The Winter's Tale Summary: Shakespeare's Late Romance of Jealousy and Reunion
What it is about
The Winter's Tale was first published in the First Folio of 1623, where it sits among the comedies. Modern editors tend to call it something else. It is usually grouped with Shakespeare's late romances, and some critics file it with the problem plays, because the two halves of it barely seem to belong to the same work. The first three acts are tight, cruel psychological drama. The last two are pastoral comedy with a happy ending. Reading it is like watching a tragedy stop mid-sentence and start again as something warmer.
The story begins with two kings who have been friends since childhood. Polixenes, King of Bohemia, has spent nine months visiting Leontes, King of Sicily. He now wants to go home to his own kingdom and his own son. Leontes cannot talk him into staying, so he asks his pregnant wife, Queen Hermione, to try. She does, with three short speeches, and she succeeds.
That success is the hinge of the whole play. Leontes watches his wife persuade his friend in a matter of minutes and decides the two of them must be lovers. There is no villain whispering in his ear. The jealousy arrives out of nothing and takes him over completely. He orders his lord Camillo to poison Polixenes. Camillo refuses, warns Polixenes instead, and the two of them flee to Bohemia.
Enraged by the escape, Leontes accuses Hermione publicly, declares her unborn child a bastard, and has her imprisoned over the objections of his court. He sends two lords, Cleomenes and Dion, to consult the Oracle at Delphos. Hermione gives birth to a daughter in prison. Her friend Paulina brings the baby to the king, hoping the sight will soften him. It does the opposite. Leontes orders Paulina's husband, Lord Antigonus, to carry the child away and abandon her somewhere desolate.
What follows is a trial, a verdict from the Oracle, and a series of losses that Leontes brings down on his own house. Then the play moves to the coast of Bohemia, a shipwreck, a bear, and a shepherd who finds an abandoned baby with a bundle of gold beside her. A figure called Time walks on and announces that sixteen years have passed.
The main characters
Leontes is one of Shakespeare's hardest roles because his collapse has no cause. He is a man destroyed by an idea he invented, and he spends the rest of the play paying for it.
Hermione is dignified under accusation, defending herself at trial with a composure her husband cannot match. Paulina, her friend, is the play's conscience. She speaks to the king when nobody else dares and she keeps speaking long after the crisis has passed.
Perdita is the abandoned daughter, raised by the Old Shepherd and his son (called Clown in the text), who have prospered on the gold left in her bundle. Florizel is the son of Polixenes, in love with a girl he believes is a shepherd's daughter. Camillo, exiled in Bohemia, spends sixteen years homesick for Sicily and eventually engineers a way back. Autolycus is a pedlar, pickpocket and con man who sells trinkets, sings bawdy songs and lifts the purse of the Young Shepherd at the sheep-shearing feast.
The themes
Jealousy in this play is a form of madness. It needs no evidence and no provocation. Leontes refuses the Oracle's plain words even when they are read aloud to him, which tells you how far from reason he has travelled.
Against that sits the long work of repentance. Leontes does not get forgiven quickly. Years pass. Paulina holds him to his grief and refuses to let him remarry, arguing that no woman could match what he lost. The play is unusually honest about how slow atonement is.
Then there is the pastoral half, which is about generation and renewal. Children replace parents. The sheep-shearing feast is full of flowers, music and courtship, and Shakespeare lets it run long. Polixenes, tearing off his disguise to threaten Perdita and the Old Shepherd, repeats his old friend's mistake in a new key. Fathers in this play are the problem.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the ending fresh. Camillo sends Florizel and Perdita to Sicily so that Polixenes will follow and bring him home. In Sicily the truth of Perdita's birth comes out, Leontes is reunited with his daughter, and he asks Polixenes for his forgiveness. Much of this reunion is reported by courtiers rather than shown. The company then goes to Paulina's house to view a newly finished statue of Hermione. Leontes is overcome by the likeness. Then the statue begins to show signs of life.
Why it still matters
The play has drifted in and out of favour. After a long gap with no major performances, David Garrick premiered an adaptation in 1753 called Florizel and Perdita, printed in 1756, which concentrated on the pastoral material. The nineteenth century revived the full play and loved the fourth act most of all. In the second half of the twentieth century it was more often staged whole, from the Folio text, with mixed results. Leading Shakespearean directors keep returning to it.
Its hold comes from the structural gamble. A play that breaks in two, that kills off hope and then hands it back, asks the audience to accept something logic would reject. The last scene is one of the strangest and most moving things Shakespeare wrote, and it works because the first three acts were so unforgiving.
