Coghill’s defence
Many critics have disliked The Winter’s Tale, finding it to be badly constructed. In 1958 Nevill Coghill (one of the Inklings) published a paper called ‘Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter’s Tale’ which defended the play as well-made. It’s an acute and sensitive reading that seeks to understand the play on its own terms.
Coghill defends the play against six common criticisms. His points are still worth learning today, and can inform a reading or a production of the play.
Leontes’ sudden jealousy
Why does Leontes’ become jealous out of nowhere? The first scene is one of those oblique openings Shakespeare was so good at. Rather than showing us the protagonists, we enter with two courtiers, who talk about what good friends the two kings are. Thus our expectations are set up to be undermined.
Leontes and Polixenes enter separately as Polixenes gives a speech about having been visiting Sicilia for nine months. He gives this speech next to Hermione, who is visibly at the end of a pregnancy. (“The queen, your mother, rounds apace.”)
Coghill says “who can fail to wonder whether this man so amicably addressing this expectant mother may not be the father of the child?”
Leontes is grumpy: he has short, curt lines. Polixenes gives long, florid speeches. And everything Leontes’ says is ominous, equivocal, full of implication. “Our queen” is rather cold, and “tongue-tied” is a “familiar epithet for guilt”.
Some critics will say the lines don’t have to hold this interpretation, but the essence of reading a play is to make dramatic sense of it—and Leontes’ jealously is fully explicable. It doesn’t come out of nowhere: he comes on stage in a bad mood that he is trying to mask. But soon enough, the mask slips.
Exit, pursued by a bear
This is often called crude, needless, and done merely for popular effect. Coghill calls it a tour de force which turns the play from tragedy to comedy. (And what’s wrong with popular effect?) The bear is both fierce and funny and becomes a way to modulate between the two modes.
Now it is terrible and pitiful to see a bear grapple with and carry off an elderly man to a dreadful death, even on stage; but (such is human nature) the unexpectedness of an ungainly animal in pursuit of an old gentleman… can also seem wildly comic; the terrible and the grotesque come near to each other in a frisson of horror that is shortly succeeded by a shout of laughter.
Once you realise the bear was, most likely, played by an acrobat in costume, this is readily understood. (Stage historians still debate this point.) Thus the bear becomes a “unique and perfect link” between the play’s two halves. This double mood is captured in the famous line “thou met’st with thigs dying, I with things newborn”. Coghill calls this unparalleled avant garde work. “It symbolises the revenge of Nature on the servant of a corrupted court… and yet those Naturals that are always demanding naturalism cannot complain, for what could be more natural than a bear?”
Father Time
The Time chorus is usually described as a mere device for slipping past sixteen years of plot. Coghill defends the chorus because it gives us three importance pieces of information:
the plot moves ahead sixteen years,
Leontes has shut himself away in penitence,
now we will meet Perdita and Florizel
For pure plot we might not need this chorus, but it is essential to theme and quality. Time’s function is to show us we are “being taken beyond ‘realism’ into the region of parable and fable.” Time becomes a “pause or poise” at the play’s centre. It shows us that rehabilitation is the work of time. Time is the test of repentance. “Time is at the heart of the play’s mystery: why should his visible presence offend?”
IV.iv, Camillo, Florizel, Perdita, Autolycus
Many complaints are made about this scene, some small as when Camillo directly addresses the audience when he is in disguise in this scene, which critics complain about, but it is common technique from Aeschylus to T.S. Eliot! Mostly the stage-directions cause confusion. But they are often added by editors. The dialogue gives actors all the clues they need to make natural performances. The pastoral is essential to the play’s redemptive arc.
V.ii, the messengers
Many critics find it corny, clumsy, or even comically bad. But Coghill says it is thrilling on stage, such as in Peter Brook’s 1951 production.
Let us consider this situation: never in the memory of court gossip has there been so joyful and astounding a piece of news to spread… so far as they can, they temper their tears with wit.
This is why it is not silly but hugely emotional. To show us the reunion would be to show us the ordinary, expected course of events. To show us the courtiers is dramatically more effective. In this way, it is similar to the opening scene.
I will have more to say about this scene in a separate essay.
The statue
Any critic with misgivings about the bear will inevitably dislike the Galatea scene at the end when Hermione is revived. The idea that she is dead is thought absurd. But, Coghill says,
She is not a Lazarus. The play is about Leontes’ spiritual crisis and the restoration of Hermione to him. He thought her dead and finds her not. After a long repentance… his soul is restored, which he thought he had destroyed with sin. To feel the dramatic power of this, the audience must believe her dead as well. Then, we must believe her to be a statue… Hence, she stands, motionless, for eighty lines. To build suspense, and prevent too much audience suspicion, Paulina’s speech has 12 colons in five lines. Hermione only moves after a long, pausing entreaty.
I happen to disagree with Coghill: Paulina is clear Hermione was dead and it’s not explained whether she “really” was or not. This is, as he said about the bear, a play that moved away from realism. She perhaps truly is a Lazarus… but his point about dramatic effect is sound.
Coghill’s talent
The reason why Coghill understood this play so well, against the prevailing attitude, is because as well as being a scholar (he become Merton Professor) he directed plays, including a famous performance of The Tempest in 1949. At the end, Ariel ran across the grass, while the artificial lights were just taking over from the failing daylight, and, when he reached the lake, he carried on running—a shallow waterway had been installed. Once he reached the darkness of the other side a firework went off, as if Ariel had ascended to the sky. It was that understanding of stage-craft that made Coghill such a splendid appreciator of Shakespeare.
also, is fair that I'm wondering about Shakespeare's cuckold obsession? I know its come up in the group and perhaps it isn't a favorite topic. But I can't help but marvel at it. He seems to want to look at cuckoldry from every feasible angle. At the end of Much Ado, Benedick makes a joke about it even as he is getting married! Its like a rite of passage for these people.
The dramatic tension surrounding Leontes' not-so-sudden jealousy, to me, says a lot about Hermione. I think it fits with your argument in this post, but here it is in a nutshell.
Camillo's decision to disobey Leontes and save Polixenes indirectly highlights the exceptional quality of Hermione's character. While Leontes commands respect as a king, Hermione inspires deep affection and loyalty. Camillo protects Polixenes, abandons his prestigious position in Sicilia, and goes to exile in Bohemia at least in part for his reverence for her. At the same time, Camillo handles the situation with political savvy, diplomatically framing Leontes’ jealousy as a kind of sickness or irrational affliction. His tact ensures his survival, allowing him to adapt and thrive in a new kingdom.
After my first reading of the play, the separate fates of Camillo & Antigonus jumped out at me more than the arc of the 'mad' Leontes. Camillo disobeys his king while Antigonus only half-obeys. And we know what happens to Antigonus!