the slaves of chance and flies of every wind that blows.

I have been reading The Winter's Tale this week, and I absolutely love it. I went in to this play not knowing anything about it, which, i think, aided my imagination and I was really able to get in to the minds and actions of the characters, as well as really visualize the setting of the different acts and scenes.

There are a few things I noticed right off that I wanted to pursue further, so I'll just list them off here, and get to them later, either in this post or another.

• First off, TWT was mentioned by Bevington as being the best example of Shakespeare's genre tragicomedy. After reading the whole play, I was able to see why it was named so: the first half was definitely tragic, while the second half was full of love and forgiveness. What's interesting is that the play was set up in a very stark contrast between the two emotions, rather than mixing the two, as is done very frequently in even Shakespeare's tragedies and comedies, they will mix all sorts of emotions without a very clear-cut scene for each emotion. Example, Hamlet; you get wit and comedy swirled in here and there even though the whole over-arching theme is very traumatic and disturbing.
• TWT boasts to have the most unique stage direction of any Shakespeare play, that being "Exit, pursued by a bear." This made me wonder how many productions of this play really did stage a live bear, as the Bevington intro indicates. That certainly would cause a scene.
• TWT has a significant amount of prose, more so than any other Shakespeare play I've read, other than The Tempest, which I wonder, and know, there has to be some reason Shakespeare turned toward the more natural speech of man during his last years. 
• TWT is obviously set in a pre-Christian world. The play is very consistent in referring to the Roman gods that were so highly favoured, as well as the oracle at Delphi. However, I did notice one reference of a chapel in act 3, scene 2. In my mind, chapel refers to Christianity, so I'm very curious...was this word ever used in describing temples of the Roman gods? Or did Shakespeare use chapel because he knew his audience would be more familiar with that term? I could just be fixating on a small detail, but it did made me wonder enough to note it here.
• There is a fair deal of mentioning the improbability of such stories as TWT within the play. It's almost like Shakespeare is making a commentary of the silliness of fantastical tales that he himself is so expert at weaving. 
• In act 4, scene 4 there is a reference to BOWLING! I was curious about how the game has changed since Shakespeare's time.
• And finally, Queen Hermione...why did Shakespeare fool the audience in to thinking she had died? Or did she really die and Paulina was a sorceress who brought the statue of Hermione to life at the end of the play so she could offer a blessing to her daughter and forgive her husband Leontes? Either way, Bevington, once again, was right in saying that Shakespeare used "a kind of trickery found in no other Shakespearean play." 

Hopefully, during this three-day weekend, I can address most of these questions I have brought up to myself.