1. The Winter’s Tale: The Fall

2. First Order of Business:
How would you rate the difficulty level of the Hamlet test?
Very Hard
Hard
Medium Difficulty
Easy
Very Easy

3. The Winter’s Tale: The Fall

4. The Winter’s Tale appears in the First Folio (1623) grouped with Shakespeare’s comedies. Would you call this play a comedy?
A) Yes  B) No

5. If the play ended with Act 3, scene 2, what genre of play would it be?
Comedy
History
Tragicomedy
Tragedy
Romance

6. Which of the following topics in the tragedy Hamlet is NOT prominent in The Winter’s Tale?
Its emphasis on remembering a dead monarch
Its obsession with suicide
Its obsession with female sexuality
Time gets stuck for most of the play
Someone is ordered to kill a king

7. Does Leontes have a tragic flaw?
A) Yes  E) No

8. Let’s look at the scene where Leontes’s jealousy first surfaces:
pp. 7-11,
Is there any “justification” for Leontes’s jealousy?

9. Some very circumstantial “evidence”:
Polixenes has been visiting for 9 months (1.2.1), and Hermione appears to be close to 9 months pregnant.
Hermione convinces Polixenes to stay when Leontes cannot.
Polixenes and Leontes express a latent misogyny ( ; ) and Leonetes a resentment of Hermione ( ).
Leontes is possessive:
He asks Mamillius “Art though my boy” ( ) and “Art thou my calf” ( )

10. Opening scenes are very important in Shakespeare’s plays, as we saw in Hamlet.
See pp. 3-4, 1.1.
What is the function of this short opening scene?
What is the point of stressing the difference between Sicilia and Bohemia?

11. Recent critics have tended to group The Winter’s Tale with Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest, calling them all “Romances” characterized by:
A discovery of lost royalty
Princesses with almost divine virtue and beauty
Characters near death restored to life
Travel to far away places over long periods of time
A disaster in a prince’s life mended many years later through the agency of young, beautiful, and innocent people
Pastoral scenes

12. The “difference” set up between Sicilia and Bohemia establishes the context for a deadly conflict and a revivifying resolution to that conflict through youthful innocence (though not, notably, via Mamillius) as well as through the transportation over expansive space and time from one very different country to the other, and back again.