Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale” starts out with a scene that the audience takes will be a leisurely exposition of who is who. It begins with fulsome praise by a resident king to a visiting one, and then shifts to an even more fulsome praise by the resident queen to the visiting king. And then the audience begins to notice something, or has been prepared to notice it by having prepared for this visit to the theatre by reading the text (something, it need hardly be said, that was not done in Shakespeare’s day, though that would have meant an appreciation of the scene rested solely on its stagecraft). The mutual statements of love become much too fulsome, crossing some kind of line into being inappropriate. The Queen’s husband no longer likes what he hears and you see him and hear him in a few lines deliberating about what is going on and coming to the conclusion that his wife has indulged in adultery with his best friend. He turns on her and denounces her and that is what sets the play in motion: a set of suspicions that are turned into a conviction and which he then proceeds to act upon, making plans to murder the erstwhile cuckold maker. A lot has been compressed into that scene and it sets an audience reeling, wanting to know how things will further escalate and unravel, and there are enough surprises ahead, enough plot twists, to satisfy anyone’s sense that good plays often are continually turning the tables.
Then, at the end of the play, there is the living statue, so reminiscent of the later use of this trope by Mozart in “Don Giovanni”, where De Ponte’s libretto does not explain very well why this figure makes the aristocratic world crash. “A Winter’s Tale”, for its part, explains very well why Hermione restores the world by being restored from her suspended animation. Her restoration or resurrection makes complete in a lifetime what would otherwise be a saga of generations coming to terms with an irredeemable sin committed in the past. The play therefore emerges as a comedy, in that everybody is paired off, even Paulina, and so not a tragedy that sees to it a family line and not just some protagonists are destroyed. Shakespeare is so in control of his materials that he can pause and play with the image, it dawning on the audience before it dawns on the characters that Hermione is not just a statue. She has aged, which is not something statues do. Shakespeare has even departed from his own usual practice of making the key revelation and reconciliation scene, during which the fathers accept that their kids are a couple, occur off stage, reported by various “gentlemen”, so as to give pride of place to the statue scene which creates a grander reconciliation, one between the members of the prior generation and, in this case, also between the dead and the living. Now, that is theatre!
Then there is the masterfulness of the plot structure. Each of the acts surrounds its own distinctive fulcrum and takes place in a nest of its own circumstances. That makes it easier for an audience, which can catch on to the fact that it is watching five plays each of which feeds off what has gone before. Also making it easier is the fact that the plot devices used in the acts are reprises of Shakespeare’s own Golden Oldies or of plot devices known to any of today's educated audience.
The first act is centered on a ceremonial encounter gone very wrong. Pleasantries turn to rage and tragic results when what was expected to be said is not said or, in this case, said too forcefully. It evokes the opening act of “King Lear'' where a polite statement of appreciation would have sufficed to keep Cordelia in Lear’s good graces, but she could not bring herself to do even that, not knowing how vain or crazy or both her father had become. In “The Winter’s Tale”, the King again seems to go mad, though that does not keep him from continually staying his hand when his counselors ask him to, forgoing brutality, expelling his child to the wilderness, his wife dying of distress rather than by the king’s intent. Why he is so taken by his suspicions is a wonder to be endured rather than explained, just as it was in Lear. Has language induced people to this impasse? Is jealousy always there and so in need of suppression if one is to remain sane? Is there something wrong with this kingdom or with this particular relationship between two brotherly kings that accounts for it? The facts are left as a mystery, serving to propel a play rather than to get the play to resolve them.
The second act centers on a trial for the supposedly offending Queen. Why would Paulina have taken the baby to the King? His ostensible madness would make him reckless and could result in what it does, the ostracism of the baby. There is something off about all these courtiers to the King being still so taken with his authority that they do not do what any sensible courtier does for a King or a President: run interference for him, forgetting that they had been fired or instructed to do something silly the day before. Why infuriate the King when he is already furious? Maybe he had been such a model of good sense that they cannot believe he is this off and that perhaps indicates that his jealousy is all the more off—or else more plausible than the courtiers let on.
The act is a reference to the trial scene in “The Merchant of Venice”. The Queen plays a very eloquent Portia, this time in her own defense. She explains that no worse verdict could be passed on her than the disfavor already visited upon her by her husband. That is a sufficient death sentence. This proclamation of loyalty to the one who passes judgment upon her is far superior to Portia’s appeal to a mercy that does not admit that a wrong has been done to Shylock, and that he ought to be given some recompense, even if not what the letter of the loan agreement required. The third act of “A Winter’s Tale”, for its part, plays on Oedipus as a baby put out to die and who is rescued and raised by shepherds, and the fourth act is again a play on Shakespeare’s own work, this time reworking the forest of Arden without the metaphysics and the role playing by aristocrats and with a lot more humor, though not without a very telling bite. The brotherly King, for eighteen years in his own kingdom, has not learned the lesson of what had gone before, or at least takes a while to catch on. He at first denounces his son for having taken a woman who he unwilling to acknowledge to his father. He is not that different from the King who thought he had been cuckolded. It is difficult to refrain from providing a Freudian interpretation of this play: sons and daughters should be afraid of their fathers who just go crazy out of jealousy and false pomp, the adult women just pawns caught in the middle.
