Leontes, King of Sicilia, and Polixenes, King of Bohemia, have been friends since childhood. When the play opens, Polixenes has spent nine months as the guest of Leontes and his wife, Queen Hermione, and is now anxious to return home. Leontes presses him to stay longer, to no avail; it is not until Hermione adds her own entreaties that Polixenes finally yields. More ...
Director's notes by Marti Maraden
Leontes, however, is becoming obsessed with the suspicion that Hermione and Polixenes have formed an adulterous liaison, and that Polixenes has fathered the child Hermione is carrying.
Informed of his danger by Camillo, a Sicilian lord, Polixenes flees for home; meanwhile, Leontes throws Hermione into prison, where she gives birth to a daughter. Ordering that the child be abandoned in the wilds, Leontes prepares to put Hermione on trial for her life.
Sixteen long years must elapse before the grievous consequences of Leontes’s jealousy find resolution in the hope of a new generation – and a seemingly miraculously reunion.
Two of this season’s plays, The Winter's Tale
and The Tempest
, are among Shakespeare’s final works. Written within a few months of each other, both were first performed in 1611, and both have at their centre powerful fathers and remarkable daughters. More ...
Program notes by Alexander Leggatt
In The Tempest, Prospero and Miranda share twelve years of exile, having only each other as (entirely human) companions. In The Winter's Tale, King Leontes believes his newborn daughter Perdita (named for loss) is a bastard, and abandons her to almost certain death. They are exiled from one another for sixteen years.
Prospero, having been usurped as Duke of Milan, is now, by virtue of his magic art, absolute ruler of a small island. At last his old enemies come within his grasp. How will he use his power against them? What choices will he make about their humanity and his own?
Leontes would appear to share the throne with his queen, Hermione, but it soon becomes apparent that he is absolute ruler of Sicilia. From the beginning of The Winter's Tale, afflicted with a “diseas’d opinion,” he abuses his power, causing grievous harm to himself and those he loves best. He effectively usurps himself. His exile from warmth and life is of his own making.
And all the while, the two daughters grow in grace and truth and beauty. Bred in extreme innocence – Miranda alone on a desert island with only her father and the half-human Caliban, and Perdita, unaware of her heritage, nurtured in a shepherd’s cottage – both young women nevertheless flourish. Each possesses an innate honesty, intelligence and generosity of spirit.
At the end of The Tempest, fifteen-year-old Miranda gazes on the blighted, motley assortment of her father’s enemies and says, “O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is. O brave new world that has such people in’t!” As naïve as her assessment may seem, Miranda’s words offer an expectation of something better from these imperfect beings.
At the end of The Winter's Tale, it is only through the restoration of “that which is lost” – the sixteen-year-old Perdita, “now grown in grace equal with wond’ring” – that genuine repentance can be blessed with forgiveness, and a long and sorrowful winter can be banished.
Two daughters, just beginning life’s journey, are inextricably linked to the resolution of their fathers’ troubles, and their youth and buoyancy signal hope and healing in the time to come.
Among the most powerful words that link people together are: tell me a story. Early in The Winter's Tale
Hermione asks her young son Mamillius to tell her a tale. She asks for a merry one, but he replies, “A sad tale’s best for winter.” The story he promises, “of sprites and goblins,” sounds not so much sad as scary, the sort of tale children tell around a campfire to frighten each other. And the play at this point is launched on its own story – no sprites or goblins, but as frightening in its own way as the story Mamillius promises to tell. More ...
Festival Production History
As this story begins, Polixenes, King of Bohemia, is at the end of a nine-month visit to his childhood friend Leontes, King of Sicilia. Amid the polite courtly conversation – must you go? yes, really, I must – Leontes suddenly imagines that his wife Hermione has been sleeping with Polixenes, and Polixenes is the father of the child she is carrying. His mind fills with gross images of what Hermione and Polixenes are doing, and for him these images are reality. His jealousy strikes unexpectedly, like an attack by a wild animal, yet the irrational obsession it produces is frighteningly real. No fantasy is so powerful as the fantasy that feeds on itself, following its own laws.
Certain of the outcome, Leontes puts Hermione on trial and sends to the Oracle of Apollo to confirm his accusation. The Oracle was famous for its ambiguity, but this time its message is plain: “Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless . . . Leontes a jealous tyrant.” Leontes strikes back: “There is no truth at all i’ th’ Oracle.” Apollo retaliates, hitting Leontes as swiftly as his jealousy did, killing the two people who matter most to him. Suddenly the gods are as alarmingly close to humanity as they are in Greek tragedy. Leontes’s repentance is as sudden and complete as his jealousy – that’s what happens when you’re struck by a god – but the mischief he set afoot is still working. Hermione having given birth prematurely, Leontes has sent his courtier Antigonus with orders to abandon the baby in some wild place. The Oracle’s prediction, “The king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found,” is both a threat and a promise. Suddenly the future hinges on a baby girl called Perdita, the lost one.
