The Winter's Tale

by William Shakespeare

  ACT 5 SCENE 3

  Paulina reveals the statue of Hermione and Leontes is overcome by its likeness to his wife. He comments that the statue shows Hermione as older than she was, and Paulina explains that the "carver's excellence" has portrayed her as she would be now. Leontes wistfully compares the cold statue to the "warm life" of Hermione. Perdita kneels and reaches out to touch the statue, but Paulina stops her. Camillo, Polixenes, and even Paulina try to comfort Leontes, who is overcome, but he will not allow Paulina to cover Hermione again. As everyone comments on how lifelike the statue is, Paulina claims that she can make it move and speak. Leontes commands her to do so and Paulina pronounces a "spell" to music. In a visual affirmation of the regeneration that characterizes the latter half of the play, Hermione steps down from the plinth, although whether this is an act of magic or the revelation that she has been alive all this time is not certain. Leontes and Hermione embrace, and Perdita kneels again before her mother. Hermione blesses her daughter. Leontes declares that Paulina and Camillo will marry and, despite the tragic deaths of Antigonus and Mamillius, the play ends in unity and celebration.

  THE WINTER'S TALE

  IN PERFORMANCE:

  THE RSC AND BEYOND

  The best way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or ideally to participate in it. By examining a range of productions, we may gain a sense of the extraordinary variety of approaches and interpretations that are possible--a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made "our contemporary" four centuries after his death.

  We begin with a brief overview of the play's theatrical and cinematic life, offering historical perspectives on how it has been performed. We then analyze in more detail a series of productions staged over the last half-century by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The sense of dialogue between productions that can only occur when a company is dedicated to the revival and investigation of the Shakespeare canon over a long period, together with the uniquely comprehensive archival resource of promptbooks, program notes, reviews, and interviews held on behalf of the RSC at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-upon-Avon, allows an "RSC stage history" to become a crucible in which the chemistry of the play can be explored.

  Finally, we go to the horse's mouth. Modern theater is dominated by the figure of the director, who must hold together the whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director's viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare's plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.

  FOUR CENTURIES OF THE WINTER'S TALE: AN OVERVIEW

  The Winter's Tale was one of four plays described by Simon Forman, Elizabethan quack doctor and astrologer, in his commonplace book. Forman saw it at the Globe on Wednesday, May 15, 1611, and wrote a rough outline of the plot, although he failed to mention either the bear or Hermione's statue coming back to life. He was especially impressed by Autolycus, drawing the moral, "Beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning fellows."1 Richard Burbage, leading tragedian with the King's Men, probably played Leontes, and Robert Armin, the company's scholarly comedian, renowned for his wit and his singing, would have been Autolycus. The play must have been popular since there are recorded performances at court on November 5, 1611, another in spring 1613 as part of the wedding celebrations of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, one in 1618, and another on January 18, 1624, before the Duchess of Richmond. The Revels Accounts also record that "The Winter's Tale was acted on Thursday night at Court, the 16 Janua[ry] 1633, by the K[ing's] players and liked."2

  The play was not, however, much liked by Restoration audiences when the theaters reopened in 1660. The change of tone and location between the two halves of the play, the sixteen-year time gap, and the geographical solecism of a sea coast in landlocked Bohemia all offended prevailing neoclassical tastes. The same issues have worried some subsequent critics and directors.

  In 1754 Macnamara Morgan's popular adaptation, The Sheep-Shearing: or, Florizel and Perdita, solved the problem by eliminating Leontes and Hermione entirely. It focused on the pastoral scenes, with Spranger Barry as Florizel and Isabel Nossiter as Perdita. The action was set in Bithynia, an ancient province of Asia Minor, rather than Bohemia (a change based on a suggestion in Thomas Hanmer's edition of the play). The Old Shepherd is finally revealed as a disguised Antigonus! Two years later David Garrick produced his version, Florizel and Perdita, A Dramatic Pastoral. The setting was returned to Bohemia; this version also featured the pastoral scenes but now included the restoration in the final act. Garrick explained his intentions in the prologue:

  The five long acts from which our three are taken

  Stretch'd out to sixteen years, lay by, forsaken.

