Shakespeare

The play was closer to a musical comedy than any previously written by him; there are six songs, five of them sung by Armin as Autolycus, with Robert Johnson as the very likely composer of the music. One song demands a trio. There are also two elaborate dances, by satyrs and by shepherds, which would have been closer to masque than popular folk dance. Music would also have been heard as the enchanted statue begins to move. It is perhaps indicative of the play’s appeal that it was performed at court on an unprecedented six occasions. It was better than a masque. It was a full-scale entertainment, drama and ritual all in one. Yet, as Forman suggests, it also pleased the great crowds at the Globe. Many of the scenes relied upon spectacle as much as sense. One long scene, one of the longest in all of Shakespeare’s works, depicts a sheep-shearing festival which becomes an image of timeless popular ritual. And there is the famous stage-direction in the third Act (1309-10):

This is the Chace,

I am gone for euer.

(Exit pursued by a Beare)

The bear was a familiar feature of Bankside, of course, and dancing or performing bears were also very common in the streets of London. But it is doubtful that the King’s Men used or borrowed a real animal from their colleagues in the baiting arena. It would have been more comic to have an actor in a costume. But the sudden and apparently random use of the animal testifies to Shakespeare’s extraordinary grasp of stage business. The appearance of the bear marks the transition in this play from the direst tragedy to the most whimsical comedy, and just such a diversion prepares the audience for the change in pace and tone. The pursuit of the old man by the bear is, of course, terrible and comic all at once. It is a symbol of the play itself.

As in all romances, or musical comedies, the passions in The Winter’s Tale are strident and ill-concealed. The principal themes are of insane jealousy followed by guilt and remorse; the unhappy and separated protagonists are then reunited in a scene of ultimate forgiveness and reconciliation. It is a play that induces happiness, and awakens hope, in its spectators. It is perhaps not coincidental that it was performed on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, and then again after the catastrophic death of James’s elder son and heir. The Winter’s Tale was something of a public benefit, a device to remove mourning. In this play the human and the natural come together, in the great ongoing rhythm of life itself. The poetry of the dialogue follows the natural fluencies and hesitations of thought itself; it is instinct with the life of the mind.

The principal source of the play is Robert Greene’s prose romance Pandosto, from which Shakespeare takes much of the material for his first three acts. It will be remembered that Greene was the author who, just before his death, had attacked “Shake-scene” in Groats-worth of Witte. Among other charges he accused him of plagiarism. Now, eighteen years later, Shakespeare was extracting matter from the dead man’s most popular work, making the whole plot more fanciful and more unreal. He may have permitted himself a moment of satisfaction. And then he called it a winter’s tale, an idle story, an old fable, a fireside extravagance. Shakespeare was not a sentimental man.

In this year, too, there were third editions of no fewer than three of his plays-Titus Andronicus, Hamlet and Pericles. These were plays from all the stages of Shakespeare’s career, from the very early Titus to the very late Pericles. He was now being recognised and measured by his total achievement. He could delight the royal family, please the audiences of Oxford, and entertain the great crowds at the Globe. It seems clear, in retrospect at least, that he had reached the very pinnacle of his career. And now he was on everyone’s lips. One author, writing upon the standards of “true writing,” refers to Shakespeare as one from whom “wee gather the most warrantable English.”⁴ In a letter of 1613 Leonard Digges, the stepson of Shakespeare’s executor, wrote of a “Booke of Sonets which with Spaniards here is accounted of their lope de Vega as in Englande wee sholde our Will Shakespeare.”⁵ Note that here he is “our” Shakespeare, already treated as a representative of the national literature.