ABSTRACT
In a pivotal scene in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a baby is abandoned in the middle of a storm, and the man responsible for this deed is pursued and soon after devoured by a bear. This bizarre episode supposedly takes place in ‘The deserts of Bohemia’. The play’s haphazard geography is compounded by an equally chaotic temporality apparent, for example, in the play’s many wellknown anachronisms (Ewbank 1964:83ff.; Salingar 1966:3-11). The Winter’s Tale is equally notorious for the abrupt temporal hiatus or ‘wide gap of time’ that marks its formal organization (Blisset 1971: 52-57; Krier 1982:341ff.). These oddly conspicuous features in the play’s structure in fact correspond to a complex model of social time. The play links two seasonal narratives based on traditional festive cycles of winter and spring. The story of family violence that connects these two narratives suggests how social benefits and grievances are held in trust over time.
