If your insanely jealous daddy put your mommy on trial for infidelity, resulting in her death and that of their young son; and you were banished as illegitimate, you’re not alone. Perdita feels ya.
Here’s my Shakespeare Illuminated episode on The Winter’s Tale.
Turns out I am just plagiarizing myself from many years ago in the short School of Night episode.
Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale defies categorization: a tragicomedy? a fever-dream? “[I]f it had been expressly written to defy the classic unities, it could hardly have violated them more flagrantly” (Goddard, II 263). “Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well, Hamlet, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Pericles all tell of an entirely loving wife rejected by a suborned husband, who allows his jealous imaginings to run away with him (though in Alls Well the ‘wife’ is rejected for her inferior birth, and the hero, as in Hamlet, is not suborned) (Beauclerk 119).
So, exploring another facet of accusations against a wife, Shakespeare-Oxford expiates some guilt while offering Queen Elizabeth a therapeutic allegory of extreme family dysfunction; and, after a jump ahead 16 years, a rustic springtime festival, a Clown, and young love, let’s have a miracle and try to get the remnants of a family back together for some healing restoration.
Imagine you’re Queen Elizabeth and this will make a lot more sense. We’re just not sure what to do about that guy eaten by a bear.
Although in a generic way, “winter’s tales” are supposed to be like “old wives’ tales” (Wells 339), “diverting entertainment, largely for the amusement of women, children, and the old” (Garber 830), and although certainly the implausibilities in what Shakespeare does present as an old-fashioned tale are always noted, other than that soppy and patronizing attempt at an explanation, the title bears very little relationship with the play itself in any intrinsic manner. The best explanation is that it’s a matter of bilingual wordplay. In French, “winter’s tale” would be rendered “conte d’hiver” (“account of winter,” vs. “histoire”/story) — which sounds like Count de Vere (especially in Elizabethan pronunciation) with Count being the French equivalent of Earl. [On the continent, the introduction is “the Count and Countess Dracula”; in England, “the Earl and Countess Oxford.”] Hence, an encoded identification of Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (Desper and Vezzoli).
Robert Greene, part of Oxford’s circle (Farina 90), wrote a sloppy euphuistic prose romance called Pandosto (1588) which Stratfordians consider the source for the play (e.g. Bloom 639); Charlton Ogburn thinks vice versa (675), and his parents took Pandosto to be another case of a secondary work seeming like a source simply because of publication order (Ogburn and Ogburn 535-536; cf. Jolly 177f). As with Wilkins and Pericles, these prose efforts may be like novelizations of movies. Pandosto is dedicated to George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, with the hope that he will be “measuring my work by my will” (xxix). Inside the work, we hear that “conscience is a worm that ever biteth, but never ceaseth” (10). Differences between the “Greene” work and the play include all the changed names: Shakespeare probably derived Hermione from the Greek play Andromache (Thomas xvii); Pandosto of Bohemia becomes Leontes of Sicily, Egistus of Sicily becomes Polixenes of Bohemia, Bellaria becomes Hermione, Garinter becomes Maximilius, Dorastus becomes Florizel, Fawnia becomes Perdita. The queen really dies of grief in Pandosto, is embalmed, and entombed (so the statue bit occurs only in Shakespeare). And Pandosto tries to kill himself after his queen’s death; he does end by suicide at the end of the work. (See Thomas; also Showerman).
Recorded mention of performances come in 1611, so the ostensible relevance of the death of Prince Henry in 1612 is crap (e.g., Garber 827). And don’t even with the Hamnet Shakspere rubbish. Here’s a representative and ambivalent Stratfordian attempt: “The play’s author had also lost a son, and had married off a daughter. Hamnet Shakespeare died at age eleven in 1596. Susanna married Dr. John Hall in 1607. Yet, there is no specific reason to read the play as in any way ‘autobiographical,’ except in the sense that all artistic work is part of the autobiography of its creator” (Garber 828). Then why in hell did you … oh, forget it. Anyway, Oxford lost a son too, btw (Ogburn and Ogburn 757).
