He did it well; your day is lengthened and
The blissful dew of heaven does arrose you.
The powerful Venus well hath graced her altar
105
And given you your love. Our master Mars
Hath vouched his oracle and to Arcite gave
The grace of the contention. So the deities
Have showed due justice. Bear this hence.
PALAMON O, cousin!
That we should things desire, which do cost us
110
The loss of our desire! That nought could buy
Dear love, but loss of dear love!
[Arcite’s body is carried out.]
THESEUS Never Fortune
Did play a subtler game. The conquered triumphs;
The victor has the loss; yet in the passage
The gods have been most equal. – Palamon,
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Your kinsman hath confessed the right o’th’ lady
Did lie in you, for you first saw her and
Even then proclaimed your fancy. He restored her
As your stol’n jewel and desired your spirit
To send him hence forgiven. The gods my justice
120
Take from my hand and they themselves become
The executioners. Lead your lady off
And call your lovers from the stage of death,
Whom I adopt my friends. A day or two
Let us look sadly and give grace unto
125
The funeral of Arcite, in whose end
The visages of bridegrooms we’ll put on
And smile with Palamon – for whom an hour,
But one hour since, I was as dearly sorry
As glad of Arcite, and am now as glad
130
As for him sorry. O, you heavenly charmers,
What things you make of us! For what we lack
We laugh, for what we have are sorry, still
Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful
For that which is, and with you leave dispute
135
That are above our question. Let’s go off
And bear us like the time. Flourish. Exeunt.
EPILOGUE
Enter Speaker of the Epilogue.
I would now ask ye how ye like the play,
But, as it is with schoolboys, cannot say.
I am cruel fearful! Pray yet, stay a while,
And let me look upon ye. No man smile?
Then it goes hard, I see. He that has
5
Loved a young handsome wench, then, show his face –
’Tis strange if none be here – and, if he will,
Against his conscience let him hiss, and kill
Our market. ’Tis in vain, I see, to stay ye:
Have at the worst can come then! Now, what say ye?
10
And yet mistake me not: I am not bold;
We have no such cause. If the tale we have told
(For ’tis no other) any way content ye –
For to that honest purpose it was meant ye –
We have our end; and ye shall have ere long,
15
I dare say, many a better, to prolong
Your old loves to us. We, and all our might,
Rest at your service. Gentlemen, goodnight!
Flourish. Exit.
The Winter’s Tale
Shakespeare began his career in London as actor-dramatist in time to be denounced for his success by a rival playwright, the dying Robert Greene, in the autumn of 1592. Some eighteen years later, Greene’s popular romance, Pandosto, or The Triumph of Time (1587) supplied Shakespeare with the plot of The Winter’s Tale, while the roguery of Autolycus (among Shakespeare’s main additions to the story) drew on anecdotes from Greene’s popular pamphlets about the London underworld of the 1580s and 1590s. Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline about 1609–10, perhaps during a lengthy closure of the theatres caused by the plague. No consensus exists about which came first, and both were seen at the Globe in the spring of 1611 by Simon Forman, whose notes surprisingly make reference neither to the bear that pursues Antigonus nor to the final scene of Hermione’s resurrection.
In the First Folio The Winter’s Tale appears as the last of the fourteen comedies, Cymbeline as the last of the tragedies (and so the last play in the book). Both are now commonly referred to as romances, or late plays, and attempts have been made to associate them with Jacobean politics and with the royal family. What is certain is that their tragicomic actions, like that of Pericles, make nostalgic reference to the romantic plays of the 1570s and 1580s derided by Sidney in his Defence of Poetry as ‘mongrel tragicomedy’.
A winter’s tale was the sort of story told round the fire to while away a long winter evening, hence simply an implausible romantic or fairytale fiction. The passage of time, human and seasonal, destructive and restorative, is among the major motifs of the play, whose cast includes characters of all ages from a newborn baby to a man of eighty. In The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare simultaneously asserts the implausible conventionality of his story and invests it with a poetic and emotional power that transcends convention. The jealous Leontes may recall Othello, but the violence and irrational suddenness of passion launch the action at a high pitch of tension. Time, as chorus, divides the play into balancing and antithetical halves when he turns his hourglass exactly in the middle of his speech. The sixteen-year gap in time between acts 3 and 4, more sharply defined than the fourteen years in the middle of Pericles, reflects the passage the human seasons from the winter guilt and sadness Leontes’ court to the springtime innocence of his lost daughter Perdita and her lover Florizel. As in The Comedy of Errors and Pericles, the family reunion (promised by the oracle of Apollo) is capped by the reappearance of the supposedly dead mother, with the difference that this time the audience too have been persuaded of her death. The first half of the play ends with the pursuit of Antigonus by a bear, the second with the descent of the statue of Hermione from its plinth to reunited with husband and daughter. Both are Shakespeare’s additions to Greene’s story, as is Paulina, the agent Hermione’s survival and the penitence of Leontes.
The Winter’s Tale has had a long and successful stage
history. An influential twentieth-century production was that by Harley Granville Barker at the Savoy Theatre London in 1912, which restored the full text and simplified the setting in the interests of pace and clarity of performance. Today The Winter’s Tale is, after The Tempest, the most frequently revived of the romances.
The Arden text is based on the 1623 First Folio.
LIST OF ROLES
LEONTES
King of Sicilia
MAMILLIUS
young Prince of Sicilia
four lords of Sicilia
POLIXENES
King of Bohemia
FLORIZEL
Prince of Bohemia
ARCHIDAMUS
a lord of Bohemia
Old SHEPHERD
reputed father of Perdita
CLOWN
his son
AUTOLYCUS
a rogue
MARINER
GAOLER
HERMIONE
Queen to Leontes
PERDITA
daughter to Leontes and Hermione
PAULINA
wife to Antigonus
EMILIA
a lady attending on Hermione
shepherdesses
Other Lords and Gentlemen, Ladies, Officers, and Servants, Shepherds and Shepherdesses TIME, as Chorus
The Winter’s Tale
1.1 Enter CAMILLO and ARCHIDAMUS.
ARCHIDAMUS If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit
Bohemia, on the like occasion whereon my services are
now on foot, you shall see, as I have said, great
difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia.
CAMILLO I think, this coming summer, the
King of
5
Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the visitation which he
justly owes him.
ARCHIDAMUS Wherein our entertainment shall shame
us: we will be justified in our loves: for indeed –
CAMILLO Beseech you –
10
ARCHIDAMUS Verily I speak it in the freedom of my
knowledge: we cannot with such magnificence – in so
rare – I know not what to say – We will give you sleepy
drinks, that your senses (unintelligent of our
insufficience) may, though they cannot praise us, as
15
little accuse us.
CAMILLO You pay a great deal too dear for what’s given
freely.
ARCHIDAMUS Believe me, I speak as my understanding
instructs me, and as mine honesty puts it to utterance.
20
CAMILLO Sicilia cannot show himself over-kind to
Bohemia. They were trained together in their
childhoods, and there rooted betwixt them then such
an affection which cannot choose but branch now.
Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities
25
made separation of their society, their encounters,
though not personal, have been royally attorneyed
with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies,
that they have seemed to be together, though absent;
shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced, as it were,
30
from the ends of opposed winds. The heavens
continue their loves!
ARCHIDAMUS I think there is not in the world either
malice or matter to alter it. You have an unspeakable
comfort of your young prince Mamillius: it is a
35
gentleman of the greatest promise that ever came into
my note.
CAMILLO I very well agree with you in the hopes of him:
it is a gallant child; one that, indeed, physics the
subject, makes old hearts fresh: they that went on
40
crutches ere he was born desire yet their life to see him
a man.
ARCHIDAMUS Would they else be content to die?
CAMILLO Yes; if there were no other excuse why they
should desire to live.
45
ARCHIDAMUS If the king had no son, they would desire
to live on crutches till he had one. Exeunt.
1.2 Enter LEONTES, HERMIONE, MAMILLIUS, POLIXENES, CAMILLO and attendants.
POLIXENES Nine changes of the watery star hath been
The shepherd’s note since we have left our throne
Without a burden. Time as long again
Would be fill’d up, my brother, with our thanks;
And yet we should, for perpetuity,
5
Go hence in debt: and therefore, like a cipher
(Yet standing in rich place) I multiply
With one ‘We thank you’ many thousands moe
That go before it.
LEONTES Stay your thanks a while,
And pay them when you part.
POLIXENES Sir, that’s to-morrow.
10
I am question’d by my fears, of what may chance
Or breed upon our absence; that may blow
No sneaping winds at home, to make us say
‘This is put forth too truly’. Besides, I have stay’d
To tire your royalty.
LEONTES We are tougher, brother,
15
Than you can put us to’t.
POLIXENES No longer stay.
LEONTES One seve’night longer.
POLIXENES Very sooth, to-morrow.
LEONTES
We’ll part the time between’s then: and in that
I’ll no gainsaying.
POLIXENES Press me not, beseech you, so.
There is no tongue that moves, none, none i’th’ world,
20
So soon as yours, could win me: so it should now,
Were there necessity in your request, although
’Twere needful I denied it. My affairs
Do even drag me homeward: which to hinder
Were (in your love) a whip to me; my stay,
25
To you a charge and trouble: to save both,
Farewell, our brother.
LEONTES Tongue-tied our queen? speak you.
HERMIONE
I had thought, sir, to have held my peace until
You had drawn oaths from him not to stay. You, sir,
Charge him too coldly. Tell him, you are sure
30
All in Bohemia’s well: this satisfaction
The by-gone day proclaim’d: say this to him,
He’s beat from his best ward.
LEONTES Well said, Hermione.
HERMIONE
To tell, he longs to see his son, were strong:
But let him say so then, and let him go;
35
But let him swear so, and he shall not stay,
We’ll thwack him hence with distaffs.
Yet of your royal presence I’ll adventure
The borrow of a week. When at Bohemia
You take my lord, I’ll give him my commission
40
To let him there a month behind the gest
Prefix’d for’s parting: yet, good deed, Leontes
I love thee not a jar o’th’ clock behind
What lady she her lord. You’ll stay?
POLIXENES No, madam.
HERMIONE Nay, but you will?
POLIXENES I may not, verily.
The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works Page 561