1 00:00:13,830 --> 00:00:20,610 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. 2 00:00:20,610 --> 00:00:23,370 The Winter's Tale. 3 00:00:23,370 --> 00:00:35,130 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, 4 00:00:35,130 --> 00:00:41,460 why then turn to this story that spans generations and kingdoms and which requires the 5 00:00:41,460 --> 00:00:46,920 apparently clumsy intervention of the figure of time itself to smooth over the cracks? 6 00:00:46,920 --> 00:00:52,410 Why this revisiting of the tropes of, on the one hand, mistaken jealousy? 7 00:00:52,410 --> 00:00:57,480 Think Othello or much ado about nothing and pastoral hijinx. 8 00:00:57,480 --> 00:01:07,030 Think as you like it. Why this catalogue of frankly, improbable events which culminate in a statue stepping down from its pedestal, 9 00:01:07,030 --> 00:01:15,750 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. 10 00:01:15,750 --> 00:01:22,560 So one answer to why has been to relegate or to ignore the play. 11 00:01:22,560 --> 00:01:28,950 Virtually the same external evidence that The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare's last play last. 12 00:01:28,950 --> 00:01:35,910 So authored play exists as does for The Tempest being Shakespeare's last soul authored play. 13 00:01:35,910 --> 00:01:43,080 There seem to have been written in the same year, but criticism has widely preferred the melancholic, leave-taking, 14 00:01:43,080 --> 00:01:52,830 wise old man stuff of the tempest in the narrative arc of Shakespeare's development over this bewildering splicing of tragic and comic conventions, 15 00:01:52,830 --> 00:01:58,080 which seems to allow no such sentimental biographical reading. 16 00:01:58,080 --> 00:02:03,570 What does it mean to call The Winter's Tale a late play? And is that an answer to why? 17 00:02:03,570 --> 00:02:09,720 Why this play? So today I'm going to try and suggest that the intertwined histories of Shakespearean 18 00:02:09,720 --> 00:02:16,020 performance and criticism have been trying to answer why The Winter's Tale? 19 00:02:16,020 --> 00:02:20,100 And as usual, I'm going to emphasise, as I have been throughout these lectures, 20 00:02:20,100 --> 00:02:26,190 that the play provides the question, not the answer or not the singular answer. 21 00:02:26,190 --> 00:02:36,400 The Winter's Tale seems deliberately to stretch our credulity to see just how far we will go. 22 00:02:36,400 --> 00:02:47,830 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, 23 00:02:47,830 --> 00:02:56,110 these this group. This cluster tends to include The Tempest, parallelise and Cymbeline. 24 00:02:56,110 --> 00:03:00,100 You'll recognise from your work in the mediaeval period that romance is here, 25 00:03:00,100 --> 00:03:05,260 a kind of extended fiction can concerned with adventures of love or chivalry, 26 00:03:05,260 --> 00:03:13,240 or preferably both satirised by Chaucer in the tale of Sir Topaze and later by 70s and Don Quixote. 27 00:03:13,240 --> 00:03:21,370 The first part of Don Quixote appeared in English. Around the same time as The Winter's Tale 16 12. 28 00:03:21,370 --> 00:03:25,390 In late Elizabethan England, Green, Spencer and Sidney. 29 00:03:25,390 --> 00:03:35,560 All right, romance is prose romances and indeed Arcadia, Sydney's Arcadia is a source for Shakespeare on several occasions, 30 00:03:35,560 --> 00:03:43,930 most notably, perhaps for King Lear, a play which Shakespeare may have been rewriting the folio text of King Lear at the time. 31 00:03:43,930 --> 00:03:48,760 He's writing his late plays, including The Winter's Tale. 32 00:03:48,760 --> 00:03:55,960 The main features of romance might be identified as a courtly setting, a loose episodic structure, 33 00:03:55,960 --> 00:04:07,780 elements of fantasy improbability or the supernatural within a narrative of spectacular achievement and heroism and romance. 34 00:04:07,780 --> 00:04:16,420 As those Sydney Spencer green practitioners might suggest, is a popular genre of the mid Elizabethan period. 35 00:04:16,420 --> 00:04:29,050 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. 36 00:04:29,050 --> 00:04:38,290 The revival of romance can be attributed, I think, to a constellation of circumstances in the Jacobean period in the theatre. 37 00:04:38,290 --> 00:04:48,160 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. 38 00:04:48,160 --> 00:04:54,820 These were high. Is it become high status performance attributes largely because of a kind of trickle down from mask culture, 39 00:04:54,820 --> 00:05:06,230 from court culture and these highly operatic, highly stylised, very richly costumed and spectacularly lavishly staged masks. 40 00:05:06,230 --> 00:05:13,280 The Blackfriars has is an indoor theatre, so it has artificial lighting, it has candle light, 41 00:05:13,280 --> 00:05:26,130 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. 42 00:05:26,130 --> 00:05:36,220 So Blackfriars and the theatre aesthetic, which it enables us to respond to, are more dependent on visual than non-verbal gymnastics, 43 00:05:36,220 --> 00:05:41,770 we might think of the verbal going to see because I'm going to hear a play being 44 00:05:41,770 --> 00:05:45,550 the idea about the Globe theatres that where language is the most important thing, 45 00:05:45,550 --> 00:05:53,170 hearing its most important Blackfriars probably gives us a sense that seeing is more important. 46 00:05:53,170 --> 00:05:58,390 And The Winter's Tale that in some of The Winter's Tale is one example and there aren't all that many. 47 00:05:58,390 --> 00:06:04,000 If you try and think when one of Shakespeare's plays has a denouement, which is predominantly visual. 48 00:06:04,000 --> 00:06:10,400 Well, you have to see it. And seeing it is what makes it happen. 49 00:06:10,400 --> 00:06:12,980 Genre fashions are changing, too. 50 00:06:12,980 --> 00:06:21,410 The Winter's Tale may well owe something to the fashionable genre of tragicomedy, as practised in particular by John Fletcher. 