A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Shakespeare's "Winter's Tale," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Shakespeare for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Shakespeare for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535843195

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The Winter's Tale

William Shakespeare

1610

Introduction

In his Diary, Simon Forman, an Elizabethan astrologer and surgeon, records that he saw The Winter's Tale performed on May 15, 1611, at the Globe Theater, the home of the King's Men, Shakespeare's acting company. A performance on November 5, 1611 is recorded in the Revels Account; another performance was given in the spring of 1613. In 1623, Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels, refers to The Winter's Tale as an olde playe formerly allowed by Sir George Bucke. Bucke had been appointed Master of the Revels in 1610, making it relatively certain that The Winter's Tale had not been written before 1610. (The Master of the Revels was an officer of the royal court who licensed plays for performance in London and selected which plays would be performed at court. He also functioned as a royal censor.) The Dance of the Satyrs, which a servant introduces in act 4, scene 4, of The Winter's Tale, and says had been performed at court, is presumed to be a dance performed before King James on January 1, 1611 as part of Ben Jonson's Masque of Oberon.

The Winter's Tale first appeared in print in 1623 in the Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays, which was assembled as a tribute to him by Henry Condell and John Hemminges, two of his fellow actors in the King's Men. Although the play appears as the last among the comedies and was probably a late addition to the Folio, it is considered by editors to be a good, reliable text, thought to have been printed from a manuscript prepared by Ralph Crane, the company's scrivener or secretary-copyist.

Robert Greene's novella, Pandosto, or The Triumph of Time, written in 1588 and frequently reprinted afterwards, is the source for The Winter's Tale. Despite numerous alterations, including the happy ending and the statue of Hermione, Shakespeare followed the core story as Greene devised it. Shakespeare's words are sometimes very close to Greene's, too, as in Hermione's defense of herself and the oracle's pronouncement. However, Shakespeare added Paulina and Autolocus, whose tricks he derived from another work by Greene, The Second Part of Cony-catching, 1591, a study of the London criminal underworld.

The Winter's Tale enjoyed great popularity on the Jacobean stage. It was presented at court in 1618, 1619, 1624, and 1634. The theaters were closed in 1642 and did not reopen until 1661, after the Puritan revolution had failed and the monarchy was restored in 1660. The re-opening of the theaters under King Charles II did not see the restoration of The Winter's Tale to the stage, however, until 1741, when it was performed at the small theater of Goodman's Fields successfully enough for it to be moved to the larger Covent Garden the next year. But Shakespeare's play, in its original form, was supplanted for the rest of the eighteenth century by Macnamara Morgan's adaptation, The Sheep-Shearing: or Florizel and Perdita, which was first produced in 1754 at Covent Garden; and by another play by the actor-manager David Garrick, whose play, Florizel and Perdita, A Dramatic Pastoral, was first staged at the Drury Lane theater in 1756. Both of these adaptations placed a great emphasis on spectacle, replacing drama with scenery and singing, and significantly cutting much of the grim first three acts and focusing on the pastoral romance of the fourth.

During the nineteenth century, Shakespeare's original was returned to the stage, although usually cut. In 1802, John Philip Kemble produced The Winter's Tale, omitting the choral figure of Time. In 1856, Charles Kean set his production in ancient Greece, using elaborately evocative Hellenic sets and costumes. Henry Irving and