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now 16 and a shepherdess, is
courted by Polixenes’s son Florizel
at a sheep-shearing festival.
Few plays experience such a
dramatic change in genre. Indeed,
the shift is so sudden that some
critics have labeled The Winter’s
Tale one of Shakespeare’s “problem
plays.” To some extent, it reflects
the contemporary vogue for
“tragicomedies” developed by
playwrights such as John Marston,
but none of the tragicomedies of
the day feature the stark midstream
shift of The Winter’s Tale.
The play is often grouped
with The Tempest, Pericles, and
Cymbeline as a “late” play. These
are sometimes described as
“romances” because they have
something akin with the poems of
the Middle Ages that told stories of
courtly love in fantastical settings.
The marked midplay shift in
The Winter’s Tale is quite unique.
Even so, the play has the same
simple three-part structure as
many of Shakespeare plays,
including As You Like It and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. These
plays begin with a problem in the
ordered “real” world of the court.
They then move into the fantasy
world of nature for the problems to
be worked out before returning to
the court where everything is
resolved. The Winter’s Tale works
in the same way. The key difference
is how fully the problem in the real
world, the world of Leontes’s court,
is developed, growing into a full
tragedy before the healing journeyinto nature begins. Indeed, it is a
problem so deep that it cannot be
solved by Leontes or Polixenes
themselves. It can only be solved
by their children.
The shift from Sicily to Bohemia
is in some ways a regeneration, a
reflection of the fact that nature is
always renewing itself. After the
harshness of winter, spring brings
forth new life, and nature is a
continuous cycle of death and
rebirth. The Old Shepherd who
finds the lost baby Perdita sums up
this rebirth when he says: “Thou
metst with / things dying, I with
things new-born” (3.3.110–111).Summer and rebirth
The Bohemian section of The
Winter’s Tale, then, symbolizes a
rebirth. The structure of the play
mirrors, intentionally or not, the
story of the European rebirth, theTHE WINTER’S TALE
A romantic painting (1845) by
Augustus Leopold Egg depicts roguish
peddler Autolycus singing in Act 4,
Scene 4. A British production that year
omitted some of the play’s indelicacies.