The Winter's Tale

Summary

The Winter's Tale is a play of two halves joined by a gap of sixteen years. Its first three acts are a tragedy of jealousy set in the court of Sicilia; its last two are a pastoral comedy in Bohemia that turns, in a final scene, into something closer to a miracle play. Leontes, King of Sicilia, has entertained his boyhood friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia, for nine months. When his pregnant queen Hermione persuades Polixenes to stay longer after Leontes has failed, Leontes is seized by a sudden and groundless conviction that she is Polixenes' lover and that the child she carries is not his. No villain prompts him; the suspicion grows from within and feeds on everything it sees. He orders his counsellor Camillo to poison Polixenes, but Camillo warns the guest and flees with him. Leontes imprisons Hermione, who gives birth in prison. Her friend Paulina brings the baby to the king, hoping the sight will soften him; instead he orders Paulina's husband Antigonus to abandon the infant in some desert place. Leontes has sent to the oracle of Apollo, but when the oracle declares Hermione chaste and Leontes a jealous tyrant, he denies it. At once word comes that his young son Mamillius has died of grief and fear for his mother. Hermione collapses and Paulina reports her dead. Leontes repents and vows to mourn daily. In Bohemia Antigonus, directed by a dream of Hermione, leaves the baby with the name Perdita and is killed by a bear, while a shepherd and his son find the child and the gold left with her. Time, as Chorus, carries the story across sixteen years. Perdita, raised as the shepherd's daughter, is loved by Polixenes' son Florizel. At a sheep-shearing feast, enlivened by the rogue Autolycus, Polixenes and Camillo come in disguise; Polixenes discovers the match and furiously forbids it. Camillo, longing for home, sends the lovers to Sicilia. The shepherd's proofs reveal Perdita as Leontes' lost daughter, a recognition reported in prose by court gentlemen rather than staged. Finally Paulina invites the company to view a lifelike statue of Hermione. Leontes is overwhelmed with remorse and wonder; Paulina calls for music and bids them awake their faith, and the statue moves, descends, and embraces him. Hermione speaks only to bless her daughter. Paulina is given to Camillo in marriage, and the play closes on reunion that does not undo the dead: Mamillius and Antigonus remain lost.

Plot or Argument

• Act 1: A friend's visit and the birth of suspicion

  Camillo and the Bohemian lord Archidamus praise the friendship of the two kings (1.1). Hermione persuades Polixenes to stay; Leontes, watching them, falls into jealous asides, interrogates his son's likeness to himself, and commands Camillo to poison Polixenes. Camillo reveals the plot to Polixenes and they flee together (1.2).

• Act 2: Accusation, imprisonment, and the cast-out child

  As Mamillius begins a winter's tale for his mother, Leontes accuses Hermione publicly and sends her to prison, while announcing that he has sent to the oracle at Delphos (2.1). Paulina receives the newborn daughter from the prison (2.2) and carries her to the sleepless king, who threatens to burn the child and finally orders Antigonus to abandon her in a remote place (2.3).

• Act 3: The oracle, the trial, and the storm

  The messengers return from Apollo's temple (3.1). At her trial Hermione defends her honour and appeals to the oracle, which declares her innocent; Leontes rejects it, learns that Mamillius is dead, and repents as Hermione is carried out and reported dead (3.2). On the coast of Bohemia Antigonus leaves the child, exits pursued by a bear, and the Shepherd and Clown find the baby and her gold (3.3).

• Act 4: Time's turning and the sheep-shearing

  Time asks the audience to pass over sixteen years (4.1). Polixenes and Camillo resolve to follow Florizel in disguise (4.2). Autolycus robs the Clown on the road (4.3). At the shearing feast Perdita distributes flowers and debates art and nature with Polixenes; ballads and a satyrs' dance follow; Polixenes unmasks and threatens the lovers, and Camillo redirects their flight to Sicilia, while Autolycus exchanges clothes with Florizel and diverts the Shepherd and Clown on board (4.4).

• Act 5: Penitence, recognition, and the statue

  After sixteen years Leontes is urged to remarry; Paulina binds him to take no wife without her consent, and Florizel and Perdita arrive (5.1). Gentlemen report the recognition of Perdita and the manner of Antigonus's death, and the Shepherd and Clown are newly made gentlemen (5.2). In Paulina's chapel the statue of Hermione is unveiled and, at Paulina's command, comes to life (5.3).

