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The Winter's Tale - William Shakespeare, scene-by-scene summary
This is a scene-by-scene summary of The Winter's Tale by Shakespeare
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The Winter’s Tale 1The Winter’s Tale
Contents
The Winter’s Tale...................................................................................................................................1
Lecture Notes....................................................................................................................................1
pandosto........................................................................................................................................1
performed......................................................................................................................................2
thorny style....................................................................................................................................2
adultery.........................................................................................................................................2
hermione.......................................................................................................................................2
polixeontes....................................................................................................................................3
paulina & perdita...........................................................................................................................3
The Winter’s Tale...............................................................................................................................4
characters......................................................................................................................................4
quick plot overview........................................................................................................................5
about.............................................................................................................................................5
actual play......................................................................................................................................5
Good Queen, My Lord, Good Queen: Sexual Slander and the Trials of Female Authority in The
Winter’s Tale....................................................................................................................................12
female crimes..............................................................................................................................12
queen elizabeth...........................................................................................................................12
defamation law............................................................................................................................12
the play is history.........................................................................................................................13
Lecture Notes
This is a late play, one of Shakespeare’s later plays. This is particularly visible in his style. It, like
Othello, is a play about jealousy.
pandosto
The play was inspired by the book Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, a prose romance written by
Robert Greene and published in 1588. This was an extremely popular text in Shakespeare’s time.
However, the play is different from the novel in some drastic way: whilst general parallels can be
drawn between Pandosto and Leontes, Ballaria and Hermione, Fawna and Perdita, the ending of the
story is changed. Leontes does not commit suicide as Pandosto does, and where Bellaria really is
dead Hermione is alive at the end of the play. 1
1
Fix-it AU, 83k, lovers to enemies to lovers.
, The Winter’s Tale 2
performed
We have a description of the play written in 1611, by Simon Forman who saw the play performed at
the play. This makes for a really good summary of the play, although it does not mention the end
where Hermione is revealed to be alive. It could be that he left the theatre earlier, or Shakespeare
could have revised his play. We do not know. Forman’s description is of a play more similar to
Pandosto.
We know that the play was also performed in 1611 at the court of King James, alongside The
Tempest. It was performed at court 2 years later too. Up until recently, however, The Winter’s Tale
has not really been performed. There is a BBC version from 1981, as well as an RSC 1999 version, and
an opera by Philippe Boesmans in the same year.
Basically all performances have their interval after act 3. This is when ‘The Gap of Time’ arrives, a
moment where time enters to announce that 16 years have passed between act 3 and 4. 2
thorny style3
Shakespeare’s late style is very thorny. His early plays follow the iambic pentameter quite strictly,
but his later sentence structure gets overly long. This can be seen in The Winter’s Tale, which has
many long speeches with extra-metrical lines, lines with more syllables than the meter allows. There
is interruption, postponement and suspension. This ‘overloaded’ speech can show the character’s
overloaded mind. Leontes’ speech when he first starts to suspect Hermione of adultery has some
postponement: ‘And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm’: he postpones the rest of his sentence by repeating
twice the ‘now, at this moment, presently’ idea. The main idea or message in Leontes’ speeches is
constantly delayed, with many asides and extra phrases and clauses.
adultery
If a woman behaves in a way that can be misinterpreted as adultery, she is already dangerous. Once
accusations of adultery are spoken, they ‘become true’. There was no way of truly, irreversibly
denying the accusations and proving innocence. Hermione can, because in her world the Oracle
exists, but in our world and that of Early Modern England things like that did not exist. In
Shakespeare’s period, all women on stage that were accused of adultery actually committed
adultery and were guilty of the crime they were accused of. With Hermione, Shakespeare plays with
this idea of guilt by making Hermione completely innocent. He does the same during Othello, where
Desdemona, who is accused of adultery, is also guiltless.
Hermione’s remark that ‘lest [Polixenes says] / Your queen and I are devils’ comments on the
anxieties of women bringing evil into the world.
hermione
Hermione is immediately the perfect wife: she is silent, chaste and obedient. However, to stay
obedient, she cannot be silent for long, since he orders her to speak: ‘tongue-tied, our Queen? Speak
you’.
Hermione makes a bold statement by saying that ‘a lady’s “verily” is as potent as that of a lord. She,
essentially, says that a woman’s word has the same value as that of a man.
2
Another great example of Shakespeare flipping the bird to the ‘three unities’
3
It’s hard to be the bard
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