ABSTRACT
The Winter’s Tale is the romance of the discovery of a daughter, a girl who has been lost by mistake-by her father’s mistake about her identity. He misidentifies her as a sign of his shame, then tries to wipe her away completely-from life, from the court. In this sense, it is not the daughter’s story at all, but the father’s story-the story of the father’s mistakes in storytelling. And yet the daughter’s concealment, and her recovery, is also an old wives’ tale, a story for winter nights around the fire. It does not entirely belong to the father. He has to steal it, or poach it, as Michel de Certeau might say (165). In de Certeau’s formulation, the poor poach from the rich, as the term “poach” implies. But in Shakespeare’s late romances, the culturally richShakespeare-is poaching from the culturally poor and unheard-old wives.1
