The Winter's Tale high school production

High School Play Recap: The Winter's Tale

2/28/2020

by David Berry

David Berry, Director of Theater, recaps the High School's fall play, The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare

In previous director’s notes, I have suggested that, in essence, Shakespearean comedy is about “standing on the brink of tragedy and then dodging the bullet.” Well, The Winter’s Tale is not a comedy, but it is not a tragedy either. In fact, we don’t really know what to call it. By the end of his career, Shakespeare was defying genere; scholars tend to refer to his final plays simply as “the late plays”—or sometimes as Romances. By romance, they do not mean romantic, but something more like fantasy. In Shakespeare’s day, a winter’s tale was synonymous with an old wive’s tale, or a fairy tale. It was a fable—an unlikely and incredible story—one that dealt with essential questions and essential truths.

Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale exists in a fantasy world that is as capable of darkness as it is of light. It is a world where accidents and errors unfold at a pace and on a scale that is utterly shocking, but it is a world where redemption and grace can always rush in with equal force. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which we have also performed twice, is about going to bed wanting what you don’t have—and likely don’t deserve—and then waking up in the morning and finding it laying in your lap, no idea how it got there. In the world of The Winter’s Tale, we are going to be asked to be a bit more mature; we are going to be kept wanting for longer than the space of a dream, and if we do indeed receive grace, it is not going to come while we are sleeping.

I think that the reason I find myself drawn to Shakespeare’s late plays is that there is such an audacious purity to the storytelling. There is no beating around the bush; things happen fast—Leontes’ jealousy and ensuing downfall come upon him lightning-quick, and seemingly out of nowhere. The mechanism is unimportant; there is no time wasted. In the end, when redemption is given her chance to reenter the story, the mechanism remains conspicuously vague. Again unlike Midsummer, if grace is going to come here, it is not going to come while we are looking the other way, but instead, it will come with a directness that challenges us—a directness that challenges our comfort level as an audience, and perhaps Shakespeare’s own comfort level as a playwright. What exactly does happen here?

Coming to this play a second time, I am struck by how clean the ending is. I said to a class this week, sometimes, the trick to Shakespeare isn’t that he tells us the truth in language that is more heightened than our own, but in language that is so simple that we have to pause to hear it afresh. “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” No one has to look up any of those words.

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