Shakespeare's into Zombies Too

I thought I had read Winter's Tale when I was a kid because the story sounded very familiar and I had made an effort to read all of Shakespeare's plays at one point or another (always failing). I thought I had until I got to the finale of the play when Hermione's statue came back to life! ... ... I would have remembered that one.
I was really shocked and didn't know what to make of it. How did it happen? Did Paulina and Hermione fake her death, like in Romeo and Juliet, for sixteen years? If so, that seems a little harsh. Was it really magic, which makes sense in a romance? So I found "Hermione's Wrinkles, or, Ovid Transformed" by Martin Mueller. It explained that Antigonus' vision of Hermione and the king's checking of both his son's and wife's death explained away the idea of them tricking death. The article concludes that it was not black magic (as Paulina explains), but more to do with the power of art and love. Basically, what we learned in class. It is a romance where unlikely things can just happen.
This was by far the biggest shock I've ever received reading Shakespeare. It shows that we are trained to more or less know what to expect from him. My only regret was that I read this play before I saw it live for the first time. What a shock this must have been to the original audience!