The Winter's Tale: Language and Writing

Mario DiGangi, Dympna Callaghan

• Publisher: The Arden Shakespeare
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350175556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Through expert guidance on understanding, interpreting, and writing about Shakespeare's language, this book makes The Winter's Tale accessible and exciting for students. It demonstrates that careful attention to Shakespeare's complex dramatic language can clarify the structure and concerns of the play, as well as provide deep and satisfying engagement with the social, political and ethical questions Shakespeare raises. Each chapter features a 'Writing Matters' section designed to connect analysis of Shakespeare's language to students' development of their own writing strategies. The book examines topics in the play such as tragicomic genre; women's assertion of social and political agency; obedience and resistance to rulers; the virtues and risks of following festivity, and disputes over the proper forms of religious devotion.

1

Engaging the language of the text(s)

The texts of The Winter’s Tale

Before embarking upon a serious examination of Shakespeare’s language, we need to understand that modern editions (such as the one you are using) are not accurate reproductions of the plays as they were written, performed and published in Shakespeare’s time. When editing texts that were first published in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, scholars make several modifications. They correct evident printing errors that might confuse us; regularize speech prefixes so that we know who is speaking (e.g. King Richard’s lines will be prefaced by Richard throughout the play, instead of alternating between Rich. and King); add stage directions that help us to imagine actions or sounds in performance; indicate asides (lines that characters speak to themselves, out of the hearing of other characters) so that we understand how characters are interacting on stage; update obsolete or inconsistent spellings so that we can more easily recognize words; and alter punctuation so that we are not misled by obsolete grammatical conventions. Editors do all these things for the very good reason of making four-hundred-year-old texts more accessible to today’s readers. Some of these changes, however, can make it more difficult for us to access potentially meaningful details that appeared in the original published texts.

For instance, the early texts of The Merchant of Venice use different speech prefixes for Shylock, the Jewish usurer who is treated contemptuously in Christian Venice: sometimes he is Shy., and sometimes Jew. While the writers and printers of early modern texts were not as concerned with internal consistency as we are, the identification of this character as Jew suggests that Shakespeare (or whoever prepared his manuscript for publication) placed significant emphasis on the kind of difference represented by a Jew living in a Christian polity – a difference explicitly marked in the play when Shylock is identified as an ‘alien’ (non-citizen) in Venice (4.1.344). Alternatively, if the speech prefix Jew means to indicate that Shylock is a ‘typical’ (and wicked) representative of his faith, the prejudice encoded in the printed text of the play would thus mirror the prejudice expressed by the Christians within the play (Drakakis). So as not to reproduce an offensive sixteenth-century prejudice, every modern editor of The Merchant of Venice regularizes this speech prefix to Shylock. Through this reasonable accommodation to modern sensibilities, readers lose whatever insight the original presence of the Jew speech prefix might provide into the religious and ethnic politics of the play and of Shakespeare’s culture.

Because every editor makes their own choices about how to modernize an early text, no two editions will produce exactly the same ‘Shakespeare’. Editors also typically include interpretative aids such as glosses (explanations of words or lines), literary references, historical contexts, discursive notes, accounts of scholarly debates etc., that shape our perspectives on what we are reading. To further complicate matters, some of Shakespeare’s plays exist in more than one early printed version; when these early texts vary significantly from each other, editors must decide which version they will use as the basis of their own edition. For instance, the 1623 publication of King Lear differs in important respects from the 1608 publication of King Lear. Hence modern editors of King Lear print either the 1608 or the 1623 text; offer both texts as two distinct versions of the play; or fashion a hybrid text that takes elements from both early texts, thus presenting a ‘conflated’ text that was never published in that form during the seventeenth century (Mowat, ‘Facts’).

Unlike King Lear, The Winter’s Tale does not have a complex early publishing history. The two main formats in which Shakespeare’s plays were published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are the quarto and the folio, terms that refer to the size of paper used in manufacturing the book. ‘Folio’ refers to a full-size sheet of paper folded once to make two leaves (or four pages) in a book. Since this sheet of paper was folded only once, the resulting pages are quite large. For a quarto, a full-size sheet of paper was folded twice to make four leaves (or eight pages); since the paper was folded twice, the resulting pages are smaller. A quarto was a small, relatively inexpensive book, the early modern equivalent of a paperback. Folios, by contrast, were large and very expensive; they were usually reserved for collections of significant poetic, philosophical, theological or historical texts. In 1623, several years after Shakespeare’s death, members of his acting company compiled thirty-six of his plays into a folio edition titled Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Today, this book is simply called the ‘First Folio’, since revised editions of the collection were later published in 1632 (the ‘Second Folio’), 1663 (the ‘Third Folio’) and 1685 (the ‘Fourth Folio’). The First Folio is considered a landmark book because it was the first time that a folio comprised entirely of contemporary English plays was published in England. The First Folio was a risky financial endeavour, as a ‘large, expensive volume of plays was not guaranteed to sell well, and whatever profits might eventually come were certain to be delayed for many months after the initial investment’ (Kastan 63).