Characters

• Leontes, King of Sicilia

  A loving husband who becomes a tyrant through self-generated jealousy, defies Apollo's oracle, and spends sixteen years in penitence under Paulina's watch.

• Hermione, Queen of Sicilia

  Gracious, witty and dignified under false accusation; she defends herself at trial without self-pity and returns in the final scene to bless her daughter.

• Paulina, Hermione's friend, wife of Antigonus

  The play's fearless truth-teller, who calls herself the king's physician, keeps his guilt before him for sixteen years, and stages the statue scene.

• Polixenes, King of Bohemia

  Leontes' childhood friend; wronged in the first half, he becomes a tyrannical father in the second when he forbids his son's marriage.

• Camillo, Sicilian lord and counsellor

  Refuses to commit murder at his king's command, serves Polixenes in exile, and engineers the lovers' journey home.

• Perdita, daughter of Leontes and Hermione

  The lost one of her name, raised as a shepherdess; frank, modest and clear-sighted about rank and nature.

• Florizel, Prince of Bohemia, son of Polixenes

  Courts Perdita in the guise of the shepherd Doricles and chooses her over his succession.

• Mamillius, young prince of Sicilia

  Leontes' son, whose winter's tale is interrupted and who dies of grief at his mother's disgrace.

• Antigonus, Sicilian lord, Paulina's husband

  Obeys the king's order to expose the infant, names her Perdita after a dream of Hermione, and is killed by a bear.

• Autolycus, rogue, pedlar and ballad-seller

  A former servant of Florizel turned cheerful thief, who cozens the country folk and unwittingly helps bring about the discovery.

• The Old Shepherd and the Clown, Perdita's foster father and his son

  Find and raise the abandoned child; their simplicity carries much of the comedy of Acts 4 and 5.

• Time, Chorus

  Speaks the speech at the start of Act 4 that bridges sixteen years and claims power to make and unfold error.

• Cleomenes and Dion, lords sent to the oracle

  Report the awe of Apollo's temple and later urge Leontes to forgive himself and remarry.

Lessons

• Jealousy that needs no tempter

  Unlike Othello, Leontes has no Iago. His suspicion arises in a single scene, finds evidence in ordinary courtesy, and grows by feeding on its own imaginings. When proof arrives from Apollo himself he calls it falsehood. The play studies how a mind convinced of its own perception becomes immune to correction, and it calls the result tyranny, not merely misfortune.

  • What, if anything, in Act 1, Scene 2 prompts Leontes' suspicion? Track the moment it begins.
  • Leontes says he has drunk and seen the spider. What does his image reveal about how knowledge can poison?
  • Why does Leontes reject the oracle, and what changes his mind?

• Paulina and Camillo: counsel that costs

  Camillo refuses to murder an innocent king and loses his home; Paulina confronts Leontes with his newborn daughter and later with his guilt, at real risk to herself. Antigonus, by contrast, obeys an unjust command and dies. The play honours courageous truth-telling while showing that Paulina herself sometimes overreaches and asks pardon for her rashness.

  • Compare Camillo's disobedience with Antigonus's obedience. Is Antigonus guilty, pitiable, or both?
  • Paulina calls herself the king's physician. In what sense does she heal him?
  • Where does Paulina's boldness cross into cruelty, and how does she respond when she realizes it?

• Sixteen years of penitence

  After the oracle, Leontes accepts blame, vows daily visits to the graves of his wife and son, and keeps them. Paulina first tells him to despair, then repents her words; by Act 5 Cleomenes urges him to forgive himself as the heavens have forgiven. The play distinguishes repentance from despair and from easy self-forgiveness, and lets restoration come only after long, faithful sorrow.

  • Is Cleomenes right that Leontes has paid more penitence than trespass? Why does Leontes refuse to forget?
  • Why does Paulina insist that Leontes take no wife without her consent?
  • The final scene restores Hermione and Perdita but not Mamillius or Antigonus. What does that loss add to the ending?

