King Leontes of Sicilia accuses his wife, Queen Hermione, of infidelity with his childhood friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia. Consumed by irrational jealousy, Leontes becomes obsessed with proving Hermione's supposed adultery and orders her imprisonment before putting her on trial, where she steadfastly maintains her innocence.
Leontes' baseless accusations lead to the destruction of his family: Hermione dies of grief, her newborn daughter is abandoned in a distant land, and her son, Mamillius, dies due to the distress caused by his father's madness. Leontes' abandoned daughter, Perdita, grows up as a shepherdess, unaware of her royal heritage. Sixteen years later, she returns to Sicilia.
This Standard Ebooks edition is based on William George Clark and William Aldis Wright's 1887 Victoria edition, which is taken from the Globe edition.
The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's most haunting late plays, following a king's jealous rage through tragedy, exile, and an almost miraculous reconciliation.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)