Retelling the Tale

Comic and tragic, epic and intimate, William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is a patchwork of contradictions. Ever since John Dryden complained in 1672 that “the Comedy neither caus’d your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment,” the play has confounded critics’ attempts to sweep Shakespeare’s plays into tidy genres. In 1877 Edward Dowden grouped The Winter’s Tale with The Tempest and Pericles as “The Late Romances,” an appellation that raises as many stylistic questions as it answers, while in 1922 Lyton Strachey, despairing of the whole question of genre, declared that Shakespeare can only have been bored while writing the play: “He is no longer interested, one often feels, in what happens, or who says what, so long as he can find place for a faultless lyric, or a new unimagined rhythmic effect, or a grand and mystic speech.”

Literary critics may condemn the text’s apparent lack of tonal and thematic unity, but the enigmas of The Winter’s Tale are a magnet for imaginative theater directors, and the play has long stood at the vanguard of theatrical innovation. The primary challenge is one of structure: the first three acts dramatize Leontes’ fatal jealousy with a compression and speed unmatched in Shakespeare, while the pastoral fourth act slows to a leisurely crawl–at more than eight hundred lines, the cheerful sheep-shearing festival is one of the longest scenes ever written and, uncut, can try the patience of the most docile audience after the white-knuckle thrills of Sicilia.

Until the early nineteenth century, English actor-managers applied rough justice to The Winter’s Tale, excising the scenes set in Leontes’ court and presenting only the gentler episodes of Bohemia in an attempt to repair what they saw as the play’s faulty structure. In 1757 audiences could choose whether to watch David Garrick’s Florizel and Perdita, a Dramatic Pastoral at Drury Lane, or Macnamara Morgan’s The Sheep-Shearing, or Florizel and Perdita at the rival Covent Garden Theatre. Morgan’s version even omitted the now-famous statue scene, which a contemporary critic had dismissed as “childish,” adding that “reason operates too strongly against the incident, and our passions subside into calmness and inactivity.”

In 1811, the great actor-manager John Philip Kemble restored most of Shakespeare’s text in a production that ran for several years at Covent Garden to popular (if not always critical) acclaim. Mrs. Siddons, Kemble’s sister and the most famous actress of her generation, played Hermione with “unbending and freezing dignity,” according to a review in The Times. True to the fashion of the day, Kemble filled his vast stage with countless props and pieces of scenery, including a replica of the coronation throne in Westminster Abbey, a full-scale Court of Justice, and a shepherd’s cottage complete with arbor and lawn.

Kemble’s production, though lavish, was by no means the grandest of the century. In 1856 the actor Charles Kean staged The Winter’s Tale as an extravaganza that tested the limits of contemporary stagecraft. With a precision that now seems pedantic given Shakespeare’s obvious disregard for geographic and historical accuracy, Kean set the first three acts of the play in 330 B.C. at Syracuse, Sicily, and used every scrap of archeological evidence available in decorating the stage. A reviewer for The Times recorded that the second scene alone, set in a “splendid hall supported by figures of Canephorae” contained “musicians playing the ‘Hymn to Apollo’ on lyres of antique form” and cup-bearers enacting “all the mysteries of wine-making . . . The banquets of the luxurious ancients were enlivened by dances, so here is an opportunity for introducing the warlike Pyrrhic dance . . . Three dozen ladies of the corps de ballet, attired in glittering armour as youthful warriors, go through all the mazes of Terpsichorean strife, in the course of which occurs a group representing a scene of victory and death that might have been copied from some ancient freeze.”

Kean’s Winter’s Tale set the standard for grand Victorian productions of Shakespeare. Theaters, vying to produce ever more extravagant spectacles, concerned themselves with archeological rather than textual fidelity. A playbill for a mid-century King John announced that each actor would appear “in the precise habit of the period, the whole of the dresses and decorations being executed from indisputable authorities, such as monumental effigies, seals, illuminated MSS., &c.” Audiences, dazzled by the intricate illusion of reality, came for the pageant rather than the play; few seem to have minded that the text and performances were almost stifled by the mass of historical detail. Only the critic for the Daily News noticed this imbalance and lamented that the “very splendour and beauty” of Kean’s Winter’s Tale gave “the predominance to the scene painter, the carpenter, and the dressmaker, throwing Shakespeare, his characters, and those who represent them into the background.”

