ABSTRACT
Central to The Winter’s Tale is the personification of Time. Central to critical discussion of the play is the disparate nature of the scenes set in Sicilia and those set in Bohemia, bridged as it would seem only by this theatrical ‘speaking-clock’. The contrasts between Court and country, age and youth, winter and spring and the defiance or disregard of the dramatic unities of time, place and action implicit in these contrasts have struck both readers and spectators so forcefully that critics, in attempting to defend Shakespeare, have found themselves obliged to excuse the play either as a poem in dramatic dialogue or as a carelessly constructed essay on the regenerative power of youth. The possibility that the moral meaning of the play (and thus its unity) might lie in the fusion of seemingly irreconcilable opposites seems not to have been considered. Since artistic unity of some sort is a producer’s first concern, it is this possibility which I wish to consider in this essay.
