The Winter's Tale

The last period of Shakespeare's development yielded four great plays--Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest--none of which, unfortunately, often reaches the stage. These are not four separate plays; they really constitute a monumental tetralogy, in which respect, among others, they correspond to Beethoven's late quartets, Op. 130-133. Each of the two men filled his four works with many thematic and other interrelations, and each turned from the probable to the possible and even the implausible.

Shakespeare's quartet of plays deals, in a new symbolic way, with the bonds of friendship and blood. Basic to all four, more specifically, are an estrangement-remorse-reconciliation theme, first attempted (but ending differently) in King Lear, and the idea of grace, a more Christian grace than that found in Macbeth. Near the start of all four, a father loses a child through his own fault.

Technically, these four plays are comedies, but, despite their relatively happy endings, the term is misleading. Actually, they are romantic tragi-comedies after the manner just popularized by Beaumont and Fletcher.

The Winter's Tale, which the Stratford Festival has chosen as its third item in this year's repertory, presents special problems. Unlike The Tempest, it violates the unities of time and place, with a gap of 16 years in the middle. Before the gap, the play is unrelieved tragedy; after the gap, it is mostly pastoral romance. For this reason the more superficial commentators have regarded Tale as two plays. It is one play, however; and this production, under the combined direction of John Houseman and Jack Landau, preserves its oneness successfully.

The central character, played by John Colicos, is King Leontes, who unjustly believes himself cuckolded and proceeds to wreak his jealousy on everyone around, even defying the oracle of Delphi. Of Shakespeare's three great studies of jealousy--Leontes, Othello, and Ford--this is the most realistic. Leontes is a neurotic with high blood pressure and fits of paranoia. Whereas Othello's jealousy builds up in a steady crescendo, Leontes' bursts out in white heat at the outset and, feeding on itself, stays at the same level.

This is an extremely difficult part to pull off, and Colicos acquits himself admirably. He wisely avoids the temptation of bellowing monotonously at a constant fortissimo--fortunately, for he is best when not at full volume. He manages to vary the level and manner of his delivery widely, while preserving the intensity of Leontes' derangement all the time. In his movements there are occasional hints of the ham, but they come from the best hogs.

Colicos has a good deal of fine support. Nancy Wickwire, as his wronged queen Hermione, is cool at first, but warms up to moving eloquence in the trial scene. And she performs a remarkable ten-minute bit of inanimation in the final scene. Hermione's attendant Paulina is one of literature's great denunciators, and Nancy Marchand brings plenty of force to the part. It is no discredit to her that she cannot match the magnificent power that Florence Reed imparted to the role in the Theatre Guild production a dozen years ago.

Ellis Rabb's loyal counsellor Camillo, Richard Waring's King Polixenes, and Earle Hyman's rogue Autolycus are all superlative portrayals. These three actors are the finest classical speakers in the company, and they all are ever careful about how they use their bodies. Autolycus, an ingratiatingly light-fingered jack-of-no-trades, is a wonderful creation without a counterpart elsewhere in literature. And Hyman, in and out of disguise as well as in and out of other people's pockets, makes the most of him, with his funny figure-4 stances, his weatherbeaten hat and purple beard, and his tooth-picking and fingernail-cleaning. The bit in which he joins with Barbara Barrie and June Ericson to sing a three-voice ballad is supremely hilarious.

Inga Swenson is a charming adolescent Perdita, who has the loveliest speech about flowers in the English tongue. Richard Easton and Will Geer are appealing as her princely suitor and her foster-father shepherd.

David Hays '52 has designed some fitting modernistic settings. He clearly indicates the shifts of locale between Bohemia and Sicilia by suspending representations of two different suns overhead, with a Damoclean sword for the trial scene and a double font for the final reconciliation scene. The sheep-shearing festival, with the whole stage and its inhabitants bathed in garlands, is a delight to the eye. Marc Blitzstein has composed rather modern music--appropriately dissonant or consonant as the situation warrants. The backstage instrumentalists are not yet wholly at ease in their parts, but a few more performances will fix that.

I have only two reservations to make. In the middle of the play, the directors have Jack Bittner, portraying Time, rise out of the ground wearing a 1958 suit and carrying a wet umbrella over his head. They would be wise to do away at once with this altogether too jarring bit of costuming. In the penultimate scene, they make Hiram Sherman, as Paulina's steward, treat his lengthy account of off-stage doings as though he were supposed to be burlesquing the Messenger of ancient Greek drama. This is a questionable interpretation, although admittedly it does get plenty of laughs.

It will probably be a long time before another fine production of The Winter's Tale comes along. Verbum sapientibus

(Ed. note: The drive to the picturesque Stratford grounds by the Housatonic takes only three hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike and Exit 53 from the Merritt Parkway. There are free outdoor facilities for picnickers; and two girls in period costume sing Elizabethan duets on the grass a half hour before each performance.)