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Is the Winter's Tale based on a true story?
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Is a Winter's Tale a fable?
What is a Winter's Tale?
The Winter's Tale is a play by William Shakespeare originally published in the First Folio of 1623. Although it was grouped among the comedies, [1] many modern editors have relabelled the play as one of Shakespeare's late romances.
One of Shakespeare’s final plays, The Winter’s Tale is a romantic comedy with elements of tragedy. The plot was based on a work of prose fiction called Pandosto (1588) by Robert Greene. The play opens with Leontes, the king of Sicilia, entertaining his old friend Polixenes, the king of Bohemia.
- David Bevington
A “winter’s tale” is a story to be told or read in front of a fire on a long winter’s night. Paradoxically, this Winter’s Tale is ideally seen rather than read. Its sudden shift from tragedy to comedy, its playing with disguise, its startling exits and transformations seem addressed to theater audiences, not readers.
Oct 6, 2023 · The Winter’s Tale is one of Shakespeare’s last plays, and we don’t know exactly when he wrote it, but we do know that it was being performed onstage by 1611 because the astrologer Simon Forman reported seeing it that year at the Globe. However, the play was not published for another 12 years, in the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623.
The title declares it a fable—a winter’s tale is a trifle, a fairy tale to enliven long winter nights. Yet the first half presents, in the depiction of Leontes’ jealousy, one of Shakespeare’s most brilliant and deeply felt studies of human psychology, uncompromising in its intensity and realism.
As a play written at this late stage of Shakespeare's career, The Winter's Tale can be given two important classifications: it is more Jacobean than Elizabethan, and it is more Romance than Comedy, History, or Tragedy.
There is no one source for The Winter's Tale, although Shakespeare relies heavily on the works of Richard Greene, a London writer in 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 appropriate.)
