Loyalty
The Winter's Tale is rife with different perceptions of loyalty, and indeed includes many tests of loyalty that characters often misinterpret. The most obvious example comes at the beginning of the play, when Leontes convinces himself that his wife Hermione has been unfaithful to them in their marriage, and that his best friend Polixenes has betrayed their friendship by having an affair with his wife. While loyalty is something that many characters in the play value and cherish, it is also something that is frequently doubted and called into question, leading to paranoia, conflict, and wrongful punishments.
Time
A unique attribute of The Winter's Tale among all of Shakespeare's plays is that it features a 16-year time jump between Acts Three and Four. This time jump is announced by Father Time himself, who appears on stage to usher in the beginning of Act Four. The jump allows the audience to see how time has aged Leontes, Polixenes, Paulina, and even Hermione as a statue (an element of foreshadowing suggesting that Hermione is not actually dead). It also showcases Perdita's maturation from an infant to a young woman, specifically a young woman eligible for marriage. All of these transformations help heighten the stakes of the play's central conflicts by gesturing toward the notion of mortality, especially for the play's older characters.
Friendship
Leontes and Polixenes are, at the beginning of the play, such close friends that their youth together is described as that of "twinned lambs." As the play focuses heavily on the passage of time, it suggests that this youth the two men shared was uncomplicated and consumed by one another – a homosocial relationship between two boys growing up together. However, the inevitable passage of time brought each man to marriage, and it is in introducing this new, heterosexual relationship that conflicts between the two friends arises. The play suggests that the relative bliss of homosocial youth becomes challenged in the face of heterosexual bonds, where emotions like jealousy can run rampant.
Justice
Because the play is so invested in notions of loyalty, fidelity, and honesty, it also features a number of acts of justice – many of which are examples of wrongful or false justice. Of course, Hermione being thrown into prison because Leontes thinks she is having an affair with Polixenes is a clear example of wrongful punishment. Leontes is then punished himself through the death of his son and the alleged death of his wife. The play is interested in the relationship between belief (a more abstract concept) and execution (or how events actually play out). Because of characters' skewed beliefs and assumptions, the play emphasizes, people suffer needlessly until the truth comes out.
Genre Mixing
The Winter's Tale was originally documented as one of Shakespeare's comedies. However, in recent years, it has been recategorized by scholars as a romance – or a play that blends elements of the tragic and comic, often to shape a narrative of redemption. Indeed, The Winter's Tale features a relatively tragic beginning, with the infant Perdita being abandoned and her mother, Hermione, dying in prison. By the end of the play, however, the narrative shifts into a comic register when Perdita marries Florizel and Hermione comes back to life. This genre bending is often cited as evidence that The Winter's Tale is a "problem play," which sets up a series of conflicts in the first half that are then resolved (or redeemed) in the latter half.
Truth and Belief
Related to the themes of loyalty and justice are the themes of belief, perception, and their relationship to reality. The play showcases how one's assumptions and deep-seated insecurities can influence their beliefs so thoroughly as to destroy their own life (as in the case of Leontes). More often than not, characters in The Winter's Tale misinterpret situations and the meaning of loyalty, thereby complicating the narrative further and leading to many instances of wrongful punishment. The play's ending – which is largely redemptive – shows how the pursuit of truth over one's own biases is more valuable than the pursuit of justice for justice's sake.
Love
The Winter's Tale features a number of different loving relationships: friendship (especially homosocial friendship between Leontes and Polixenes), familial love, and romantic love. All of these relationships are complicated throughout the play by characters' assumptions and misinterpretations; Leontes, for example, assumes that Polixenes professed love for Hermione, which he compares to his love for Leontes, is actually romantic in nature. The play ultimately showcases the tensions that arise when one experiences different types of love, but rebuilds each relationship by the end of the last act and refuses to prioritize one form of love over another.
