The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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The Winter's Tale

Winter's Tale, The
Although it clearly belongs among the late romances—with its artful structure and almost insolent mastery of complex narrative and characterization—The Winter's Tale is difficult to date with precision. A dance of satyrs in Act 4 (4.4.340–1) seems to be borrowed from Ben Jonson's Masque of Oberon, acted at court on 1 January 1611, but its irrelevance there and the awkwardness with which it is introduced by the surrounding dialogue suggests that this may be a late interpolation, indicating that the play was written before Jonson's masque rather than after it. In any event The Winter's Tale had been completed by May 1611, when Simon Forman saw it at the Globe: his journal entry describing the performance supplies the only reliable external evidence for the play's date of composition. Internal evidence is more ambiguous. Autolycus' grisly account of the torments allegedly in store for the Clown (4.4.784–92) derives...

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