  Lest then this precious liquor run to waste,

  'Tis now confin'd and bottled for your taste.

  'Tis my chief wish, my joy, my only plan

  To lose no drop of that immortal man!3

  Garrick's version had the benefit of a star-studded cast, with Garrick himself as Leontes, his leading lady Hannah Pritchard as Hermione, and the rising star Susannah Cibber as Perdita. It was a great success and was frequently revived until the end of the century, often in a double bill with Catherine and Petruchio, a similarly abridged version of The Taming of the Shrew. The Prince of Wales (and future King George IV) fell in love with the young actress Mary Robinson when she took over the part of Perdita in the early 1780s. He sent her love letters signed "Florizel" and she became known as "Perdita," then she left the stage and became a famous society beauty and fashion icon. The affair with the prince ended in a public scandal, but Perdita, despite being partially paralyzed as a result of rheumatic fever, remade herself as a novelist, feminist pamphleteer, and poet, highly regarded by leading intellectuals such as William Godwin and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.4

  It was John Philip Kemble who restored Shakespeare's play to the stage in 1802 at Drury Lane and later Covent Garden. While restoring the first three acts, with minor alterations, Kemble still omitted the figure of Time, a practice continued by several subsequent producers. The reviewer in The Gentleman's Magazine details with disapproval the eclectic mix of props and costumes used by Kemble, describing them as "The usual perloinings [sic] from the fashions of James I, Charles I, and Oliver's courts, and the common country garb of our own time." He goes on to comment that "It remains for our classical managers to inform us, how this association of scenes, dresses, and decorations, of different ages, times, and places, could, with any degree of propriety, probability, or consistency, be brought together in one point of view; leaving it to them to fix their own data, architecture, customs, or manners."5 Most critics, however, were impressed. The theater historian Dennis Bartholomeusz argues in his study of the play in performance that, in combining Gothic and Grecian settings, Kemble was responding, "whether consciously or not, to the different levels of time in the play."6 Kemble's Leontes was generally admired, while his sister Sarah Siddons' Hermione was regarded as one of her greatest roles: "Kemble, in Leontes, evinced a perfect knowledge of his author, and displayed a judgment and feeling which justly place it among his most successful parts. The agonies of extreme jealousy with which his mind is tortured, were admirably depicted ... The Hermione of Mrs. Siddons towers above all praise."7

  Actor-manager William Charles Macready also produced the play and played Leontes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. Critics were still carping about the play's form and structure. They compared Macready unfavorably to Kemble. His most distinguished Hermione was Helen Faucit, who wrote a detailed account of her experience:

  My first appearance as Hermione is indelibly imprinted on my memory by the acting of Mr Macready as I have described it in the statue scene. Mrs Warner [formerly the actress Mary Amelia Huddart, widely admired for her own performance as Hermione] had rather jokingly told me, at one of the rehearsals, to be prepared for something extraordinary in
his manner, when Hermione returned to life. But prepared I was not, and could not be, for such a display of uncontrollable rapture ... It was the finest burst of passionate speechless emotion I ever saw, or could have conceived. My feelings being already severely strained, I naturally lost something of my self-command, I looked as the gifted Sarah Adams afterwards told me, "like Niobe, all tears" [Hamlet, 1.2.149]. Of course, I behaved better on the repetition of the play, as I knew what I had to expect and was somewhat prepared for it; but the intensity of Mr Macready's passion was so real, that I never could help being moved by it, and feeling much exhausted afterwards.8

  Samuel Phelps' production at Sadler's Wells achieved critical and popular success with an interpretation of Leontes based on Coleridge's assessment of the character as a tormented man prone to jealousy. An innovation was the setting of the play in ancient Greece:

  Mr Phelps, though occasionally given to over-vehemence in his renderings of emotion, plays with genuine feeling always. The torments of his jealousy as Leontes are unmistakeable, his pathos strikes home ... The scenery is entirely new, for the most part consisting of felicitous representations of classical interiors, decorated in the polychromatic style. The famous scene of the statue is so managed as to produce a most beautiful stage effect. The light is so thrown, and the drapery is so arranged, that the illusion is all but perfect, the stately figure of Mrs Warner, who looks the statue admirably, contributing in no small degree to the beauty of the picture. The moment the curtain was removed, and Hermione was discovered, the applause of the audience broke with immense force.9

