The Winter’s Tale revisited: thoughts on the play and some commentaries

Alexandra Gilbreath as Hermione and Antony Sher as Leontes (my favourite production). 

I have just reread The Winter’s Tale. What a wonderful play! The final scene is one of the greatest, most moving scenes in Shakespeare, but I forgot that the play as a whole was like a fairytale, including the figure of the tyrant. I also picked up The Winter’s Tale Casebook, a collection of essays edited by Kenneth Muir. 

1/ My top 5 is Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure. Is it not strange, when you think about it, that the last three plays took centuries to be understood and appreciated? King Lear is now generally recognised as the highest peak of Shakespeare, but Measure and Measure and The Winter’s Tale are still not particularly popular even though their status has now risen among some Shakespeare fans and critics. 

What is it about the development of taste over the centuries that early critics didn’t see the power of The Winter’s Tale but modern critics (and I) do? I can’t help wondering. But it’s amusing to see that Charlotte Lennox (the author of The Female Quixote) is among the ones insensible to the beauty of the resurrection scene and of the play as a whole. 

The usual complaints are these: 

a) The plot is improbable—Charlotte Lennox says “what reason could [Hermione] have for chusing to live in such a miserable confinement when she might have been happy in the possession of her husband’s affection and have shared his throne?”, but she’s not the only one expressing such sentiments; 

b) Leontes’s jealousy lacks a motive—Robert Bridges for example says “the jealousy of Leontes is senseless, whereas in the original story an adequate motive is developed.” 

The latter is not a surprise. Detractors—Tolstoy for instance—sometimes complain about the lack of motive in Shakespeare. But that’s his thing—it’s not only that Shakespeare doesn’t give motive to his characters (in some cases), sometimes he perversely removes the motive stated in his source story. I myself see nothing wrong or unconvincing about it. Shakespeare is fascinated by jealousy and explores it throughout his career, and in his final play about jealousy, pushes to the extreme the idea “They are not ever jealous for the cause/ But jealous for they are jealous; ’tis a monster/ Begon upon itself, born on itself.” 

As for the former, there are two interpretations of the resurrection scene: the mythic one and the realistic one. I’m inclined to go with the realistic reading, but the vision of resurrection in the final ending still fills me with awe and wonder—that she lives in isolation after 16 years isn’t illogical to me—do people forget that Leontes for no reason accused her of not only adultery but also treason? That he imprisoned her and put her on trial? That he caused the death of their son Mamillius? That he banished Perdita and she doesn’t know when she can ever see her daughter again? Leontes needs penance and Paulina is there to make sure he never forgets what he has done. 

2/ I like Robert R. Price’s remark from 1890: 

“And so, in dramatic art, The Winter’s Tale is, I think, Shakespeare’s experiment in constructing a diptych. This experiment no poet, to my knowledge, had ever tried before him, and none that I know of has ever tried it since. Thus, received as a bold experiment in dramatic art, The Winter’s Tale may well stand last in time of the works of Shakespeare’s genius, the final stretching forth of that genius to accomplish a design never before essayed. 

The play is, then, as I conceive it, a genuine diptych in construction. It is made up of two plays, the first a tragedy and the second a comedy, so joined together in the middle as to produce a final result that belongs equally to each.” 

That is indeed something that makes The Winter’s Tale different from everything else by Shakespeare, and most narratives in general. And I love that. When I first read The Winter’s Tale, I thought it lacked harmony even though I loved the play—the shocking rage and intensity seem to appear out of nowhere then vanish into thin air, the play slows down, the mood changes—but I no longer find it odd after watching the Antony Sher production—the two parts go together perfectly well, and the ending is wonderful. It’s a bold experiment that shows Shakespeare’s mastery of mood, pacing, and structure. 

But how does he do it successfully? I like that Ernest Schanzer writes in his essay “The Structural Pattern” that “the two halves of the play consist not only of a series of contrasts but also a series of parallels.” In both halves, Shakespeare paints a picture of harmony and happiness that is violently interrupted by a tyrant. In both halves, Perdita is “committed to the mercy of the waves.” In both halves, Camillio plays the same role of helping the victim of the king escape. In both halves, there’s a climax with Hermione in the centre. 

“The first half culminates in Hermione’s death, the second in her ‘resurrection’.” 

3/ Mark Van Doren says:

“Shakespeare disappoints our expectation in one important respect. The recognition of Leontes and his daughter takes place off stage; we only hear three gentlemen talking prose about it (v ii), and are denied the satisfaction of such a scene as we might have supposed would crown the play. The reason may be that Shakespeare was weary of a plot which already had complicated itself beyond comfort; or that a recognition scene appeared in his mind more due to Hermione, considering the age and degree of her sufferings, than to that ‘most peerless piece of earth’ Perdita.” 

“Our”? Speak for yourself! I don’t agree—the resurrection scene is more important—Shakespeare understands pacing and tension (better than anybody) and knows that two reunion scenes so close to each other would very much reduce the emotional impact—that’s why he leaves one offstage. 

In “Six Points of Stage-Craft”, Neville Coghill defends the scene of the gentlemen telling each other about the first reunion: 

“… in practice this scene is among the most gripping and memorable of the entire play. Whoever saw the production of it by Peter Brook at the Phoenix Theatre in 1951-2 will remember the excitement it created. I know of at least two other productions of the play in which this scene had the same effect, and generated a mounting thrill of expectation needed to prepare us for the final scene.” 

4/ In the same essay, Nevile Coghill defends the “Exit, pursued by a bear” scene, which many people have derided: 

“… [Shakespeare] deliberately underlined the juxtaposition of mood, achieved by the invention of the bear, in the speeches he put into the mouth of the Clown, grisly and ludicrous, mocking and condoling, from one sentence to another: 

[…]

If Shakespeare did not mean it that way, why did he write it that way? So far from being crude or antiquated, stage-craft such as this is a dazzling piece of avant-garde work; no parallel can be found for what, at a stroke, its effects; it is the transformation of tragedy into comedy; it symbolizes the revenge of Nature on the servant of a corrupted court; it is a thundering surprises; and yet those Naturals that are always demanding naturalism cannot complain, for what could be more natural than a bear?” 

That’s a good point. I have learnt to always assume that Shakespeare knows what he’s doing—sometimes one may think something seems wrong or something is a flaw, until one sees a critic defend it, or even better, sees a production which works perfectly, demonstrating again that Shakespeare understands drama better than anybody. 

In the essay Neville Coghill argues several times against S. L. Bethell, who calls the play naïve, antiquated, outmoded, etc. I especially like this point he makes about the final scene (and the fact that Shakespeare does the anachronistic thing of naming a contemporary man as the sculptor): 

“The spiritual meaning of the play in no way depends on [Hermione] being a Lazarus or an Alcestis. It is a play about a crisis in the life of Leontes, not of Hermione, and her restoration to him (it is not a ‘resurrection’) is something which happens not to her, but to him. He had thought her dead by his own hand (‘She I kill’d’, v i 7) and now finds her unexpectedly alive in the guardianship of Paulina. […] That is the miracle, it seems to me, for which Shakespeare so carefully prepared. 

It had to be a miracle not only for Leontes, but for the audience. His first dramaturgical job, then, was to ensure that the audience, like Leontes, should believe her dead. For this reason her death is repeatedly reasserted during the play by a number of characters, and accepted by all as a fact. Shakespeare’s next care was to give credentials to the statue. The audience must accept it as a statue, not a woman; so the Third Gentleman names its sculptor, an actual man, Giulio Romano; a novel trick to borrow a kind of authenticity from the ‘real’ world of the audience, to lend solidity to the imaginary world of the play; it seems to confer a special statueishness.” 

I like that. And this scene is one of the most wonderful and affecting scenes in Shakespeare.  

5/ In my first reading of The Winter’s Tale, I didn’t particularly like Autolycus. But now I do, partly thanks to Ian Hughes’s hilarious performance in the Antony Sher production, partly because Scott Newstok argues in How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education that the character of an unrepentant thief is Shakespeare’s joke (The Winter’s Tale is based on Pandosto by Robert Greene, who is now mostly known for calling Shakespeare “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers”), and partly because I now see him as part of the sun-burnt mirth of the second half of the play. 

Updated: 

My first blog post about the play is here. My post about the play and G. Wilson Knight is here.