This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

  If the historical question of the bear is part of the referential appeal of this familiar stage direction, it also has claims on us that are more closely poetic. Its specific, compressed, epigrammatic quality is key to its quotability. We have heard almost nothing before in the play about bears. There is no corresponding entrance direction for the animal. The indefinite article ‘a’ – ‘Exit pursued by the bear’ would be significantly different, because ‘the’ gives the reassuring sense that we do already know about this animal – introduces a randomness that is either joyful or terrifying or both. The stage direction itself enacts the shock of the theatrical moment. Wait … there’s a bear? Where did that come from? But the real significance of this stage direction is the work it does as part of a cluster of dramaturgical, linguistic and structural effects in the middle of The Winter’s Tale. These effects have one concerted purpose: to wrest the play from the path of tragedy and to pluck a comedy from its darkest reaches. It’s not easy. Rerouting The Winter’s Tale from its tragic groove is a collective effort that is going to require that bear to dig deep for his cameo performance.

  The Winter’s Tale comes right at the end of Shakespeare’s writing career. As we have already seen, Shakespeare has experimented before with the membrane between tragedy and comedy – in the Duke’s comedic commitment to multiple marriages at the end of Measure for Measure, for instance, or in Iago’s queasy, improvisatory plotting in Othello. These earlier generic experiments tend to find their creative possibilities in a mismatch or unevenness of tone. In The Winter’s Tale we get instead a radical swerving away from tragedy into comedy, which requires a rapid series of gear changes in the middle of the play. The first three acts of The Winter’s Tale give us a condensed version of tragedy: Leontes convinces himself that his wife has been unfaithful with his dear friend Polixenes, puts her on trial and sends to Apollo’s oracle for instruction. He banishes their newborn daughter as a bastard. News of the death of his son and his wife brings about the reversal of fortune that Aristotle, in his theory of tragedy, called ‘peripeteia’. Leontes’ story ends with his grief-stricken recognition of his own terrible folly:

  Prithee bring me

  To the dead bodies of my queen and son.

  One grave shall be for both. Upon them shall

  The causes of their death appear, unto

  Our shame perpetual.

  (3.2.233–7)

  So far then, so tragic. We have, at least in outline, a textbook tragedy, in which a man of high status is brought to the destruction of his own family due to his tragic flaw (Aristotle called this ‘hamartia’). Leontes’ hamartia is his irrational jealousy.

  But this perfect tragic play is foreshortened; there is also at least an hour to go. We haven’t yet heard the Shakespearean equivalent of the fat lady singing (or in this case stepping down from her statue pedestal). If the Sicilian portion of The Winter’s Tale is a tragedy, it’s too quick: rather as Leontes’ jealous rage blows up from nowhere, it is all too much, too soon. ‘Too hot, too hot’ (1.2.110), we might say. So, unlike in those previous plays, the tragedy is not the endpoint. In refusing to fade to black on the sorrowful and bereft tragic figure, this play forces us to consider what comes next. What really happens when you’ve screwed up royally, and lost everything because of your own bloody-mindedness? What is it like when, rather than dying majestically (like Othello, for example, ‘upon a kiss’), you are condemned to wake up every day and remember again what you have done? Shakespeare’s tragedies are bleak, to be sure, but their apocalyptic conclusions actually spare us the real unbearable mundanity of grief, guilt and the consequences of our actions.

  In foreshortening its tragic first movement, the play engages with suffering. It also creates space for a potentially more optimistic structure – not the inevitable and unavoidable spiral of tragedy, but a sort of philosophy of the second chance. ‘Tears,’ vows Leontes, ‘Shall be my recreation’ (3.2.238–9). The word here hovers between ‘recreation’ as pastime – I will spend my time now weeping – and also the stronger sense of new possibilities – I will be created anew through tears. We sometimes comfort ourselves by observing of Shakespeare’s tragic characters that they have learned something from their experiences, or grown in humanity, as if tragedy were a kind of Outward Bound personal development course, helping the senior manager King Lear develop a more collaborative leadership style through harsh weather training on the heath. The ameliorative comfort is a bit hollow, though, when it is clear that the reward for these trials of mettle is – to die. What’s the point, we might wonder, in learning through experience if you don’t get the chance to try again and do better next time? Leontes, unlike the early flawed heroes of tragedies, does get a second chance – but he also has to wait for it. (We might be reminded of Samuel Beckett in ‘Worstward Ho’: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’)

  After Leontes realizes the terrible cost of his jealousy, the play needs to regroup. For this to work out, we need to move place, tone, genre, and then time – so the middle of the play sees a number of transitional scenes. The first shifts place – from Sicily, the hot-blooded location of the play’s first half, to its pastoral counterpart, Bohemia. The nobleman Antigonus brings Hermione’s banished baby in a storm to a beach and abandons her there, under Leontes’ instructions. It is here that he leaves, ‘pursued by a bear’. Although admittedly it’s not very funny for Antigonus, the surprise of this moment in the theatre seems most likely to provoke laughter. Modern theatrical representations, from a man in a bear suit, to a shadow projection of a large claw, share this urge: these depictions are funny. The purpose of the stage direction seems to be to shift tone. Antigonus sacrifices himself to the transition between genres: as the last of the play’s deaths, he completes its tragic sequence; as the victim of a slapstick stage trick, he bequeaths to The Winter’s Tale a comic second half. Enter a shepherd, grumbling.

  I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.

  (3.3.58–62)

  This colourful prose registers aurally the shift away from the high tragic poetry of Sicily. In the modern theatre, we almost certainly hear rustic accents (cue more hilarity). The content of this speech is, like comedy itself, about youth, regeneration and rebirth. Addressing his son, who has reported the bear’s meal of an unknown gentleman, the shepherd underlines the generic point: ‘Thou metst with things dying, I with things new-born’ (3.3.110–11). It’s a moment from a fairy tale. The baby is saved, like Moses in the rushes, with all that that promises for the future. When the younger man describes Antigonus’ death in humorous terms – ‘how the poor souls roared, and the sea mocked them, and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him’ (96–8) – the transformation is complete. We have moved place, genre and tone. And in a last shift, we move time.

  In shifting time, the play displays another distinctive dramaturgical experiment. Let’s take The Tempest, the play discussed in this book’s final chapter, as a parallel. Written in the same year as The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest also tells a cross-generational story, in which crimes can only be expiated and recompensed in the next generation: the deposition of Prospero from Milan will take the twelve years before his enemies are brought to his island kingdom; Leontes’ breach with Polixenes can only be healed by the union of their children, Perdita and Florizel. Both plays thus operate as romance stories, involving great tracts of time and space. But in The Tempest, Shakespeare returns to a technique he had attempted only once before, in the early play The Comedy of Errors. He writes a play which complies with the classical aesthetic ideal of the unities of time, place and action. The Tempest unfolds in the same performance time as its story time, telling the story of three decisive hours on the island. This involves Prospero in a lengthy flashback scene in Act 1, a scene that is very difficult to perfor
m effectively because its main purpose is the undramatic one of telling, rather than showing. We hear in narrative form all that we need to know to understand the significance of the forthcoming encounter between the magus and the shipwrecked nobles: it is a reckoning for a story long past, but not forgotten. Theories of narrative call this kind of explication ‘diegesis’ (telling), rather than ‘mimesis’ (showing) (also discussed in Chapter 10 on Julius Caesar).

  In The Winter’s Tale, the same dramatic problem is tackled through mimesis – the scenes of the initial, traumatic event are staged for us rather than being described. Shakespeare brings in the figure of Time to explain the next chapter of the story. Straddling this ‘wide gap’, Time requests that the audience ‘Impute it not a crime / To me or my swift passage that I slide / O’er sixteen years’ (4.1.4–6). Shakespeare translates the dilated spatial and temporal coordinates of the romance genre into drama by invoking this Chorus-like character.

  In the world of art appreciation, the term ‘experimental’ can be a euphemism for ‘incomprehensible’ or just ‘disappointing’. That Shakespeare experiments here doesn’t necessarily mean it works. But the visible effort, the play’s white knuckles as it wrests its generic steering wheel, is revealing. The Winter’s Tale completes its transformations with something like the equivalent of a film title ‘Sixteen years later’: it smooths over a chronological disjunction in the play. The plot is not interested in the girlhood of the baby, nor her life among her adopted family. We resume the story and turn back to this girl, Perdita, just as she is on the brink of adulthood and available for the comic Shakespearean destiny of single females: courtship.

  The second half of the play introduces an entirely new cast – although they would, of course, almost certainly be the same actors doubling in new roles, which can help us make some suggestive connections between the two halves of the play. Does the same actor play Mamilius and Perdita, Leontes’ two children who never appear together, for example? Or Mamilius and Florizel? Is Leontes somewhere in Bohemia, playing a different role? The scene in Bohemia is a lengthy one, whose main purpose seems to be to insulate the tragic first part – to put some distance between us and the accelerated trauma of the Sicilian scenes. The tone is festive, and the stress is on fruitfulness and comic plenty, rather than the ‘sad tale’ ‘best for winter’ (2.1.27) in Leontes’ emotionally icy court. But here, too, genre is not entirely transparent. Polixenes’ fury on hearing of his princely son’s entanglement with an apparently unworthy woman sounds an uncomic note – or perhaps he is just unfamiliar with the genre. He obviously doesn’t know that in a romance, when a prince falls in love with a shepherdess, she always turns out to be a lost or disguised princess after all; he is like those hapless suitors in The Merchant of Venice, who must be the only people in the world not to have got the fairy-tale memo stating that the gold and silver caskets are never what they seem.

  Having turned the play towards pastoral comedy, Shakespeare still has his work cut out to deliver a happy ending. As so often, there’s a disobliging source text lurking in the play’s unconscious and resisting complete reinvention. Here it’s a twenty-year-old prose romance by Robert Greene called Pandosto: The Triumph of Time (1588) which ends in a rather different way. In Greene’s Pandosto (it’s named after the Leontes equivalent, but in this description I’ll stick with Shakespeare’s names), when Florizel and Perdita arrive, unrecognized, at Leontes’ court, the king, ‘contrary to his aged years, [begins] to be somewhat tickled’ with her beauty. His ‘frantic affection’ for her grows, despite his efforts to deny it. Perdita, however, rejects his advances summarily: ‘I had rather be [Florizel’s] wife and a beggar, than live in plenty and be [Leontes’] concubine.’ Greene’s original Leontes, ‘broiling at the heat of unlawful lust’, has Florizel imprisoned. Hearing of this, Polixenes commands him to kill Perdita as an unworthy bride, but before this can be enacted, the Old Shepherd, Perdita’s foster-father, reveals the jewels and seal found with her, and Leontes recognizes her as his lost daughter. All seems to be reconciled, but Leontes cannot enter into the rejoicing and marriage celebrations, ‘(calling to mind how first he betrayed his friend [Polixenes], how his jealousy was the cause of [Hermione’s] death, that contrary to the law of nature he had lusted after his own daughter) moved with these desperate thoughts, he fell in a melancholy fit, and to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem, he slew himself.’

  Greene’s phrasing is interesting: in his story, Leontes’ death turns a comedy into a tragedy – and perhaps this gave Shakespeare the spur to reverse it, and to turn a tragedy into a comedy. By keeping Leontes alive at the end, by miraculously returning Hermione to him, and by evading the issue of a king’s incestuous desire for his unrecognized daughter, Shakespeare grapples the tragedy of the opening acts into an apparently comic redemption for both generations. But we might look a little more closely at what is going on in the play, to see the faint but undeniable outline of those darker forces.