And anyway, A Wynters nightes pastime was registered in 1594, before little Hambone’s death. E.T. Clark and the elder Ogburns detect instead allusions to Mary Stuart’s trial, Raleigh’s rise in court, and the introduction of tobacco by the Virginia colony, pushing the composition date back to the mid-1580s.
“There may well be a pun on ‘Sicilia’ in the name given to England by Continental observers in the 1590s, regnum Cecilianum (i.e., the increasingly bureaucratic kingdom of the Cecils — pronounced ‘Sicils’ — William and Robert)” (Beauclerk 317). This designation for England seems also assigned by Leicester’s party derisively because of Burghley’s enormous political influence (Clark 755; cf. Ogburn and Ogburn 746ff).
Critics have problems with the plot but typically praise the poetry; and that some key dramatic events are narrated instead of shown in Act V seems to indicate strategic condensing after reconsideration. So how about this? Oxford wrote an early play; Greene did his prose version; then the play was revised.
The Winter’s Tale, Act by Act
The Winter’s Tale Intro
Further Resources
Filmography
The Winter’s Tale. Thanhouser Company, 1910. 12+ minutes.
The Winter’s Tale. Starring Jane Asher. BBC, 1967.
The Winter’s Tale. BBC, 1981.
The Winter’s Tale. Starring Anthony Sher. Heritage Theater, 1999. Entire filmed stage production here.
Branagh Theatre Live: The Winter’s Tale. 2015.
Best Editions
Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 6th ed. Pearson Education Inc., 2009. 1527-1569.
Furness, Horace Howard, ed. The Winter’s Tale. A New Variorum Edition. Vol. 11. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1898.
Pitcher, John, ed. The Winter’s Tale. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd Series. Bloomsbury, 2014.
Oxfordian Resources
Beauclerk, Charles. Shakespeare’s Lost Kingdom. NY: Grove Press, 2010. 316-325.
Clark, Eva Turner. Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. 3rd ed. by Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. 749-769.
Desper, C. Richard and Gary C. Vezzoli. “A Statistical Approach to the Shakespeare Authorship Question.” Elizabethan Review 1.2 (Fall 1993): 36-42.
Farina, William. De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006. 88-92.
Jolly, Eddi, ed. “The Winter’s Tale.” In Dating Shakespeare’s Plays. Ed. Kevin Gilvary. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Parapress, 2010. 177-188. Here.
Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & The Reality. 2nd ed. McLean, VA: EPM Publications, Inc., 1992.
Ogburn, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn. This Star of England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Pub., 1952. Esp. 746-763, 993-996.
Roe, Richard Paul. The Shakespeare Guide to Italy. NY: Harper Perennial, 2010. Chapter 11: 245-264.
Showerman, Earl, M.D. “Look Down and See What Death Is Doing: Gods and Greeks in The Winter’s Tale.” The Oxfordian 10 (2007): 55-74. Rpt. in Shakespeare’s Greater Greek. Kindle Direct, 2025. 180-204.
Showerman, Earl, M.D. Shakespeare’s Greater Greek. Kindle Direct, 2025. Chapter The Winter’s Tale: 180-204.
And Other General Resources
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. NY: Riverhead Books, 1998. 639-661.
Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare After All. NY: Pantheon Books, 2004. 827-851.
Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Vol. 2. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. 262-276.
Smidt, Kristian. Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Later Comedies. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. 135-144. Smidt finds numerous time discrepancies suggesting significant revision.
Thomas, P.G., ed. Greene’s ‘Pandosto’ or ‘Dorastus and Fawnia’ Being the Original of Shakespeare’s ‘Winter’s Tale.’ London: Chatto and Windus, Pub., 1907.
“The Winter’s Tale with Simon Russell Beale.” Shakespeare Uncovered, 2018. Excerpts here.
Shakespeare Authorship Organizations
The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Browse, get hooked, become a member.
The De Vere Society. Our Oxfordian friends and collaborators across the pond.
The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. We consider all possible authors behind the “Shakespeare” name.
The Shakespeare Foundation. You say you want a revolution.