  By far the most spectacular production, however, was at the Princess' Theatre in 1856, when, as the London Times review put it, "Mr. Charles Kean's principle of making the stage a vehicle for historical illustration was never carried out so far as in his revival of the Winter's Tale."10 Archaeological research supplied details for the Sicilian setting which opened with a view of the Temple of Minerva at Syracuse, followed by a Greek banquet in Act 1, enlivened by the introduction of dances including the "warlike Pyrrhic dance" with "[t]hree dozen ladies of the corps de ballet, attired in glittering armour as youthful warriors." Hermione's trial in Act 3 took place in the theater at Syracuse. The previously banished figure of Time now reappeared as

  an episodical allegory, consisting of three distinct tableaux--first, by that contrivance which allows stage goddesses and spirits to fly without visible ropes ... we have Luna in her car, personified, accompanied by stars, who are personified likewise. These disappear to make way for Time--not the old gentleman, with sithe [sic] and hour-glass, but Chronos, father of Zeus--who delivers his speech sitting on this mundane globe, as its ruler. He is succeeded by Phoebus in his car, copied from Flaxman's shield of Achilles, and an antique vase. This group, while it has all the effect of an exquisite piece of sculpture, is lighted in a manner that almost dazzles the eye, and it is impossible to conceive the solar glory more vividly personified.11

  Meanwhile, Bohemia reverted to Bithynia so as to allow maximum contrast with the barbaric tribes of Asia Minor for the pastoral scenes when "the sheep-shearing holyday is heightened into a Dionysiac orgie [sic], in which something like 200 dancers are employed."12 Florizel was played as a breeches part (a male part played by a female actor) by a Miss Heath and Ellen Terry made her first stage appearance as Mamillius.13 Kean's production provided not only "gorgeous spectacle, but good and sufficient acting,"14 and the play's enthusiastic reception seems to have been enhanced by the presence of Queen Victoria on the opening night. The satirical magazine Punch was less impressed, claiming:

  Mr Punch has it upon authority to state that the Bear at present running in Oxford Street in the Winter's Tale is an archaeological copy from the original bear of Noah's Ark. Anything more modern would have been at variance with the ancient traditions reproduced in the drama. Further, by one of those curious coincidences that too rarely repay the industry of genius, we hear that among the engagements of scene-shifters newly made at the Princess', there are three individuals named HAM, SHEM, and JAPHET.15

  The chief innovation in the 1887 production was American actor Mary Anderson's doubling of the roles of Hermione and Perdita. The show opened in Nottingham before transferring to the Lyceum and going on to a triumphant tour of the United States. Critical views were divided, most feeling that Anderson was more successful as Perdita and criticizing the cutting of the text as well as Anderson's verse-speaking. The London Times was blunt:

  There is small advantage in having the Bohemia of Shakespeare's fancy restored and the crazy archaeology of Charles Kean discarded if such tampering as this with a Shakespearian subject is to be allowed. Nor does the evil stop here. To the grotesque effect of the doubling of the parts in the statue scene, must be added a certain confusion of identity between mother and daughter which detracts from the spectator's enjoyment of the play as a whole.16

  In 1906 Herbert Beerbohm Tree produced another spectacular three-act version with a text cut by nearly half to allow for change of the elaborate sets, which included a running brook, several trees, and a donkey. The performances of the distinguished cast--Ellen Terry as Hermione, Charles Warner as Leontes, and Maud Tree as Paulina--were overwhelmed by sets and orchestra.

