So let's make a start. Today's the last lecture in the series, and I'm going to talk about one of the last plays Shakespeare wrote.
The Winter's Tale.
And as I said last week, the question I think this play wants us to ask is why, having learnt to handle the genres of comedy and of tragedy,
why then turn to this story that spans generations and kingdoms and which requires the
apparently clumsy intervention of the figure of time itself to smooth over the cracks?
Why this revisiting of the tropes of, on the one hand, mistaken jealousy?
Think Othello or much ado about nothing and pastoral hijinx.
Think as you like it. Why this catalogue of frankly, improbable events which culminate in a statue stepping down from its pedestal,
but we should give him quite a boost in the pull. The other one stakes by that most famous of stage directions exit pursued by a bear.
So one answer to why has been to relegate or to ignore the play.
Virtually the same external evidence that The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's last play last.
So authored play exists as does for The Tempest being Shakespeare's last soul authored play.
There seem to have been written in the same year, but criticism has widely preferred the melancholic, leave-taking,
wise old man stuff of the tempest in the narrative arc of Shakespeare's development over this bewildering splicing of tragic and comic conventions,
which seems to allow no such sentimental biographical reading.
What does it mean to call The Winter's Tale a late play? And is that an answer to why?
Why this play? So today I'm going to try and suggest that the intertwined histories of Shakespearean
performance and criticism have been trying to answer why The Winter's Tale?
And as usual, I'm going to emphasise, as I have been throughout these lectures,
that the play provides the question, not the answer or not the singular answer.
The Winter's Tale seems deliberately to stretch our credulity to see just how far we will go.
Many critics since Dowden writing in the late 19th century have identified The Winter's Tale amongst a group of so-called late plays or romances,
these this group. This cluster tends to include The Tempest, parallelise and Cymbeline.
You'll recognise from your work in the mediaeval period that romance is here,
a kind of extended fiction can concerned with adventures of love or chivalry,
or preferably both satirised by Chaucer in the tale of Sir Topaze and later by 70s and Don Quixote.
The first part of Don Quixote appeared in English. Around the same time as The Winter's Tale 16 12.
In late Elizabethan England, Green, Spencer and Sidney.
All right, romance is prose romances and indeed Arcadia, Sydney's Arcadia is a source for Shakespeare on several occasions,
most notably, perhaps for King Lear, a play which Shakespeare may have been rewriting the folio text of King Lear at the time.
He's writing his late plays, including The Winter's Tale.
The main features of romance might be identified as a courtly setting, a loose episodic structure,
elements of fantasy improbability or the supernatural within a narrative of spectacular achievement and heroism and romance.
As those Sydney Spencer green practitioners might suggest, is a popular genre of the mid Elizabethan period.
And thus I think it is like pastoral, part of the retro fashion of the Jacobean era, a consciously nostalgic deployment of a vintage form.
The revival of romance can be attributed, I think, to a constellation of circumstances in the Jacobean period in the theatre.
The king's men's move to the indoor Blackfriars as a winter performance space enabled them to develop special effects and more lavish costuming.
These were high. Is it become high status performance attributes largely because of a kind of trickle down from mask culture,
from court culture and these highly operatic, highly stylised, very richly costumed and spectacularly lavishly staged masks.
The Blackfriars has is an indoor theatre, so it has artificial lighting, it has candle light,
and that's often given as a contributing factor to more spectacular kinds of theatre tricks, such as the coming to life of her mind statue.
So Blackfriars and the theatre aesthetic, which it enables us to respond to, are more dependent on visual than non-verbal gymnastics,
we might think of the verbal going to see because I'm going to hear a play being
the idea about the Globe theatres that where language is the most important thing,
hearing its most important Blackfriars probably gives us a sense that seeing is more important.
And The Winter's Tale that in some of The Winter's Tale is one example and there aren't all that many.
If you try and think when one of Shakespeare's plays has a denouement, which is predominantly visual.
Well, you have to see it. And seeing it is what makes it happen.
Genre fashions are changing, too.
The Winter's Tale may well owe something to the fashionable genre of tragicomedy, as practised in particular by John Fletcher.
Fletcher is Shakespeare's successor with The King's Men and also his collaborator on late plays, including Henry the Eighth and Two Noble Kinsman.
In the preface to one of his plays, The Faithful Shepherdess,
Fletcher defines the genre of tragicomedy as a kind of new thing and requires a definition.
At this point in the first decade of the 17th century, a tragicomedy is not so-called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect.
It wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy,
which must be a representation of familiar people with such kind of trouble as no life.
The question but it with that very well, let me do it again. A tragic comedy is not so in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect.
It wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy yet.
Bring some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, which must be a representation of familiar people with such kind of trouble as no life.
Be questioned if your Mimili are slow, but who more later or antagonists.
Likewise, you might not want to ascribe Winter's Tale to the genre of tragic comedy very easily
as a a play which wants deaths make such kind of trouble as no life be questioned.
I think even despite that, despite the fact that The Winter's Tale pushes that flat cherian definition of tragicomedy,
we still might want to see the form of this play as a response to fashion and commercial circumstance.
We've tended to construct post hoc Shakespeare, whose motivations are loftily aesthetic.
But what we see time and again in Shakespeare's career is the ability to write precisely and skilfully to the market.
That response to contemporary city comedies, which I talked about in measure for measure the echoes of domestic tragedy in Macbeth,
the engagement with revenge, tragedy in Hamlet, and here the incorporation of the characteristics of this new form of tragicomedy.
When I discussed. Measure for measure. I suggested that maybe the generic problem critics have identified in that play is a problem
only if we see it narrowly in relation to Shakespeare's own earlier comedies and not a problem.
If we look laterally at city comedies by Marston, Middleton and Dekker, the same may be true here.
The Winter's Tale is different from Shakespeare's earlier plays, but perhaps not so different from other plays of the same time.
When we look at Shakespeare in isolation from the theatrical culture in which he performed so adeptly, we obscure how to understand his plays.
And I suppose then, as comparative comparisons with Winter's Tale,
I might think about Beaumont and Fletcher Knights of the Burning Pessl as a another take on romance.
Webster's White Devil by another woman is on trial for her sexuality, perhaps as a as a kind of romance love story.
Fletcher's must Thomas. But if we do stay within Shakespeare's own canon,
the comparison that is most useful is probably that with the tempest that both plays from the same year,
they both invoke romance stories which involve great tracts of time and space.
Each establishes a human scenario which can only be resolved by the subsequent generation and in a different place.
The deposition of Prospero from Milan will take the 12 years before his enemies are brought to his island kingdom.
The breach between Mounties and perplexities can only be healed by the union of the next generation.
Floras Owl and per deter.
Interesting to think, I mean, they're both relationships, kind of homosocial relationships between men, the rush to impress Brown,
his brother and between allowances and and his brotherly friend Polixeni is it's
interesting of parallel to think what women are doing in The Winter's Tale.
What about him? I am going to come back to her in a minute.
But I've tried to suggest that the breach that happens in The Winter's Tale is not really so much that between loyalties and her mind,
but that between the aunties and Polixeni is that's the thing which the plot is trying to put right.
So there are lots of there there are those structural similarities there, there's a narrative similarities between The Tempest and The Winter's Tale.
But there are some really significant differences in the temper's Shakespeare experiments for only the second time in his career.
The first is the early play, the comedy of errors,
and lots of interesting ways in which Shakespeare's very last plays to flip back to his very first ones.
Here he's experimenting. Then, as in the comedy of errors with the unity of time, place and action.
So if you know anything about how there's a great vogue in the in the 50s, really,
for essays on the double time scheme in Othello and how many days of Romeo and Juliet married and how long the Shakespeare's plays?
