Viewing Shakespearean romance as a poetic response to the metaphysical problems of “mutability” and man's place in nature, the author has selected The Winter's Tale to illustrate his hypothesis. His critical study—from a perspective gained through comparative references to a large number of works by other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights—rejects the traditional notion that Shakespeare deliberately created a fantasy world in which the happy ending signified an escape from reality and interprets the tone of the romance in terms of an all-encompassing vision in which time and change are accepted as life-fulfilling forces.