51 00:06:21,410 --> 00:06:31,400 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. 52 00:06:31,400 --> 00:06:35,120 In the preface to one of his plays, The Faithful Shepherdess, 53 00:06:35,120 --> 00:06:42,110 Fletcher defines the genre of tragicomedy as a kind of new thing and requires a definition. 54 00:06:42,110 --> 00:06:52,280 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. 55 00:06:52,280 --> 00:07:00,800 It wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy, 56 00:07:00,800 --> 00:07:05,240 which must be a representation of familiar people with such kind of trouble as no life. 57 00:07:05,240 --> 00:07:11,570 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. 58 00:07:11,570 --> 00:07:16,340 It wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy yet. 59 00:07:16,340 --> 00:07:24,830 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. 60 00:07:24,830 --> 00:07:31,250 Be questioned if your Mimili are slow, but who more later or antagonists. 61 00:07:31,250 --> 00:07:36,500 Likewise, you might not want to ascribe Winter's Tale to the genre of tragic comedy very easily 62 00:07:36,500 --> 00:07:44,960 as a a play which wants deaths make such kind of trouble as no life be questioned. 63 00:07:44,960 --> 00:07:51,380 I think even despite that, despite the fact that The Winter's Tale pushes that flat cherian definition of tragicomedy, 64 00:07:51,380 --> 00:07:58,190 we still might want to see the form of this play as a response to fashion and commercial circumstance. 65 00:07:58,190 --> 00:08:03,950 We've tended to construct post hoc Shakespeare, whose motivations are loftily aesthetic. 66 00:08:03,950 --> 00:08:11,960 But what we see time and again in Shakespeare's career is the ability to write precisely and skilfully to the market. 67 00:08:11,960 --> 00:08:18,820 That response to contemporary city comedies, which I talked about in measure for measure the echoes of domestic tragedy in Macbeth, 68 00:08:18,820 --> 00:08:28,340 the engagement with revenge, tragedy in Hamlet, and here the incorporation of the characteristics of this new form of tragicomedy. 69 00:08:28,340 --> 00:08:36,470 When I discussed. Measure for measure. I suggested that maybe the generic problem critics have identified in that play is a problem 70 00:08:36,470 --> 00:08:42,740 only if we see it narrowly in relation to Shakespeare's own earlier comedies and not a problem. 71 00:08:42,740 --> 00:08:50,750 If we look laterally at city comedies by Marston, Middleton and Dekker, the same may be true here. 72 00:08:50,750 --> 00:08:58,850 The Winter's Tale is different from Shakespeare's earlier plays, but perhaps not so different from other plays of the same time. 73 00:08:58,850 --> 00:09:06,530 When we look at Shakespeare in isolation from the theatrical culture in which he performed so adeptly, we obscure how to understand his plays. 74 00:09:06,530 --> 00:09:10,380 And I suppose then, as comparative comparisons with Winter's Tale, 75 00:09:10,380 --> 00:09:16,570 I might think about Beaumont and Fletcher Knights of the Burning Pessl as a another take on romance. 76 00:09:16,570 --> 00:09:25,520 Webster's White Devil by another woman is on trial for her sexuality, perhaps as a as a kind of romance love story. 77 00:09:25,520 --> 00:09:32,640 Fletcher's must Thomas. But if we do stay within Shakespeare's own canon, 78 00:09:32,640 --> 00:09:39,690 the comparison that is most useful is probably that with the tempest that both plays from the same year, 79 00:09:39,690 --> 00:09:47,850 they both invoke romance stories which involve great tracts of time and space. 80 00:09:47,850 --> 00:09:56,280 Each establishes a human scenario which can only be resolved by the subsequent generation and in a different place. 81 00:09:56,280 --> 00:10:03,420 The deposition of Prospero from Milan will take the 12 years before his enemies are brought to his island kingdom. 82 00:10:03,420 --> 00:10:09,590 The breach between Mounties and perplexities can only be healed by the union of the next generation. 83 00:10:09,590 --> 00:10:13,660 Floras Owl and per deter. 84 00:10:13,660 --> 00:10:19,590 Interesting to think, I mean, they're both relationships, kind of homosocial relationships between men, the rush to impress Brown, 85 00:10:19,590 --> 00:10:27,260 his brother and between allowances and and his brotherly friend Polixeni is it's 86 00:10:27,260 --> 00:10:31,870 interesting of parallel to think what women are doing in The Winter's Tale. 87 00:10:31,870 --> 00:10:34,750 What about him? I am going to come back to her in a minute. 88 00:10:34,750 --> 00:10:40,960 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, 89 00:10:40,960 --> 00:10:47,460 but that between the aunties and Polixeni is that's the thing which the plot is trying to put right. 90 00:10:47,460 --> 00:10:54,930 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. 91 00:10:54,930 --> 00:11:02,190 But there are some really significant differences in the temper's Shakespeare experiments for only the second time in his career. 92 00:11:02,190 --> 00:11:04,230 The first is the early play, the comedy of errors, 93 00:11:04,230 --> 00:11:10,740 and lots of interesting ways in which Shakespeare's very last plays to flip back to his very first ones. 94 00:11:10,740 --> 00:11:17,010 Here he's experimenting. Then, as in the comedy of errors with the unity of time, place and action. 95 00:11:17,010 --> 00:11:21,960 So if you know anything about how there's a great vogue in the in the 50s, really, 96 00:11:21,960 --> 00:11:32,020 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? 97 00:11:32,020 --> 00:11:37,050 Laughs It doesn't really it doesn't really matter how long they last, but they don't last three hours. 