Laughs It doesn't really it doesn't really matter how long they last, but they don't last three hours.
That's the point. Apart from the comedy of Errors and The Tempest,
these are the only plays in which the performance time the source thought that the time
that the play takes to unfold before us is the same as the story time that it covers.
So it takes place in in real time. If you're if you're interested in the in the unities and how the unities work, 24, that's our best example.
Think of the unities now. So what what happens in The Tempest?
What what what necessitated by sticking so closely to the unities is a very lengthy flashback sequence in Act one.
Scene two, we hear in narrative form from Prospero all the things that we need to know
to understand the encounter between the magician and the shipwrecked nobles.
It's a very difficult time to perform because it's very full of it's full of incident and it's full of described incident.
And it's very important for what comes. But it's terribly dull because nothing actually happens.
It's all talking, not showing theories of narrative.
Call this diagnosis so dire. Jesus is telling the ICG.
Yes. I ask why Jesus is telling rather than my MI6 showing.
So in The Tempest, the dramatic unities are adhered to,
but they require a long day agentic section which slows down the action of the play in the Winter's Tale,
we largely get my mistress, not Diageo says we could have had a version of The Winter's Tale,
which began in Bohemia, and told us dejectedly everything that happened up to that point.
But that's not what Shakespeare chooses to do here. This technique in The Winter's Tale requires a different stage expedient.
The figure of time telling us where we are. That Shakespeare works with both these techniques in the same year.
At the end of his career might be thought to suggest active experimentation with the actual form.
Having experimented earlier in his writing with issues of character and different ways of suggesting interiority,
we discuss some of these at the end of the last of last week's lecture on the on on Macbeth dialogue soliloquy doubling,
Foyles splitting always of trying to show the interior we might want to see him now experimenting with plot construction,
with narrative style, and specifically with how to translate the dilated spatial and temporal axis of romance into drama.
Perhaps, perhaps is a good time to think about the different connotations of the designation of Winter's Tale as a late play.
Cultural lateness, as Gordon McMullen has recently explored in a study which goes well beyond Shakespeare.
But the phenomenon of lateness has a range of connotations which cluster around ideas of summation,
detachment, philosophising, maybe even world weariness.
And Shakespeare's late plays have been particularly suited to and generative of interpretations stressing these aspects.
And again, we might see why The Tempest is thought to embody these attributes more properly than The Winter's Tale.
That's quite good example, I think of the way cut critical assumptions,
create problems with those texts which don't subscribe to their own preconceptions.
We are more used to the biographical image of a Shakespeare who is about to step down from active,
dramatic life in London and planning his retirement.
Stratford, the biographical counterpart of the Associations of late play The Idea of late is a by Rafeal category, isn't it?
Because it's late in relation to Shakespeare's life for Shakespeare's other other plays.
It's not a generic. It's not it's not from the start a generic category or a thematic one.
It's a biographical one. Interesting that we don't use biographical categories elsewhere in thinking about Shakespeare.
So the biographical counterpart associations of the late play is Shakespeare preparing for retirement.
Shakespeare, who has done it all and who for whom? Like Prospero, every third thought shall be my grave.
But those critics who have been brave enough to challenge the bar dollar tree that can only see Shakespeare as a genius,
have been quick to make other associations of lateness with The Winter's Tale to associate this play with a clapped
out elderly playwright figure who is struggling to keep up with a dynamic cultural medium like the theatre.
There are lots of artists, of course, whose first work is their best and lots of examples of artists who get worse rather than better as they go on.
In no particular order room with no room for you to argue, here are a few examples I would think.
Hardy George Lucas. Take that. Wordsworth, Elvis, John Wayne, possibly also Shakespeare.
So the same evidence can support quite a different reading that lateness.
Let lateness is a kind of summation. Lateness is the best thing that you can do.
And lateness is a falling off from what you were good at before.