Artistic fashion swings like a pendulum, and it was inevitable for financial as well as aesthetic reasons that theaters would eventually seek an alternative to the costly, spectacular realism of the nineteenth century. Two productions in particular marked the change: in London a Hamlet staged by William Poel in 1881, and in New York a Winter’s Tale directed by Winthrop Ames at the New Theatre in 1910. Both Poel and Ames replaced the grand illusion of the Victorian stage with a simple, Elizabethan setting that attempted to reproduce the theatrical style of Shakespeare’s day. Somber tunics, curtains, and benches replaced glittering costumes and trompe l’oeil sets, and, for almost the first time in three hundred years, audiences were encouraged to listen to the verse and engage their imaginations while watching the actors perform on a virtually bare stage.

Though our understanding of Elizabethan stagecraft has advanced considerably over the past century, and photographs of Ames’ production of The Winter’s Tale now appear mannered and naïve, the importance of the artistic revolution it represents should not be underestimated. Poel and Ames understood that the huge, picture-box prosceniums of the nineteenth century destroyed the intimate relationship between performer and spectator that was crucial to the immediacy of Elizabethan theater. They designed fore-stages that restored the actors’ proximity to their audience) paving the way for such experiments in theatre design as the Loeb Drama Center’s flexible thrust stage). George Bernard Shaw, a young critic who had yet to have his first play produced when he saw Poel’s Hamlet, later wrote: “The more I see of these performances, the more I am convinced that their method of presenting an Elizabethan play is not only the right method for that particular sort of play but that any play performed on a platform amidst the audience gets closer home to its hearers than when it is presented as a picture framed by a proscenium. Also, that we are less conscious of the artificiality of the stage when a few well-understood conventions, adroitly handled, are substituted for attempts at an impossible scenic verisimilitude.”

Shaw was equally enthusiastic about the next experimental Winter’s Tale, a production directed in 1912 by the impresario and playwright Harley Granville-Barker at the Savoy Theatre in London. Barker’s aesthetic owed much to the simplicity of the new Elizabethan style, as well as to the contemporary “art pour l’art” movement, exemplified by Léon Bakst’s costume designs for the Ballets Russes. Barker’s scenic design was elegant and abstract–a line of pure white columns for the Sicilian court, a hint of leaves on a curtain for Bohemia–and he adopted the most recent advances in stage lighting to create atmosphere by mixing color, rather than flooding the stage with harsh footlights.

The novelty of Barker’s technique lay in the demands he placed on the imaginative powers of his audience; he presented The Winter’s Tale in a self-consciously non-realistic, impressionist environment, that forced the to work hard to interpret what they saw. Several critics complained about the innovations, although Bernard Shaw, ever Barker’s champion, answered that it wasn’t the production they disliked–it was Shakespeare himself, whom they were seeing clearly for the first time. By stripping away the cluttered detail of Victorian literalism, Barker forced his audience into a direct confrontation with the language, images, and characters of Shakespeare’s play.

Barker went on to stage similarly radical productions of Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and is now remembered as one of the twentieth century’s leading innovators. So great was his impact on the performance of Shakespeare that when Peter Brook staged The Winter’s Tale at London’s Phoenix Theatre in 1951, audiences had come to regard abstract, anachronistic productions as the norm.

Like Barker, Brook chose The Winter’s Tale as one of his first major encounters with Shakespeare–almost two decades before his more famous productions of King Lear and A Midsummer Night’s Dream–perhaps because the play was still relatively unknown on the stage. He assembled a powerful cast, including John Gielgud as Leontes, Diana Wynyard as Hermione, and Flora Robson as Paulina, and presented the play in a minimalist setting that emphasized the quality of his actors. A cluster of arches served to represent, with only minor adjustments, both Leontes’ palace and the Bohemian countryside. The production was a great public success and ran for 167 performances–the longest uninterrupted run of The Winter’s Tale ever recorded.

The second half of the twentieth century brought few major innovations to English and American interpretations of The Winter’s Tale, though the play continued to flourish in translation. One of the most lauded recent productions was that of Ingmar Bergman with the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, which toured to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1995. Bergman attempted to solve the play’s structural conundrum by presenting Shakespeare’s text within a framing narrative: the curtain rose not on Leontes’ Sicilian palace but on a nineteenth-century Swedish manor house, where a birthday party was in progress, and the play was announced as part of the festivities. In 1998 the English director Declan Donnellan staged a minimalist production in Russian at the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg, one of the world’s finest resident companies, where hitherto all productions had been directed by the Artistic Director Lev Dodin.

As a glance at the play’s history shows, a production of The Winter’s Tale is often an occasion for theatrical innovation and a reminder that artistic tastes and styles are in continual flux. From at least two perspectives, the A.R.T.’s upcoming production is a milestone: for Slobodan Unkovski it is the first of Shakespeare’s plays he has directed in English; for the A.R.T. it is the theater’s first Shakespeare production of the twenty-first century.

Gideon Lester is the American Repertory Theater’s Resident Dramaturg.