'...the Country must diminish': Jacobean London and the Production of Pastoral Space in The Winter's Tale

The City of London underwent enormous geographic and demographic expansion in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. By 1603, London had become a suburban metropolis, spreading well beyond the ancient walls into surrounding countryside. This expansion was a cause of great anxiety for local authorities and created an ambivalent cultural space which challenged traditional distinctions between 'city' and 'country'. The Winter's Tale (1610) seems to reproduce this collapse in spatial relations, presenting a pastoral vision that has confounded many readers. Earlier modes of pastoral romance offer a clear separation of city and rural locations, whereby the latter performs a recuperative function within the drama. In The Winter's Tale, this kind of pastoral geography is offered, but simultaneously rejected. The rural world of Bohemia is an ambivalent synthesis of city and country. Much like the extra-mural areas of London, it is a location in which conflicts are sustained and intensified, rather than resolved.