Shakespeare’s play is itself a cover version, adapting an Elizabethan prose romance, by Robert Greene in the original, Greene gives the king’s worries a slow build: “These and such like doubtful thoughts a long time smothering in his stomach began at last to kindle in his mind a secret mistrust, which, increased by suspicion, grew at last to be a flaming jealousy that so tormented him as he could take no rest.” But Shakespeare sacrifices credibility for dramatic urgency: when Leontes sees Hermione and Polixenes conversing in their first scene, he simply flares up: “Too hot, too hot!” Unlike in “Othello,” there is no Iago to prompt his mistrust. What baffles many critics, beyond the juxtaposed genres, is the cause of Leontes’s jealousy. Can the children’s love heal their parents’ strife? It’s pastoral romance grafted onto royal tragedy, “As You Like It” giving “Othello” a shot at redemption. When the story resumes, the banished daughter, Perdita, who has come of age in Bohemia, attracts the affections of Florizel, the disguised son of Polixenes. Then the figure of Time appears onstage to announce a sixteen-year leap forward. The first three acts spin a vicious web of obsession and betrayal: King Leontes of Sicilia, certain that his wife, Hermione, is sleeping with his best friend, King Polixenes of Bohemia, tears his own world apart-he tries to have Polixenes poisoned, rejects his newborn daughter as a bastard, and puts Hermione on trial for treason, creating such anguish that their son dies when his wife hears that news, she drops dead as well. PHOTOGRAPH BY LEON NEAL / AFP / GETTYĪccording to the Times, Winterson’s publisher was surprised that she passed up “Hamlet,” “Othello,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth,” and chose instead what the reporter calls “one of Shakespeare’s most baffling, jarring and uneven plays.” The play is a mashup of disparate modes, reflecting the Jacobean taste for tragicomedy.

A portrait believed to be the only one painted of Shakespeare during his lifetime.

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