After reading the beginning of a summary of Winter's Tale, I automatically thought TRAGEDY.But that proved to be the wrong categorization as I read on and eventually read some writing by someone with more authority than me and found it was a ROMANCE.
But I find that now I more enjoy the term FAIRY TALE. Fairy Tales have always captivated me. With princesses and princes and dragons, knights, kingdoms, magic, romance, and most of all adventure they make my imagination not only fly but do amazing flips and twists in the air. What Winter's Tale has is misunderstanding and therefore suspense. Then there's the leap in time that leaves you hanging with the baby princess somewhere unknown (to her father) and a problem that seems too tangled to fix it up. This is
how a fairy tale keeps me interested. It suspends belief and then makes someone the hero. In this case, people fall in love and it all works out in the end (sorry for the spoiler but usually romances end up like that). Happily Ever After. Definitely Fairy Tale.
I think genre is hard to definitively pin down for most of Shakespeare's works, but The Winter's Tale in particular is way out of the way of traditional classification. It somewhat follows the comedic story arc (things start out bad in the beginning, get better at the end), but there's so much out of left field that even that isn't quite appropriate. It's definitely a romance, and there's some degree of morality play, and there's some amount of fantasy, so I think you're right on.
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