98 00:11:37,050 --> 00:11:40,740 That's the point. Apart from the comedy of Errors and The Tempest, 99 00:11:40,740 --> 00:11:46,290 these are the only plays in which the performance time the source thought that the time 100 00:11:46,290 --> 00:11:51,900 that the play takes to unfold before us is the same as the story time that it covers. 101 00:11:51,900 --> 00:12:01,560 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. 102 00:12:01,560 --> 00:12:09,380 Think of the unities now. So what what happens in The Tempest? 103 00:12:09,380 --> 00:12:16,110 What what what necessitated by sticking so closely to the unities is a very lengthy flashback sequence in Act one. 104 00:12:16,110 --> 00:12:20,820 Scene two, we hear in narrative form from Prospero all the things that we need to know 105 00:12:20,820 --> 00:12:26,340 to understand the encounter between the magician and the shipwrecked nobles. 106 00:12:26,340 --> 00:12:32,370 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. 107 00:12:32,370 --> 00:12:37,520 And it's very important for what comes. But it's terribly dull because nothing actually happens. 108 00:12:37,520 --> 00:12:42,090 It's all talking, not showing theories of narrative. 109 00:12:42,090 --> 00:12:47,860 Call this diagnosis so dire. Jesus is telling the ICG. 110 00:12:47,860 --> 00:12:55,240 Yes. I ask why Jesus is telling rather than my MI6 showing. 111 00:12:55,240 --> 00:12:57,640 So in The Tempest, the dramatic unities are adhered to, 112 00:12:57,640 --> 00:13:04,160 but they require a long day agentic section which slows down the action of the play in the Winter's Tale, 113 00:13:04,160 --> 00:13:09,160 we largely get my mistress, not Diageo says we could have had a version of The Winter's Tale, 114 00:13:09,160 --> 00:13:16,450 which began in Bohemia, and told us dejectedly everything that happened up to that point. 115 00:13:16,450 --> 00:13:23,230 But that's not what Shakespeare chooses to do here. This technique in The Winter's Tale requires a different stage expedient. 116 00:13:23,230 --> 00:13:30,310 The figure of time telling us where we are. That Shakespeare works with both these techniques in the same year. 117 00:13:30,310 --> 00:13:36,970 At the end of his career might be thought to suggest active experimentation with the actual form. 118 00:13:36,970 --> 00:13:43,860 Having experimented earlier in his writing with issues of character and different ways of suggesting interiority, 119 00:13:43,860 --> 00:13:49,960 we discuss some of these at the end of the last of last week's lecture on the on on Macbeth dialogue soliloquy doubling, 120 00:13:49,960 --> 00:13:58,360 Foyles splitting always of trying to show the interior we might want to see him now experimenting with plot construction, 121 00:13:58,360 --> 00:14:09,560 with narrative style, and specifically with how to translate the dilated spatial and temporal axis of romance into drama. 122 00:14:09,560 --> 00:14:17,750 Perhaps, perhaps is a good time to think about the different connotations of the designation of Winter's Tale as a late play. 123 00:14:17,750 --> 00:14:24,560 Cultural lateness, as Gordon McMullen has recently explored in a study which goes well beyond Shakespeare. 124 00:14:24,560 --> 00:14:30,680 But the phenomenon of lateness has a range of connotations which cluster around ideas of summation, 125 00:14:30,680 --> 00:14:36,380 detachment, philosophising, maybe even world weariness. 126 00:14:36,380 --> 00:14:44,630 And Shakespeare's late plays have been particularly suited to and generative of interpretations stressing these aspects. 127 00:14:44,630 --> 00:14:52,020 And again, we might see why The Tempest is thought to embody these attributes more properly than The Winter's Tale. 128 00:14:52,020 --> 00:14:54,890 That's quite good example, I think of the way cut critical assumptions, 129 00:14:54,890 --> 00:15:00,770 create problems with those texts which don't subscribe to their own preconceptions. 130 00:15:00,770 --> 00:15:05,990 We are more used to the biographical image of a Shakespeare who is about to step down from active, 131 00:15:05,990 --> 00:15:08,930 dramatic life in London and planning his retirement. 132 00:15:08,930 --> 00:15:17,090 Stratford, the biographical counterpart of the Associations of late play The Idea of late is a by Rafeal category, isn't it? 133 00:15:17,090 --> 00:15:22,000 Because it's late in relation to Shakespeare's life for Shakespeare's other other plays. 134 00:15:22,000 --> 00:15:26,360 It's not a generic. It's not it's not from the start a generic category or a thematic one. 135 00:15:26,360 --> 00:15:32,900 It's a biographical one. Interesting that we don't use biographical categories elsewhere in thinking about Shakespeare. 136 00:15:32,900 --> 00:15:38,810 So the biographical counterpart associations of the late play is Shakespeare preparing for retirement. 137 00:15:38,810 --> 00:15:46,760 Shakespeare, who has done it all and who for whom? Like Prospero, every third thought shall be my grave. 138 00:15:46,760 --> 00:15:53,440 But those critics who have been brave enough to challenge the bar dollar tree that can only see Shakespeare as a genius, 139 00:15:53,440 --> 00:15:59,840 have been quick to make other associations of lateness with The Winter's Tale to associate this play with a clapped 140 00:15:59,840 --> 00:16:07,100 out elderly playwright figure who is struggling to keep up with a dynamic cultural medium like the theatre. 141 00:16:07,100 --> 00:16:16,760 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. 142 00:16:16,760 --> 00:16:21,380 In no particular order room with no room for you to argue, here are a few examples I would think. 143 00:16:21,380 --> 00:16:30,760 Hardy George Lucas. Take that. Wordsworth, Elvis, John Wayne, possibly also Shakespeare. 144 00:16:30,760 --> 00:16:34,690 So the same evidence can support quite a different reading that lateness. 