The Winter's Tale
The Winter's Tale, a play by William Shakespeare, contains the most famous stage direction in all of his work: "Exit, pursued by a bear." That single line has long overshadowed a drama of jealousy, grief and apparent resurrection. The story crosses two kingdoms and leaps over a span of years. It never settles into one kind of play.
A bear, a queen and a seacoast make up three puzzles that scholars have argued over for generations. Did anyone ever bring a real bear onto a stage? Did a queen truly die, or did she simply vanish from view? And how does the kingdom of Bohemia end up with a coastline? The clues lie scattered through an old romance, a court masque and the play's own lines. To follow them, begin with the way the play splits in two.
The First Folio of 1623 grouped The Winter's Tale among the comedies, yet many modern editors now call it one of Shakespeare's late romances. Some critics go further and label it a problem play. Their reason is its split personality. The first three acts are intense psychological drama, while the last two are comic and end happily.
Nine months into a visit to Sicily, King Polixenes of Bohemia says he must go home to his kingdom and his son. His host is Leontes, king of Sicily and a childhood friend, who cannot change his mind. Leontes sends his pregnant queen, Hermione, to plead in his place. Three short speeches from her succeed. That easy victory plants a poisonous idea in Leontes, who decides his wife is having an affair with Polixenes. He orders the Sicilian lord Camillo to poison the guest. Camillo warns Polixenes instead, and the two escape to Bohemia.
Leontes answers by accusing Hermione in public and declaring that the child she carries is Polixenes's bastard. He jails her over the protests of his nobles. He also sends the lords Cleomenes and Dion to the Oracle at Delphos for confirmation. Meanwhile Hermione gives birth to a girl. Her loyal friend Paulina carries the baby to the king, hoping the sight will soften him. It only angers him. He tells Paulina's husband, Lord Antigonus, to abandon the child in a desolate place.
Cleomenes and Dion return from Delphos to find Hermione on trial. The Oracle declares her and Polixenes innocent and calls Camillo an honest man. It warns that Leontes will have no heir until his lost daughter is found. Leontes refuses to believe it. Then he learns that his son Mamillius has died of a wasting sickness brought on by the accusations against his mother. Hermione collapses, and Paulina later reports that the queen is dead. A heartbroken Leontes vows to spend the rest of his life atoning. The boy's death is never undone, and it shadows even the happiest moments to come.
On the Bohemian coast, Antigonus leaves the baby and says Hermione appeared to him in a dream. In that dream she told him to name the girl Perdita. Beside the child he places a fardel, a bundle holding gold and trinkets that hint at noble blood. A violent storm wrecks the ship that carried him. A shepherd and his son, known as Clown, rescue the baby.
Then a figure named Time walks on stage and announces that sixteen years have passed. Camillo now serves Polixenes and begs to return to Sicily, but the king refuses. Polixenes has learned that his son Florizel loves a lowly shepherd girl, Perdita. He proposes that he and Camillo disguise themselves and attend the sheep-shearing feast, where the pair are to be betrothed. The Old Shepherd hosts it, and he has prospered thanks to the gold in the fardel.
At the feast, the peddler Autolycus picks the Young Shepherd's pocket. In various guises he also entertains the guests with bawdy songs and trinkets. Florizel, calling himself Doricles, and Perdita are betrothed before the disguised watchers. Polixenes tears off his disguise and threatens the Old Shepherd and Perdita with torture and death. He forbids his son ever to see her again. Camillo, still longing for his homeland, arranges for the lovers to sail to Sicily so that Polixenes will pursue them and bring him along. The two shepherds and Autolycus sail too.
In Sicily, Leontes greets the young couple warmly, and Polixenes and Camillo arrive soon after. Gentlemen of the court report the reconciliation of the kings and princes secondhand. At the end, a freshly finished statue of Hermione waits at Paulina's country house.
Robert Greene's pastoral romance Pandosto, published in 1588, supplies the main plot. Shakespeare's changes are uncharacteristically slight, especially given how undramatic the romance is. That loyalty produces the play's most distinctive feature, a leap in time between the third and fourth acts. The leap breaks the Classical Unities, a set of principles for dramatic tragedy introduced in 16th-century Italy from the work of Aristotle.
