The purpose of this study is to explore the use and contra-use tragicomedy in Winter's Tales. As a way of facilitating such an enquire, we shall employ Giambattista Guarini's theory of tragicomedy, focusing primarily on his analysis of the phenomenon of fusion between tragedy and comedy. Guarini is an Italian playwright strongly interested in dramaturgy and the emotional effect of tragicomedy. To make an authentic tragicomedy, he argues, there must be a harmonious mixture of tragic and comic elements far removed from the kind of tension or emotional confrontation which characterizes most modern tragicomedies. At its best, according to Guarini, tragicomedy happens when the two distinct entities are melded into parts that cannot be divided. For this to occur though, Art, as a kind of demiurge, must alter the autonomous natures of the tragic and comic so that they can be successfully integrated as tragicomedy - thus producing a perfect blend in which the comic and the tragic moderate one another. It is important, however, not to think of this blending as an equal identity of opposites; for, despite Guarini's idea of tragicomedy as an organic form, much of his observation clearly demonstrates that the tragic is subordinate to the comic. According to Guarini, it is tragicomedy that adopts the comic order. The Winter's Tale is a unique play in which Shakespeare appears to succeed in deceiving his audience by making them believe that Hermione has really died in Act Three. Until Act Five, Scene One and Two, the audience is given no clues to whether Hermione is still alive. At the same time Shakespeare makes his audience anticipate emotionally, if not cognitively, the play's happy ending—perhaps through the suggested restoration of Hermione--by means of a tragicomic dramaturgy that is extraordinarily subtle, implicit, and suggestive. Finally, the audience is brought to share fully in Leontes's sense of wonder at the miracle of the statue that comes to life. Paulina, as a dramatist-actor in the play, directs the miracle of the statue scene, and, by doing so, implicitly creates an identity with the theater as medium for the artifice of art. Since the resurrection of Hermione is enacted on the border between the miraculous and realistically possible, the joy it occasions is strangely muted, both for the characters on the stage as well as for the audience. The realistic touches employed in the presentation of the family reunion serves to remind the audience vividly of past suffering and the terrible price that has been paid for Leontes' sin and error. Shakespeare's tragicomic endings induce critical discomfort in the audience because his dramatist-actor goes against audience expectation. However, the discomfort or dissatisfaction aroused by Shakespeare's dramatist-actor, especially one experienced in dramatic resolution, is not the result of any flaw in the play's design. The reason for this is because ‘the flaw’ is very much part of the inherent design underpinning Shakespeare's tragicomic aesthetics.