145 00:16:34,690 --> 00:16:38,600 Let lateness is a kind of summation. Lateness is the best thing that you can do. 146 00:16:38,600 --> 00:16:41,600 And lateness is a falling off from what you were good at before. 147 00:16:41,600 --> 00:16:49,130 And both those cultural myths about lateness as a biographical catalogue I think exist in culture more widely. 148 00:16:49,130 --> 00:16:53,030 The lateness of The Winter's Tale, though, is not the same tonally as that of The Tempest. 149 00:16:53,030 --> 00:17:03,200 Outplays mood is more active, and its final scene urges a reconnection with theatre and its powers of transformative illusion. 150 00:17:03,200 --> 00:17:12,860 Paulina, who acts as the director of the play, particularly in this final scene, tells Layon Tease awake your faith. 151 00:17:12,860 --> 00:17:20,630 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 152 00:17:20,630 --> 00:17:26,330 which has taken on the penal qualities of that kind in which Secour Acts imprisoned Ariel. 153 00:17:26,330 --> 00:17:31,400 Release me from my bands with the help of your good hands. 154 00:17:31,400 --> 00:17:35,720 So we might think that the experimental form of the Winter's Tale doesn't entirely corroborate a 155 00:17:35,720 --> 00:17:44,870 view of its writer as weary with the theatre and ready to hang up his quill in previous plays. 156 00:17:44,870 --> 00:17:50,330 And some of these we've looked at already in this series. Shakespeare has experimented with the relation between tragedy and comedy. 157 00:17:50,330 --> 00:18:03,050 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. 158 00:18:03,050 --> 00:18:05,810 When I was talking about a fellow and about measure for measure, 159 00:18:05,810 --> 00:18:13,640 I've discussed some of the ways that genre theory has helped us to understand the structural and tonal expectations of comedy and tragedy. 160 00:18:13,640 --> 00:18:25,190 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. 161 00:18:25,190 --> 00:18:32,660 Claudio's speech on death in the middle of measure for measure or an uneasily comic tone in tragedy. 162 00:18:32,660 --> 00:18:42,350 We might think of all those puns on hands in that strange paean to the hand ectomy Titus Andronicus. 163 00:18:42,350 --> 00:18:47,930 That's a very good hope that's been recorded, that fantastic laugh here. 164 00:18:47,930 --> 00:18:51,800 I think in The Winter's Tale, the experimentation is something different. 165 00:18:51,800 --> 00:19:00,110 A radical swerving away from tragedy into comedy, which is managed not just by the intervention of the figure of time, 166 00:19:00,110 --> 00:19:05,910 but by a range of shifting registers in the middle of the play. 167 00:19:05,910 --> 00:19:11,710 In fact, one to three of the Winter's Tale give us a condensed version of tragedies, 168 00:19:11,710 --> 00:19:21,700 anagnorisis or recognition and Peripeteia or reversal loungy lounges continues stubbornly in his conviction of her mind. 169 00:19:21,700 --> 00:19:32,380 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. 170 00:19:32,380 --> 00:19:37,960 So we go through all sorts of recognition and reversal in a very condensed 171 00:19:37,960 --> 00:19:42,880 way and act one to three pretty bring me the dead bodies of my queen and son. 172 00:19:42,880 --> 00:19:50,980 One grave shall be for both upon them. Shall the causes of their death appear unto our shame perpetual. 173 00:19:50,980 --> 00:19:55,510 So we might think at the end of Act three, we've come so far so tragic. 174 00:19:55,510 --> 00:20:02,170 We have at least in outline a man of high status brought to the destruction of his own family due to his own mistake, 175 00:20:02,170 --> 00:20:07,300 making Lelantos a tragic patriarch like King Lear or Othello. 176 00:20:07,300 --> 00:20:15,970 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. 177 00:20:15,970 --> 00:20:20,860 Rather, as lay on his rage blows up from nowhere, it is too much, too soon. 178 00:20:20,860 --> 00:20:31,750 Too hot, too hot. So unlike in these previous plays, Lear and Othello, tragedy is not the end point of the play. 179 00:20:31,750 --> 00:20:39,850 In refusing to close the play on the sorrowful and bereft, tragic figure, the play prompts us to consider what comes next. 180 00:20:39,850 --> 00:20:44,650 What really does happen when you've screwed up royally lost everything. 181 00:20:44,650 --> 00:20:52,600 And rather than dying majestically like Othello, dying upon a kiss, you have to face that knowledge every day. 182 00:20:52,600 --> 00:20:58,690 And in doing that, the play, one might think, offers us a potentially more optimistic structure, 183 00:20:58,690 --> 00:21:06,970 not the inevitable and unavoidable spiral of tragedy, but a sort of philosophy of the second chance. 184 00:21:06,970 --> 00:21:11,560 Tears, vows lay on Ts. She'll be my recreation. 185 00:21:11,560 --> 00:21:18,700 And that word recreation has in it very prominently, of course, recreation. 186 00:21:18,700 --> 00:21:30,340 So whereas tears are destructive in tragedy or metaphorically so here that they are thought to be regenerative recreating. 187 00:21:30,340 --> 00:21:34,000 We sometimes say about Shakespeare's tragic characters probably trying to cheer ourselves 188 00:21:34,000 --> 00:21:38,740 up about that terrible situation that they have learnt something about themselves. 189 00:21:38,740 --> 00:21:44,470 Well, they have grown in humanity that Lear recognises it should not have treated Cordelia as he did, 190 00:21:44,470 --> 00:21:48,100 or he should have been a better king to all those poor naked wretches. 191 00:21:48,100 --> 00:21:54,520 But the ameliorative comfort of this is a bit hollow, given that the reward of this personal development is to die. 192 00:21:54,520 --> 00:21:55,240 What's the point? 193 00:21:55,240 --> 00:22:04,480 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, 194 00:22:04,480 --> 00:22:10,030 ever failed. No matter. Try again, fail again, fail better. 