An Inkling defends The Winter's Tale

Nevill Coghill's famous paper

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.

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