The central node of the last act occurs just before the end, most of it concerned with the comedy left over from the rustic characters introduced in the fourth act, which is used, I take it, to give some emotional pause before presenting the boffo ending that has a statue of Hermione come to life. Where did that come from? The Pygmalion story is retold by Ovid and so Shakespeare and an educated audience would know of it, but the earthlings would have been caught by surprise at a story that was not even reintroduced to general European culture until John Jacques Rousseau and has become a staple of the Western Imagination only since Shaw. In the instance of “A Winter’s Tale”, it makes sense to think of the emergent Hermione as a reference to the Virgin Mary, someone who takes pain upon her so as to ease it in humankind, and reappears in any imagination inclined to think on the suffering of the world. Hermione is similarly self-less and constructed of uncompromised good. And she too had been a wife rather than only a creature who had retired to a nunnery, which is one interpretation that Paulina allows to be associated with the statue she had cared for. That “A Winter’s Tale” is a religious progress, a story of a King redeemed from his sin against his wife and child, even if he does not deserve redemption, given his own view of what he had done and the clarity with which the fact that he had committed a terrible crime had been presented, is a standard interpretation of the play.
But it will not quite do, especially if we turn to another feature of theatre that Shakespeare can use to his audience’s advantage. Shakespeare’s theatre is also a theatre of ideas: not just political ones or religious ones or psychological ones but also metaphysical ones. Ideas may not be called by the names they go by in philosophical discourse but they are not just there by inference. Shakespeare spells them out in the speeches he has his characters make. The king who is convinced he is a cuckold says he has evidence: the way Hermione and her suspected lover talked to one another, the way they looked at one another, and the fact that a trusted aide had absconded with the found out King rather than betray him. From the evidence of the senses and the inferences that can be drawn from behavior as to what motivated the behavior, it is possible to conclude with some certainty what has occurred. Those conclusions are not to be denied just because some courtiers have come to different conclusions, that the Queen has been honest, that simply supports the emotional system that existed before suspicion was raised and the suppression of which would keep the kingdom on a steady keel. The King is willing to face up to the truth rather than simply follow convention.
Nor when he is found wrong is that the end of that, empiricism defeated by reference to categories of what must be, a Queen who is honest and a courtier who is to be trusted. This is not a play where empiricism is a straw man to be shown up by faith. Remember, first of all, how it was, that the King came to realize he was wrong, profoundly wrong, about the Queen. It was not because he had looked into himself and found out why he harbored doubts about the Queen or about his lifelong friend, the other King. It is not because he consulted his love for the Queen and so put his concerns out of his head and heart as unworthy. It was because he had sent representatives to Delphi to find out what the gods proclaimed about the matter and after having assured himself about the procedures that had been set in place so that he could be sure he was getting in fact what the gods had said, opens their message to find that his queen had been declared innocent, and this is repeated in two or three different ways. The King was not consulting gods who speak in cryptic messages, who sound oracular, which means that you can read into what they say what you want to be there. Rather, it was as if the King had sent DNA away to a laboratory for testing. He was getting the indisputable results. The gods declared her not guilty and there is nothing to do about it but accept it, but he hesitates and that is the moment in which the Queen purportedly dies, perhaps of a broken heart that the King did not believe in the announcement of her innocence. The King repents that he had not immediately acknowledged the facts, but by then it seems to be that it is too late for the Queen and for her baby.
Empiricism continues to be the gold standard by which the play judges behavior. The reports that there were bears in the wilderness is true, and so rather than it is just a sign of bravery to disregard such reports, the bear will take its toll, killing Paulina’s husband, who is not to be written off as just one of the supernumeraries. The young Princess who has lived her life as a shepherd’s daughter shows herself to be of at least a kind of royalty because she is a beauty and speaks smartly. The King wonders whether Hermione is only a statue because she shows signs of aging, and the answer by Paulina that the sculptor had been artful enough to include the wrinkles is more than a stretch. Whatever the nature of faith, it cannot withstand truth. One of the serious points that Shakespeare is making in this comedy is that science is to be incorporated into a Christian faith if for no other reason that reason and evidence have always been part of how people confront the world. That the King had gone too far, that he had interpreted clues to an outrageous conclusion, shows that there is evil in the world, that we can be overcome by our worst instincts, rather than that reason is no guide to sanity—and, indeed, is the way to get back to it.