Jealousy
Leontes’ jealousy is the ‘green-eyed monster’ that needs no goading from an Iago. It is self-inflicted but on the basis of flimsy evidence of the kind that Iago fabricates. There is no handkerchief, just looks, hands joined and the fact that at Hermione’s entreaty, not the King’s, Polixenes agrees to stay longer at the court – an insult perhaps also to Leontes’ authority. The question we have to ask here is why does all this happen so quickly? The answer lies in the conversation between Hermione and Polixenes about the two men’s childhood experiences. She characterizes maturity as ‘falling’ into the world of adult sexuality, but says that this ‘fall’ can be excused so long as the spouse remains faithful to one partner. This becomes the cue for Leontes to misinterpret Hermione’s and Polixenes’ gestures, and to speculate that he is not the father of Hermione’s unborn child. This, perhaps, can all happen more quickly in the later play because it has already happened in a more protracted form in the earlier Othello.
The result of Leontes’ error is the death of his heir and condemnation to a winter life, when there can be no celebrations until the oracle’s prophecy is acknowledged. As in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, it is a state of existence where it is always winter and never Christmas.
Time
As you would expect, neoclassical critics dislike the time gap between the two halves of the play and even some modern critics have seen the introduction of the character Time as a contrived convenience. Shakespeare designed it to be so, as a necessary element of the story he was telling:
I that please some, try all: both joy and terror
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me, or my swift passage, that I slide
O’er sixteen years…
(4.1.1–6)
As we have seen in play after play, he encourages the audience to think that they have been asleep, although in this play, it is the entire ‘tale’ that is the ‘dream’:
…Your patience this allowing,
I turn my glass, and give my scene such growing
As you had slept between:
(4.1 15–17)
Yet the dream, like a play and like life itself (The Tempest, 4.1.146–58), is subject to Time, paradoxically to an awakening and an ending. So, in many of Shakespeare’s works, Time plays a prominent part. It is, as we have seen, a formative motif in the Sonnets and an agent of mutability reflected in the comedies, as in Twelfth Night:
Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty:
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.
(2.3.51–2)
In that play it is also the one to ‘untangle’ error’s ‘knots’ (Twelfth Night, 2.2.40–41). In As You Like It, when Rosalind asks ‘I pray you, what is’t o’clock?’ Orlando replies, ‘You should ask me what time o’day; There’s no clock in the forest’, only to receive the humorous correction, ‘Then there is no true lover in the forest, else sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the lazy foot of Time, as well as a clock’ (3.2.295–300). People can affect the experience of Time, as Rosalind proceeds to explain (3.2.303–27), but Time is still Time, ‘that old common arbitrator’, as Hector calls him in Troilus and Cressida, which ‘Will one day end it’ (4.5.225–6). These are just a few examples of references to Time that permeate the poems and the plays, whether comedies, histories or tragedies.
With The Winter’s Tale towards the end of Shakespeare’s writing career, we may feel, therefore, that it is fitting that Time makes an actual appearance as a Chorus between the two narrative movements of the play. There is an old tradition that Shakespeare even played the role, but in that supposition there is a danger of creating self-fulfilling interpretations in a way that, as we’ve noted, has sometimes occurred with The Tempest. So let us concentrate on Time’s role in the play.
Time and remembrance
Time, as Chorus, goads the neoclassicists, calling on our remembrance:
…imagine me,
Gentle spectators, that I now may be
In fair Bohemia, and remember well
I mentioned a son o’th’ king’s, which Florizel
I now name to you;
(4.1.19–23)
and teasing his audience in expectation by talking of Perdita:
…What of her ensues
I list not prophesy; but let Time’s news
Be known when ’tis brought forth.
(4.1.25–7)
So time in this play bridges the stages of action found in the development of the narrative, through a traditional structure, but it cannot do it for everyone. The threat of death at the start of the play becomes a reality. Mamillius dies and Leontes, and the theatre audience, think that Hermione has died too. ‘A sad tale’s best for winter:’ innocently says Mamillius, ‘I have one/Of sprites and goblins.’ He begins, ‘There was a man –…Dwelt by a churchyard: I will tell it softly,/Yond crickets shall not hear it’ (2.1.25–6, 29–31). But we hear no more. He is the victim of time, of ‘the man’ and ‘the churchyard’ as surely as Antigonus is, in the form of his assailant, the Bear.
Spring
The boy dies because of the violation of the oracle’s truth and the treatment of the mother by the ‘man’ Leontes. Hermione’s heart ‘dies’, turning her to stone – the statue that will be erected in her memory. But can art imitate the seasons? Can spring release the fertility of the earth after the frosts of winter? To survive through the winter is one of the basic challenges of life. Antigonus is eaten by a hungry bear and his companions perish at sea but, elsewhere, spring gradually dawns – but not as some paradise. The daffodils begin to appear, Autolycus, the roguish pedlar sings, ‘With heigh! the doxy over the dale,/Why then comes in the sweet o’th year,/For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale’ (4.3.2–4). The daffodils will bloom, as will the prostitutes (doxy), in the spring sunshine, escaping the cruel winter’s hold but still within its domain (the pale).
