The vocabulary associated with the face of human beings, the various functions and shapes1 of the human face, explorations of face-to-face encounters and gazes as well as the spaces in which they can take place occasionally preoccupy the minds of early modern writers. But they seem unusually predominant in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale,2 though faces and gazes are at times invoked and marveled at in other plays and poetic works by Shakespeare and by some other early modern figures. This excursion takes into account a few early modern texts, by Shakespeare and some of his contemporaries, in order to offer some reflections on the concept of the face as what can be called the horizon of opacity and frustration of knowledge.
