Quibble of the Week: “Shakespeare’s Legacy: Hermione the Queen and Schoolgirl”

Our next Quibble of the Week comes from Helena. As a student of both Jo Rowling and Shakespeare she has endeavored to find a connection between the fandom’s favorite “insufferable know-it-all” and the queen from the play “A Winter’s Tale.”

Helena’s reading of our Hermione in the context of Shakespeare’s Queen Hermione offers great insights into the character we all know and love. Like our other quibble-writers who’ve done cross-text analysis, she builds her essay on the assumption that these two works are in a kind of literary discourse with each other, and this leads Helena to discover this brainy witch of the Potter series can be seen as a feminist figure, an intellectual who mixes her intelligence with compassion, and an advocate for social justice.

This is an excellently written and thought-out quibble. But consider this: suppose J.K. Rowling came out and said she never read this play, or (though very unlikely) even knew about Queen Hermione. Would the analysis in this essay still hold weight?

Literary scholars everywhere are split on this question. But in our Editorials section we think all new insights are interesting and valuable (given the right amount of text-evidence). So for us the answer is an unequivocal (and perhaps over-jubilant) “yes!”

Read all our excellent quibbles and learn how you can submit one of your own on the MuggleNet Quibbler page, right here.