And both those cultural myths about lateness as a biographical catalogue I think exist in culture more widely.
The lateness of The Winter's Tale, though, is not the same tonally as that of The Tempest.
Outplays mood is more active, and its final scene urges a reconnection with theatre and its powers of transformative illusion.
Paulina, who acts as the director of the play, particularly in this final scene, tells Layon Tease awake your faith.
It's an attitude to the magic of theatre, which is very different from Prospero's epilogue pleading to be set free from a stage
which has taken on the penal qualities of that kind in which Secour Acts imprisoned Ariel.
Release me from my bands with the help of your good hands.
So we might think that the experimental form of the Winter's Tale doesn't entirely corroborate a
view of its writer as weary with the theatre and ready to hang up his quill in previous plays.
And some of these we've looked at already in this series. Shakespeare has experimented with the relation between tragedy and comedy.
This is not in itself new. In the late plays, it may be a more extreme version of generic experimentation, but it isn't if it isn't a qualitative one.
When I was talking about a fellow and about measure for measure,
I've discussed some of the ways that genre theory has helped us to understand the structural and tonal expectations of comedy and tragedy.
As genres, what we've seen previously is that generic expectation has tended to take the form either of an on uneasily tragic tone in comedy.
Claudio's speech on death in the middle of measure for measure or an uneasily comic tone in tragedy.
We might think of all those puns on hands in that strange paean to the hand ectomy Titus Andronicus.
That's a very good hope that's been recorded, that fantastic laugh here.
I think in The Winter's Tale, the experimentation is something different.
A radical swerving away from tragedy into comedy, which is managed not just by the intervention of the figure of time,
but by a range of shifting registers in the middle of the play.
In fact, one to three of the Winter's Tale give us a condensed version of tragedies,
anagnorisis or recognition and Peripeteia or reversal loungy lounges continues stubbornly in his conviction of her mind.
Is infidelity even defying Apollos Oracle until the news of the death of the son of his son and his wife brings about that reversal.
So we go through all sorts of recognition and reversal in a very condensed
way and act one to three pretty bring me the dead bodies of my queen and son.
One grave shall be for both upon them. Shall the causes of their death appear unto our shame perpetual.
So we might think at the end of Act three, we've come so far so tragic.
We have at least in outline a man of high status brought to the destruction of his own family due to his own mistake,
making Lelantos a tragic patriarch like King Lear or Othello.
But we also have at least an hour to go. If the Sicilian portion of the Winter's Tale is a tragedy, it's too quick.
Rather, as lay on his rage blows up from nowhere, it is too much, too soon.
Too hot, too hot. So unlike in these previous plays, Lear and Othello, tragedy is not the end point of the play.
In refusing to close the play on the sorrowful and bereft, tragic figure, the play prompts us to consider what comes next.
What really does happen when you've screwed up royally lost everything.
And rather than dying majestically like Othello, dying upon a kiss, you have to face that knowledge every day.
And in doing that, the play, one might think, offers us a potentially more optimistic structure,
not the inevitable and unavoidable spiral of tragedy, but a sort of philosophy of the second chance.
Tears, vows lay on Ts. She'll be my recreation.
And that word recreation has in it very prominently, of course, recreation.
So whereas tears are destructive in tragedy or metaphorically so here that they are thought to be regenerative recreating.
We sometimes say about Shakespeare's tragic characters probably trying to cheer ourselves
up about that terrible situation that they have learnt something about themselves.
Well, they have grown in humanity that Lear recognises it should not have treated Cordelia as he did,
or he should have been a better king to all those poor naked wretches.
But the ameliorative comfort of this is a bit hollow, given that the reward of this personal development is to die.
What's the point?
We might wonder in learning through experience if you don't get the chance to try again and do better next time we might think of back it ever tried,
ever failed. No matter. Try again, fail again, fail better.
But lay on TS does get a second chance in the Winter's Tale.
