Breaking Boundaries : Tyranny and Roguery in The Winter’s Tale
Résumé
This paper seeks to explore how tyranny and roguery are implicitly intertwined, how the knavish cutpurse can be regarded as the jealous tyrant’s counterpart, and how contrastive parallels and parodical echoes contribute to shifting points of view in Shakespeare’s play. At first sight, Autolycus and Leontes have antithetical statuses, but a close study reveals their unstable identity and their disregard of the law, their ability to create fake perspectives whether by using force or resorting to ruse. In both cases, legal, moral and religious values are reversed and unexpectedly reverberate from Bohemia to Sicilia; the voice of authority is usurped, the registers of language are turned upside-down, uncontrolled linguistic debasement serving as a foil to mock heroic counterfeiting.