Oracles have a bad reputation in early modern literary history, as Howard Felperin has observed: ‘The fondness of pagan oracles for ambiguity, obscurantism, equivocation, and general verbal trickery is commonplace in Elizabethan literature.’ Stephen Orgel underscores their spiritual dubiousness: the oracle in The Winter's Tale, he argues, ‘would have been rather like the word of the ghost in Hamlet – something the play requires you to believe but that you knew, as a good Reformation Christian, you were supposed to reject.’ What critics have not noted, however, is that this perspective coexisted with another oracular tradition that functioned in the legal-political and literary contexts contemporaneous with Shakespeare's romance. The epithet ‘oracle’ also distinguished a legal-political type, the legal expert and wise counsellor whose authority was established through deliberative and self-fashioning practices that suggested the rhetorical mode and performance style of the oracles of antiquity. Adopting an appropriately epideictic tone, Thomas Blount honours several legal luminaries in the Nomo-lexikon by claiming that ‘[t]he first and principal’ motive for writing his law dictionary was ‘to erect a small Monument of that vast respect and deference, which I have for your Lordships, who are … the Oracles of our Law, and Grand Exemplars of Justice’. While the judiciary cultivated its own oracular image through professional practices, this same kind of oracle was repeatedly depicted as a recognisable social type in a literary form that gained momentum in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, the ‘charactery’ or character essays that were compiled in miscellanies like Joseph Hall's Characters of Vertues and Vices and Nicholas Breton's The Good and The Badde: or, Descriptions of the Worthies, and Unworthies of This Age. The oracle of the law, then, was a culturally widespread (professional and amateur, legal and literary) figure who exploited the mystique of the classical oracle in the exercise of his judgement and the cultivation of his authority.

This alternate tradition enables a reimagining of The Winter's Tale, in which Apollo's supernatural oracle evokes human judicial figures. I argue that the play thereby resonates with the explosive tensions between the judiciary and the sovereign in early seventeenth-century England.