The biggest departure comes at the ending. In Pandosto, the character matching Hermione dies after being accused of adultery. The king matching Leontes looks back over his deeds, including an incestuous fondness for his daughter, and kills himself. Shakespeare lets Hermione survive, presumably to prepare the coup de theatre of the statue. That choice also changes the meaning of the story.
Greene follows the usual spirit of Hellenistic romance. There, the return of a lost prince or princess restores order and suggests the hand of Providence. Shakespeare instead puts the older generation in the foreground, in the reunion of Leontes and Hermione. Leontes not only lives but seems to insist on the happy ending.
Eric Ives, who wrote a biography of Anne Boleyn in 1986, believes the play also echoes her fall. Anne was beheaded in 1536 on false charges of adultery on the orders of her husband, Henry VIII. Sir Henry Norreys, one of Henry's closest friends, was beheaded as one of her supposed lovers. He refused to confess to save his life, saying that everyone knew the Queen was innocent. If Ives is right, Perdita stands for Anne's only daughter, Queen Elizabeth I.
The figure of Time recalls the chorus in Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a device borrowed from a naive dramatic tradition. Reaching back to a pastoral romance from the 1590s suggests that Shakespeare, near the end of his career, felt fresh interest in the theatre of his youth. Whether the play really belongs to the end of his career depends on clues that are scattered and hard to read.
The First Folio of 1623 is the first time The Winter's Tale appeared in print. Most critics place its writing in 1610 or 1611. One clue is Ben Jonson's Masque of Oberon, performed at Court on the 1st of January 1611. It includes a dance of ten or twelve satyrs, and The Winter's Tale has a dance of twelve men costumed as satyrs. The servant announcing them says some of the dancers have already danced before the King.
J.H.P. Pafford, an editor of the Arden Shakespeare, argued that the language, style and spirit all point to a late date. He cited tangled speech, packed sentences, and speeches that begin and end in the middle of a line. He also noted many light and weak line endings. More important to him was the likeness in spirit and theme to Shakespeare's other last plays.
Earlier guesses ranged widely. In the late 18th century, Edmond Malone wondered whether a "book" entered in the Stationers' Register on the 22nd of May 1594 as "a Wynters nightes pastime" might be Shakespeare's. No copy is known. According to Samuel A. Tannenbaum in 1933, Malone later assigned the play to 1604, then 1613, and finally 1610-11. Hunter assigned it to about 1605.
The title itself carried a message. To audiences of the time, a play called The Winter's Tale signalled an idle old wives' tale that did not aim at realism and promised a happy ending. George Peele's play The Old Wives' Tale of 1590 may have inspired it, since a storyteller there tells "a merry winter's tale" about a missing daughter.
Early in Shakespeare's play, the young prince Mamillius warns that "a sad tale's best for winter." His mother is soon on trial for treason and adultery. His death is announced seconds after she is shown to be faithful and the accusations baseless. What really became of his mother is the question the final scene leaves hanging.
In Paulina's country house, Leontes stands before a statue of his wife and is overcome. Then, to everyone's amazement, the figure shows signs of life. Either Hermione has been miraculously restored, or she has simply been living in seclusion with Paulina for sixteen years. Paulina's language evokes a magical ritual, but several passages point to a likelier, non-magical answer. On that reading, Hermione only fainted at her trial, and Paulina hid her far away to protect her from Leontes's wrath.
The case rests on small details. A courtier named Rogero says of Paulina: "I thought she had some great matter there in hand, for she hath privately twice or thrice a day, ever since the death of Hermione, visited that removed house." Leontes is also startled that the statue is "so much wrinkled", unlike the wife he remembers. Paulina replies that the aging shows the "carver's excellence". Hermione herself then says that the hope of seeing her daughter let her endure sixteen years apart.
The trial scene argues the other way. Hermione swoons at the news of Mamillius's death and is rushed from the room. Paulina returns after a short monologue from Leontes and announces the queen is dead. The king demands to be led to the bodies of his wife and son, saying "One grave shall be for both." Paulina seems convinced of the death, and no later event in the play questions his order to see both bodies buried.