As though Leontes’s defiance of the Oracle has created shock waves in nature, when Antigonus leaves Perdita on the shores of Bohemia – Polixenes’s kingdom – a storm breaks out, the ship that brought Perdita there sinks, the crew drowns, and Antigonus is eaten by a bear. Given the belief that bear cubs were born as shapeless lumps, literally licked into shape by their mothers, the bear was for Shakespeare a symbol of chaos; and the sport of bear-baiting, in which a bear tied to a stake was set upon by dogs, appealed to spectators with a taste for blood and violence. The gross physical images that fill Leontes’s jealous mind find a counterpart in the sheer animal shock of the bear. It is as though everything dark and frightening in the play, everything Leontes’s jealousy released into what looked like a polite and civilized world, comes to a head in one startling moment.
The one member of the Sicilian landing party who survives is the one who is completely helpless. Perdita is found by an old shepherd who, seeing an abandoned baby, suspects as Leontes did that there has been “some behind-door work.” Leontes’s jealousy burst into the open when, seeing Polixenes and Hermione holding hands, he exclaimed, “Too hot, too hot!” As the shepherd puts it, “They were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here.” (The warmth in this winter’s tale comes from human bodies.) The shepherd’s speculations about the child’s parentage are as jocular and tolerant as Leontes’s were angry and bitter, and he takes it up “for pity.” The very presence of the shepherd turns Bohemia from a wild place to a cultivated one, and his voice – comic, gentle and natural – strikes notes we have not heard before. The play seems to be reinventing itself, even becoming a new play.
But it is still the same play, and Perdita is the link. She appears on stage before she is born, in Hermione’s visible pregnancy. Before Apollo strikes, Leontes’s strongest opposition comes from Antigonus’s wife, Paulina, who, like a no-nonsense nurse opening the windows of a sickroom to let in some air, attacks him with the force of sheer common sense; the newborn Perdita in her arms is her strongest argument. After the play has leapt over sixteen years, Perdita reappears as a young woman, the centre of a sheep-shearing feast held by her adopted family, moving the story towards the future through her love affair with Florizel – who just happens to be the son of Polixenes.
While Leontes’s court was chilled and darkened by his jealousy, Bohemia is a place of warmth and colour, music and dance. The court is full of accusations of high crimes, tyranny and treason. The one-man criminal class of Bohemia is the rogue Autolycus, who sings ballads and sells trinkets when he is not picking pockets – the crook as entertainer. And while for Leontes sex was a sickness, in Perdita’s frank desire for Florizel – she wants to strew his body with flowers “like a bank for love to lie and play on” – it is natural, healthy and fun. In defiance of the play’s title, it seems to be at once spring and late summer in Bohemia: late summer in the literal season, spring in the songs of Autolycus and Perdita’s catalogue of the flowers she wants to give her lover.
Meanwhile Sicilia is in a deep freeze. Leontes has been in mourning for sixteen years, and Paulina, to the chagrin of the courtiers who want him to remarry and produce an heir for his childless kingdom, insists on keeping his grief fresh, keeping him locked in the past. It takes another journey, and another twist in the story, to bring Perdita back to Sicilia and, with her marriage to Florizel, to move both kingdoms towards the future. But the play has not finished with the past. The last part of the story should be told by the play, not by a program note. Let’s just say that it’s as startling as Leontes’s jealousy, as supernatural as the intervention of a god and as natural as a human face.
A sad tale? Yes, up to a point: even at the end of the play there is damage that cannot be repaired. But there is healing and restoration as well, enough to make us question the idea that a winter’s tale must be a sad one. And “sad” has another meaning in Shakespeare’s English: it can mean serious. This is one of Shakespeare’s most fantastic plays, even a bit crazy at times, full of surprises, coincidences and old story devices shamelessly trotted out for the umpteenth time. But it speaks of our deepest fears and our wildest hopes, and it puts a human face on both. It’s a strange tale, and a serious one.
Alexander Leggatt is Professor Emeritus of English at University College, University of Toronto.
DIRECTOR: Douglas Campbell
DESIGNER: Tanya MoiseiwitschChristopher Plummer
Charmion King as Hermione
Eileen Herlie as Paulina
Jason Robards Jr. as PolixenesMore ...
DIRECTOR: Peter Moss
DESIGNER: Daphne Dare
Brian Bedford as Leontes
Margot Dionne as HermioneMartha Henry
Ted Follows as Polixenes
DIRECTOR: David William
DESIGNER: Shawn Kerwin
Colm Feore as Leontes
Goldie Semple as Hermione
Susan Wright as PaulinaStephen Russell
Tom Patterson Theatre
DIRECTOR: Brian Bedford
DESIGNER: Ming Cho LeeWayne Best
Kate Trotter as Hermione
Diane D'Aquila as PaulinaJuan Chioran