Historical Background Information—The Winter’s Tale
By Dr. Susan Breitzer
This aspect of dramaturgy has posed a challenged, because technically this play reflects no actual
history, at least on the surface. Probing below the surface however, it is believed to be allegorical to the
second marriage of King Henry VIII of England to Anne Boleyn, or more to the point, its tragic ending. A
little historical background to that is in order.
The English Reformation was different from that of Continental Europe in that 1. It was a largely top-
down affair, legislated by the monarchy 2. It had very much to do with the personal life of King Henry
VIII. Henry VIII’s marital record is very well known to history, and much came down to producing a
male heir. His first wife, Catherine of Aragon had produced only one surviving child—a daughter, Mary.
Then as she aged, Henry genuinely developed the hots for her lady-in-waiting, Anne Boleyn. So Henry
appealed to Rome for an annulment of his first marriage, on the retrospectively decided grounds of
Catherine’s being his brother Arthur’s widow, something that was apparently disallowed without a
dispensation (which they had gotten) The divorce suit, was hardly the most frivolous one to come forth
from or been granted to a monarch nonetheless threatened to undo the whole legitimacy of Papal
Dispensations. Plus at the time, Pope Clement VII was under the political thumb of Catherine’s nephew,
Charles V.
The pope therefore had little option but to dither and stall, allowing the suit to proceed in England for
the next two years, before suddenly announcing that it had to be brought to Rome anew. Henry, after
laying increasing pressure on the Pope, in 1531 compelled an assembly of English clergy to make him
“protector and only supreme head” of the Church in England. Then, in 1533, went ahead and married
the already pregnant Anne, without waiting for an annulment of his previous marriage. Then the child
was turned out to be a girl (the future Queen Elizabeth I), it must have seemed all for nothing—Henry
refused even to attend her christening. From there, things didn’t work out so well for Anne, after
subsequent failed efforts to give the king a son, ending with a miscarriage. Afterward, the king fell
in love with her lady-in-waiting, Jane Seymour, his eventual third wife. Rather than attempt another
divorce, he had Anne imprisoned and executed on trumped-up charges of adultery with multiple
men—including a close friend of the king’s who refused to confess even to avoid execution. It has been
suggested then that Perdita was an allegorical presentation of Elizabeth, the unwanted daughter who
went on to be one of the greatest (if not greatest) English monarchs in history.
There are also historical circumstances surrounding some of the geographical oddities described in
the play. In The Winter’s Tale there are references to the “seacoast” and “desert” of the Kingdom of
Bohemia. If this Bohemia is the same the comprises most of the modern Czech Republic, this does not
make since, because this region has neither desert nor seacoast. But Bohemia in this context, may
refer to a much lager territory briefly ruled by Ottokar II of Bohemia that included the Adriatic coast,
making it theoretically possible to sail from Sicily to the “seacoast of Bohemia” during the period under
discussion. Other possibilitiesare that Bohemia was an alternate name for the region Apulia in Sicily or
misspelling of Bithynia in Asia Minor. The most likely theory is that Shakespeare, when adapting the
novella Pandosto, in which King Pandosto of Bohemia was the one who suspected his wife of being
unfaithful with his best friend, the King of Sicily, Shakespeare chose to reverse the locations of the
two characters. This was because of King James II’s alliance with Rudolph II, the King of Bohemia (and
the Holy Roman Emperor!)at the time of the play was first performed—also making it possible for the
play to be performed in honor of the marriage of James’s daughter Elizabeth to the crown prince of
Bohemia! There are also other explanations for this and other geographic improbabilities that will be
discussed in a separate literary history of the play.
Beyond Bohemia, there is also the question of why Shakespeare located the Oracle of Delphi on an
island, when Delphi (ancient and modern) is located in the mountains in Central Greece. Rather, this
seeming relocation of the Oracle to the island of Delos (known in Shakespeare’s time as Delphos) is
lifted straight from Pandosto, whose author in turn refers Virgil’s Aeneid.