Like the biblical jobe, he endures his losses and he has at least some of them restored to him, but not yet.
I want to think as the light goes on about whether that very positive, optimistic, even you might say,
sentimental view of the Winter's Tale as the philosophy of the second chance,
whether that's actually borne out in the way the play works, particularly on the stage.
But after Lantis realises what he has done at the end of at three, the play shifts a number of gears.
We need to move place, tone, genre and time.
So the middle of the play sees a number of transitional scenes.
The first is the shifting of plays and Tichenor springs per editor, the baby in a storm to a beach and leaves her there.
But the second, I think, shift tone, that most famous stage direction in all of Shakespeare exit pursued by a bear.
You're not really believe how much ink has been spilt on the question of whether in sixteen eleven.
This could have been a real bear. The answer is we don't know.
We do know that bears were high status fashion accessories in Jacobean London.
After two polar bear cubs were bought but brought back from a North Atlantic expedition and given to the king,
they were the sort of equivalent of Bo, that dog in the White House that everyone was mad about.
After Obama's election, White Bears make an appearance in the mask of Oberon, one of the masks before King James.
And we do know the theatre district of early modern London shared space and clients with bear baiting.
The Hope Theatre, which is built around this time,
is built purp purpose built as an alternative venue for theatre on Sundays and bear baiting on others.
So it's not impossible that the that a real bear might have been used, but it would have been dangerous and unpredictable to have a bear onstage.
It seems more likely that what we would have got is some representation of a bear.
Now, if we think about more recent stage productions,
representations have been off the bat had been anything from a man in a bear suit to a monster made of sheets of paper.
See, in the most recent RISC production to a shadow projection of a large claw.
But one thing they tend to share is that they provoke laughter. They're funny.
The purpose of the stage direction seems to be to shift tone rather unfortunately, since it registers the demise of antagonists.
Who is the last victim of a tragedy which is now wrestling its way into comedy?
The baby is then found by two rustic types. Q. Of course, funny accent, more hilarity and colourful prose, all of which register hourly,
really the shift from the high tragic poetry of Sicily instead of death.
Is that the stuff of tragedy? We have rebirth and regeneration comedy.
In case we're not getting the generic point, the shepherd pointed out for us, thou matched with things dying.
I wish things neuborne. It's pretty clear, isn't it?
The baby is saved like a fairytale like Moses in the rushes.
With all that that promises for the future. When the shepherd's son describes the bear eating until Guinness in humorous terms, interestingly,
we've moved away from knowing antagonism to the caring about him and come to objectify him.
We've moved our perspective to the perspective of Bohemia.
Think how the poor souls roared and the sea mocked them and how the poor gentleman roared and the band mocked him.
The transformation is complete. We've moved place, genre and tone.
And in the last shift we moved time in, bringing on the figure of time to indicate that 16 years has passed.
The play does something like the equivalent of a film flashing up 16 years later.
It's moves over a chronological disjunction in the play.
It makes clear that what's interesting to the plot is not the girlhood of the baby, nor her life amongst her adopted family.
We renew our interest in her just as we took up our interest in Miranda, for example, or we take our interest in Marina and parallelise.
We renew our interest in Perjeta justice shellfish, just as she's on the brink of adulthood.
When a new young couple come into the courtship, which is typical of Shakespeare's comedies.
The second half of the play introduces an entirely new cast, although of course they're almost certainly the same actors doubling in new roles,
which can help us make some suggested connexions between the two halves of the play.
Does the same actor play familiar? Some Purgative, for example, or Milius and Flora Zell is lay on tea somewhere in Bohemia playing a different role.
What if Hamani returns as per to Judi Dench? Did this famously in 60s production?
The scene in Bohemia at four is a lengthy one which seems to have as its main purpose to be long to insulate the tragic first part,
to put some distance between us and the accelerated trauma of the Sicilian scenes.
The genre here is festive. The stresses on fruitfulness and comic plenty rather than the s tale best for winter in Lavant is emotionally icy court.
But here, too, perhaps genre is unthaw uncertain. One king Polixeni is hears of his son's entanglement with an apparently unworthy woman.
He is misreading the genre. He obviously doesn't know that in a romance prete princess who fall in love with Shepherdess
is always discover that they are actually lost or disguised princesses after all.
And here, Prolix Nese is like those hapless suitors in the Merchant of Venice who must
be the only people in the world not to know that if you're in a fairy tale, you never pick the gold or silver casket's.
Like most of Shakespeare's plays and like the plays I've been talking about previously in this series,
The Winter's Tale follows a pre-existing source. And here the source is a 20 year old prose romance by Robert Greene.
The romance is called Pantusso or the Triumph of Time.
First published in 15 88. Panopto is the lay on TS figure.
Bulgaria, Romania fornia per deter the Rastus flurries out under Justice Polixeni.
As I say that just so you can see that the same characters that Shakespeare uses are very strongly characterised as part of Greene's story.
What's very different, though, in what Shakespeare does to Green is the ending of the story in Green's Panopto.
I'm going to talk about the figures in this prose romance by using the names of Shakespeare's characters,
even though, of course, they've got their own names. But in Greenspan Doster when Floras Alan Purdie to arrive at lound, he's caught the king.
Contrary to his age, it year began to be somewhat tickled with the beauty of purdah to his frantic affection for her grows,
despite his efforts to deny it Purdie to reject his advances.
But lay on is so keen on her that he has Flores out. Imprisoned in the green says that lounge is is broiling up the heat of unlawful lust.
Hearing of this, Polixeni, these commands lay on Ts to kill, purge, deter and to return his son to him, Lowndes wants to be reconciled to polices.
He thinks this is this is how it's going to work. He will kill, kill Perjeta.
But then the fact that predators down to his daughter is revealed and lay on TS recognises her as his daughter.
All seems to be reconciled, but his cannot enter into the rejoicing in the marriage celebrations and green story ends in this way.
Calling to mind how first he betrayed his friend perplexities how his jealousy was the cause of Khomeini's death, that contrary to the law of nature,
he had lusted after his own daughter,
moved with these desperate thought to fell into a melancholy fit and to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem.
He slew himself. So the story that Shakespeare takes for The Winter's Tale has a lay on his who is so burdened with grief,
particularly for his ancestor's desire of his own daughter,
but also for falling out with Flexner's in the first place and killing off Miami that he that he ends in suicide.
It's a tragedy.
Green's phrasing there is interesting part lound his death turns a comedy into a tragedy to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem.
He sloup himself by keeping his lay on TE's alive at the end and by miraculously returning Dominy
to him and by evading the issue of Lay on his incestuous desire for the unrecognised Perjeta.
Shakespeare works with the tragedy of the opening acts and forces them into an apparently comic redemption for both generations.
But if we look a little bit more closely, what's going on?
We might see the faint but undeniable outline of those darker forces and the tragic story that these narratives before Shakespeare gets hold of it.
Shakespeare's late plays are all preoccupied with the relationship between fathers and adult or near adult daughters.
And it's arguable that all these relationships bear traces of incestuous desire.
Prospero Miranda in The Tempest sees extreme paternal aggression to the threats of her chastity and a kind of preoccupation with Miranda's chastity,
which which which we might want to interpret in the light of the other plays as suppressed as a presently incestuous in Cymbeline.
The wicked stepmother doesn't have a name in the play.
The wicked queen is jealous of the king's daughter in Ajin and suspects that
this is a more more prominent relationship for Cymbeline than his marriage.
But most prominently in these late plays, we get parallelise and Marina Pericles begins with an explicit scene a father daughter incest at Antioch,
presenting himself as a suitor to the king's daughter. She doesn't have a name either.
parallelise has to answer a riddle in order to win her hand.
This is the riddle. I am no VIPR yet.
I feed on mothers flesh, which did me breed. I sought a husband in which labour I found that kindness in a father.
He's father, son and husband, mild I mother, wife, and yet his child.
How this may be. And yet in2 as you will live.
Resolve it you. It's not rocket science.
But paraphrase fear for his own life means he can neither confront the insets nor refuse to answer the riddle.
Instead, poetries escapes and he is condemned to a long series of sea voyages.
At the end of which he is reunited with his own lost daughter, Marina,
who is another sexual anomaly, a chaste prostitute who has brought one of her brothel's clients.
The governor of mightily to repent his ways and to propose marriage to her.
So we already know that shapes with long interest in father daughter relationships, which we also see in earlier plays like As We Like It or.
King Lear reaches a particular intensity in these late plays.
But we also know that if we compare with Greenspan Dostal in The Winter's Tale,
Shakespeare has chosen to omit this dynamic between aunties and per deter, or at least he is structured the play to suppress.
Or perhaps we might say, to sublimate this desire. But we can still see that lay on his first encounter with Partita is marked by the incest taboo.
Lantis is full of praise for the young brides beauty when Floras Al says his father will
grant mountains anything the king's hypothetical wishes to have predator for himself.
And this Ernes from Pollina, the rump. The remonstrance. Your.
I have too much youth in it. After that point to The Winter's Tale, there is no further discussion between father and daughter.
It's almost as if the play is too frightened to have them on stage again together
in case the incestuous desires from Pam Dosso break out into the Winter's Tale.
The scene in which Lake Empties recognises Purdie to ask his daughter is recounted, not shown.
Interesting in a play which, as I've already said, is so structured around my missis showing.
This is an interesting cutaway to Diageo, says Tallin. I'm most extraordinarily of all, and this doesn't happen in the source.
Hamani name is revealed to be alive.
She returns to claim lay on Ts to mop up that youth in his eyes to divert sexual desire back into marriage and away from incest.
Perhaps her mind then is brought back to life precisely to interrupt Green's incest narrative.
And it's interesting to think about that in given that The Winter's Tale is probably the only play by Shakespeare,
which has anything approaching a narrative twist at the end.
It's the only play for which we could give a plot spoiler.
Shakespeare's plays are always dependent on dramatic irony and on the way that we know more than characters on the stage.
We're always in a position of of of masterly control over events in the play.
We know who's who who's disguised. We know he Argo doesn't is not honest, as everybody else thinks.
We know that the answer to the confusion is in Twelfth Night is that Sebastian is also there.
We know that the merry wives are only pretending to trick their husbands and all those things.
So there's no reason why at the end of Shakespeare's career, we should mistrust the evidence that the play gives us.
Paulina announces that three years into the Queen, the queen, the sweetest, dearest creatures dead lay on his exits that seem pretty.
Bring me to the dead bodies of my queen and son. Nothing in the lines and nothing in what's happening at this point in the play
suggests that this is an impossibility since the Queen is not really dead.
You could, in performance, have Pollina winking to the audience, or she could overplay these quite histrionic lines in the scene.
I mean, they may look histrionic, but when people die and chase abuse, people usually are histrionic.
So it's hard to say that it's an index of insincerity. None of these things, though, is scripted.
And when I'm Tekin and sees the ghost of him, Ironi in a dream that seems further to corroborate the fact that she's dead,
people in Shakespeare's plays see ghosts of dead people not living people in their dreams.
So dramatic irony is suspended in The Winter's Tale. Really important structural point about our relation to the play.
The play tells us Hamani is dead,
Sihamoni is dead and is only after Purdy's is reappearance at court that we hear anything at all to preparer's for her mind is revival.
One of the gentlemen you'll remember,
is discussing the reunion of the father and daughter and mentions that Paul Ironer is about to reveal a statue of Hamani.
