This discussion might well be entitled ‘Three Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter’s Tale’, were I not anxious to avoid the implication that it offers only half the value already provided by Nevill Coghill in Shakespeare Survey 11. I hope instead to offer an analysis which, building upon Coghill’s insights, goes beyond them to call particular attention to the way in which Shakespeare, thus late in his career, had learned both to trust his actors and to manipulate audience response.

A beginning playwright is apt to think almost entirely in terms of putting necessary information into his lines. In setting the bare Elizabethan stage, no other course is open to him: