SOURCE: "From Matter to Magic: The Winter's Tale," in Dream Works: Lovers and Families in Shakespeare's Plays, University of Toronto Press, 1987, pp. 184-96.

In the essay that follows, Stockholder considers the sexual conflict of The Winter's Tale to be resolved by dream-visions.

In Macbeth Shakespeare expressed the psychic and sexual dynamic of a mature and fully heterosexual relationship through public action that expressed metaphorically the protagonist's private state. In that play Macbeth associates the sexual centre of his mature relationship with a vision of evil and corruption that destroys the relationship and the harmony of the familial state that contains it.

The Winter's Tale more directly than Macbeth explicitly concerns itself with family relations and with distorted sexual passions that warp them. In this play, however, the consequent political disorder does not overshadow the family relations. As though in compensation for this greater directness, like the earlier romances...