Theme and Structure in The Winter’s Tale

Summary

Theme in The Winter’s Tale is both one and many-sided. It can be stated symbolically as the victory of spring over winter. But inherent in this, as in a seed, are flowerings of implication and amplification. Emotionally, joy comes to supersede sorrow, though to do so it must first wade in tears. Morally, a virtuous innocence succeeds over vice and tyranny. Metaphysically, order surmounts disorder, and harmony replaces discord. Theologically, grace is victorious over sin, and faith over doubt and suspicion. In religious terms, the hopes of a palace and a garden, the court and the country, find their fulfilment in a chapel, where art achieves a breathtaking holiness and nature an immortal art. Socially, a broken marriage is mended and regenerated in a more glorious form, with two new marriages added for a triple epiphany. The disbranched have been regrafted into an enlarged family tree. Alienations between parents and children and servants end in a household communion that spans the generations.