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Portrait of The Winter's Tale

Shakespeare · Late romances

The Winter's Tale

c. 1610–11

Late romance — from Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto (1588)

A king of Sicilia is seized by a jealousy that arrives from nowhere, accuses his pregnant queen of adultery with his oldest friend, defies the oracle at Delphos and destroys his own family within three acts. Then a chorus called Time skips sixteen years, the play moves to a Bohemian sheep-shearing feast, and the abandoned daughter is found. It ends with a statue that comes to life, and it contains the most famous stage direction in English drama.

How to spot them

  • ▸Sicilia and Bohemia, split by a gap of sixteen years announced by Time as chorus
  • ▸A king's jealousy of his lifelong friend, with no Iago to prompt it
  • ▸The most famous stage direction in English, involving a bear
  • ▸A newborn daughter left on a sea-coast and raised by a shepherd
  • ▸A statue of a dead queen that steps down from its pedestal

Scenes, characters & lines

'Exit, pursued by a bear'

The stage direction that disposes of Antigonus after he abandons the baby

A queen is tried for adultery and an oracle from Delphos is denounced as false

Hermione's trial; the god's answer is read out and the king rejects it, and his son dies at once

'Thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born'

The Shepherd to his son, after finding the abandoned baby beside a fresh corpse

A pedlar sings ballads and picks pockets at a sheep-shearing feast

Autolycus, 'a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles', with 'When daffodils begin to peer'

A chorus called Time steps forward to leap over sixteen years

The hinge between the tragedy of the first half and the pastoral of the second

A statue by Giulio Romano is unveiled and proves to be warm

Paulina's chapel scene: 'It is required you do awake your faith'

A princess raised as a shepherdess distributes flowers at a feast

Perdita on rosemary, rue and the debate over grafted 'streak'd gillyvors'

Key ideas

  • The play breaks in half, tragedy then pastoral comedy, and asks the audience to accept a miracle the way a child accepts a winter's tale
  • Hermione's sixteen hidden years make the resurrection just possible naturally — Shakespeare leaves both readings open

Quick-fire facts

  • •The astrologer Simon Forman recorded seeing it at the Globe on 15 May 1611
  • •First printed in the First Folio of 1623, where it is the last of the comedies
  • •Shakespeare gives Bohemia a sea-coast, which it does not have; Ben Jonson mocked him for it
  • •In the source, Pandosto, the queen really does die; the statue scene is Shakespeare's invention
  • •Giulio Romano, named as the statue's sculptor, is the only Renaissance artist Shakespeare mentions by name
  • •The lost daughter is Perdita; the son who dies is Mamillius; the king and queen are Leontes and Hermione
  • •Paulina, Antigonus's widow, keeps Hermione hidden and stage-manages the ending
  • •Kenneth Branagh, Judi Dench and, in 2015, a Garrick Theatre season made it a modern staple; Christopher Wheeldon's 2014 Royal Ballet version is now widely danced

Drill it — 9 cards

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Sources