SOURCE: Nichols, Mary Pollingue. “The Winter's Tale: The Triumph of Comedy over Tragedy.” Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy 9, nos. 2-3 (September 1981): 169-90.

In the following essay, Nichols contends that the genres of comedy and tragedy are not equally balanced in The Winter's Tale; rather, comedy is victorious, particularly in the play’s implication that the tragic condition is not universal.

At the end of the Symposium, Socrates tries to persuade a tragic poet and a comic poet that the same man can dramatize both tragedies and comedies (223d). Socrates' assertion seems paradoxical because of the great differences between tragedy and comedy as we ordinarily understand them. The choice of one of these dramatic forms seems to imply a view of the human situation—and consequently of the function of the poet—that is at odds with the choice of the other. One can see the different responses...