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The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s final plays. Composed and performed around 1610–1611, along with Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, it is one of the genre-defying later plays that are usually referred to as romances, or tragicomedies. Each of these productions has a happy ending that sets them apart from earlier histories and tragedies, but each emphasizes the power of evil and the threat of death. While never finally victorious, tragic elements are nonetheless ever-present in the stories. The Winter’s Tale concludes with a joyous resolution, but before then the playwright demands that we endure the cruel madness of Leontes as well as the deaths of three innocent people.
There is no one source for The Winter’s Tale, although Shakespeare relies heavily on the works of Richard Greene, a London writer who worked during the 1580s and 1590s. (Greene may have been the author of a 1592 pamphlet attacking Shakespeare, which would make the Bard’s borrowings from the deceased writer particularly snarky.) From Pandosto, Greene’s 1588 prose romance, Shakespeare borrowed most of the characters and events of the first three acts. As for the character and habits of Autolycus, they seem to be drawn from Greene’s pamphlet accounts of criminals in Elizabethan London. Meanwhile, the story of the abandoned royal baby owes much to popular folklore of the time, and the seasonal themes touched on in act 4 echo Ovid’s Metamorphoses. For example, Perdita is associated with Proserpina, whose emergence from the Underworld in Greek myth was supposed to herald the return of spring. Finally, the resurrection of Hermione in act 5 owes an obvious debt to the Pygmalion story, in which a sculptor’s work comes to life through divine intervention.
In terms of strength of character, unity of plot, and audience satisfaction, The Winter’s Tale may be the best of the later romances, and it has been a favorite of directors and audiences down to the present day.
