The Winter's Tale - an introduction

Mr Anthony

NB: The following essay contains plot spoilers regarding the play’s ending. 
 
The Winter’s Tale is a play about a man who believes a lie of his own making and is outraged when others won’t believe it too. Leontes’s confidence in his wife’s infidelity is, unlike Othello’s, entirely self-generated; indeed, Emilia’s famed description of jealousy as 'a monster begot upon itself, born on itself' is more fitting of Leontes’s condition than that of Othello, who requires three acts of careful priming by Iago before exploding with the ferocity Leontes achieves in his first scene. The refusal of Leontes’s court to support the false narrative of Hermione’s adultery reveals a political microclimate (unusual in Jacobean theatre) devoid of sycophants and schemers, devoted instead to truth and plain speaking.

Yet if honesty were the benchmark of goodness, two thirds of the play’s characters would fall short: Camillo falsely assures Leontes he will assassinate Polixenes; Antigonus’s decision to leave identifying papers and a considerable sum of money in Perdita’s basket is not fully in accord with his sworn oath to abandon the baby 'to its own protection and favour of the clime'; Autolycus, as a professional rogue, is a past master of the tall tale; Florizel and Perdita’s courtship requires a prolonged deception of their respective fathers (prompting Polixenes to employ disguise as a means of unveiling the truth); on arrival at Leontes’s court, Florizel (at Camillo’s prompting) delivers a cock and bull story par excellence; and, in one of theatre’s most audacious denouements, Paulina is discovered to have been lying about the death of her mistress for the past sixteen years. 

 
A great swathe of deception is needed, it seems, to heal a universe torn asunder by one terrible lie. In The Winter’s Tale, morality is made muddy by the positioning of truth and falsehood not as a hierarchical binary, but as a necessary blend. For a playwright who began his career aping a model of tragedy steeped in Greek didacticism, his final masterpiece is surprising in its commitment to ambiguity. In its climactic scene alone, the reunion of the two kings is tempered with loss ('a notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder could not say if th’ importance were joy or sorrow'), Paulina admits her pursuit of justice was morally culpable ('What I did not well, I meant well') and the sight of Hermione’s ‘statue’ stirs both longing and guilt in Leontes  ('There’s magic in thy majesty, which has my evils conjur’d to remembrance'). Hermione’s final ‘resurrection’ conflates past and present, art and life, in a spectacle so giddy it all but defies explanation ('Were it but told you, [it] should be hooted at like an old tale'). Derrida wrote that 'it is this longing for a centre, an authorising presence, that spawns hierarchical oppositions'; in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare seems determined to abdicate his authorising presence by swerving any conclusive moral, emotional or tonal stance. 
 

Jacques Derrida - quite possibly reading The Winter's Tale

Indeed, the play’s most fruitful interplay of opposites lies in its genre-defying structure. Most tragedies permit comic relief (the porter in Macbeth, the fool in King Lear) and several comedies house a tragic stowaway (Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice), but these are mere interludes: the fool cannot prevent Lear’s downfall, whilst Portia is impervious to Shylock’s suffering. However, in The Winter’s Tale, tragedy disrupts the confidence of comedy, whilst comedy heals the wounds of tragedy. The play is a diptych (hinged on the stage direction 'Exit, pursued by a bear'), presenting two independent images which reflect, challenge and extend interpretation of the other. Sicilia, its urbane court stifled by grief, is a world apart from the raucous fecundity of Bohemia. Yet in this pastoral idyll, Polixenes tramples on his son’s budding romance with a tyranny unwitnessed outside Sicilia, whilst the arrival of Florizel and Perdita at the court of Leontes reignites in the king concepts of love and hope long forgotten. Each location lends perspective on the other, showing us how, as W H Auden put it, suffering 'takes place while someone else is eating or opening a window'. 
 

David Hockney drawing W H Auden (photo: Peter Schlesinger)

Such geographical and tonal variety presents design challenges. In choosing to transpose Sicilia to 1970s California, I was inspired by David Hockney’s swimming pools and the society photography of Slim Aarons, each depicting an atmosphere of organised glamour, doused in sunlight and pastel shades: a canvas both dignified and benign, on which Leontes’s outbursts should appear a gross aberration. The resultant passage of sixteen years dictated a 1980s aesthetic for Bohemia and, inspired by a lifelong love of Dolly Parton, a trailer park on the outskirts of her beloved Tennessee seemed a fitting locale for the vibrancy, sexuality and optimism of the play’s second half. For successfully combining these opposing worlds in a single, composite set (and one which can smoothly reverse itself from Bohemia to Sicilia in the final scenes of Act Two), I must thank our designer, Raphaella Philcox, for her imagination and ingenuity. 

Before unveiling Hermione’s ‘statue’, Paulina informs the assembled company: 'It is requir’d you do awake your faith'. She speaks not of religious faith per se but of the ability to exist comfortably, enthusiastically even, in an equivocal space, a space where meaning is multiple and perspective ever changing. Such an existence requires humility, the courage to see oneself in a wider context, a quality The Winter’s Tale continually reinforces. Perhaps Dolly Parton (with uncanny echoes of W H Auden) said it best, in her 1977 hit ‘Two Doors Down’:

 
Two doors down they’re laughing and drinking and having a party.
Two doors down they’re not aware that I’m around.
Cause here I am crying my heart out, feeling sorry, while
They’re having a party just two doors down. 

You can watch the trailer for The Winter's Tale here.