Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale: Analysis, Criticism, and Interpretations
The Winter’s Tale
2 Jacobean Shakespeare
– The mature, final, most artistic style of Shakespeare’s plays
– Dramatic maturity and theatrical crowning of his career
– Shakespeare at his best.
– It implies previous developments and dramatic experiments
3 The Winter’s Tale
Together with The Tempest, Cymbeline, and Pericles, it is generally referred to as one of Shakespeare’s late final plays or romances. They were written between 1608 and 1611. They share several characteristics:
– A child who is lost is found again
– Fantastic plots, magic events, and exotic locations (the same exotic contexts are used in The Winter’s Tale and his final plays)
– At the end of the play, there is regeneration, restoration, and forgiveness
– They dramatize broken families who are finally reunited.
The Winter’s Tale is a confusing and complex play. It’s neither a tragedy nor a comedy, though it contains tragic and comic elements.
– The first three acts are filled with intense psychological drama
– It was possibly written in 1610 or 1611. First published in the First Folio 1623 as a comedy
– The earliest recorded performance was at Court on November 5, 1611
Characters
– Leontes: The King of Sicilia and the childhood friend of the Bohemian King Polixenes. He is gripped by jealous fantasies, which convince him that Polixenes has been having an affair with his wife, Hermione; his jealousy leads to the destruction of his family.
– Hermione: The virtuous and beautiful Queen of Sicilia. Falsely accused of infidelity by her husband, Leontes, she apparently dies of grief just after being vindicated by the Oracle of Delphi but is restored to life at the play’s close.
– Perdita: The daughter of Leontes and Hermione. Because her father believes her to be illegitimate, she is abandoned as a baby on the coast of Bohemia and brought up by a Shepherd. Unaware of her royal lineage, she falls in love with the Bohemian Prince Florizel.
– Polixenes: The King of Bohemia and Leontes’s boyhood friend. He is falsely accused of having an affair with Leontes’s wife and barely escapes Sicilia with his life. Much later in life, he sees his only son fall in love with a lowly Shepherd’s daughter, who is, in fact, Perdita.
– Florizel: Polixenes’s only son and…
Critics’ Forum
The Winter’s Tale has received a mixed reception from critics, directors, and reviewers. Some feel that Shakespeare’s creative powers were failing. Others see a mature writer unafraid to experiment with dramatic form, even at this stage of his career.
[The play]…has all the fascination of a daring experiment, devised by the subtlest of artists in extending the domain of his art…a genuine diptych in construction. It is made up of two plays, the first a tragedy and the second a comedy, so jointed in the middle as to produce a final result that belongs equally to each…an experiment in dramatic art, may fairly be regarded as among the boldest and most conspicuous feats of his genius.
The Winter’s Tale is a typically romantic drama, a winter’s dream, when nights are longest, constructed in defiance of probabilities, which it rides over happily. It has all the license and it has all the charm of a fairy tale, while the matters of which it treats are often serious enough, ready to become tragic at any moment, and with much of real tragedy in them as it is. The principal charm in The Winter’s Tale, its real power over the sources of delight, lies in the two women, true mother and daughter, whose fortunes we see at certain moments, the really important crises of their lives…The end, certainly, is reconciliation, mercy—mercy extended even to the unworthy, in a spirit of something more than mere justice.
Leontes is in a destructive nightmare, ‘performed’ in a ‘wide gap of time’. Spring breaks through the grip of winter, love returns, enabling Leontes to awake his faith and be redeemed. Shakespeare absolves the gods of all failure; the responsibility is in us, the faith demanded is faith in ourselves.
Trevor Nunn pompously interprets this popular nonsense as some profound allegory about a search for love through suffering and ultimate redemption. I suggest the Bard would have had hilarious hysterics at such an interpretation.
I believe the resolution and forgiveness and the happy ending are extremely fragile. I don’t say it isn’t going to go on, but it needs more work…There are some things you’ve got to forget in order to relive. ‘Hastily lead away’ – Why does he want to go hastily? Why does he, as the king, ask others to lead? Also, it’s not a rhyming couplet. It is a suspended end… It’s a question mark.
The fact that Hermione never speaks to Leontes in the final scene has often seemed disturbing. But…what could she possibly say? What she does offer Leontes, before they embrace, is both easier and more important than words. Once again, the Emperor of Russia’s daughter takes the hand of the Sicilian king. The contract this time is initiated by her. It is also made (as it was not before) in perfect silence…Hermione’s voiceless hand—tendered and accepted—seals a promise for the future, and a full consent. Judged by realistic standards, the [statue] episode in The Winter’s Tale is absurd…But by this stage in the play, we know we are not watching realistic drama, and if we have accepted the conventions in which the play is written and responded to its poetry of both language and action, we shall experience this scene as the inevitable if unexpected conclusion of all that has gone before.
Outstanding Topics
The Destructive Nature of Jealousy
Repentance and Regeneration
Everything comes to a happy end. After the death of his son and his wife, Leontes’ jealousy changes to deep sorrow and repentance. Abrupt change. Regeneration occurs in Bohemia’s spring. Death is overcome and changed into rebirth as Hermione and Perdita live again.
Faith and Religion
A Christian play. Religious overtones. Spiritual journey. As Roman Catholicism continued to play a vital role in the culture of 17th century England, the play can be regarded as a defense of traditional Catholic pastimes.
Fidelity of Women
As shown by the three major female characters. For Leontes, all women are sexually unfaithful. He blames the temptation of women for his fall. For Jankowski, there is a Lesbian relation between Paulina and Hermione. She raises the possibility that Hermione was cared for and attended to by Paulina. She attended to all of Hermione’s needs while she was in the “removed house” as a secure place where a woman could engage in an erotic relation with another woman without arousing suspicion. It is a highly feminist play. Importance of women, new female identity.
Time
Joy and Celebration
Can Hermione’s marriage return to the same basis of trust as before Leontes’ jealousy?
James A. Knapp: (Shakespeare Quarterly vol. 55, 3/2004)
– The indeterminacy of both art and life. It means that life is open to surprise, to miracles.
– Everything unexpected is possible.
– Choice between certitude and openness. Openness in the way we should approach the play. Life is not only what we see, there is something beyond that.
– The theme of redemption. It is also important because it is what we see in the case of Leontes.
Eric Rohmer’s Conte d’hiver (1992)
– The unexpected as ordinary experience
– A tale of the unexpected
– Disowning knowledge (Stanley Cavell). The answer to skepticism. A revelation
– Going to church. No words. Something magic. “Je flote”
– Going to the theatre