The tyranny of immaterialism: Refusing the body in The Winter’s Tale

The aim of this study is to analyze the way Shakespeare’s work reveals the failure – in both private and public lives – of a system of thought in which the body is construed as a mere receptacle of immaterial and “superior” entities, supposedly governed by rational kinds of political and social power. After a brief consideration of Measure for Measure as a play focused on the political danger of denying the material aspect of the individual, The Winter’s Tale will be seen as presenting a similar problem. Here, the aspiration to an ideal of absolute purity and the consequent demonization of the sexualized flesh, deriving from both Puritan theology and neo-Platonic philosophy, merges with the anxiety towards the “rebellious” body fostered by sixteenth-century medical science, constituting the disruptive force that initiates the plot. This attitude of denial of the body, linked to political power, leads to both a psychological breakdown and, in the public sphere, to a regime of tyranny.