The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page A

whole play, whereas the actor must concentrate on his or her part. The director’s viewpoint is therefore especially valuable. Shakespeare’s plasticity is wonderfully revealed when we hear directors of highly successful productions answering the same questions in very different ways.
FOUR CENTURIES OF
THE WINTER’S TALE:
AN OVERVIEW
    The Winter’s Tale
was one of four plays described by Simon Forman, Elizabethan quack doctor and astrologer, in his commonplace book. Forman saw it at the Globe on Wednesday, May 15, 1611, and wrote a rough outline of the plot, although he failed to mention either the bear or Hermione’s statue coming back to life. He was especially impressed by Autolycus, drawing the moral, “Beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning fellows.” 1 Richard Burbage, leading tragedian with the King’s Men, probably played Leontes, and Robert Armin, the company’s scholarly comedian, renowned for his wit and his singing, would have been Autolycus. The play must have been popular since there are recorded performances at court on November 5, 1611, another in spring 1613 as part of the wedding celebrations of Princess Elizabeth and Frederick V, the Elector Palatine, one in 1618, and another on January 18, 1624, before the Duchess of Richmond. The Revels Accounts also record that “The Winter’s Tale was acted on Thursday night at Court, the 16 Janua[ry] 1633, by the K[ing’s] players and liked.” 2
    The play was not, however, much liked by Restoration audiences when the theaters reopened in 1660. The change of tone and location between the two halves of the play, the sixteen-year time gap, and the geographical solecism of a sea coast in landlocked Bohemia all offended prevailing neoclassical tastes. The same issues have worried some subsequent critics and directors.
    In 1754 Macnamara Morgan’s popular adaptation,
The Sheep-Shearing: or, Florizel and Perdita
, solved the problem by eliminating Leontes and Hermione entirely. It focused on the pastoral scenes, with Spranger Barry as Florizel and Isabel Nossiter as Perdita. The action was set in Bithynia, an ancient province of Asia Minor, rather than Bohemia (a change based on a suggestion in Thomas Hanmer’s edition of the play). The Old Shepherd is finally revealed as a disguised Antigonus! Two years later David Garrick produced his version,
Florizel and Perdita, A Dramatic Pastoral
. The setting was returned to Bohemia; this version also featured the pastoral scenesbut now included the restoration in the final act. Garrick explained his intentions in the prologue:
    The five long acts from which our three are taken
Stretch’d out to sixteen years, lay by, forsaken.
Lest then this precious liquor run to waste,
’Tis now confin’d and bottled for your taste.
’Tis my chief wish, my joy, my only plan
To lose no drop of that immortal man! 3
    Garrick’s version had the benefit of a star-studded cast, with Garrick himself as Leontes, his leading lady Hannah Pritchard as Hermione, and the rising star Susannah Cibber as Perdita. It was a great success and was frequently revived until the end of the century, often in a double bill with
Catherine and Petruchio
, a similarly abridged version of
The Taming of the Shrew
. The Prince of Wales (and future King George IV) fell in love with the young actress Mary Robinson when she took over the part of Perdita in the early 1780s. He sent her love letters signed “Florizel” and she became known as “Perdita,” then she left the stage and became a famous society beauty and fashion icon. The affair with the prince ended in a public scandal, but Perdita, despite being partially paralyzed as a result of rheumatic fever, remade herself as a novelist, feminist pamphleteer, and poet, highly regarded by leading intellectuals such as William Godwin and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 4
    It was John Philip Kemble who restored Shakespeare’s play to