What It Is About "Winter's Tale"

Shakespeare was the world’s greatest rewrite man. This is no secret. And it is not a put-down. The point is that he had an almost uncanny knack for responding to possibilities: to look at another person’s play, or poem, or whatever and say—hm, I can do something with this.

In this vein, it is fun and instructive to study, say, Shakespeare’s use of North’s Plutarch, or Arthur Golding’s Ovid. But I think there is never more point to the inquiry than with Shakespeare’s sad, spooky, penultimate play, the Winter’s Tale. This is the one about Leontes, King of Sicily, and his paranoid conviction that his wife has been unfaithful with his best friend. His son dies; his wife dies (or so he believes) and he consigns his daughter to the elements. Years pass, and then all is made whole again.

This is a plot, as they might say, sufficient to give absurd plots a bad name. The play also contains some of the best poetry Shakespeare ever wrote. And for all its manifold imperfections, it leaves an aftertaste as memorable as any Shakespeare ever achieved.

How to account for these jangling inconsistencies? Here more than anywhere, I think it is important to look to the source. In particular, that would be a little potboiler called Pandosto: The Triumph of Time, published in 1588, some 23 years before the first recorded production of WT. Evidently it was popular: it seems to have gone through five editions before Shakespeare brought it to the stage.

Pandosto may be hackwork in a way, yet it is oddly compelling. And here is an odd fact: the structural problems that give so much grief in WT—in Pandosto, they really aren’t a problem. Example: the jealosy of Leontes. It’s a problem in the play. It seems to come from nowhere, and near-300 years of critical ink cannot blot out its utter absence of motive. Now compare the story (and ignore the name changes):

…he called to mind the beauty of his wife Bellaria, the comeliness and bravery of his friend Egistus, thinking that love was above all laws, and therefore to be stayed by no law; that it was hard to put fire and flax together without burning; that their open pleasure might breed his secret displeasure. He considered with himself that Egistus was a man, and must needs love; that his wife was a woman and therefore subject to love; and that where fancy forced, friendship was of no force.

Fine, this is enough. We are in a folk tale, and by the stipulations of the game, this is more than sufficient to justify or explain the conduct of the king.

So also with the time gap. Shakespeare has to bring on time personified; the storyteller can ease us through the years so smoothly that we barely them. And so again (I will not labor the point) with the statue. The point is that things that may seem odd or out of place in the play work just fine in the story.

And this, I think, helps us to get a handle on what Shakespeare I up to here. He’s old in his career, if not in life: he has tried tragedy, comedy, history, farce. He reads Pandosto: he knows he has a problem but he says: I think I can turn this into a play.

And either he did or he didn’t. Either way, my point is that this is one play for which knowledge of the source may really enhance our understanding. Not that Pandosto is a better piece of work than WT. Only that our understanding of WT is richer, more nuanced, more three-dimensional, if we take it in context.

Readers may recall that there is yet one more zinger in this history: authorship. Pandosto was the work of Robert Greene—university wit, general mischief-maker and (most important for our purpose) the man who introduced Shakespeare into the arena of history. Recall that it was Greene, washed up and dying, who wrote Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit, his testament and parting shot. Recall:

..there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes that he is able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you; and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.

Recall, in short, what appears to be the first-ever mention of William Shakespeare in the world of the London theatre.

I think that Shakespeare’s use of Greene’s plot is a kindness to Greene: a recognition, from a great artist at the end of his life, to another who died at the beginning of his. One more reason why such a strange and ill-formed masterpiece can still tug at our attention.