The whole plot of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” is complex.
The King and Queen are happy…. and expecting a baby. Then the King decides that clearly his wife has had an affair with his mate (who has been in the court for 9 months…. and she convinced him to stay longer). She denies the affair, but he throws her in jail anyway. Later she gives birth to a girl, who the King disowns. They also had a son who was a child…. remember this.
So the daughter gets sent away by ship….and the ship gets shipwrecked. The King sentences the Queen to death, (but doesn’t actually die… remember that)…. and the son commits suicide from grief.
The King then goes into mourning for 16 years.
Meanwhile… the baby ends up in Bohemia, where she is actually adopted by a Shepherd. Later the daughter grows up and meets a guy and they want to get married. Long story short, she and her fiance return to the land of her birth.
Really long story short…. the King finds out it is his long lost daughter… and he weeps again because his wife is dead…. then the wife’s friend comes out with a statute like the Queen, where the King weeps again, and because he is truly repentant, the statute turns back into the Queen. Happy ending.
Beyond Theatre 