Even the scene's biggest question has a rival in the place where the story is set. A fellow playwright took aim at Bohemia, and he was not impressed.
Ben Jonson mocked the play for giving Bohemia a seacoast and a desert. The real Kingdom of Bohemia, in the west of today's Czech Republic, had neither, because it was landlocked. Shakespeare took the coast from Greene's Pandosto, but he swapped the roles. In Greene, the king of Bohemia plays the jealous husband and the king of Sicily is the guest. Shakespeare made the Sicilian the jealous one and the Bohemian the guest.
Defenders have offered several rescues. For a brief period in the 13th century, lands ruled by Ottokar II of Bohemia stretched to the Adriatic. If "Bohemia" means all his territories, a sailor could indeed go from Sicily to the seacoast of Bohemia. Jonathan Bate offers a political explanation instead. King James's court was allied with that of Rudolf II, so the rulers' roles were reversed out of sensitivity. That would also have suited a performance at the wedding of the Princess Elizabeth.
In 1891, Edmund Oscar von Lippmann pointed out that "Bohemia" was a rare name for Apulia in southern Italy. More influential was Thomas Hanmer's argument in 1744 that Bohemia was a printing error for Bithynia, an ancient nation in Asia Minor. Charles Kean's influential 19th-century production adopted the idea and featured a resplendent Bithynian court. Yet by the time of medieval Sicily, Bithynia was long extinct, and the Byzantine Empire controlled its lands.
The play alludes to Hellenistic antiquity, for example in the Oracle of Delphos and the kings' names, so Sicily may mean Greek Sicily. That theory collides with Hermione's identity as a princess of Russia, a country that did not exist in the classical period. Andrew Gurr suggests the coast is there "to flout geographical realism, and to underline the unreality of place in the play". C. H. Herford ties this to the title, since fireside tales for children were not meant to be taken too seriously.
John A. Pitcher, in the Arden Shakespeare Third Series edition of 2010, reads the coast as a joke, like jokes about a "Swiss Navy". Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Prince Otto later parodied the idea with a land called "Seaboard Bohemia".
The Oracle's home draws similar mockery. Placing the Oracle of Delphi on a small island has been cited as proof of Shakespeare's limited education. Again he copied Pandosto, and Greene was not mistaken. The Isle of Delphos is the Cycladic island of Delos, the mythical birthplace of Apollo, which England knew as "Delphos" from the 15th to the late 17th century. Greene's likely source was Virgil's Aeneid, where Priam consults the Oracle of Delos before the Trojan War. Aeneas consults the same oracle after escaping Troy.
Not every oddity in the play comes from Greene's book. The creature on that same Bohemian shore has a different source.
Mucedorus, a chivalric romance revived at court around 1610, almost certainly inspired the bear on the Bohemian seashore. The direction itself foretells the offstage death of Antigonus. Because the animal never appears in the text as a character, readers have long wondered how early productions handled it.
Some have theorized that the first productions used a real live bear. Contemporary scholarship rejects that idea. Bears are unreliable and hard to train, and no historical evidence shows that live bears were ever used in Elizabethan theatre.
Whoever or whatever played the animal, the play found audiences quickly. One of the earliest to record seeing it was an astrologer with a journal.
Simon Forman, the Elizabethan astrologer known as a "figure caster", noted in his journal on the 11th of May 1611 that he saw The Winter's Tale at the Globe playhouse. The play was then performed before King James at Court on the 5th of November 1611. It was acted at Whitehall during the festivities before Princess Elizabeth's marriage to Elector Frederick V of the Palatinate on the 14th of February 1613. Later Court performances followed on the 7th of April 1618, the 18th of January 1623 and the 16th of January 1634. Unlike many Shakespearean plays, it was not revived during the Restoration.