• Art, nature, and the grafted flower

  At the sheep-shearing Perdita refuses to grow streaked gillyvors because human art has mixed them, and Polixenes argues that the art of grafting is itself part of nature. He then forbids his own son to marry a shepherd's daughter. The debate frames the play's larger questions about rank and worth, about whether art can improve nature, and about Paulina's statue, an artwork that may be nature itself.

  • Restate Polixenes' argument in your own words. Is it sound?
  • How does Polixenes contradict his own argument a few minutes later?
  • Perdita says the same sun shines on court and cottage. How does the play answer her claim by the end?

• Awake your faith: the statue scene

  Paulina tells her audience that it is required they awake their faith, insists her spell is lawful, and calls Hermione back from apparent stone. Shakespeare leaves the mechanics unclear: Hermione says she preserved herself in hope of the oracle's promise, yet the scene is staged as a resurrection. Christian readers have found in it images of grace, death and new life, while the play's own world is nominally pagan; students should weigh both the resonance and the restraint.

  • Was Hermione alive all along? What evidence in the text supports each answer, and does it matter?
  • Why does Paulina insist that what she does is lawful and not magic?
  • Leontes asks whether the stone rebukes him for being more stone than it. What has changed in him since Act 3?

Context

The Winter's Tale belongs to the group of late plays usually called romances, with Pericles, Cymbeline and The Tempest, written for the King's Men in the years when the company also played at the indoor Blackfriars theatre. These plays share lost children, long separations, wanderings by sea, and recognitions that border on the miraculous. The setting is a loosely ancient, pagan world with an oracle at Delphos and gods named Apollo and Jupiter, yet the language of grace, penitence and redemption carries Christian resonance for an audience in Jacobean England. Its Bohemia has a coast, a geographical liberty Ben Jonson mocked in his conversations with William Drummond in 1619. The play also contains Shakespeare's only reference to a named artist, the Italian Julio Romano, credited with the statue.

Composition

Usually dated c. 1609-1611. The astrologer Simon Forman recorded seeing it at the Globe on 15 May 1611, and it was played at court in November 1611. The principal source is Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588), in which the jealous king rules Bohemia rather than Sicilia, the queen dies and does not return, and the king ends by killing himself. Shakespeare reversed the kingdoms, added Paulina, Antigonus, Autolycus and the Clown, and invented the statue scene, drawing on Ovid's Pygmalion and Proserpina stories. The play was first printed in the 1623 Folio, last among the comedies, apparently from a transcript by the scribe Ralph Crane.

Reception

Forman's notes dwell on Autolycus and on the jealous king. The play was revived at court in the 1610s and after, then largely neglected after the Restoration; David Garrick's pastoral adaptation Florizel and Perdita (1756) kept mainly the Bohemian half. Later critics, among them Coleridge, praised the study of Leontes' jealousy, and twentieth-century criticism, from S. L. Bethell's Christian reading to Northrop Frye's work on romance and Stanley Cavell's on skepticism, made it central to the study of Shakespeare's late style. The statue scene and the stage direction for the bear remain among the most discussed moments in English drama.

Comparisons

• Othello

  Othello is driven by Iago's insinuations and demands ocular proof; Leontes invents his own evidence and rejects divine proof when it comes. Othello ends in murder and suicide, while The Winter's Tale gives its jealous husband sixteen years to repent and a second chance he does not deserve.

• The Tempest

  Both late romances end in forgiveness and a marriage that unites rival houses, and both are steered by a figure who controls a final revelation: Prospero by magic he later renounces, Paulina by an art she insists is lawful. The Tempest keeps to a single afternoon, while The Winter's Tale deliberately breaks the unity of time with a sixteen-year leap.

• Pericles, Prince of Tyre

  Pericles also loses a wife and daughter and finds them again, and its wife Thaisa is revived from apparent death by the physician Cerimon. Comparing Cerimon's openly medical restoration with Paulina's mysterious one shows how differently the two plays present the return from death.

• Cymbeline

  Written in the same years, Cymbeline also turns on a husband convinced of his wife's infidelity, a wife presumed dead, and a final scene of multiple recognitions. Posthumus is deceived by a wager and false evidence, which makes Leontes' unprompted jealousy look starker by comparison.

