The Winter's Tale
The Winter's Tale is my personal favorite of Shakespeare's plays. It's also one of the hardest to stage well. Neither comedy nor tragedy, it's classified (alongside Cymbeline and The Tempest) as a "romance," that tricky category that often places the most extreme elements of the other two genres side by side. How should a director, or dramaturge, or company handle the tonal switch from Leontes' bombastic di…