Stephen Greenblatt on Rabelais and carnival: "Gargantua and Pantagruel is not carnival, but the brilliant aesthetic representation of carnival motifs; not the communal laughter of a largely illiterate populace, but the highly crafted, classicizing of a supremely literate individual, not festive mayhem in the streets, but words on a page. The difference - like the difference between the traditional Whitsun-ale an Englishman could still have seen in 1611 in dozens of country villages, and the Whitsun-ale he could have seen represented at the Globe Theater in The Winter's Tale - signals as much the break away from the festive mode as its continued vigor. "