In 1741 the play was performed at Goodman's Fields Theatre, and in 1742 at Covent Garden. In the mid-18th century, after a long interval without major performances, David Garrick premiered his adaptation Florizel and Perdita. It was first performed in 1753 and published in 1756. Adaptations titled The Sheep-Shearing and Florizal and Perdita played at Covent Garden in 1754 and at Drury Lane in 1756. In the 19th century the fourth, pastoral act was widely popular. Notable stagings featured John Philip Kemble in 1811 and Samuel Phelps in 1845. Charles Kean's production of 1856 was famous for elaborate sets and costumes, and Johnston Forbes-Robertson played Leontes memorably in 1887.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree took the role of Leontes in 1906. The longest-running Broadway production starred Henry Daniell and Jessie Royce Landis and ran for just 39 performances in 1946. Peter Brook staged one of the best remembered modern productions in London in 1951, with John Gielgud as Leontes. In 1980, David Jones launched his new theatre company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with the play, starring Brian Murray. In 1983, the Riverside Shakespeare Company mounted a production based on the First Folio text. In 1993, Adrian Noble won a Globe Award for Best Director for his Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation, which reached the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1994. In the second half of the 20th century, the play was often performed in its entirety, with varying degrees of success.
In 2009, four separate productions were staged. Sam Mendes inaugurated his transatlantic Bridge Project with the play, casting Simon Russell Beale as Leontes, Rebecca Hall as Hermione and Ethan Hawke as Autolycus. Sinead Cusack played Paulina. In 2013, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged a new production directed by Lucy Bailey, which premiered on the 24th of January. In 2015, Kenneth Branagh played Leontes at the Garrick Theatre, with Judi Dench as Paulina and Miranda Raison as Hermione, and the show was broadcast simultaneously to cinemas. The same year, Cheek by Jowl staged it under Declan Donnellan. That production toured to France, Spain, the US and Russia, and was livestreamed around the world with the BBC and Riverside Studios.
In 2023, Shakespeare's Globe in London staged a version in which the audience walked between two venues. The Sicilian scenes played in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and the Bohemian scenes in the main Globe Theatre. That autumn, the Folger Theatre in Washington, DC chose it as the first play in its theatre after a multi-year, multimillion-dollar renovation. Tamilla Wodard directed. The Stratford Festival included the play in its 2025 season.
Screen versions began early, with a silent film in 1910. A television film in 1961 starred Robert Shaw, and a 1967 version starred Laurence Harvey as Leontes. In 1981 the BBC televised an "orthodox" production, produced by Jonathan Miller and directed by Jane Howell. Eric Rohmer's 1992 film A Tale of Winter shows its characters attending a performance. Christopher Wheeldon choreographed a full-length ballet to music by Joby Talbot, premiering at the Royal Opera House in London in 2014. Jeanette Winterson published a modern adaptation, The Gap of Time, in 2015, and E. K. Johnston followed in 2016 with Exit, Pursued by a Bear. Ryan Wigglesworth's opera premiered at the English National Opera on the 27th of February 2017. In 2021, the Melbourne Shakespeare Company turned the story into an abridged musical at Central Park in Melbourne.
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Common questions
What is The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare about?
The Winter's Tale follows King Leontes of Sicily, who wrongly accuses his wife Hermione of adultery with his friend King Polixenes of Bohemia. The accusation costs him his son and his infant daughter, and the family is reunited sixteen years later.
When was The Winter's Tale written and first published?
Most critics believe The Winter's Tale was written in 1610 or 1611. It was not published until the First Folio of 1623.
Is Hermione really dead in The Winter's Tale?
Hermione is revived in the final scene, and her fate is debated. Passages suggest she may have only fainted at her trial and been hidden by Paulina for sixteen years, though Paulina's report of her death and Leontes's order to see both bodies argue for a miracle.
Why does The Winter's Tale give Bohemia a seacoast?
Shakespeare took the Bohemian seacoast from Robert Greene's romance Pandosto, even though the real Bohemia was landlocked. Explanations include Ottokar II's 13th-century territories reaching the Adriatic, political sensitivity at King James's court, or a deliberate joke about unreal places.
Was a real bear used in The Winter's Tale?
Contemporary scholarship rejects the theory that early productions used a live bear. Bears are unreliable and hard to train, and no historical evidence shows live bears in Elizabethan theatre.
What is the source of The Winter's Tale?
The main plot comes from Robert Greene's pastoral romance Pandosto, published in 1588. Shakespeare changed little, but he let Hermione survive, whereas her counterpart in Pandosto dies.
