Abstract

Shakespeare in The Winter’s Tale in describing the annual year names only three seasons—Spring, Summer, and Winter. This tripartite scheme is not unprecedented in Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, e.g. Sonnet 5.5-6; Sonnet 6.1-2, 2 Henry 6 2.4. 1-3; The Tempest 4.1.114-15. What is unique to The Winter’s Tale involves Shakespeare’s correlation of three seasons to a tripartite division of humankind’s age, with a stress on the climacteric years when one season passes to the next. An assumption and a fact undergird this scheme: that a lifetime is 70 years (Psalm 90, verse 10), and that 23 is an important recurring number in this play. Humankind passes from Spring to Summer at age 23 and from Summer to Winter at age 46. Given the possible calculation of major characters’ ages in The Winter’s Tale, one discovers that Leontes after a sixteen-year gap of time is 44, while—in 1610 (the likely date of the play)—Shakespeare himself is 46. This correspondence is richly evocative of figurative final harvests.