Most modern editions of The Winter's Tale explain - and rightly - that its title is an Elizabethan phrase indicating scepticism, the equivalent to our 'romantic nonsense'. The work is underwriting its own lightness, its randomness. But not without irony; for the title has a further dimension. It is oddly literal: the play begins in winter. (Even Romance times and places are there, somewhere.) At the beginning of the second act, Leontes's Queen Hermione, heavily pregnant with her second child, the future Perdita, finds herself momentarily fatigued by her small son, Mamillius, puts him aside, then revives, takes him back affectionately, and lets him tell her a story - 'A sad Tale's best for Winter,' he assures her. The two kings, Leontes and his friend Polixenes, give some sense of weariness at the end of Polixenes's nine-month-long state visit, and communicate what the grown Perdita will phrase as the feeling of 'the year growing ancient'. Even the bear, who closes this movement of the play by eating the courtier Antigonus, is at the end of a long winter hunger - 'They are never curst but when they are hungry.'

LRB 8 January 2004 | PDF Download