All sources
57 references cited across the entry
- 1WT comes last, following Twelfth Night which uncharacteristically ends with a blank recto page, suggesting to Arden editor J.H.P. Pafford there was some hesitation as to where WT belonged at the time
- 2William W. Lawrence, Shakespeare's Problem Comedies, New York, Macmillan, 1931; pp. 9–13 .
- 3C. F. Tucker Brooke, The Shakespeare Apocrypha, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1908; pp. 103–126.
- 4Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn 2004:421: in spite of other scholars' rejection of any parallels between Henry VIII and Leontes, asserts "the parallels are there", noting his article "Shakespe
- 5F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564–1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964; p. 532.
- 6Pafford, J.H.P., ed. "Introduction", The Winter's Tale Arden Shakespeare 2nd. series (1963, 1999), xxiii.
- 7Malone, Edmond. "An Attempt to Ascertain the Order in which the Plays Attributed to Shakspeare Were Written," The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare in Ten Volumes. Eds. Samuel Johnson and George
- 8Tannenbaum, "The Forman Notes", Shakespearean Scraps, 1933
- 9BookOxford English Dictionary1989
- 10BookComplete WorksJonathan Bate et al. — Macmillan — 2007
- 11Act 2 scene 1
- 12BookThe Winter's TaleMacmillan — 1912
- 13Ben Jonson, 'Conversations with Drummond of Hawthornden', in Herford and Simpson, ed. Ben Jonson, vol. 1, p. 139.
- 15See J. H. Pafford, ed. The Winter's Tale, Arden Edition, 1962, p. 66
- 16BookA Time of GiftsPatrick Fermor — John Murray — 1977
- 17BookSoul of the AgeJonathan Bate — Viking — 2008
- 19Thomas Hanmer, The Works of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1743–44), vol. 2.
- 20JournalThe Bear, the Statue, and Hysteria In The Winter's TaleAndrew Gurr — Winter 1983
- 21See C.H. Herford, ed. The Winter's Tale, The Warwick Shakespeare edition, p.xv.
- 22NewsSwiss Navy Joke Vanishing As This All-Fools' Day Dawns1927-04-01
- 23Terence Spencer, Shakespeare's Isle of Delphos, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Apr., 1952), pp. 199–202.
- 24Virgil, Aeneid, In. 73–101
- 25Staging an exit (pursued by a bear)Aubrey Whitlock — 2018-11-01
- 26Exit, Pursued by a Polar? Bear2023-09-19
- 27Journal'Exit Pursued by a Beare': A Problem in The Winter's TaleDennis Biggins — Winter 1962
- 28All dates new style.
- 29Halliday, pp. 532–533.
- 31Langham and Winter's Tale': Identity by Richard Eder Special to The New York Times, Dec. 11, 1976
- 32"Brooklyn Bets on Rep", T. E. Kalem, Time, 3 March 1980
- 33"Critics Notebook", Ben Brantley, The New York Times, 22 April 1994.
- 35RSC listingRsc.org.uk
- 36The Stage review of Theatre Delicatessen's The Winter's TaleFrancesca Whiting — Thestage.co.uk — 2009-04-23
- 37NewsHudson Shakespeare Company Returns26 June 2009
- 38Tara Fitzgerald To Make RSC Debut in Lucy Bailey's The Winter's TaleRoyal Shakespear Company
- 39NewsThe Winter's Tale review – Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench offer intriguing touchesMichael Billington — 2015-11-08
- 41Mobile Unit: The Winter's TaleThe Public Theater
- 43NewsThe Winter's Tale review – Blanche McIntyre celebrates the play's problemsArifa Akbar — 28 June 2018
- 44News'The Winter's Tale' reviewAnya Ryan — 23 February 2023
- 46NewsFolger Theatre embraces a new era with 'The Winter's Tale'Thomas Floyd — 14 November 2023
- 52NewsThe Winter's Tale review – 'a ballet to keep'Luke Jennings — Guardian News and Media Limited — 2014-04-12
- 54EXIT, PURSUED BY A BEAR8 December 2015
- 55Drama on 3, the Winter's TaleBBC Radio 3
- 57The Winter's Tale2021-03-01