Twenty-five facts about The Winter's Tale

Time calls us all: we must forgive while we can.

Before we begin I want to make a complaint. There is a recording of Ingmar Bergman’s production of The Winter’s Tale held in The Theatre on Film and Tape Archive. Amazing!

Alas, because of union agreements, you can only watch it at the Lincoln Centre, and with the prior permission of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Not online.

Outrageous!!

Bureaucracy and ideology triumph over common sense and the public’s ability to watch historic recordings of Shakespeare performances. I don’t expect very many people to care, but it ought to be changed.

All of the below information comes from the Introductions to the New Cambridge and Arden editions.

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1. In 1969 Trevor Nunn directed a famous production in which Leontes was presented as a typical modern 1960s father, playful with his son and happy to go on the rocking-horse, a child-ish man. Lighting effects were used to show the Polixenes/Hermione dynamic as part of his hallucinations. The white stage which symbolised innocence in the nursery at the start became the asylum of his rage. This was a Freudian production, focussing on Leontes as a Peter Pan. Critics at the time asked how, if Leontes could be excused by this syndrome or psychologising, there could be any high tragedy in the play.

2. This interpretation remained dominant for decades. The man-child view of Leontes accords with modern folk-psychology, though not necessarily with the words of Shakespeare’s play.

3. The Winter’s Tale is pastoral, a development of the earlier festive mode in which ordinary social customs are suspended for a period of revelry. There’s no time in the forest, and the usual constraints of class, authority, and manners are loosened. There is no Jacques in The Winter’s Tale, no cynic; instead, the pastoral mode is a depiction of “great creating nature”.

4. In August this year, the New Yorker published a report about family estrangement, about adults who cut off their parents. Sometimes for reasons of physical abuse, sometimes for the abstruser reasons of “toxicity”, and sometimes because of incompatible world-views. The Winter’s Tale, along with Tempest, Cymbeline, Pericles is the opposite of these views. True pastoral is not about psychological healing, but moral and emotional reconciliation.

5. Shakespeare’s pastoral began as a festive mode: courtiers go to the forest and frolic, forgetting time and social custom. In these late Romances, written after the great tragedies, pastoral is less playful, more sincere. Time calls us all: we must forgive while we can.

6. In the modern reading, as the Arden editor says, Leontes’ weakness or insanity turns tragedy into melodrama. And melodrama is a very apt word to describe modern culture. Leontes is wicked. Unless we accept that—and accept what it might mean about ourselves—we are not reading this play, we are merely reassuring ourselves with it.

7. The novelist Jane Smiley once compared The Winter’s Tale to King Lear, this is apt not only because Winter’s Tale “answer[s] King Lear’s tragedy with hope” but because they are both big plays with an emphasis on cosmic themes and the nature of time.

8. Lear is a play of pairs: two unfilial daughters, two suitors for Cordelia, two plucked eyes, two sorts of madness, even two plots. Winter’s Tale is a dual play too: romance and realism, tragic and comic, Christian and pagan, harsh and idyllic. (See: Goddard, Meaning of Shakespeare.)

9. One critic called Winter’s Tale a “comedy of forgiveness” which notes the moral and spiritual difference between this and Shakespeare’s earlier comedies.

10. In the nineteenth century, Edward Dowden called Winter’s Tale and the other late plays with similar conventions (Tempest, Cymbeline, Pericles) “Romances”, associating them with tales of adventure, quests, and love. In these plays, the main character goes on a spiritual journey and discovers something about themselves, as is common to quest narratives.

11. Others call these plays “tragi-comedy” a genre that was being developed by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Beaumont and Fletcher, but his plays have what theirs lack: “miraculous wonders and transformative journeys.”

12. The famous line “thou meets with things dying, I with things newborn” is suggestive of the “tragi-comedy” structure, but it is followed with a reference to “fairy-gold”, which is suggestive of Romance.

13. Barabara Mowatt has argued that these are “tragi-comic romances” which are more closely related to earlier plays than Beaumont and Fletcher, sixteenth century dramatised romances.

