The Winter's Tale

"The Winter’s Tale , again, is a play that I’ve been associated with for a long time. I edited the text for my Oxford Complete Works edition. The Winter’s Tale is complex. I saw it long ago when John Gielgud was in it as was Sybil Thorndike’s husband, Lewis Casson. It’s a great acting play. I’ve just seen it again recently with Ken Branagh. I saw it earlier in the 70s when Judi Dench played both Hermione and Perdita—she doubled as both mother and daughter. I remember her saying that when Trevor Nunn asked her to play Hermione, the mother of Perdita, she said, ‘Oh dear, is it mums’ parts already?” He then asked her to play Perdita too. She did double those parts very beautifully, though it was a bit awkward in the final scene where she has to talk to herself, as it were. They had to use a double for that and it was a bit tricky. Much more recently, in Ken Branagh’s production at the Garrick Theatre, which I saw in London, Branagh played Leontes very well and Judi played the older woman’s part of Paulina. She also spoke the chorus part, and I must say, spoke it with an authority and beauty of line that was an absolute model of verse-speaking in Shakespearean drama. “Shakespeare was a great user of silence in his plays” The greatest of all the scenes in the play is the one before the ending. [Spoiler alert!] This is the climactic scene where Hermione, who was thought to be dead for 16 years, is depicted in a statue and she miraculously comes to life. It’s absurd, if you think of it in rational terms, but it is literally miraculous in the theatre. It’s a moment that causes profound emotion in many people who see it. That’s sort of a spoiler: if possible, it’s better to go and see it without knowing what happens at the end. But it works, even if you do know what happens, time and time again because Shakespeare’s drama is such that it can make the situation imaginatively vivid for you. Even though you know what’s going to happen, you can be still be moved because of the writing, not only the verse writing but also the dramatic writing—the writing for the stage. This includes great moments of silence. Shakespeare was a great user of silence in his plays. There are some wonderful silences in The Winter’s Tale, for example when Leontes stands in awe before this big statue and then says “O, she’s warm!” as the statue begins to move. It’s not entirely easy to deduce Shakespeare’s views from his plays. It’s also important to remember that Shakespeare was an evolving person. People sometimes talk about Shakespeare as if there was only one moment in his lifetime, but the plays cover a period of 25 or so years. It’s a period during which he develops; and his attitudes change. One of my books is called Shakespeare, Sex, and Love . When I was writing that book, I felt I could discern a shift in Shakespeare’s imagination and his intellectual attitudes towards sex and love. With the earlier plays, he often made comedy out of people’s sexual attitudes. But as time goes on, he treats it much more seriously and more profoundly. He becomes concerned not only with the sexual aspects of love but with its spiritual aspects. This is also reflected in the sonnets, which are profound but impersonal love poems. But some of them, I think, are about his own love life and his own conflicted attitudes towards love. Some of them are very concerned with sex. They are some of the sexiest poems in the English language. A couplet in one of the sonnets could be spoken by the poet’s penis: it talks about being a drudge, rising and falling at the beloved’s request. It’s a very open and modern poem, in some ways. It breaks taboos. Shakespeare observed the taboos quite a lot in the plays written for the public theatres, but in the private world of some of the sonnets, he faces up to them square on."