Composed late in his career, The Winter’s Tale shares with the great tragedies of Shakespeare’s middle period an exploration of darker human behaviors and inclinations—in this case, jealousy and irrationality. In both structure and content, however, the play is essentially a comedy and listed as such in the 1623 folio.
Like the other late plays (The Tempest, Pericles, and Cymbeline), WT is often called a romance because it includes such elements as:
Another generic element, pertaining to the play’s middle section (3.3-4.4), is pastoral, which typically features the following:
Theocritus’ Idyls and Virgil’s Eclogues, early Greek and Roman forms of pastoral, describe a Golden Age or Arcadia (something like the biblical Eden) in which most of these features are present. The rural setting of 4.4 in WT, however, relies less on the Classical Arcadia than on the customs and pastimes of English country life in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The centerpiece of the play is a sheep-shearing festival, a seasonal celebration marking the transition from summer to autumn and very much familiar to Shakespeare’s audience—at least those who ventured beyond the London city limits, as Shakespeare himself must have done, given his extensive knowledge of such festivities.
Though WT contains both romance and pastoral elements, it might also be called a tragicomedy. Indeed, it is formally divided into two halves: the first a mini-tragedy ending at 3.2, the second a magical comedy culminating in the (partial) undoing of the play’s tragic first half.
The tragic locale is Sicilia: an urban, courtly world infected with age, decay, jealousy, hatred, pain, and death. Bohemia, on the other hand, is a rural, pastoral world redolent of hope and renewal, rebirth, perpetual beauty, joy, and happiness. In comedic terms, these two worlds correspond to the city world and green world of earlier comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The play’s motion from Sicilia to Bohemia is not unlike the transition in Dream. And just as the situation in Athens is transformed or resolved by the lovers’ sojourn in a magical world removed from everyday realities, so does the plot of WT pass through two radically different realms towards a happy reconciliation. Comic resolution in this play, however, differs considerably from that of Dream insofar as it is achieved only at great cost. The final mood is somber and melancholy, hardly the celebratory conclusion of Dream.
The plots in Shakespeare’s romances, like those of the earlier comedies, include the overcoming of obstacles or adversity through some journey away from and subsequently back to the original setting now transformed. The Winter’s Tale, however, complicates this convention. There are two movements, not one. The first is from Sicilia to Bohemia and back again—Camillo and Perdita escaping certain death only to return and be reconciled to their tormentor, Leontes. The second movement, which involves Perdita and Florizel escaping the wrath of a meddling father figure (very much like Hermia and Lysander escaping Egeus in Dream), is in one direction only; there is no return. Furthermore, whereas it functions as the first movement’s magical green world, Bohemia is the second movement’s beginning, the place of adversity from which the young lovers must flee if they are to realize their desires. And the place of reconciliation for both plots is Sicilia. These reversals and doublings suggest a middle ground between the extremes suggested by the two locales: discord in Sicilia, peace and harmony in Bohemia.
Manipulating conventional comedic structure in this way, Shakespeare expands the medium toward a more realistic portrayal of human life. Rebirth, renewal, forgiveness, reconciliation—these are all experienced by the surviving characters. But in no way does the play’s hopeful outcome mitigate their tragic loss.
Pastoral and romance elements tend to push WT in a non-realistic direction. As artificial as the play is, however, its treatment of universal themes is in feeling as real as anything we might encounter in English drama. Shakespeare deliberately calls attention to the fantastic and artificial elements in the play even while rendering its protagonists’ experiences emotionally compelling. Why this combination of the real and the artificial? What are its emotional, aesthetic, and thematic effects?
Here I defer again to the great literary scholar Northrop Frye. Frye has suggested that the magical worlds of theatrical illusion are in a way more, not less, real than everyday experience. He called Shakespeare’s comedies “models of desire,” supreme expressions of the world we want as opposed to the one we have. They are more real because they are human creations, artistic visions of a world liberated from the limitations of human life in a fallen world. Such models are not utopias, however, for they are not prescriptive. Rather, they suggest the impossible return to an ideal we have never known, a going back to a place we have never been—a world, in other words, toward which we can gesture only through the language of myth, metaphor, symbol, and music.
In reading or hearing The Winter’s Tale, we have the sense that we are witnessing the enactment of ritual, something at once alien and yet deeply familiar. The great cycles of nature, from birth to death and rebirth, springtime to harvest and winter decay, the interminable passing of time: these form the background of all the comedies, but come increasingly into the thematic foreground of the later plays in particular. It is as though Shakespeare were returning to the primitive foundations of the drama, the religious rituals and festivals which in the earliest cultures were creative means of dealing with those aspects of human experience over which we have little if any control: the seasons, the weather, the motions of heavenly bodies, birth and death, illness and aging.
But the author of WT and Hamlet goes a step further, recognizing that the most alienating aspect of our existence is not our infinitesimal place in an expanding universe, but the human psyche itself. Leontes and Hamlet—like Lear, Macbeth, and Othello—are fierce reminders of the passions of lust, hatred, jealousy, ambition, and fear that rumble just below the skin. Hamlet’s “let it be ” (5.2.280) and the melancholy conclusion of WT embrace these human realities, not by way of false hope or stoicism, but through the transformative power of art.
©Robert Whalen, 2025