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.