SOURCE: "The Truth of Your Own Seeming: Romance and the Uses of Dream," in Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis, Yale University Press, 1974, pp. 163-86.

In the following excerpt, Garber examines the importance of time in The Winter's Tale, especially with regard to dreams and the metamorphoses concomitant with seasonal changes.

The Winter's Tale, . . . centers much of its attention on problems of timelessness and time. Metamorphosis is everywhere in its plot and imagery. The large structural units of the play are the four seasons of the year: winter in the opening "jealousy" scene at Leontes' court; spring with the finding of the child in Bohemia; summer in the great pastoral scene of the sheepshearing; and autumn or harvest in the return to Sicilia and the restoration of the king's wife and child, assuring order and fertility. This cyclical movement is occasionally cut, or halted, by moments of...