14. The bear of the famous stage direction exit pursued by a bear would have been a man in a bear costume. Bears were being baited on the south bank of the river, but they were hardly tame enough to be reliable actors. Some have argued that the polar bear cubs brought to London in 1609 were used. Some think the baited bears could have been used. Who knows…

15. Winter’s Tale was written sometime around 1609-1611, when the Blackfriars theatre was newly opened. This theatre relied on candlelight, unlike the Globe, so far more stage effects were possible, such as Hermione’s reawakening, and could be done with suspense.

16. In previous plays, Shakespeare had used ghosts (RIII, Hamlet, Macbeth) and women who seemed to be dead (Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado, Pericles); now he uses both: Antigonus is visited by the “ghost” of the “dead” Hermione. The Arden edition says we know this cannot happen, and that ghosts could only appear once the person was dead and buried—the ghost of a living woman cannot appear. But in Walton’s Life of Donne, he reports Donne saying “I have seen my dear wife pass twice by me through this room, with her hair hanging about her shoulders, and a dead child in her arms.” It was the child who died, not the wife, yet he saw her apparition too. (Nor was the child buried at that point.)

17. Ghosts were not supposed to be acceptable to Anglican theology, but they were still a part of popular culture. Even the Anglican Walton wrote this:

    This is a relation that will beget some wonder, and it well may; for most of our world are at present possessed with an opinion, that Visions and Miracles are ceased. And, though it is most certain, that two lutes being both strung and tuned to an equal pitch, and then one played upon, the other, that is not touched, being laid upon a table at a fit distance, will — like an echo to a trumpet — warble a faint audible harmony in answer to the same tune; yet many will not believe there is any such thing as a sympathy of souls; and I am well pleased, that every Reader do enjoy his own opinion.

18. Thus, we don’t need to try and “solve” this “problem” by talking about the implausible events of Romance, as the Arden edition does. Such things were not unknown. It is true that Hermione being both dead and not dead is acceptable to Romance, but also true that ghosts appeared in usual ways.

19. One major source for The Winter’s Tale is Euripides’ play Alcestis, in which it is said of Alcestis “She is alive. And dead.” Alcestis also has a tragi-comic ending. Shakespeare would have known this play in one of the multiple Latin translations available in the sixteenth century. The ending of Much Ado, with the revelation of Hero, is Alcestian too.

20. Aristotle’s dictum that a probable impossibility is preferable to an improbable possibility is what gives rise to this genre—to the idea that a tragedy can have a happy ending. The English were very comfortable with this mingled genre, and were used to seeing Romance and comedy elements in tragic plays.

21. But the English model was low comedy. In 1600, a neoclassical play called The Faithful Shepherd arrived from Italy, which presumed to turn the genre into something high and formalised. The Winter’s Tale is a bridge between the high and low versions of this art.

22. Romance presents the “truth of an illusion (Arden Introduction) and we see this in Lear, such as Gloucester at the fake cliff where his eyes look like two moons. Cordelia and her sisters are a version of Cinderella. And the description of Cordelia in Act IV is suddenly like something out of Romance.

    patience and sorrow strove
    Who should express her goodliest. You have seen
    Sunshine and rain at once: her smiles and tears
    Were like a better way: those happy smilets,
    That play'd on her ripe lip, seem'd not to know
    What guests were in her eyes; which parted thence,
    As pearls from diamonds dropp’d.

    Later on, Lear describes the breath on her lips in a line that echoes when Hermione’s lips are said to still be warm. This passage, though, is not in all versions of Lear, and Shakespeare may have revised it out, to reduce the elements of Romance intruding in his tragedy. And he may have done that at around the time he wrote Pericles, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Speculative, but even the late collaborations have Romance elements. Romance is the natural evolution of his comedies, towards the forgiving resolution after the dark problem, but it may have been just as much an evolution out of his tragedies, too.

23. Romances were instructive stories about the upper classes and the perils of love. Stories that were too fanciful, or that lacked moral purpose, were tales (old wives’ tales, mouldy tales, tale of a tub, and so on). A winter’s tale was gossip, possibly lies, or fairy stories such as Mamillius starts telling his mother. The Winter’s Tale is therefore an announcement of Shakespeare’s intention to raise up a low genre.

24. The child is important. Like fairy tales, children were not taken seriously; but this play does require you to take it seriously. It requires naive acceptance of Romance and tale conventions as well as the usual sophisticated attention the theatre demands.

25. For the Romantics, like Schlegel, this play was thus an example of the need for adults to recover their child-like wonder at the world.