SOURCE: "Delusions and Dreams: The Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare's Other Language, Methuen, 1987, pp. 95-129.

In the following essay, Nevo contends that, while the traditional dramatic unities are flouted in The Winter's Tale, fantasy shapes the drama's two interrelated plots around a pair of dreams, "where one represents a terror inelecutably realized and the other a restitutive wish-fulfillment."

Death, as we all know, is not something to be looked at in the face.

(J.-B. Pontalis)

In The Winter's Tale the once mandatory dramatic "unities"—time, place, action and motivation tumble to the ground like a house of cards. Constructed out of two antithetical parts, in two different geographical locations, it is halved in the centre by a "wide gap of time" and propelled into action by an unmotivated outburst of ruinous rage. Among other notorious oddities, such as the bear-infested but nonexistent sea-coast of Bohemia, there is a...