Winter's Tales

Since the 19^th century, editors have designated Shakespeare's late plays—Pericles, Prince of Tyre; Cymbeline; The Winter's Tale; and The Tempest—as romances, to distinguish them from the First Folio categories of comedies, tragedies, and histories. Leaving aside The Tempest, the first three share a number of features that are new to Shakespeare's plays: convoluted plots that take place over long periods of time and in widely separated locations. These plots are resolved by surprising recognitions and reunifications. The main plots are about royals, but the vital subplots are about commoners, even outlaws, in Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale. Recent studies have shown that Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale are tragicomedies, English versions of a new and popular style of drama that emerged in Italy in the late 1580s. Tragicomedy was novel, and even daring, because it combined two genres that had been rigidly separated since Classical times. At the turn of the 17^th century, tragicomedy fused these two concepts: tragicomedy depicted disaster turning, providentially, to happiness for everyone involved. Thus in The Winter's Tale, the most popular of the three in Shakespeare's time and since, Leontes's savage jealousy brings about a dangerous political situation: there is no legitimate heir to Leontes's throne. The problem is solved when his daughter, Perdita, reappears as the result of a succession question in Bohemia. The play's conclusion—Paulina seems to bring Leontes's long-dead wife back to life—illustrates the providential nature of the play's resolution.

The challenge these plays pose for a modern director is to establish a relationship between the tragic and the comic elements that a modern audience will accept. Establishing that relationship requires the director to think through two issues, the overall style of the production and how to account for Leontes's sudden jealousy and Polixenes's lethal fury. Two recent productions of The Winter's Tale, in Brooklyn and Washington, offer strikingly different approaches to the relation of tragedy and comedy. At the Folger Theatre in Washington (Folger Shakespeare Library, March 13–April 22), director Aaron Posner portrays comedy as a redemptive force. It unites everyone in a spirit of forgiveness. The production at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn (Polonsky Shakespeare Center, March 13–April 15), directed by Arin Arbus, takes the opposite tack. The comedy is loud and modern, but tragedy is always in the background. The differing ideas about comedy and tragedy in these two productions lead to very different styles of production and to different solutions to the problems of motivation.

The Folger production treats the play as a pair of myths. The first half is a tragic myth, the second, a pastoral myth. The first half, up to act 3, scene 3, is a tragedy in the style of Euripides's Herakles or The Bacchae, in which a god punishes a character by deranging his or her mind. Hermione (Katie deBuys) is innocent and girlish in the scene in which she coaxes Polixenes into staying on at Sicilia; Leontes's suspicions come upon him suddenly, as if from outside of him: on Hermione's line "Th' other, for some while a friend," the lights change, isolating Leontes, and he drops the cup he has been holding. As played by Michael Tisdale, Leontes becomes progressively more manic through the first two acts. The Folger production makes it clear that Apollo is the one who cures Leontes of his jealousy; a clap of thunder accompanies the news of Mamillius's death, which brings Leontes to his senses.

The second half of the Folger production is the pastoral myth. Posner holds off the intermission until Antigonus has finished his sad job of leaving Perdita on the Bohemian seashore. This arrangement connects Antigonus's dream of Hermione, presented here as a vision in which Hermione, her silhouette projected rather crudely on a screen, speaks the lines he recalled from the dream, with Leontes's vow to visit the common tomb of his wife and son. The drawback is that it draws a thicker line between the tragic first half and the...