195 00:22:10,030 --> 00:22:13,870 But lay on TS does get a second chance in the Winter's Tale. 196 00:22:13,870 --> 00:22:21,470 Like the biblical jobe, he endures his losses and he has at least some of them restored to him, but not yet. 197 00:22:21,470 --> 00:22:28,450 I want to think as the light goes on about whether that very positive, optimistic, even you might say, 198 00:22:28,450 --> 00:22:32,710 sentimental view of the Winter's Tale as the philosophy of the second chance, 199 00:22:32,710 --> 00:22:39,340 whether that's actually borne out in the way the play works, particularly on the stage. 200 00:22:39,340 --> 00:22:45,460 But after Lantis realises what he has done at the end of at three, the play shifts a number of gears. 201 00:22:45,460 --> 00:22:49,660 We need to move place, tone, genre and time. 202 00:22:49,660 --> 00:22:54,490 So the middle of the play sees a number of transitional scenes. 203 00:22:54,490 --> 00:23:04,810 The first is the shifting of plays and Tichenor springs per editor, the baby in a storm to a beach and leaves her there. 204 00:23:04,810 --> 00:23:13,520 But the second, I think, shift tone, that most famous stage direction in all of Shakespeare exit pursued by a bear. 205 00:23:13,520 --> 00:23:18,040 You're not really believe how much ink has been spilt on the question of whether in sixteen eleven. 206 00:23:18,040 --> 00:23:22,810 This could have been a real bear. The answer is we don't know. 207 00:23:22,810 --> 00:23:28,180 We do know that bears were high status fashion accessories in Jacobean London. 208 00:23:28,180 --> 00:23:34,920 After two polar bear cubs were bought but brought back from a North Atlantic expedition and given to the king, 209 00:23:34,920 --> 00:23:39,280 they were the sort of equivalent of Bo, that dog in the White House that everyone was mad about. 210 00:23:39,280 --> 00:23:47,220 After Obama's election, White Bears make an appearance in the mask of Oberon, one of the masks before King James. 211 00:23:47,220 --> 00:23:53,710 And we do know the theatre district of early modern London shared space and clients with bear baiting. 212 00:23:53,710 --> 00:23:57,010 The Hope Theatre, which is built around this time, 213 00:23:57,010 --> 00:24:05,400 is built purp purpose built as an alternative venue for theatre on Sundays and bear baiting on others. 214 00:24:05,400 --> 00:24:13,330 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. 215 00:24:13,330 --> 00:24:18,730 It seems more likely that what we would have got is some representation of a bear. 216 00:24:18,730 --> 00:24:22,030 Now, if we think about more recent stage productions, 217 00:24:22,030 --> 00:24:28,680 representations have been off the bat had been anything from a man in a bear suit to a monster made of sheets of paper. 218 00:24:28,680 --> 00:24:34,180 See, in the most recent RISC production to a shadow projection of a large claw. 219 00:24:34,180 --> 00:24:39,370 But one thing they tend to share is that they provoke laughter. They're funny. 220 00:24:39,370 --> 00:24:47,830 The purpose of the stage direction seems to be to shift tone rather unfortunately, since it registers the demise of antagonists. 221 00:24:47,830 --> 00:24:54,190 Who is the last victim of a tragedy which is now wrestling its way into comedy? 222 00:24:54,190 --> 00:25:03,450 The baby is then found by two rustic types. Q. Of course, funny accent, more hilarity and colourful prose, all of which register hourly, 223 00:25:03,450 --> 00:25:08,740 really the shift from the high tragic poetry of Sicily instead of death. 224 00:25:08,740 --> 00:25:13,960 Is that the stuff of tragedy? We have rebirth and regeneration comedy. 225 00:25:13,960 --> 00:25:20,750 In case we're not getting the generic point, the shepherd pointed out for us, thou matched with things dying. 226 00:25:20,750 --> 00:25:25,000 I wish things neuborne. It's pretty clear, isn't it? 227 00:25:25,000 --> 00:25:28,960 The baby is saved like a fairytale like Moses in the rushes. 228 00:25:28,960 --> 00:25:39,200 With all that that promises for the future. When the shepherd's son describes the bear eating until Guinness in humorous terms, interestingly, 229 00:25:39,200 --> 00:25:43,820 we've moved away from knowing antagonism to the caring about him and come to objectify him. 230 00:25:43,820 --> 00:25:46,130 We've moved our perspective to the perspective of Bohemia. 231 00:25:46,130 --> 00:25:51,920 Think how the poor souls roared and the sea mocked them and how the poor gentleman roared and the band mocked him. 232 00:25:51,920 --> 00:25:56,810 The transformation is complete. We've moved place, genre and tone. 233 00:25:56,810 --> 00:26:06,590 And in the last shift we moved time in, bringing on the figure of time to indicate that 16 years has passed. 234 00:26:06,590 --> 00:26:12,030 The play does something like the equivalent of a film flashing up 16 years later. 235 00:26:12,030 --> 00:26:16,190 It's moves over a chronological disjunction in the play. 236 00:26:16,190 --> 00:26:23,270 It makes clear that what's interesting to the plot is not the girlhood of the baby, nor her life amongst her adopted family. 237 00:26:23,270 --> 00:26:32,570 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. 238 00:26:32,570 --> 00:26:38,570 We renew our interest in Perjeta justice shellfish, just as she's on the brink of adulthood. 239 00:26:38,570 --> 00:26:45,560 When a new young couple come into the courtship, which is typical of Shakespeare's comedies. 240 00:26:45,560 --> 00:26:53,930 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, 241 00:26:53,930 --> 00:26:58,340 which can help us make some suggested connexions between the two halves of the play. 242 00:26:58,340 --> 00:27:07,430 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. 243 00:27:07,430 --> 00:27:15,050 What if Hamani returns as per to Judi Dench? Did this famously in 60s production? 