This provides the opportunity, as it does for Marina in Pericles, for the unblemished life to flourish, in spite of the brothel. In the case of Perdita, the ‘lost one’, goodness also flourishes. This is not to imply some form of rural quaintness or a panacea or some sentimentalizing loss of a world that was. It is rather a movement towards what is to occur at the end of the play. The country dancing, the festivity and the comedy are part of the entertainment. The queen of the festivity is the woman, the lost Perdita, about to be found as the prophecy – an agency of time – has foretold.
‘The author of The Winter’s Tale was not a folk artist, and he made it clear in many ways that he was not. A sheep-shearing festival performed on the stage of the Globe as part of a sophisticated tragicomedy was not in fact a sheep-shearing festival; it was an urban fantasy of rural life, informed by knowing touches of realism but also carefully distanced from its homely roots.’
Greenblatt, S. (2004: 40), Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. London: Jonathan Cape
The art of grafting
The Winter’s Tale is a story with sadness, humour, song and dance: it is a story of life and death, of tribulation and new birth. It is controlled not by a fictionally created Chorus such as Gower but by the dramatist controlling his creation within the agencies of Time itself. The experiences of time sometimes reflect one another. Polixenes becomes, in his rage with Florizel, a parallel figure to Leontes in the first half of the play. His patience in seeing the frivolity of his son’s courtship of Perdita turns into the scene of a marriage bargain as something that as a parent he must control: ‘Is it not too far gone? ’Tis time to part them’ (4.4.346); but after some gentle pleading over the issue of allowing a son to be able to choose a wife (a cultural flashpoint, as we saw in the case of Bertram in All’s Well), he loses patience and exercises his regal authority:
Mark your divorce, young sir,
Whom son I dare not call; thou art too base
To be acknowledg’d:
(4.4.419–21)
We might imagine King James sympathizing with this response, but it reflects in its particular tyranny a control over nature.
Spotlight
Earlier, Polixenes had tried to persuade Perdita that the art of control was better than untempered nature:
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art,
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes.
(4.4.89–92)
For Perdita and Florizel, however, the art of the court or the adherence to patriarchal values is in distinct contradiction to the Polixenes argument. The debate about ‘grafting’ concerns the attachment of a branch to a root in order to strengthen the plant. At this point it is thought that Perdita is a country maiden, but of course she is a princess. In the conclusion, ‘nature’ will harmonize with the social order and provide a means of social regeneration. But here, in the play, Florizel’s flouting of Polixenes’ authority has significant social repercussions.
Recognition
Shakespeare has returned to issues that interested him at the beginning of his career, with old Egeus’ demands over whom Hermia should or should not marry, Demetrius or Lysander, but Egeus is not even a king. Florizel and Perdita’s relationship is one of genuine love that is not to be controlled by patriarchal authority, nor is it to be commodified, but cherished as the newborn flowers, as the daffodils, which had opened in Autolycus’ song. Even if nature is to be tampered with (‘grafting’), it can be improved, and Perdita sees her relationship at this point in the play with Florizel as just such an improvement.
The disguised King certainly cannot agree and so is forced out of his disguise to prohibit the marriage. As we have seen earlier from The Comedy of Errors onwards, so much of the dramatic action in the comedies revolves around disguise and unknown identity, eventually reconciling errors through anagnorisis, or recognition. In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare provides us with multiple recognitions but certainly not in the first of them – Polixenes throwing off his disguise – in order to reconcile. Instead, the King discards his disguise in order to prohibit, but in doing so he sets in motion a series of events that will lead to a further two recognitions. The first of these is the discovery of Perdita’s true identity, which is reported by the three Gentlemen (Act 5, Scene 2) rather than enacted, since the second, even greater revelation, is to prove the final moment of revelation and reconciliation.
Autolycus
While Autolycus opens Act 5, Scene 2, in which the Gentlemen report the finding of Perdita, he has, as many critics have noted, little function in the context of pushing forward the narrative. He complains that the revelation of Perdita as Leontes’ daughter was delayed because of seasickness. In the context of the entertainment value of the play, however, he serves a major function, entering into the feast with first expectation and then as a flourish, as the Vice character would have done in the old morality plays.
CLOWN Prithee bring him in; and let him approach singing.
PERDITA Forewarn him, that he uses no scurrilous words in’s tunes.
(4.4. 213–16)
His function in entertaining the country festivities is to modulate the rural idyll by introducing an element of deception and trickery and to highlight the culture of the community, including its trials and tribulations. Perdita’s stricture draws Shakespeare’s urban audience into the play. True, Autolycus steals from those he encounters, but this is a ‘realistic’ part of life that can infiltrate even the most rural of scenes. The Clown never recognizes him and, though he says he ‘was cozened by the way and lost all my money?’ (4.4.252–3), he shows no vehemence, no hatred.
