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The Winter’s Tale is a perfect tragicomedy. Set in an imaginary world where Bohemia has a seacoast and where ancient Greek oracles coexist with Renaissance sculptors, it offers three acts of unremitting tragedy, followed by two acts of restorative comedy. In between, sixteen years pass hastily, a lapse which many critics have taken as a structural flaw, but which arguably serves to highlight the disparities of theme, setting, and action between the two halves of the play. The first half is set during a gloomy winter and illuminates the destructive power that mistaken jealousy exercises over the family of King Leontes of Sicilia. In the second half, by contrast, a flower-strewn spring blossoms forth, and all the damage the king’s folly accomplished is undone through coincidence, goodwill, and finally through miracle, as a statue of his dead wife comes to life and embraces him.
The tragic mode of the play’s opening acts stems from Leontes’s belief that his wife, Hermione, and best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, are lovers. Leontes’s madness has brought more critical interest than any other aspect of the play. An Othello who is his own Iago, he is a perfect paranoiac. He is convinced that he has all the facts, and he’s always poised to twist any counterargument to fit his (mistaken) perception of the world. Yet Leontes also recalls King Lear, who demonstrates a similarly hallucinatory—if ultimately more tragic—sense of familial betrayal. Perhaps because of its uncertain origin, Leontes’s madness is a terrifying thing. Despite lacking hard evidence of his loved ones’ disloyalty, he transforms before our eyes into a jealous tyrant whose accusations grow more absurd by the minute. The roots of his jealousy seem to run too deep for the play to plumb. There are hints of misogyny, of dynastic insecurity, and of an inability to truly separate himself psychologically from Polixenes, but there are no definitive answers. Perhaps the only answer is his own: in one of Shakespeare’s finer images, Leontes says, cryptically, “I have drunk, and seen the spider” (2.1.56).
To balance his morbid, brooding nihilism and sexual jealousy, Shakespeare makes Leontes’s daughter Perdita a poet of spring, rebirth, and revitalization. Likewise, her lover, Polixenes’s son Florizell, is as constant and generous as Leontes is suspicious and cruel. She appears decked in flowers, and when she dispenses them to everyone around her, the play links her with Proserpina, Roman goddess of the spring and growing things. If Leontes is a tragic hero, then she is a fairytale heroine, a princess reared among commoners who falls in love with a prince and—eventually—lives happily ever after. Leontes casts her out as an infant in act 3, when he is in the grip of darkness. Then, in act 5, once he’s spent sixteen years in genuine penitence, she returns to him and restores his happiness. The miracle of Hermione’s resurrection in the play’s final scene offers a fitting tribute to the spirit of rebirth that Perdita brings into the story.
The play is also notable for its rich array of supporting characters. Hermione is an exemplary and eloquent figure, even though she spends the play defending herself against unjust accusations. Likewise, her friend Paulina is a cunning and brave woman who provides a voice of sanity in contrast to Leontes’s madness. She also holds him to account for his sins, which, though difficult for Leontes to bear, also facilitates his penitence. The rustic Shepherd who rescues Perdita and the ever-faithful lord Camillo are both sympathetic characters, too. But for sheer boisterous cleverness, none can match Autolycus—the peddler, thief, and minstrel who is ultimately so harmless that the audience forgives and even applauds him as he sings, dances, and robs his way through the play. By the play’s end, not only has Autolycus unwittingly enabled the play’s happy ending, but he himself has been redeemed as the servant to the newly ennobled Shepherd and his son.
