The Winter’s Tale

Leontes, King of Sicilia, grows so wildly and unreasonable jealous of Polixenes, King of Bohemia, for nine months a visitor at his court, that he believes his wife Hermione has been unfaithful and that her unborn child is not his own. Through Camillo, a Sicilian lord, he seeks to poison his guest, but Camillo warns Polixenes and they depart at once for Bohemia.

Leontes orders his wife to be imprisoned and their elder child Mamillius removed from her. In prison she gives birth to a daughter; when Paulina brings the babe to Leontes, hoping to soothe him, he commands her husband Antigonus to abandon the “bastard by Polixenes” in some desert place.

At the trial of Hermione a message from the Delphic oracle declares the Queen’s innocence; Leontes, refusing to credit it, hears immediately of the death of young Mamillius. Hermione faints and is carried out; presently Paulina tells Leontes that his Queen is dead and he vows life-long mourning. Antigonus, meantime, has left the babe on the Bohemian shore, with the name he gives her (Perdita) and gold in a bundle. Then he vanishes forever. A shepherd and his son find the child.

Sixteen years pass. In Bohemia Florizel, the King’s son, is in love with Perdita, brought up as a shepherdess. At a sheep-shearing feast a disguised Polixenes (with Camillo) reveals himself, threatening to disinherit his son and to put Perdita to death if they do not leave each other. Camillo advices them to go to Leontes in Sicilia, but he also tells Polixenes, hoping there may be a reconciliation.

All (including Shepherd and Clown, with their proofs of Perdita’s discovery) leave, variously, for Sicilia, where Leontes and Polixenes are reconciled; so is Polixenes to Florizel and Perdita. They go to Paulina’s chapel to see a remarkable “statue” of Hermione; kissing it, Leontes finds that, after the gulf of years, his wife – long cared for by Paulina – is still alive.

-The Pocket Companion to Shakespeare’s Plays by J C Trewin