Reconstructing The Winter’s Tale

Summary

Perhaps William Butler Yeats anticipated the arrival of the post-modernist movement called deconstruction in his splendid poem, ‘Lapis Lazuli’. After all, the carved Chinese stone that he received from Harry Clifton contains not only a scene suggestive of the journey of life and the role of art amidst all the tragedy, but

Every discoloration of the stone,

Every accidental crack or dent,

Seems a water-course or an avalanche ...

In other words, as in deconstructionist doctrine, the work of art contains the elements of its own undoing. A critic who patiently ‘teases out’ the contradictory aspects of any piece of literature, especially the way in which the rhetoric works against the overt statement, can show how the meaning is subverted, just as the crack in the lapis lazuli threatens to destroy the carving. In fact, no critic is needed. Eventually the work will deconstruct itself; even individual words are forever engaged in the process of their own subversion as new meanings develop, new texts are brought to bear on old ones, and the stream of language constantly shifts. Deconstruction may indeed be a very elaborate way of insisting on a Heraclitean view of life and language.

The great flux of decay and re-creation of meaning is nowhere more evident than in the stage history of Shakespearian drama since mid-century. Anyone who has sampled the vast variety of productions of Shakespeare in that period is intensely aware of the purposeful assaults on the old doublet-and-hose meanings that go against all previous interpretations. Happily Shakespeare has been strong enough not only to withstand such reshaping but to return, like the mythological hero he has become, revitalized. I am reminded particularly of the Michael Bogdanov production of The Taming of the Shrew (1978, 1979) by the Royal Shakespeare Company with Jonathan Pryce and Paola Dionisotti, which turned the play into a feminist tract with exceptional skill and ingenuity.