The Winter's Tale (opera) The Winter's Tale (opera) The Winter's Tale is an opera in three acts by Ryan Wigglesworth. The libretto is by the composer, based on the play of the same name by William Shakespeare. The opera, in a production directed by Rory Kinnear, and conducted by the composer, was premiered at the English National Opera on 27 February 2017. The opera follows the main story of the play, reduced to three acts, and dropping the character Autolycus, and some other well-known features of the play such as Antigonus's stage direction "Exit, pursued by a bear". Act I is set in Sicily.
All the world's a stage long predated Shakespeare. Juvenal, the ancient Roman poet, wrote one of the earliest versions of this line in his “Satire 3”: “All of Greece is a stage, and every Greek’s an actor.” Richard Edwards' play "Damon and Pythias", written in the year Shakespeare was born, contains the lines, "Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage / Whereon many play their parts; the lookers-on, the sage". When it was founded in 1599 Shakespeare's own theatre, The Globe, may have used the motto ' (All the world plays the actor), the Latin text of which is derived from a 12th-century