SOURCE: '"We Are Mock'd With Art': The Winter's Tale," in The Promised End: Romance Closure in the Gawain-poet, Malory, Spenser, and Shakespeare, Peter Lang, 1986, pp. 89-117.

In this essay, Lenz divides the play into three distinct sections, associating each with a certain genre and outlining the steps of the "prepared surprise" as a structural unit.

Romance, like all modes, creates and maintains a consistent fictive world, an other world with laws unto itself, so events in The Winter's Tale can fall out "like an old tale," differently than they would in "real life." Because that other world does not behave according to "normal" expectations, romance asks that we adjust our vision to meet its own. In fact, romance closure, the sense of eucatastrophic achievement, depends upon the confirmation of its vision, as we have seen in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Faerie Queene. The...