The Winter's Tale E-Book

William Shakespeare

• Herausgeber: Nick Hern Books
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

A jealous king, an abandoned daughter, a prince hopelessly in love. Shakespeare's timeless tragicomedy of obsession and redemption is reimagined in a new production co-directed by Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh. It was performed as part of the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company's Plays at the Garrick Season in 2015, starring Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh. This official tie-in edition features the version of Shakespeare's text performed in the production, plus exclusive additional content.

Leseprobe

William Shakespeare

THEWINTER’S TALE

edited by Kenneth Branagh

NICK HERN BOOKS

www.nickhernbooks.co.uk   

www.branaghtheatre.com

Contents

Title Page

Introduction by Russell Jackson

Production Details

Interview with Kenneth Branagh and Rob Ashford

Interview with Judi Dench and Michael Pennington

Interview with Patrick Doyle

The Winter’s Tale

Copyright and Performing Rights Information

‘It is required you do awake your faith…’: Shakespeare’s ‘Old Tale’

Russell Jackson

The first recorded performance of The Winter’s Tale was given by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, at the Globe in 1611. It was seen by King James in the same year and was given seven times at Court between then and 1640. Shakespeare’s source was the prose romance by Robert Greene, Pandosto, subtitled ‘The Triumph of Time’, first published in 1588. A king loses the ability to distinguish delusion from reality, veers into tyranny (the word is used more than once), and becomes the opposite of the ideal ruler James I aspired to be. Shakespeare’s play uses important elements of Greene’s romance, altering some aspects of the plot and adding three new characters: Antigonus, Paulina, and the trickster Autolycus, the ‘snapper up of unconsidered trifles’. It mixes psychological trauma, cruelty and heartbreak with nostalgia and comedy. At once realistic and a fantasy, the play includes reminders that its events, considered with any degree of scepticism, would be ‘hooted at’ as ‘an old tale’ – that is, the kind of far-fetched story that might be told to children, with all the appropriate mixture of terrors and reassurance that we associate with fairy stories. At the same time, as in some popular fairy stories, it allows for the collateral damage that accompanies many happy endings.

The tale that might be told by a winter fireside – ‘a sad tale’s best for winter’ – also encompasses ideas about nature and time (both capable of being either benevolent or destructive) that reach beyond the realm of simple explanation. In that respect it is a play of mystery, with characters expressing wonder from the very first scenes at events and behaviour that are either exceptionally promising or, as the play develops, extremely harmful. The ideal relationship of the Sicilian king Leontes and his queen Hermione, and between them and Polixenes, king of Bohemia – whom Leontes has not seen since childhood – is threatened by an inexplicable and apparently sudden mental aberration on Leontes’ part. He accuses Hermione of adultery with Polixenes and imprisons her to await trial, despite the fact that she is pregnant. The loyal courtier Camillo, instructed to poison Polixenes, instead warns him of the danger to his life and joins him in fleeing to Bohemia. In prison, Hermione gives birth to a daughter – Perdita – and when the formidable lady Paulina brings the child to him, Leontes insists that it should be burnt to death. Nevertheless, he relents to the extent of instructing Antigonus to take the child to some desert place and abandon it.

As a concession, Leontes has determined that the Oracle of the god Apollo should be consulted. Its answer is brought at the beginning of the queen’s trial: not only is Hermione vindicated against the accusation of adultery, but the paternity of the young prince Mamillius is confirmed and Leontes denounced as a ‘jealous tyrant’. When he defiantly declares that ‘there is no truth in the Oracle’, news arrives almost immediately of the death of the young prince. Hermione collapses, and is carried offstage. She is presently reported to have died from the shock. Grief-stricken and penitent, Leontes resolves to mourn both wife and child.

Fulfilling his mission of relative mercy, Antigonus reaches the coast of Bohemia and leaves the child there, with information that will identify it, together with gold that may somehow ensure its prosperity should it survive. The dream that Antigonus describes before he places the infant and the bundle tenderly on the ground (‘Blossom, speed the well’) suggests to him that this is indeed the daughter of Polixenes, a misinterpretation that is of a piece with the play’s emphasis on what should or should not be believed: ‘Dreams are toys,’ he reflects, ‘Yet for this once, yea superstitiously, / I will be squared by this.’ For all he knows Hermione has ‘suffered death’ (he was not present at the trial) and her appearance in the dream, as if she were a ghost, would seem to indicate this. The prophecy that he will never see his wife Paulina again is fulfilled almost immediately: a storm comes on, and before he can make his escape, Antigonus is attacked and eaten by a bear.

This is the pivotal sequence of the play, which tilts into comedy with the arrival on stage of the old shepherd looking for his sheep. The shepherd immediately assumes that the abandoned baby is the result of an illicit love affair: ‘They were warmer that got this than the poor thing is now.’ When his son arrives, full of the excitement of seeing two astonishing events, a ship lost with all hands and an old gentleman being eaten by a bear, the old shepherd acknowledges that these are ‘heavy matters’ but points out ‘Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born.’ It is in the nature of stories like this for audiences to expect some kind of pleasing outcome to the Oracle’s enigmatic statement that ‘The king shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found.’ At least one part of that prophecy has been fulfilled. Quite how it will be completed is far from clear. It will be sixteen years before this resolution will be achieved, a ‘wide gap’ too long for most plays but achieved here with impressive effrontery by Shakespeare, with the help of Time – in person.

