Introduction

I'm Charles Mosley,

and I'm director of studies in English at Hughes Hall in Cambridge,

and I have taught in this university for a very long time,

and for many years I used to run the university

summer schools in Shakespeare for visiting visiting scholars and students.

Um, now I'm going to be talking about the winter's tale,

and it's certainly when we first come to it.

It's not an easy play. Most of us first come to us as a text, which, of course it is not.

It is not a text, it's a script.

And there's many things that go into the experience of a play,

which I'm sure you realise, can't be recorded in the text.

But even so, it's reading it. It is a very odd play,

and it seems to split into two, almost exactly equal hard.

You can count the lines all words, and it comes out almost exactly equal

a lot of the same characters.

But those two halves are totally different in language, rhetoric, imagery. John.

It almost feels like two separate plays,

and you think, well, what's going on in its time? It was extremely successful,

and it was chosen with the tempest to be performed at court in February 16 16 13,

when James's daughter, the Princess Elizabeth Elizabeth,

was married to Frederick the Elector Palatine,

and they become king and queen of surprise, surprise Bohemia.

That's going to be relevant later.

The players stayed popular sins and in fact, one of the best ways you could

prepare yourself.

Getting most out of this play is actually to get to know the Tempest as well.

They've got a lot of the same themes.

A lot of the same concerns, a lot of the same techniques.

And of course, they had the same actors

and in large measure, probably the same audience.

So knowing those two closely related plays does help, they form thematically,

almost a pair.

But think of how this play opens. Think of those opening lines of Act one, Scene two

when after that initial prose dialogue to pardon everybody down,

which is not itself insignificant.

Uh, you've got the grand entry of public sneeze and the aunties and, uh,

harmony with all their attendance.

Nine changes were water, wrist are now,

even when they seem to be celebrating the love that there is between the two kings

the semantics in the commentary.

The semantics and the words are very, very uneasy.

Camillo and academics, for example, in that little opening scene,

11 talk about the king's embracing from the ends of

opposed winds and affection rooted that cannot choose but branch.

Now

there's a subtext of storm of opposition of separation.

And in that first line of Act one, scene two,

you've got an immediate stress on the moon

on its changeability,

instability, even perhaps, lunacy,

fortune. But also, of course,

it does relate quite explicitly

to harmonies, pregnancy and the imminence of the birth, so to speak,

the birth of loss.

Because that's what the name Perdita means. The lost one

More Milius is very soon going to be irrevocably lost two.

And as Jack Libyans knew, very well, A crown without an heir is very bad news indeed.

Now, clearly, in that opening, we are in high style.

We're in a potentially tragic mode,

and in Leontes rapid descent into irrational jealousy.

We're hearing again the very accents, the imagery of a fellow.

And yet the second half

so abruptly introduced by that shepherd in his stage marmoset accent

that all messages things dying I was things newborn.

We have a total change of tone.

A total change of imagery and genre is upbeat

is full of ideas of fertility of spring.

There's dance, the song, there's jollity, there's love, that disguise.

There's discovery resolution,

and we seem to be in the pastoral romantic comedy

That storm injury of the first half, of course, which is now put into the monarchy,

hasn't quite gone away because we're reminded of it in politics and his anger.

So you can see the first half of the place, a sort of mini a fellow,

in fact, just in passing.

He might think that Shakespeare, as a playwright,

didn't have many ideas in his life.

But what he had, we done good ones, and he kept on coming back to them.

In fact, think of the links between a fellow and much ado about nothing

and winter's tale jealousy misprision.

So we get the woman who pretends to be dead in Hero,

the woman who really is dead in Desdemona

and the woman who's thought dead but isn't in harmony.

You don't need any longer.

Once you've established that strand in your writing and you've done it in a

fellow you don't need any longer to go into the detailed pathology of jealousy.

Once more,

you've got a loyal audience.

We know they were pretty loyal,

and a fellow is regularly played.

You can now indicate that Leontes is falling this fellow like jealousy and then say,

What's going to happen next?

Now these two parts are held together,

I think

two artists, perhaps clumsily,

by the extraordinary figure of time.

He's a character in neither part,

and he has to be recognised as time,

which means he's got to be dressed in particular non naturalistic way.

And that reminds us of something else that we need

to bear in mind and watching this play and the tempest

we need to bear in mind that early modern habit

of seeing almost everything is suggesting

something else a symbolic or allegorical.

It's a way of seeing very different to our reductive insistence on the material.

How a thing is seen or known is as much a part of what it is

as what is made of

This deeper way of seeing and knowing

affects absolutely everything from plants to people

and so to drama and the figures in it.

So back to winter's tale.

It's a bit of a pig for modern actors,

and it's a pitfall for directors who are trained in the post Stanislavski idea

of the method where you get inside the detailed psychology of a character,

try to read consistent psychology into these parts

and you're inventing in inventing a play that was never written. It's something.

Actually, I think much more interesting is going on.

You see, Jacobins had different ideas of the self that's easily demonstrable

and therefore different ideas of dramatic character.

In fact, the early texts of dramatic Jacobean plays

speak of dramatic person. I literally the masks of the drama

and disguise and delusion where you really believe that somebody is

the person they're pretending to be on that intimate stage.

They're absolutely impossible.

We're watching actors performing apart,

rather as you might listen to an opera singer performing an area

and thinking of the play.

And much of Shakespeare as more like opera in how it relates to an audience

is really helpful.

That means that it's the fable what Aristotle Aristotle calls the mythos,

the story, the shape of the story and what it signifies.

It's the implications of the story that is the big issue in this play,

as in so many others

now, this has been quite a long introduction,

and I better tell you what I'm going to intend to do going to try to do.

I'm going to explore or trying to explore why the play is as it is.

So that means looking at

what Shakespeare and his company were trying to do.

Then I'm going to glance at links with the tempest and the court mask.

And with theatrical fashion

and changing artistic and political ideology,

I'm going to glance at what Shakespeare did to his source.

And

not least,

I hope I'm going to communicate to you something of my own love for this play,

which seems to work, however awful the performance.

And I have seen some pretty dire ones.

But

a word of warning before we go into this.

Do remember

that we don't know how it was performed.

We don't know how it was watched.

We don't know how it was received when it was a new play.

We can't a NBI

the years that separate us from the time of Shakespeare,

we've only got a script, but we can make inferences from that script.

And from what we know about the world in which that script was made,

do you remember to that drama is visual, and this is crucial in this play.

Drama is visual as well as verbal,

and it's nuanced by gesture,

tone,

eye contact

and so on and so forth.