SOURCE: Bieman, Elizabeth. “‘By law and process of great nature … free'd’: The Winter's Tale.” In William Shakespeare: The Romances, pp. 66-89. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

In the following essay, Bieman discusses The Winter's Tale's composition date and textual issues, provides an overview of its plot, language, themes, and characters, and argues that the play adapts the romance genre in order to emphasize its realism.

Just as all of the Romances move beyond the toughness of the tragedies without leaving tragic potentialities behind, so each Romance reaches beyond its predecessor in certain ways. If we see in Pericles a skeletal paradigm of the unrealistic conventions of romance and Cymbeline fleshing the skeleton out with every narrative and dramatic trick at Shakespeare's command, we are prepared to see The Winter's Tale modifying the genre in the direction of realism.¹

The dramatic worlds of Sicilia and Bohemia, and the seas between, may...