244 00:27:15,050 --> 00:27:26,540 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, 245 00:27:26,540 --> 00:27:32,870 to put some distance between us and the accelerated trauma of the Sicilian scenes. 246 00:27:32,870 --> 00:27:43,910 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. 247 00:27:43,910 --> 00:27:52,880 But here, too, perhaps genre is unthaw uncertain. One king Polixeni is hears of his son's entanglement with an apparently unworthy woman. 248 00:27:52,880 --> 00:27:58,610 He is misreading the genre. He obviously doesn't know that in a romance prete princess who fall in love with Shepherdess 249 00:27:58,610 --> 00:28:03,260 is always discover that they are actually lost or disguised princesses after all. 250 00:28:03,260 --> 00:28:07,040 And here, Prolix Nese is like those hapless suitors in the Merchant of Venice who must 251 00:28:07,040 --> 00:28:15,480 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. 252 00:28:15,480 --> 00:28:20,250 Like most of Shakespeare's plays and like the plays I've been talking about previously in this series, 253 00:28:20,250 --> 00:28:28,590 The Winter's Tale follows a pre-existing source. And here the source is a 20 year old prose romance by Robert Greene. 254 00:28:28,590 --> 00:28:32,850 The romance is called Pantusso or the Triumph of Time. 255 00:28:32,850 --> 00:28:40,130 First published in 15 88. Panopto is the lay on TS figure. 256 00:28:40,130 --> 00:28:46,970 Bulgaria, Romania fornia per deter the Rastus flurries out under Justice Polixeni. 257 00:28:46,970 --> 00:28:55,620 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. 258 00:28:55,620 --> 00:29:03,590 What's very different, though, in what Shakespeare does to Green is the ending of the story in Green's Panopto. 259 00:29:03,590 --> 00:29:09,470 I'm going to talk about the figures in this prose romance by using the names of Shakespeare's characters, 260 00:29:09,470 --> 00:29:16,790 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. 261 00:29:16,790 --> 00:29:25,610 Contrary to his age, it year began to be somewhat tickled with the beauty of purdah to his frantic affection for her grows, 262 00:29:25,610 --> 00:29:31,370 despite his efforts to deny it Purdie to reject his advances. 263 00:29:31,370 --> 00:29:43,920 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. 264 00:29:43,920 --> 00:29:53,430 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. 265 00:29:53,430 --> 00:29:58,110 He thinks this is this is how it's going to work. He will kill, kill Perjeta. 266 00:29:58,110 --> 00:30:06,330 But then the fact that predators down to his daughter is revealed and lay on TS recognises her as his daughter. 267 00:30:06,330 --> 00:30:14,970 All seems to be reconciled, but his cannot enter into the rejoicing in the marriage celebrations and green story ends in this way. 268 00:30:14,970 --> 00:30:23,910 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, 269 00:30:23,910 --> 00:30:26,700 he had lusted after his own daughter, 270 00:30:26,700 --> 00:30:32,970 moved with these desperate thought to fell into a melancholy fit and to close up the comedy with a tragical stratagem. 271 00:30:32,970 --> 00:30:42,750 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, 272 00:30:42,750 --> 00:30:45,270 particularly for his ancestor's desire of his own daughter, 273 00:30:45,270 --> 00:30:51,810 but also for falling out with Flexner's in the first place and killing off Miami that he that he ends in suicide. 274 00:30:51,810 --> 00:30:53,940 It's a tragedy. 275 00:30:53,940 --> 00:31:02,760 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. 276 00:31:02,760 --> 00:31:10,980 He sloup himself by keeping his lay on TE's alive at the end and by miraculously returning Dominy 277 00:31:10,980 --> 00:31:18,240 to him and by evading the issue of Lay on his incestuous desire for the unrecognised Perjeta. 278 00:31:18,240 --> 00:31:27,210 Shakespeare works with the tragedy of the opening acts and forces them into an apparently comic redemption for both generations. 279 00:31:27,210 --> 00:31:30,240 But if we look a little bit more closely, what's going on? 280 00:31:30,240 --> 00:31:41,940 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. 281 00:31:41,940 --> 00:31:48,670 Shakespeare's late plays are all preoccupied with the relationship between fathers and adult or near adult daughters. 282 00:31:48,670 --> 00:31:54,510 And it's arguable that all these relationships bear traces of incestuous desire. 283 00:31:54,510 --> 00:32:07,350 Prospero Miranda in The Tempest sees extreme paternal aggression to the threats of her chastity and a kind of preoccupation with Miranda's chastity, 284 00:32:07,350 --> 00:32:20,010 which which which we might want to interpret in the light of the other plays as suppressed as a presently incestuous in Cymbeline. 285 00:32:20,010 --> 00:32:23,490 The wicked stepmother doesn't have a name in the play. 286 00:32:23,490 --> 00:32:29,010 The wicked queen is jealous of the king's daughter in Ajin and suspects that 287 00:32:29,010 --> 00:32:33,690 this is a more more prominent relationship for Cymbeline than his marriage. 288 00:32:33,690 --> 00:32:44,760 But most prominently in these late plays, we get parallelise and Marina Pericles begins with an explicit scene a father daughter incest at Antioch, 289 00:32:44,760 --> 00:32:49,620 presenting himself as a suitor to the king's daughter. She doesn't have a name either. 290 00:32:49,620 --> 00:32:53,310 parallelise has to answer a riddle in order to win her hand. 291 00:32:53,310 --> 00:32:57,150 This is the riddle. I am no VIPR yet. 292 00:32:57,150 --> 00:33:06,490 I feed on mothers flesh, which did me breed. I sought a husband in which labour I found that kindness in a father. 293 00:33:06,490 --> 00:33:12,420 He's father, son and husband, mild I mother, wife, and yet his child. 294 00:33:12,420 --> 00:33:16,410 How this may be. And yet in2 as you will live. 295 00:33:16,410 --> 00:33:19,770 Resolve it you. It's not rocket science. 