I thought she had some great matter there in hand, for she have privately twice or thrice a day.
Ever since the death of her mind, he visited that removed house.
She have privately twice times a day, ever since the death of her mind, he visited that remove it house.
It's a rather late indication of what's to come.
There are probably about 15 minutes before her mind is going to step down from that pedestal and we suddenly get this hint,
oh, maybe she isn't dead after all. And one of the ways to play what one of the strangeness is, I think about the end of the play,
is that two different endings are jostling for that narrative superiority.
One ending is the comic ending, which is the marriage between Floras Alan Purdie to the marriage,
which is going to resolve the problems of the past and rewrite the breaches of history.
And the other is the return of harmony.
So maybe the strangeness and the unexpectedness of Khomeini's return and like her still that counterpart in Greenspan Duster
should be seen as part of Shakespeare's wrestling with his source and trying to banish that incestuous element from his comic.
Ending the hasty way in which harmonious survival is reintroduced as a possibility might give us a glimpse of Shakespeare at work.
Working with his sources but working rather effortlessly to shape his material.
Perhaps Shakespeare had not always intended that Hamani would return,
but he needs to quash this inside story, and he does it by providing an alternative mate for lay on his.
Now, productions of the play before, say,
the last 20 or so years have tended to lend their support for this hasty belated attempt to wrest the play into a comic ending,
rather, as we saw in performances of measure for measure.
So directors have provided an interpretation of The Winter's Tale, which has said, yes, it does end happily.
Yes, these amazing events do come together to bring a kind of redemption at the end.
But more recently, directors of The Winter's Tale have been preoccupied with the lost.
Milius never mentioned in the text of the play in the final scene, but often made much of in the mind of the audience.
I'm going to give you one example of a production which does that which compromises the ending.
Stress is what's not resolved,
which resists that sentimental view of the second chance or the redemptive version of The Winter's Tale that I was talking about earlier.
This is Lynn Gardner writing in The Guardian, and she's talking about Declan Donlan production.
It's quite a long quotation. I think it's I think it works to explain what I'm talking about.
What normally happens in The Winter's Tale, she says, is that lay on Ts,
the wilful king driven to the brink of despair by his lunatic conviction of his wife's infidelity,
then kisses the statue of his apparently dead spouse. Suddenly, she moves, coming to life in his arms.
It's a moment of total redemption and grace. Sanity and happiness are restored in a single act of love.
At least that's how it's generally played. But there are no such happy ever afters in Declan Donaldson's brave, bitter conclusion.
Khamenei is indeed restored to life. The lost Perjeta is found.
But rather than being transformed by the glow of love and forgiveness.
The family trio are shown isolated and frozen in time.
They empties and mania, old and broken Perdita like a supplicant begging at their feet.
What is lost can never be regained. Once you are out of Eden, the gates are locked and barred against you forever.
To make the point even more strongly, Donlon has the young dad, Prince Mimili,
as his life squandered, his father's jealousy suddenly appear from amongst the courtiers.
He moves towards his parents, a small spirit eventually ushered gently but firmly away by the figure of time herself.
He is gone, but will remain forever as the ghost between his parents.
If most good productions of A Winter's Tale leave you in tears. This one leaves you choking.
What might, of course, argue that this kind of theatrical experience is the ultimate answer to why.
And certainly the recent stage history of the play has discovered the way in which it can and does work emotionally,
even while or because it strains our expectations and our credulity.
I wanted to end this series of lectures with an example from performance to make one last methodological point.
The play text always prompts and doesn't answer questions.
Critics and more visibly. Directors take those questions and answer them down to them.
Provisionally. Contingently. Impartially. But they answer them in ways that can clarify what the options are and why the questions are important.
So my last request in these lectures is that you try to attend to performance hypothetically as you read plays,
but also practically by following reviews, websites and the many clips there are of film and theatre versions now available online.
Thank you.