's Tale"

The statue scene in The Winter’s Tale (5.3) is among the most celebrated episodes in Shakespeare. The stunning coup de théâtre involves staging the “Pygmalion Effect,” a theme Shakespeare took from Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This lecture highlights what Shakespeare remembered from Ovid coupled with treatises on the Memory Arts, which enable us to recover and reconstruct the aesthetic and epistemological underpinnings of what the “statue scene” aims to represent and recall.