In what can often seem a sleepy theatrical season, summer in Boston, the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s free performances on the Common over a three-week period stand out, not just because of the mere fact of their existence on the calendar, but for their generally high quality. I’ve not seen any reviews yet of this summer’s offering, The Winter’s Tale, but the cast alone has me feeling optimistic.
I take the opportunity every summer to reread the play I’ll be seeing, an activity that takes on an added richness this year thanks to the modest skills I’ve developed while engaging with like-minded friends in the close reading of a number of poems over the past few months.
Like most Shakespearean works, The Winter’s Tale is a combination of song, prose, and poetry, with the comic characters and common folk generally speaking in prose dialogue and with those characters of more noble birth speaking in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Every time I teach Shakespeare to my middle school students, who find Shakespeare’s language befuddling, I tell them that his plays were meant for an audience of all types, of all educational attainments. He wrote not to be read and certainly not to be studied, but to be performed, for an audience that expected to be entertained, not befuddled. Should I choose to subject any speech from the play to a close reading, the difficulties I associate with reading a poet such as Wallace Stevens are not those I encounter with Shakespeare. Stevens’ vocabulary is not challenging, but everything else about his poems is oft inscrutable. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s vocabulary is dated (thus the voluminous footnotes in any Shakespeare text) but his poetry needs to be immediately accessible to audience members who can’t stop the performance and study the text.
I find my own enjoyment reading Shakespeare to be greater if I ignore the footnotes, at least at a first reading, and trust that the poetry of the language will tell me everything I need to know. It helps that I’m comfortable with one of the cardinal rules of theater: theater is not real-life, but an enhanced, enriched, more artistically crafted version of life. Modern playwrights as different as August Wilson and Tony Kushner aren’t writing in iambic pentameter, but neither are they writing dialogue that you would actually hear people speak. Their prose is indeed poetic, if not as visibly and rhythmically so as Shakespeare’s.
Here’s two “poems” from The Winter’s Tale. I won’t do a full close reading, but do have a few points I’d like to make:
Time. I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error, Now take upon me, in the name of Time, To use my wings. Impute it not a crime To me or my swift passage, that I slide O'er sixteen years and leave the growth untried Of that wide gap, since it is in my power To o'erthrow law and in one self-born hour To plant and o'erwhelm custom. Let me pass The same I am, ere ancient'st order was Or what is now received: I witness to The times that brought them in; so shall I do To the freshest things now reigning and make stale The glistering of this present, as my tale Now seems to it. Your patience this allowing, I turn my glass and give my scene such growing As you had slept between: Leontes leaving, The effects of his fond jealousies so grieving That he shuts up himself, imagine me, Gentle spectators, that I now may be In fair Bohemia, and remember well, I mentioned a son o' the king's, which Florizel I now name to you; and with speed so pace To speak of Perdita, now grown in grace Equal with wondering: what of her ensues I list not prophecy; but let Time's news Be known when 'tis brought forth. A shepherd's daughter, And what to her adheres, which follows after, Is the argument of Time. Of this allow, If ever you have spent time worse ere now; If never, yet that Time himself doth say He wishes earnestly you never may.
The Winter’s Tale is unique in Shakespeare’s output in that it involves a significant gap in time within the play. Acts I-III, at the court of Leontes, king of Sicily, takes place over a fairly condensed period of time, while Acts IV and V occur sixteen years later. This plot twist, if you will, is so far from the Aristotelian unities (one main action, one place, a 24-hour time period) that Shakespeare felt the need to make crystal clear to his audience what he was doing by beginning Act IV with the poem above, delivered by a character costumed as “Time” and in strict rhymed iambic pentameter. The poem has three purposes beyond avoiding audience confusion: 1.) It makes some poetic statements about the concept of time 2.) It playfully begs the audience’s indulgence for the shattering of any dramatic unities 3.) It fills us in on what we’ve missed over the last sixteen years. The poem is fun to read, but we are so used to Shakespeare using poetry to illuminate character that when we look at Time’s speech, the most clear example of a poem in the entire play, we sense what’s missing.
Here, in contrast, is Leontes, responding to Paulina, as she shows him the “statue” of his “late” wife Hermoine, “dead” thanks to Leontes’ irrational jealousy:
Paulina. So much the more our carver's excellence; Which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her As she lived now. Leontes. As now she might have done, So much to my good comfort, as it is Now piercing to my soul. O, thus she stood, Even with such life of majesty, warm life, As now it coldly stands, when first I woo'd her! I am ashamed: does not the stone rebuke me For being more stone than it? O royal piece, There's magic in thy majesty, which has My evils conjured to remembrance and From thy admiring daughter took the spirits, Standing like stone with thee.
Shakespeare has written hundreds of speeches more famous than this. Still I marvel at Shakespeare’s art, present here and throughout his plays: the poetic enhancement of emotion.
Grey, thanks for sharing the video. Shakespeare's plays can be interpreted in so many different ways. The video, from the Insane Artist, has a magical sense about it; I'd interpret Time's speech in a more tongue in cheek way, basically apologizing for shattering the rules of dramatic unity.
Thanks Jack.
I'm not that familiar with the Winters Tale. The poem about time certainly lured me in with its rhyme. I find I can appreciate Shakespeare more when I hear it read so beautifully by an actor like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkWlawSRGVM