Chapter 2 - From Madness to Miracle: An Encounter with Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale

Summary

The first time I saw a performance of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale, I felt cheated. It's not as if the playwright had not done this before: we never do know what motivated Iago, despite the grab bag of possibilities he offers. And, with Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, we never know why he is so sad. But this time, my displeasure was too strong to ignore: Leontes, who would appear to have had a loving relationship with his wife, now decides that Hermione has been unfaithful, his “proof” her “paddling palms” with Polixenes and her success at persuading her husband's long-time friend to stay. Leontes’ jealousy seemed so sudden—and so unlikely. Was the world's greatest playwright getting lazy, simply telling us that Leontes had become insanely jealous but not troubling himself to dramatize what got him there? Was this literary license, or had the playwright decided, late in his career, that he no longer had to justify his characters’ feelings and deeds? For years, Leontes’ unexplained jealousy and its dire consequences kept me from appreciating the wonder of this play.

I suppose I could have avoided productions of The Winter's Tale, but back in the eighties I was co-editor of Shakespeare Bulletin and felt I should see every production within reach. In the early years of my 20-year editorship, I saw a number of Winter's Tales, but each new production only reinforced my distrust of Shakespeare. Now I was fretting over the playwright's imperfections: There was no seacoast in Bohemia (or so I thought), and I wasn't sure that Bohemia had bears. And so much else was unbelievable: Where, for example, had Hermione been those 16 years? I knew I was ruining my relationship with Will when, instead of being moved to tears by Paulina's command to the statue—“descend; be stone no more”—I found myself moaning, “Oh, you want too much.”

In the eighties, directors were struggling with how to stage Leontes’ jealousy. How could the actor play his jealousy when Shakespeare didn't bother to let us know why he was jealous? I recalled Gitta Honegger's production at the Yale Rep, which began with an interpolated scene.