SOURCE: "'Grace and Remembrance': The Winter's Tale," in The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater, University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp. 80-99.

In the essay that follows, Garner considers the dramatic tension of The Winter's Tale as a conflict between the present and time, as a place of innocence versus a realm of regret and longing.

Literally as well as figuratively, Time stands at the center of The Winter's Tale, giving strikingly emblematic stage life to a theme that had occupied Shakespeare's imagination since the sonnets and the earliest plays, through the often turbulent drama of the playwright's middle years, and into the romances, those strangely fabulous works that play variations on what came before. The confusions of Syracuse and Illyria sort themselves out in the movements of time; Richard of Gloucester and Macbeth draw back to seize time's promise; an aging poet reminds his younger friend, still...