A sad tale's best for South Africa?

Various kinds of recuperation that both traditionalist critics as well as some feminist and psychoanalytic critics discover in The Winter's Tale elides the structuring in the play of an emergent sense of class difference. The liminal space of the pastoral, the return to the court and then to Paulina's home facilitate hierarchical structurations that aristocratize the play's so-called regenerative discoveries, excluding from them the 'pastoral'/country/agricultural figures. While such elisions may be convenient for and encouraged by relatively homogenous constituencies in the 'metropolitan' academy, the increasingly heterogeneous population within the South African academy problematizes such readings.