What happens in The Winter's Tale
The whole story, start to finish — every act, in plain modern English. This summary follows the play to its ending, so read on once you're ready to know how it closes.
Two kings who grew up as boyhood friends are about to be torn apart by a thought that has no evidence behind it. Polixenes, King of Bohemia, has spent nine months visiting Leontes, King of Sicilia, and is finally going home. Leontes asks him to stay; he refuses; then Leontes’s pregnant queen, Hermione, charms him into agreeing. Watching his wife succeed where he failed, Leontes is seized by a sudden, total conviction that she and Polixenes are lovers and that her unborn child is Polixenes’s bastard. He orders his trusted lord Camillo to poison the visiting king. Camillo refuses and instead warns Polixenes, and the two flee Sicilia together by night.
Their flight only hardens Leontes. He publicly accuses Hermione of adultery, takes their young son Mamillius from her, and throws her in prison, where she gives birth to a daughter. The loyal Paulina carries the newborn to court, hoping the baby’s innocence will soften him. It doesn’t. Leontes calls the child a bastard and orders the lord Antigonus to abandon her in some wild, remote place. To prove his case, Leontes has sent to Apollo’s oracle at Delphi. At Hermione’s trial she defends herself with calm dignity and stakes everything on the oracle. The sealed answer declares her chaste, Polixenes blameless, and Leontes a jealous tyrant who will live without an heir until what is lost is found. Leontes calls the oracle a lie, and instantly news comes that Mamillius has died of grief. Hermione collapses, and Paulina soon reports her dead. Leontes, broken, begins a long penance.
Antigonus, meanwhile, lands on the coast of Bohemia in a storm and leaves the infant there, naming her Perdita, the lost one. A bear chases and kills him. An old shepherd and his son find the baby with gold and fine clothes and take her in. Time itself then steps forward as a chorus and leaps the story sixteen years ahead.
Perdita has grown up a shepherd’s daughter, and Polixenes’s son, Prince Florizel, has fallen in love with her, courting her in disguise at a sheep-shearing feast. The rogue peddler Autolycus works the crowd, cutting purses and selling ballads. Polixenes and Camillo come to the feast in disguise to learn why the prince is keeping away from court. When Polixenes reveals himself and forbids the match, Florizel refuses to give Perdita up. Camillo, longing to see Sicilia again, helps the young couple escape there by ship, sending the shepherd along too with the proof of how Perdita was found.
In Sicilia the threads draw together. Florizel and Perdita arrive claiming to be envoys, then Polixenes arrives in pursuit, and the shepherd’s bundle of gold and tokens reveals Perdita as Leontes’s lost daughter. The reunion of the two kings and the recovery of the princess happen offstage, reported by astonished gentlemen who describe a scene too full of tears and wonder to act out. The shepherd and his son are suddenly raised to gentlemen, and even Autolycus benefits.
The last marvel is saved for Paulina’s house. She leads the court to see a newly finished statue of Hermione, so lifelike it stuns Leontes. Then she calls for music and tells the statue to move. Hermione steps down, alive: Paulina has kept her hidden for sixteen years, waiting for the oracle to be fulfilled and Perdita found. Husband and wife embrace, mother and daughter are joined, and Leontes gives Paulina to Camillo. The thing that was lost has come home.
Hear the play, narrated.
