SOURCE: An introduction to The Winter's Tale, in William Shakespeare: The Late Romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, written and edited by David Bevington, Bantam Books, 1988, pp. 335-39.

In this essay, Bevington relates The Winter's Tale to Shakespeare's late romances in an effort to highlight its tragic elements, particularly Leontes' jealousy.

The Winter's Tale (c. 1610-1611), with its almost symmetrical division into two halves of bleak tragedy and comic romance, illustrates perhaps more clearly than any other Shakespearean play the genre of tragicomedy. To be sure, all the late romances feature journeys of separation, apparent deaths, and tearful reconciliations. Marina and Thaisa in Pericles, Imogen in Cymbeline, and Ferdinand in The Tempest, all supposed irrecoverably lost, are brought back to life by apparently miraculous devices. Of the four late romances, however, The Winter's Tale uses the most formal structure to evoke the antithesis of tragedy...