You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The title The Winter's Tale is not listed in the bibliography of analytic studies of Shakespeare's life and works, appearing in the first issue of the International Review of Psycho Analysis(Greenberg & Rothenberg, 1974). Yet this play, depicting in its opening scene a psychotic breakdown, linked to the expectation of a new baby in the family, is of great interest to psychoanalysts.
The sequel in The Winter's Tale to the fit of madness is a change of mood to one of remorse and then hopefulness. Mental conflict resulting from the different activities of a 'bad' part of the personality and a 'good' part appears amongst the preoccupations of many spheres of thought concerned with understanding mental pain—religion, philosophy, ethics. Taken poetically, as in The Winter's Tale, there is a terrestrial backdrop in the death of the year at the winter solstice and the renewal of the earth's fertility in spring. This last aspect of the play has only relatively recently been made explicit in literary criticism (Muir, 1968) ; (Knight, 1974).
The play is one of a group of four known as 'the late romances' and they are Shakespeare's last works— Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Jacques (1965), in describing the 'mid-life crisis', discusses the transition from Shakespeare's youthful comedies and histories to the tragedies written in middle age, between the years of 35 and 40. Ten or 15 years later, near the end of his life, a further evolution of his art brought about the creation of these last four mysterious works, with their common element of storms at sea, and children lost and restored.
There is a strong father–daughter relationship in all of them, for example Prospero and Miranda in The Tempest. A connexion with Shakespeare's return to his daughters in Stratford at this final stage of his life, has often been remarked. These plays about children and wives–believed dead and then miraculously restored–were written in the two or three years followin