  Shakespeare’s late plays, including The Winter’s Tale, are preoccupied with the relationship between fathers and adult or near-adult daughters. It’s arguable that all these relationships bear the traces of incestuous paternal desire. So, Prospero in The Tempest responds aggressively to any threat to Miranda’s chastity, be it from the despised Caliban or the preferred Prince Ferdinand. In Cymbeline the wicked stepmother is jealous of the king’s natural daughter Innogen, and contrives to alienate them from one another. And most prominently, Pericles begins with an explicit scene of father–daughter incest at Antioch. Presenting himself as a suitor to the king’s daughter, Pericles has to answer her riddle in order to win her hand:

  I am no viper, yet I feed

  On mother’s flesh which did me breed.

  I sought a husband, in which labour

  I found that kindness in a father.

  He’s father, son, and husband mild;

  I mother, wife, and yet his child.

  How this may be and yet in two,

  As you will live resolve it you

  (Scene 1, 107–14)

  It’s not, unfortunately, rocket science. But Pericles’ fear for his own life means he can neither confront the abuse, nor refuse to answer the riddle. Instead he escapes, and is condemned to a long series of sea voyages, at the end of which he is reunited with his own lost daughter, Marina, who is another sexual anomaly: a chaste prostitute who has brought one of the brothel’s clients, the governor of Mytilene, to repent his ways and propose marriage to her.

  We know, then, that Shakespeare’s long interest in father–daughter relationships – from comedies such as As You Like It or The Merchant of Venice via King Lear and Othello – reaches a particular intensity in these late plays. But we also know that, reading Greene’s Pandosto, Shakespeare has chosen to omit this dynamic between Leontes and Perdita (as in the changes to the source discussed in the chapter on Coriolanus, this looks like the allure of authorial intention). Or at least, he has structured the play to suppress – or perhaps, as a more psychoanalytical vocabulary might put it, to sublimate – incestuous desire. If we read carefully, however, we might still read Leontes’ first encounter with the adult Perdita as marked by this taboo. The young couple’s entrance follows a discussion between Leontes and Paulina about Hermione’s beauty, in which Paulina extracts from the king a promise that he will not remarry without her permission. When he sees Perdita, then, Leontes’ mind is on his queen, but he is full of praise for the young bride’s beauty, and tells Florizel he is ‘sorry / Your choice is not so rich in worth as beauty’ (5.1.212–13). When Florizel says that his father will grant Leontes anything, the king’s hypothetical wish is not for the couple’s marriage but for himself: ‘I’d beg your precious mistress’ (222), which earns from Paulina the remonstrance, ‘Your eye hath too much youth in’t’ (224).

  There is no further discussion between father and daughter. It is almost as if the play stares into the face of Pandosto’s incestuous desires from Greene’s source st
ory, and is too frightened to go further. The scene in which Leontes recognizes Perdita as his daughter is recounted, not shown – in a play so structured around the visual, it is an interesting cut-away to telling. And most extraordinarily of all, and entirely without precedent in the source, Hermione is revealed to be alive. She returns to claim Leontes, to mop up that ‘youth’ in his eyes, to divert sexual desire back into marriage and away from incest. Perhaps Hermione is revivified at the play’s conclusion precisely to interrupt Greene’s incest narrative.

  Lest this seem an improbable reading, let’s look at the way Shakespeare structures his ending, particularly in relation to his previous plays. The Winter’s Tale is the only play by Shakespeare which has an unforeseen twist – we do not know that Hermione will return. This is distinctly different from his usual dramaturgy – perhaps one of the reasons Shakespeare is so popular is that he makes us, the audience, feel smart: his plays are crucially dependent on dramatic irony, the technique by which audiences know more than the characters on stage. We know that both sets of twins are hurtling around Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors, even though it takes a while for the Antipholuses and Dromios to work it out. Much of our pleasure in the play derives from watching the comic misunderstandings proceeding from their ignorance, from the comfortable position of superior knowledge. We know that Viola in Twelfth Night and Rosalind in As You Like It are women disguised as men; we know that Iago means no good to Othello; we know that Macbeth has killed Duncan; we know that those feisty merry wives are playing a trick on their Windsor husbands. The plays are always structured to put us ahead of the game.