'Happy endings in the literature of love depend on problems being resolved and characters getting what they deserve' -- In the light of this view, discuss Shakespeare’s The Winter's Tale, in particular reference to the role of Paulina.

The AQA framework of AO3 (‘Demonstrate understanding of the significance and influence of the contexts in which literary texts are written and received.’) is particularly important for this question and could be used to helpfully frame your answer. The relevant context is this: the plot of The Winters Tale closely follows a contemporarily popular prose romance, Pandosto, written by Robert Greene in 1588. Yet in Greene’s version, events end tragically: the King (Shakespeare’s Leontes) commits suicide; the Queen (Shakespeare’s Hermione) is not resurrected. The character of Paulina is, therefore, Shakespeare’s own invention, included as an instrument of surprise and reversal. Her act of revealing Hermione as alive would have been as surprising to an early modern audience (who had every reason to expect the same ending as Pandosto) as it is for the character of Leontes. Paulina gives this would-be tragedy a ‘happy ending’, and in this sense can be seen as the ‘author’ of the play’s ‘tragicomic’ ambivalence. Paulina herself embodies this ambivalence in her reaction to Perdita’s return, as recollected by the Third Gentleman: she is said to have fought "the noble combat . . . twixt joy and sorrow”, with “one eye declined for the loss of her husband, another elevated that the oracle was fulfilled”.In this point in your answer, it would be helpful to address the AO2 framework (‘Analyse ways in which meanings are shaped in literary texts’) and think about how Paulina’s role relates to broader patterns in the play’s structure and language. For instance, ‘happy endings’ often follow a thematic chiasmus: a happy state is reversed by a perverse twist of fate, only for these problems to be subsequently resolved, restoring the original happy state. This partially describes the pattern of The Winter’s Tale but is rendered incomplete by peripheral irresolutions: the alternative plot of Pandosto that underwrites the audience’s expectations, and the deaths of Antigonus and Mamillius. If we then turn to examples of linguistic chiasmus in the play we can also see how neat resolution is disturbed. Specifically, Shakespeares uses anti-metabolic chiasmus, through which individual words are mirrored and therefore negated. In Act 5, the Third Gentleman both uses and describes this rhetorical figure: he fears that narrating Perdita’s discovery “undoes description to do it” (5.2.57). Words unravel at almost the same rate that they unfold. When, therefore, in Act 1, Scene 2, Leontes asserts that Hermione’s indiscretion exists “Plainly as heaven sees earth and earth sees heaven” (371), his claim is undermined by its own rhetorical flourish, in which he reveals the circular, self-affirming reasoning employed to analyse the proof of his suspicions. This reasoning results in the death of Leontes own son. Both Paulina’s characters and the disturbed chiastic structures in the play, therefore, highlight problems that remain unresolved in the final ‘happy ending’.