The Lady, or the Tiger?

One of the king's innovations is the use of a public trial by ordeal as "an agent of poetic justice", with guilt or innocence decided by the result of chance.

The king learns that his daughter has a lover, a handsome and brave youth who is of lower status than the princess, and has him imprisoned to await trial.

Instead, the narrator departs from the story to summarize the princess's state of mind and her thoughts about directing the accused to one fate or the other, as she will lose him either to death or to marriage.

Instead of allowing him to see any available ladies, the king had him immediately taken to guest quarters and summoned attendants to prepare him for a wedding to be held the next day.

One attendant introduced himself as the Discourager of Hesitancy and explained that his job was to ensure compliance with the king's will, through the subtle threat of the large "cimeter" (scimitar) he carried.

At noon on the following day, the prince was blindfolded and brought before a priest, where a marriage ceremony was performed and he could feel and hear a lady standing next to him.

In addition to stretching out the story as long as possible to make it a play, at the end the choice was revealed to the audience: neither a lady nor a tiger, but an old hag.

[5] The first set of logic puzzles in the book had a similar scenario to the short story in which a king gives each prisoner a choice between a number of doors; behind each one was either a lady or a tiger.

However, the king bases the prisoner's fate on intelligence and not luck by posting a statement on each door that can be true or false.

[8] The 2011 They Might Be Giants album Join Us includes a song titled "The Lady and the Tiger," which retells Stockton's story through lyrics such as "behind one door, a muffled roar.