Time shares with both Nature and the playwright the power to ‘please some’ and ‘try all’, bringing ‘both joy and terror’. Both Time and Shakespeare are able to ‘o’erthrow Law, and in one self-born hour / To plant and o’erwhelm custom.’ Like Shakespeare, Time calls for what Coleridge famously called a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ – or rather, Time claims with good-humoured finality the ability to impose it, as part of the contract between the audience and the play. This, then, is ‘an old tale’, a reminder that wonders may never cease, in which characters within the play express their astonishment and incredulity on our behalf. For us, as for them, it is required that, for our pleasure’s sake, we ‘do awake our faith’.

Jealousy, Greene points out in Pandosto, is unique among the passions of the mind in placing the sufferer beyond the persuasion of friends or the effects of time: he is ‘always frozen with fear and fired with suspicion’ because ‘that wherein consisteth all his joy’ has become ‘the breeder of his misery’. In The Winter’s Tale, as in the tragedy Othello, Shakespeare presents male sexual jealousy as destructive, taking the sufferer beyond reason and isolating him. In the psychological theories of the time it is a variety of ‘melancholy’. Perception becomes distorted and delusions take over, as though in a dream or nightmare. Accused of adultery, Hermione tells Leontes, ‘My life stands in the level of your dreams,’ and his chilling, unanswerable reply is ‘Your actions are my dreams.’ But this irrational state, like other natural occurrences in the play, is also part of what Perdita describes as ‘great creating Nature’. There is nothing surprising (or original) in the suggestion that Nature encompasses ‘things dying’ and ‘things new-born’: what is surprising is the way The Winter’s Tale reminds us of this, notably in Perdita’s comments on hybrid flowers in Act Four, but also implicitly in the fact that a storm and a wild carnivore are no less part of Nature than its more benign aspects. Shadowing these references in the play is Nature’s relationship with Art, in a complex of ideas that finds its fullest expression later in The Tempest with the figure of Prospero, the magus, exiled duke and, in the last analysis, playwright and actor on both the stage and the play’s fictional island.

The restorative effect of the pastoral world in Act Four, and the love of Polixenes’ son Florizel for Perdita, ‘now grown in grace / Equal with wondering’, echo the childhood innocence of the two kings evoked by Polixenes in Act One: ‘We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’ th’ sun… What we changed was innocence for innocence.’ Although the idyll is threatened by the Bohemian king’s anger at his son’s underhand wooing of a shepherd’s daughter, in this case what was earlier called ‘the doctrine of ill-doing’ does not prevail. Rather, a solution is achieved through the revelation of Perdita’s true identity and the reconciliation of Leontes and Polixenes. The astonishing revelation that Hermione did not die is accomplished not simply through report but also by the seeming magic of a statue that lives and breathes – and is indeed not a magical effect but the queen herself.

Is there any significance in the fact that it is not to Leontes but to her daughter that Hermione speaks, calling on the gods to ‘pour your graces / Upon my daughter’s head’? Although what we see on stage indicates her forgiveness of Leontes – she ‘embraces him’ and ‘hangs about his neck’ – her speech is reserved for that which was lost and has been found, the hope that sustained Hermione through the years. Greene’s story ends with the suicide of the guilt-ridden Pandosto, but Shakespeare does not take his audience in that direction, explained by Greene disarmingly as a device ‘to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem’. In the final moments of The Winter’s Tale we are to ‘awake our faith’ once again, this time in the restoration of happiness to the ‘precious winners’. Nevertheless, as so often in Shakespeare’s plays, the effect is qualified: Mamillius and Antigonus are both dead, and it is hard not to recall the child’s words as he began to tell the bedtime story he never finished: ‘A sad tale’s best for winter.’

This production of The Winter’s Tale was first performed as part of the Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company’s Plays at the Garrick season, at the Garrick Theatre, London, on 7 November 2015 (previews from 17 October), with the following cast:

MAMILLIUS

Pierre Atri / Rudi Goodman

ARCHIDAMUS

Jaygann Ayeh

FLORIZEL

Tom Bateman

LEONTES

Kenneth Branagh

PERDITA

Jessie Buckley

DORCAS

Vera Chok

CLOWN

Jack Colgrave Hirst

AUTOLYCUS

John Dagleish

PAULINA

Judi Dench

POLIXENES

Hadley Fraser

LORD AMADIS

Adam Garcia

AEGEUM

Matthew Hawksley

CAPNIO

Taylor James

SHEPHERDESS

Pip Jordan

CLEOMENES

Ansu Kabia

DION

Stuart Neal

ANTIGONUS

Michael Pennington

EMILIA

Zoë Rainey

HERMIONE

Miranda Raison

GAOLER

Michael Rouse

CAMILLO

John Shrapnel

MOPSA

Kathryn Wilder

THE SHEPHERD

Jimmy Yuill

Director

Rob Ashford

Director

Kenneth Branagh

Set and Costume Designer