The Winter’s Tale is a comedy by William Shakespeare. This play is one of Shakepeare’s later efforts, probably written in 1610 or 1611, and is commonly classified with Shakespeare’s other late romances. Some critics, among them W.W. Lawrence and R.A. Foakes, also consider it to be one of the “problem plays”, because the first three acts are filled with intense psychological drama, but the last two acts are comedic and supply a happy ending.
Synopsis
Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, is concluding a nine-month visit with his lifelong friend, Leontes, King of Sicilia. Leontes inexplicably suspects that his pregnant wife Hermione has been having an affair with Polixenes and that the child is a bastard. Leontes orders his servant Camillo to poison Polixenes.
When Camillo instead warns Polixenes and they both flee to Bohemia, Leontes arrests Hermione on charges of adultery and conspiracy against his life. She gives birth to a daughter in prison, and Leontes orders Antigonus, a Sicilian courtier, to dispose of the infant. At Hermione’s trial, the Oracle at Delphi pronounces her innocent, but Leontes defies the oracle; he immediately receives word that his young son, Mamillius, has died of grief. Hermione faints and is reported to have died. Leontes laments his poor judgement and promises to grieve for his dead wife and son every day.
Antigonus is sent by Leontes to abandon Hermione’s newborn daughter on the seacoast of Bohemia. Hermione appears to Antigonus in a dream and tells him to name the child “Perdita” (derived from the Latin word for “lost”). He wishes to take pity on the child, but is chased away in one of Shakespeare’s most famous stage directions: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” It is not known whether Shakespeare used a real bear from the London bear-pits, or an actor in bear costume. Fortunately, Perdita is rescued by a shepherd and his son also known as “Clown”.
Father Time enters and announces the passage of sixteen years. Leontes has spent the sixteen years mourning his wife and children. In Bohemia, Polixenes and Camillo attend a sheep-shearing festival (in disguise) only to discover that the young Prince Florizel (Polixenes’ son) plans to marry a beautiful young shepherd’s daughter (Perdita, who knows nothing of her royal heritage). Polixenes objects to the marriage and threatens the young couple, so they flee to Sicilia with the help of Camillo. Polixenes pursues them. Eventually, with a bit of help from a comical rogue named Autolycus, Perdita’s heritage is revealed and she reunites with her father. The kings are reconciled and both approve of Florizel and Perdita’s marriage. They all go to see a statue of Hermione kept by Paulina, a lady of Hermione’s court, the widow of Antigonus, and her most ardent defender in life and death. The statue comes to life and it is intimated that Hermione went into hiding in the hope of finding Perdita again, but it also appears that she has been brought to life by magical means. They are one big happy family again (except for Mamillius who is still dead).
Controversies
The question of whether Hermione is genuinely brought back to life by magical means or whether the “resurrection” is some kind of trick is left unanswered in the text. She says to Perdita, “thou shalt hear that I, / Knowing by Paulina that the oracle / Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserved / Myself to see the issue.”
In reality Bohemia roughly corresponds to the modern-day Czech Republic and had neither a coast (being landlocked) nor a desert. Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Ben Jonson ridiculed the play for this, but the pastoral genre is not generally known for precise verisimilitude, and, like the assortment of mixed references to ancient religion and contemporary religious figures and customs, this apparent inaccuracy may have been included to underscore the play’s fantastical and chimeric quality.
Sources
The main plot of The Winter’s Tale is taken from Robert Greene’s pastoral romance Pandosto, published in 1590. Shakespeare’s changes to the plot are uncharacteristically slight, especially in light of the romance’s undramatic nature, and Shakespeare’s fidelity to it gives The Winter’s Tale its most distinctive feature: the sixteen-year gap between the third and fourth acts. There are minor changes in names, places, and minor plot details, but the largest change is in the survival of Hermione. The equivalent character in Pandosto dies after being accused of adultery. This change, while presumably intended to create the last scene’s coup de théâtre involving the statue, creates a distinctive thematic divergence from Pandosto. Robert Greene follows the usual ethos of Hellenistic romance, in which the return of a lost prince or princess restores order and provides a sense of closure that evokes Providence’s control. Shakespeare, by contrast, foregrounds the restoration of the older, indeed aged, generation in the reunion of Leontes and Hermione.
It has been suggested that the use of a pastoral romance from the 1590s suggests that at the end of his career, Shakespeare felt a renewed interest in the dramatic contexts of his youth. Minor influences also suggest such an interest. As in Pericles, he uses a chorus to advance the action in the manner of the naive dramatic tradition; the use of a bear in the scene on the Bohemian seashore is almost certainly indebted to Musedorus, a chivalric romance revived at court around 1610.
One modern historian, Eric Ives, believes that the play is really a parody of the fall of Queen Anne Boleyn, who was beheaded on false charges of adultery on the orders of her husband Henry VIII in 1536. There are numerous parallels between the two stories – including the fact that one of Henry’s closest friends, Sir Henry Norreys, was beheaded as one of Anne’s supposed lovers and he refused to confess in order to save his life – claiming that everyone knew the Queen was innocent. If this theory is followed then Perdita becomes a dramatic presentation of Anne’s only daughter, Queen Elizabeth I.
Cultural references
J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series named one of her main characters after Hermione in this play.
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