296 00:33:19,770 --> 00:33:26,730 But paraphrase fear for his own life means he can neither confront the insets nor refuse to answer the riddle. 297 00:33:26,730 --> 00:33:31,410 Instead, poetries escapes and he is condemned to a long series of sea voyages. 298 00:33:31,410 --> 00:33:35,010 At the end of which he is reunited with his own lost daughter, Marina, 299 00:33:35,010 --> 00:33:40,920 who is another sexual anomaly, a chaste prostitute who has brought one of her brothel's clients. 300 00:33:40,920 --> 00:33:47,490 The governor of mightily to repent his ways and to propose marriage to her. 301 00:33:47,490 --> 00:33:54,210 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. 302 00:33:54,210 --> 00:33:59,490 King Lear reaches a particular intensity in these late plays. 303 00:33:59,490 --> 00:34:03,960 But we also know that if we compare with Greenspan Dostal in The Winter's Tale, 304 00:34:03,960 --> 00:34:11,460 Shakespeare has chosen to omit this dynamic between aunties and per deter, or at least he is structured the play to suppress. 305 00:34:11,460 --> 00:34:23,180 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. 306 00:34:23,180 --> 00:34:29,330 Lantis is full of praise for the young brides beauty when Floras Al says his father will 307 00:34:29,330 --> 00:34:34,430 grant mountains anything the king's hypothetical wishes to have predator for himself. 308 00:34:34,430 --> 00:34:38,160 And this Ernes from Pollina, the rump. The remonstrance. Your. 309 00:34:38,160 --> 00:34:46,610 I have too much youth in it. After that point to The Winter's Tale, there is no further discussion between father and daughter. 310 00:34:46,610 --> 00:34:50,570 It's almost as if the play is too frightened to have them on stage again together 311 00:34:50,570 --> 00:34:56,210 in case the incestuous desires from Pam Dosso break out into the Winter's Tale. 312 00:34:56,210 --> 00:35:02,540 The scene in which Lake Empties recognises Purdie to ask his daughter is recounted, not shown. 313 00:35:02,540 --> 00:35:07,340 Interesting in a play which, as I've already said, is so structured around my missis showing. 314 00:35:07,340 --> 00:35:15,620 This is an interesting cutaway to Diageo, says Tallin. I'm most extraordinarily of all, and this doesn't happen in the source. 315 00:35:15,620 --> 00:35:18,610 Hamani name is revealed to be alive. 316 00:35:18,610 --> 00:35:27,760 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. 317 00:35:27,760 --> 00:35:38,650 Perhaps her mind then is brought back to life precisely to interrupt Green's incest narrative. 318 00:35:38,650 --> 00:35:44,010 And it's interesting to think about that in given that The Winter's Tale is probably the only play by Shakespeare, 319 00:35:44,010 --> 00:35:48,150 which has anything approaching a narrative twist at the end. 320 00:35:48,150 --> 00:35:52,410 It's the only play for which we could give a plot spoiler. 321 00:35:52,410 --> 00:35:58,310 Shakespeare's plays are always dependent on dramatic irony and on the way that we know more than characters on the stage. 322 00:35:58,310 --> 00:36:04,830 We're always in a position of of of masterly control over events in the play. 323 00:36:04,830 --> 00:36:10,230 We know who's who who's disguised. We know he Argo doesn't is not honest, as everybody else thinks. 324 00:36:10,230 --> 00:36:15,480 We know that the answer to the confusion is in Twelfth Night is that Sebastian is also there. 325 00:36:15,480 --> 00:36:22,260 We know that the merry wives are only pretending to trick their husbands and all those things. 326 00:36:22,260 --> 00:36:29,490 So there's no reason why at the end of Shakespeare's career, we should mistrust the evidence that the play gives us. 327 00:36:29,490 --> 00:36:39,420 Paulina announces that three years into the Queen, the queen, the sweetest, dearest creatures dead lay on his exits that seem pretty. 328 00:36:39,420 --> 00:36:45,210 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 329 00:36:45,210 --> 00:36:49,500 suggests that this is an impossibility since the Queen is not really dead. 330 00:36:49,500 --> 00:36:56,400 You could, in performance, have Pollina winking to the audience, or she could overplay these quite histrionic lines in the scene. 331 00:36:56,400 --> 00:37:01,050 I mean, they may look histrionic, but when people die and chase abuse, people usually are histrionic. 332 00:37:01,050 --> 00:37:09,720 So it's hard to say that it's an index of insincerity. None of these things, though, is scripted. 333 00:37:09,720 --> 00:37:15,990 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, 334 00:37:15,990 --> 00:37:22,170 people in Shakespeare's plays see ghosts of dead people not living people in their dreams. 335 00:37:22,170 --> 00:37:28,380 So dramatic irony is suspended in The Winter's Tale. Really important structural point about our relation to the play. 336 00:37:28,380 --> 00:37:30,400 The play tells us Hamani is dead, 337 00:37:30,400 --> 00:37:40,230 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. 338 00:37:40,230 --> 00:37:41,670 One of the gentlemen you'll remember, 339 00:37:41,670 --> 00:37:49,050 is discussing the reunion of the father and daughter and mentions that Paul Ironer is about to reveal a statue of Hamani. 340 00:37:49,050 --> 00:37:54,660 I thought she had some great matter there in hand, for she have privately twice or thrice a day. 341 00:37:54,660 --> 00:37:59,030 Ever since the death of her mind, he visited that removed house. 342 00:37:59,030 --> 00:38:03,760 She have privately twice times a day, ever since the death of her mind, he visited that remove it house. 343 00:38:03,760 --> 00:38:06,030 It's a rather late indication of what's to come. 344 00:38:06,030 --> 00:38:12,780 There are probably about 15 minutes before her mind is going to step down from that pedestal and we suddenly get this hint, 345 00:38:12,780 --> 00:38:21,840 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, 346 00:38:21,840 --> 00:38:27,810 is that two different endings are jostling for that narrative superiority. 