• Metamorphoses

  Ovid supplies Pygmalion's statue that warms to life, Proserpina's flowers dropped from Dis's wagon, which Perdita invokes at the shearing, and the name of the thief Autolycus, son of Mercury. Shakespeare reworks Ovid's transformations into scenes of repentance and restored marriage.

• Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (Robert Greene)

  Greene's romance gives Shakespeare the plot of jealousy, oracle, exposed daughter and pastoral courtship, but ends with the queen permanently dead and the king's suicide. Shakespeare's changes, especially the statue and Paulina, turn a tale of fortune into one of penitence and restoration.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The play repeatedly frames jealousy as disease. Leontes names his palpitations tremor cordis, speaks of the infection of his brains, and is told by Camillo to be cured of a diseased opinion; Paulina presents herself as the king's physician, come to purge the humour that keeps him from sleep. Modern readers sometimes compare Leontes' sudden, unshakeable conviction of infidelity with what psychiatry calls delusional or morbid jealousy; that is a retrospective reading, useful for discussion, while the play itself speaks of humours, infection and tyranny. Mamillius's decline, losing spirit, appetite and sleep before dying of conceit and fear, is an early modern picture of grief killing the body. Hermione's complaint that she was hurried to trial before regaining her strength, without the customary rest after childbirth, records customs of lying-in after birth. Poison runs through the first half, from the commission to Camillo to the spider in the cup. The statue scene, with music, warmth and breath returning, can be read alongside early modern interest in apparent death and revival, though Shakespeare leaves its nature deliberately uncertain.

• Act 1, Scene 2

  Leontes' asides describe his jealousy in bodily terms (a trembling heart, an infection of the brain), and Camillo speaks of a sickness he cannot name and of a diseased opinion needing cure.

  Obsession Monomania Mind Body
• Act 1, Scene 2

  Leontes commands his cupbearer Camillo to poison Polixenes; Camillo says he could do it with a slow-working dose but refuses.

  Pharmacology Poisons
• Act 2, Scene 1

  The image of the spider steeped in a cup, harmless until seen, joins the period belief about venom with a reflection on how knowledge itself can make one sick.

  Pharmacology Poisons Mind Body
• Act 2, Scene 3

  Mamillius has sickened with shame at his mother's disgrace, losing spirit, appetite and sleep; Leontes has not slept; Paulina enters as self-proclaimed physician offering truth as medicine for the humour.

  Melancholia Depression Sleep Insomnia Humoral Medicine Physicians Doctors
• Act 3, Scene 2

  Hermione describes being brought to court soon after childbirth, denied the customary childbed rest; Mamillius is reported dead of conceit and fear; Hermione faints and remedies are called for.

  Childbirth Maternal Mind Body Death Dying
• Act 3, Scene 3

  Antigonus recounts a dream so like waking in which Hermione appeared in white, wept, and named the child Perdita.

  Dreams Nightmares
• Act 5, Scene 1

  Sixteen years of mourning: Leontes' daily penitence and the courtiers' counsel that his sorrow should end.

  Grief Melancholia Depression
• Act 5, Scene 3

  The statue scene: Leontes perceives breath, warmth and blood in the figure; Paulina calls for music and the figure moves and descends.

  Reanimation Galvanism Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write the winter's tale of sprites and goblins that Mamillius was about to tell his mother before his father interrupted, keeping it suitable for a child to tell and hinting at what follows.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between Paulina and Hermione on the night after the trial, as Hermione decides whether to hide herself until the oracle is fulfilled.

• Essay

  Argue whether the statue scene is better understood as a staged deception by Paulina or as a genuine miracle within the play's world, using Paulina's insistence on lawfulness and Hermione's own explanation as evidence.

• Classroom

  Divide the class into Sicilian and Bohemian courts and stage the flower distribution of Act 4, Scene 4, then discuss what each flower Perdita gives says about the person who receives it.

• Poetry

  Write Time's speech for a second gap in the play, carrying the audience from the reunion forward sixteen more years, in rhymed couplets like Shakespeare's Chorus.

Further Reading

• Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, Robert Greene

  Shakespeare's main source, a prose romance of 1588.

• The Winter's Tale: A Study, S. L. Bethell

  A 1947 study that reads the play in Christian terms.

• A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance, Northrop Frye

• Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare, Stanley Cavell

  Includes an essay on Leontes' skepticism and its cure.