The Winter's Tale

"The Winter's Tale" is a hybrid of romance and tragicomedy, first performed in 1611. Shakespeare based the play on Robert Greene's 1588 prose romance "Pandosto: The Triumph of Time" but he was also influenced by a tale in Ovid's "Metamorphosis" in which Pygmalion's statue comes to life. It is important to remember that the play does not begin in the regenerative world of romance. It is only in the second half, when there is a redemptive movement from court to country that allows the plot to shift toward a happy resolution. It is therefore, a great shame that directors sometimes excise the pastoral Act IV when the play is put into production.

King Polixenes of Bohemia is visiting his childhood friend King Leontes of Sicilia. All seems idyllic enough, until Leontes becomes unhinged with suspicion that he is a cuckolded husband. He fantasizes that his heavily pregnant wife, Hermione, and Polixenes are conducting an affair right under his nose. It is Leontes's lord Camillio who warns Polixenes that Leontes wants to poison him for this imagined transgression. Polixenes and Hermione are innocent of the crime, but while Polixenes manages to escape with help from Camillio, Hermione must endure.

Upon discovering Camillio's sympathies for Polixenes, Leontes concludes that Camillio must have been in Polixenes's pay from the beginning. He angrily accuses Hermione of being pregnant with Polixenes's child. The lords of Sicilia plead with their mad king that the queen is innocent but the king is certain that he is right. Antigonus is the most vociferous defender of the queen out of the lords. His wife, Paulina, visits Hermione in prison. Hermione has given birth to a beautiful baby girl. Paulina decides to bring the child to the king, hoping that the sight of the child will release the king from his madness. Her plan backfires. Instead, the king is infuriated by the sight of the baby. Leontes orders Antigonus to abandon the baby in the wilderness.

In Act three, a trial for Hermione's crime/innocence is held. Leontes convenes a court with himself self-appointed as the judge. Hermione defends herself eloquently but Leontes is unmoved, declares her guilty and decrees the punishment is death. An officer reads a message from the oracle that proclaims Hermione's innocence and Leontes's tyranny. Leontes is convinced the message is a falsehood. A servant rushes into the assembly with the news that Mamillius, Hermione and Leontes's only son has died from fear and worry of the queen's fate. Hermione faints and is taken away. Paulina informs Leontes that Hermione too has died and that he murdered her. Leontes comes out of his madness to be grief-stricken, and says: "lead me/ To these sorrows" (III.ii). Meanwhile, Antigonus has arrived on the Bohemian coast with the princess. He talks about a dream he had in which Hermione tells him to name her daughter Perdita, and declares he will never see his wife or home again. He lays the infant down in the woods with a note and some jewels. Shakespeare's most famous stage direction appears: Exit, pursued by a bear. A Shepherd and his son, Clown, chance by the baby and vow to take care of her. As they converse, we learn that Antigonus was finished by the bear.

Time comes on stage to announce that sixteen years have passed. The scene then shifts to Polixenes's castle in Bohemia. Polixenes and Camillo discuss Polixenes's son Florizel, who has been spending much time at the house of a wealthy shepherd whose daughter is reputed to being a great beauty. Polixenes wants to visit this house in a disguise to spy on his son Florizel. Meanwhile, in the Bohemian countryside, Clown's pockets are picked by a professional thief, Autolycus. The king denounces his son for courting a low-born shepherdess. Florizel and Perdita flee to Sicilia with Camillo's assistance. The shepherd and clown follow, bringing with them artifacts that will reveal Perdita's true identity. The reconciliation between Leontes and Perdita is detailed in a conversation between two nobles. Paulina reveals a statue of Hermione. Leontes is entranced. "Still, methinks," he says, "There is an air comes from her. What fine chisel/ Could ever yet cut breath?" (V. iii. 91-3). Wondrously, the statue comes to life and embraces the king. A royal family is happily reunited.

In a play that exists in the space between the two poles of reality and illusion, the narrative takes on a kind of metamorphosis. And since a metamorphosis is a kind of translation, Hermione's reawakening, is the translation of art into life. There is also the debate between Polixenes and Perdita in Act four scene four about nature versus art. Both are concerned with what is natural, and what can claim legitimacy. Earlier in the play, there is much made at court of the tyranny of the mad king. The playwright seemed interested in the relationships surrounding absolute power, with its potential to turn to tyranny. In the role of Paulina, a wise counselor, Shakespeare poses the question: how far can an advisor go in speaking truths that the ruler may not want to hear? The journey of Leontes's heart, hardened as it is at the start of the play, to when it melts at the end of it, is metaphorically projected in Hermione's states of being throughout the play. At the trial, she told him, "My life stands in the level of your dreams" (III. ii. 81).

The Royal Shakespeare Company, in one production of the play, used a large silk sheet to create shapes that symbolized the bear and the wind that Antigonus was travelling in. The most famous "The Winter's Tale" performance of the twentieth century was staged in London in 1951, directed by Peter Brook with John Gielgud as Leontes. A 1946 Broadway production starred Henry Daniell and Jessie Royce Landis. In 1980, director David Jones launched his new theater company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with this very play. It starred Brian Murray. Riverside Shakespeare Company took on the First Folio version of the play and mounted a production at Manhattan's The Shakespeare Center in 1983. Director W. Stuart McDowell decided to answer who the unidentified man in Mamillius's story was. The concept arose from the moment in the First Folio when Mamillius is asked to tell a tale and the boy responds: "There was a man…dwelt by a Church-yard…" In McDowell's interpretation of these eight words, the lines prophesy Leontes will someday dwell by a graveyard, grieving the passing of Hermione and Mamillius. BBC made a television version in 1981. It was directed by Jane Howell and starred Jeremy Kemp as Leontes. There is a 1968 film version starring Laurence Harvey as Leontes. Dougray Scott will play Leontes in a film that is scheduled to be released in 2009 under the direction of Waris Hussein.