But, for the expectation of Polixenes, this spring is a cruel beginning of something. In Sicilia, Paulina has refused Leontes, the King of Winter, the warmth of consolation, while secretly maintaining Hermione, feeding her a ‘little life’ until regeneration, an acknowledgement of loss and ultimately forgiveness can take place through the re-awakening of Leontes’ ‘faith’. So the Chorus has indeed prophesied to ‘make stale/The glistering of this present’ (4.1.13–14). Aligned with the role of the author, the Chorus, Time – whether originally played by Shakespeare or not – will move on ‘To th’ freshest things now reigning’ (13), and will promise the audience to ‘let Time’s news/Be known when ’tis brought forth’ (26–7).
Key idea
Time provides a dramatic function of expectation. That expectation comes, therefore, not with the reported recognition of Perdita, but with the coming to life of the statue of Hermione.
The theatrical wonder
Thus we come to the theatrical wonder itself. Shakespeare perhaps imitated the sexual titillation of Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598), taken from Ovid, to bring the statue to life in a scene of mystery. It has been suggested that necromancy is being hinted at in this episode but Paulina defends what she is doing by highlighting the theatricality of the scene and the legitimacy of the ‘magic’ that she will now perform:
…Then all stand still:
Or – those that think it is unlawful business
I am about, let them depart.
(5.3.95–7)
In a progression built up carefully through the scene, Hermione comes alive only when she moves, and she moves only when Leontes renews his faith in her. The Second Gentleman notes that Paulina ‘hath privately twice or thrice a day, ever since the death of Hermione, visited that removed house’ (5.2.106–8), where, it is revealed, Julio Romano has been carving Hermione’s statue. (Shakespeare is being particularly astute in naming the artist, since works by Guilio Romano (c.1499–1546) were particularly liked by the Stuart family. Romano’s engravings of his mentor Raphael’s work had been used, for example, as the basis for the costumes of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’s Masque of Queens performed at Whitehall Palace in 1609.) The climax is that Hermione turns out to be alive. The statue miraculously has ‘aged’ and breathes and moves. As Leontes suggests, ‘art’ and ‘life’ come together and this is something for which there should be legislation:
…O she’s warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.
(5.3.109–11)
She embraces him and, prompted by Paulina, she turns and speaks to the lost daughter who has been found:
…You gods, look down,
And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon my daughter’s head!
(5.3.121–3)
Shakespeare has moved the polarity once again, from the male who appears as the protagonist to the female, whose ‘spring’ regeneration is the hope of the play. Today we might recall the first lines of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Wasteland (1922):
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
as the spring of The Winter’s Tale is confirmed by Hermione’s voice:
…For thou shalt hear that I,
Knowing by Paulina that the Oracle
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserv’d
Myself to see the issue.
(5.3.125–8)
Is Leontes forgiven? Another production of the play in 2015 – but one which was rather dull – at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford played against any forgiveness on Hermione’s part. In the conclusion, Leontes, it was made clear through the body language, was still rejected. The production played against, thereby, the clear stage directions in the lines from Polixenes, ‘She embraces him.’ Surely, Hermione’s embrace of Leontes and Camillo’s words ‘She hangs about his neck!’ (5.3.111–12) indicate her forgiveness. Had the conferment of meaning by the director in this case been in blatant contradiction of authorial stage direction and intent? Branagh’s interpretation, in contrast, as most do, expressed Hermione’s forgiveness
for Leontes, and his wonder and joy.
Branagh’s production, sadly, in the remembrance of ‘my time’ will, nevertheless, always be tarnished with the actual atrocities of that November night, 2015, in Paris. In a sombre way, my experience, however, illustrates some of the issues we have been discussing throughout our journey. Shakespeare’s plays are works of art, representations of reality, but not actual life and death. We enjoy Shakespeare. We are entertained and intellectually and emotionally challenged by him but we project our experiences, ideologies and meanings upon him. We appreciate the way in which his plays work, drawing us into them, pushing us this way and that, as he varies his structural templates for the narratives he imparts. We begin to understand his plays, considering them as complex mechanisms. We locate them in their historical moment, and appreciate them in our own time.
Conclusion
The line of enquiry in this book has followed Shakespeare’s plays more or less chronologically but also by genre, with six ‘critical perception’ chapters and one on language breaking the journey. Various alternative structures could have been followed. I could, for example, have grouped the plays according to the different theatres where they were first performed, or related them to known facts about Shakespeare’s life or according to their order in the First Folio, or I could have taken an even stricter chronological approach, irrespective of genre. There were many options but whatever the approach taken it would have had an effect on my critical judgements which, implicitly or explicitly, I have been making along the way. To discuss the plays chronologically and/or according to genre is to impose upon the oeuvre a certain rigidity of interpretation, but so would any other critical arrangement. There is no key that will fully unlock Shakespeare’s drama; there are just gates to open, paths to follow. Quite deliberately, I did not conclude with The Tempest, which many chronological interpretations do, because there is no firm authority for regarding it as Shakespeare’s final play.
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