This is an essential student guide to the text, context and performance of "The Winter's Tale".This book provides the only introduction to "The Winter's Tale" on the market which offers a theatrical commentary - enabling students to get a sense of the play as a performance text. It responds to the increasing focus on the plays as performance in English literature courses and the growth in student numbers on undergraduate Theatre and Performance courses. The series editor is an internationally well regarded scholar of Shakespeare.This Handbook provides an introductory guide to "The Winter's Tale" offering a scene-by-scene theatrically aware commentary, contextual documents, a brief history of the text and first performances, case studies of key performances and productions, a survey of film and TV adaptation, a wide sampling of critical opinion and further reading.