Apart from any more general indebtedness of the romantics to Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale is particularly apt in relation to their themes of reawakening or revival, as for example entering into the figure of the six-year-old boy of Wordsworth's Intimations ode and the ode's idea of the adult's world as “remains,” as of corpses. I associate this figure, especially in view of his difficulties over remembering, with Freud's report of a phobia in a five-yearold boy, partly simply to commemorate Freud's acknowledgment that he was preceded in his perceptions by the poets, more specifically because of Freud's consequent perception in this case of adult human life struggling toward happiness from within its own “debris.” Now here at the end of The Winter's Tale a dead five-or six- year-old boy remains unaccounted for.

Or is this prejudicial? Shall we say that the absent boy is meant to cast the shadow of finitude or doubt over the general air of reunion at the end of the play, to emblematize that no human reconciliation is uncompromised, not even one constructible by the powers of Shakespeare? Or shall we say that in acquiring a son-in-law the loss of the son is made up for? Would that be Hermione's – the son's mother's – view of the matter? Or shall we take the boy's death more simply symbolically, as standing for the inevitable loss of childhood? Then does Perdita's being found mean that there is a way in which childhood can, after all, be recovered? But the sixteen years that Perdita was, as it were, lost are not recovered.