  Harley Granville-Barker's 1912 production at the Savoy Theatre revolutionized the staging of Shakespeare's plays forever and his influence on modern production practices is still evident.17 Critics were quick to recognize its significance:

  Mr. Barker's production of "The Winter's Tale" on Saturday last is probably the first performance in England of a play by Shakespeare that the author would himself have recognised for his own since Burbage--or, at any rate, Davenant--retired from active management.18

  Yes, there is no other word for it save the word that in popular usage denotes a special kind of artistic assault on conventionalism; it is Post-Impressionist Shakespeare.19

  Granville-Barker was influenced by the work of William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society, which attempted to re-create original performance conditions in his production of Hamlet in 1881. In New York Northrop Ames directed a production of The Winter's Tale in similar conditions at the New Theatre in 1910. But it was Granville-Barker's Winter's Tale that crystallized the new production style. His most telling resource was a simple thrust stage:

  2. The clean lines of modernity: Time introduces the audience to Perdita, the Old Shepherd, and Florizel in Harley Granville-Barker's 1912 production at the Savoy Theatre.

  For the management of the action Mr. Barker has revived the Elizabethan plan with a difference. The stage has three planes, or steps, with two side-doors in the foreground, through which courtiers and messengers make their entrances and exits. There is only one interval, after the third act, to mark off the two periods of the story, and the act-drop occasionally descends upon the actors when they are speaking (this, by the way, is taken from the theatre of the Restoration), so that they begin a speech in mid-stage and finish it before the curtain. Set speeches they deliver at the very edge of the stage (there are no footlights, but search-lamps converging on the stage from the dress-circle), addressing them directly to the audience, the proper method, of course, of the old "platform." The rustics dance and sing to pipe and tabor; there is no orchestra.20

  Those critics who liked the production admired the performances. John Palmer called Henry Ainley's Leontes "the finest piece of Shakespearian acting I have yet seen" and was equally enthusiastic about Lillah McCarthy's Hermione.21 Not everyone was convinced, however, and the production closed after six weeks: "Mr Granville Barker, in a distressful striving after the artistic, has achieved that mingling of discordant, ill-related elements, that impossible jangling of different keys, which can never be far removed from vulgarity."22

  Peter Brook's 1951 production at the Phoenix Theatre achieved popular and critical success, despite continued misgivings about the play itself:

  But for all its structural shortcomings The Winter's Tale has eminence, charm, of an indef
inably old-fashioned kind, and Mr Peter Brook's production discovers in it a certain strength as well. Most of this stems from Mr Gielgud's very fine performance as Leontes, whose jealousy is so unquestionably real and terrible that we are not worried by the fact that its causes are flimsy and its consequences far-fetched. He is well partnered by Miss Diana Wynyard's handsome and long-suffering Hermione and Miss Flora Robson's staunch Paulina (though I am not sure that Shakespeare did not see this officious lady as a slightly more comic character than Miss Robson makes her).23

  Brook was clearly influenced by Barker's ideas, but theater historian Dennis Bartholomeusz concludes that while "Barker was very much in play" in terms of the simple set and fluid performance style, "Barker's other important principle of intimacy, dictated by the thrust-stage, was not a part of Brook's design. The production was not as radical in its sweep as Granville-Barker's, nor quite as original."24

  In recent years the play has regained some of its early popularity, and those issues that rendered it problematic for theater audiences attuned to a realist mode of representation seem less daunting to those willing to suspend their disbelief and, as required by Paulina, to awake their poetic and theatrical faith. Most recent productions have nevertheless been performed under the aegis of the subsidized theaters such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. RSC productions are discussed in detail below, while the most significant production at the National has been Nicholas Hytner's modern dress version in 2001 with Alex Jennings as Leontes, Claire Skinner as Hermione, and Deborah Findlay as Paulina. A play as ever of two halves, it had critics mixed in their views as to which worked better. Most were impressed by Hytner's inventive updating: "His contrasting versions of contemporary life suggest Establishment and drop-out, old order and New Age, Windsor and Spencer."25 Sicilia became a "sleek monochrome box ... peopled by sycophants in grey suits," while "Bohemia is an explosion of colour: Glastonbury-cum-Woodstock, with no morris-dance romping or unfunny clowns, no yokels and no wenches."26 All were agreed that "Findlay, always subtle and always substantial, gives the outstanding performance of the production: she's never a shrew or simply a visionary."27 The part of Paulina has again and again proved to be one of the most rewarding female roles in Shakespeare.