347 00:38:27,810 --> 00:38:32,700 One ending is the comic ending, which is the marriage between Floras Alan Purdie to the marriage, 348 00:38:32,700 --> 00:38:38,490 which is going to resolve the problems of the past and rewrite the breaches of history. 349 00:38:38,490 --> 00:38:43,740 And the other is the return of harmony. 350 00:38:43,740 --> 00:38:50,970 So maybe the strangeness and the unexpectedness of Khomeini's return and like her still that counterpart in Greenspan Duster 351 00:38:50,970 --> 00:38:56,910 should be seen as part of Shakespeare's wrestling with his source and trying to banish that incestuous element from his comic. 352 00:38:56,910 --> 00:39:04,650 Ending the hasty way in which harmonious survival is reintroduced as a possibility might give us a glimpse of Shakespeare at work. 353 00:39:04,650 --> 00:39:09,930 Working with his sources but working rather effortlessly to shape his material. 354 00:39:09,930 --> 00:39:14,130 Perhaps Shakespeare had not always intended that Hamani would return, 355 00:39:14,130 --> 00:39:21,910 but he needs to quash this inside story, and he does it by providing an alternative mate for lay on his. 356 00:39:21,910 --> 00:39:24,130 Now, productions of the play before, say, 357 00:39:24,130 --> 00:39:33,280 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, 358 00:39:33,280 --> 00:39:36,040 rather, as we saw in performances of measure for measure. 359 00:39:36,040 --> 00:39:42,040 So directors have provided an interpretation of The Winter's Tale, which has said, yes, it does end happily. 360 00:39:42,040 --> 00:39:49,720 Yes, these amazing events do come together to bring a kind of redemption at the end. 361 00:39:49,720 --> 00:39:54,350 But more recently, directors of The Winter's Tale have been preoccupied with the lost. 362 00:39:54,350 --> 00:40:02,590 Milius never mentioned in the text of the play in the final scene, but often made much of in the mind of the audience. 363 00:40:02,590 --> 00:40:08,600 I'm going to give you one example of a production which does that which compromises the ending. 364 00:40:08,600 --> 00:40:10,900 Stress is what's not resolved, 365 00:40:10,900 --> 00:40:19,180 which resists that sentimental view of the second chance or the redemptive version of The Winter's Tale that I was talking about earlier. 366 00:40:19,180 --> 00:40:25,260 This is Lynn Gardner writing in The Guardian, and she's talking about Declan Donlan production. 367 00:40:25,260 --> 00:40:30,220 It's quite a long quotation. I think it's I think it works to explain what I'm talking about. 368 00:40:30,220 --> 00:40:33,460 What normally happens in The Winter's Tale, she says, is that lay on Ts, 369 00:40:33,460 --> 00:40:38,950 the wilful king driven to the brink of despair by his lunatic conviction of his wife's infidelity, 370 00:40:38,950 --> 00:40:45,220 then kisses the statue of his apparently dead spouse. Suddenly, she moves, coming to life in his arms. 371 00:40:45,220 --> 00:40:52,240 It's a moment of total redemption and grace. Sanity and happiness are restored in a single act of love. 372 00:40:52,240 --> 00:40:59,980 At least that's how it's generally played. But there are no such happy ever afters in Declan Donaldson's brave, bitter conclusion. 373 00:40:59,980 --> 00:41:04,510 Khamenei is indeed restored to life. The lost Perjeta is found. 374 00:41:04,510 --> 00:41:08,110 But rather than being transformed by the glow of love and forgiveness. 375 00:41:08,110 --> 00:41:12,460 The family trio are shown isolated and frozen in time. 376 00:41:12,460 --> 00:41:18,550 They empties and mania, old and broken Perdita like a supplicant begging at their feet. 377 00:41:18,550 --> 00:41:26,780 What is lost can never be regained. Once you are out of Eden, the gates are locked and barred against you forever. 378 00:41:26,780 --> 00:41:31,030 To make the point even more strongly, Donlon has the young dad, Prince Mimili, 379 00:41:31,030 --> 00:41:37,190 as his life squandered, his father's jealousy suddenly appear from amongst the courtiers. 380 00:41:37,190 --> 00:41:44,540 He moves towards his parents, a small spirit eventually ushered gently but firmly away by the figure of time herself. 381 00:41:44,540 --> 00:41:49,100 He is gone, but will remain forever as the ghost between his parents. 382 00:41:49,100 --> 00:41:55,110 If most good productions of A Winter's Tale leave you in tears. This one leaves you choking. 383 00:41:55,110 --> 00:42:01,040 What might, of course, argue that this kind of theatrical experience is the ultimate answer to why. 384 00:42:01,040 --> 00:42:06,650 And certainly the recent stage history of the play has discovered the way in which it can and does work emotionally, 385 00:42:06,650 --> 00:42:12,410 even while or because it strains our expectations and our credulity. 386 00:42:12,410 --> 00:42:19,010 I wanted to end this series of lectures with an example from performance to make one last methodological point. 387 00:42:19,010 --> 00:42:23,540 The play text always prompts and doesn't answer questions. 388 00:42:23,540 --> 00:42:29,750 Critics and more visibly. Directors take those questions and answer them down to them. 389 00:42:29,750 --> 00:42:39,200 Provisionally. Contingently. Impartially. But they answer them in ways that can clarify what the options are and why the questions are important. 390 00:42:39,200 --> 00:42:45,620 So my last request in these lectures is that you try to attend to performance hypothetically as you read plays, 391 00:42:45,620 --> 00:42:54,110 but also practically by following reviews, websites and the many clips there are of film and theatre versions now available online. 392 00:42:54,110 --> 00:42:58,194 Thank you.