Because The Winter’s Tale was not published in quarto form, the earliest authoritative text of the play that we have appears in the First Folio. The actors who collected and published Shakespeare’s plays in the First Folio made their own editorial interventions, some of which are doubtless invisible to us, which is not surprising considering the collaborative efforts that went into writing and publishing plays at the time. As David Scott Kastan explains, ‘Shakespeare has become virtually the iconic name for authorship itself, but he wrote in circumstances in which his individual achievement was inevitably dispersed into – if not compromised by – the collaborations necessary for both play and book production’ (16). Gary Taylor estimates that ‘anywhere from a quarter to a third of Shakespeare’s plays contain material written by other professional playwrights’ (141), including Pericles, Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, Macbeth and probably 1 Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, Edward III and Sir Thomas More (Jowett 106). Although we tend to stress Shakespeare’s originality, Taylor describes the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries as ‘an expression of “artiginality”: the creativity of artisans who tinker with inherited forms and stories’ (146). Shakespeare displayed ‘artiginality’ in adapting Greene’s Pandosto and many other kinds of stories for The Winter’s Tale. After his death, members of his company, including his erstwhile collaborator John Fletcher, revised, reshaped and edited his texts for both performance and publication (Kastan 68).

One possible intervention that Shakespeare’s company made while preparing the First Folio was the division of plays into five acts, since it’s unlikely that Shakespeare composed his plays with that structure in mind. By dividing the plays into five acts and marking those divisions with Latin text – so that ‘Actus primus, Scena prima’ stands for ‘Act one, Scene one’ – the compilers of the First Folio presented Shakespeare’s plays as authoritative ‘classical’ texts, comparable to the plays of the ancient Roman writers Terence and Seneca (Hamlet on the Ramparts). Although modern editors of The Winter’s Tale follow the lead of the Folio and of subsequent eighteenth-century editors in dividing the play into five acts, that division might occlude the organic structure of the play. Once you eliminate the imposition of a five-act structure, it’s easy to see The Winter’s Tale as a three-act play in which each act roughly aligns with the different generic categories we discussed in the Introduction. The first act of the play, including the banishment of Perdita and the deaths of Mamillius, Antigonus and Hermione, constitutes a tragedy. The second act of the play is a pastoral comedy focused on Perdita and Florizel in Bohemia. The third and final act, which returns to Sicily, provides the romance or tragicomic ending.

Listening to the language of the opening scene

A significant difference between the First Folio and modern Shakespeare editions concerns the amount of information that modern editors provide even before we start reading the play. Modern editions typically include an introduction, a list of characters – sometimes with detailed notes about each character – and an indication of the setting. The Winter’s Tale is among just a handful of plays in the First Folio that contain a list of characters. Yet since those lists, with one exception, are printed at the end of the plays, their evident intention is not to give readers information to help orient them during a first reading of the text. Seventeenth-century readers, just like theatre audiences, would have simply relied on the words spoken by characters to orient themselves at the beginning of a play.

What can the opening dialogue of The Winter’s Tale tell us? A character identified in the First Folio speech prefixes as Archidamus (but never named in the dialogue) provides an initial glimpse into matters of location, social status and unfolding events: ‘If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia on the like occasion whereon my services are now on foot, you shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia’ (1.1.1-4). We can infer from this that Archidamus comes from Bohemia (‘our Bohemia’) and Camillo from Sicily (‘your Sicilia’). Both characters are ‘now’ in Sicily, where Archidamus is performing ‘services’; Camillo might in the future visit Bohemia on a ‘like occasion’. Camillo’s response indicates that these ‘services’ and ‘visits’ concern their respective monarchs: ‘I think this coming summer the King of Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the visitation which he justly owes him’ (1.1.5-7). Since Archidamus and Camillo seem well aware of the diplomatic schedules of their kings, seventeenth-century playgoers or readers would probably have identified them as courtiers. Moreover, they speak the refined language of diplomacy. Archidamus compliments Camillo by admitting that the Bohemians will be unable to match the opulent ‘entertainment’ provided by the Sicilians. In the following dialogue, observe how the speakers are not exchanging information as much as they are performing courtly compliment:

ARCHIDAMUS

Wherein our entertainment shall shame us, we will be justified in our loves; for indeed –

CAMILLO

Beseech you –

ARCHIDAMUS

Verily, I speak it in the freedom of my knowledge. We cannot with such magnificence – in so rare – I know not what to say.

(1.1.8-13)

Even with these small words (‘indeed’, ‘Beseech you’, ‘Verily’) the speakers demonstrate an eagerness to please. As we will discuss later, the failure of language to communicate truth is a major theme in The Winter’s Tale. For now, we might observe that Archidamus introduces this theme by declaring his inability to express his feelings about his nation’s inferior hospitality. How might this confessed failure of language itself comprise a performance of courtliness? What might Archidamus have to gain from such a confession?

Archidamus and Camillo also provide two crucial pieces of information that will colour our experience of the following scene, in which we meet the aforementioned kings of Bohemia and Sicily. First, Camillo rehearses the kings’ long-standing ‘affection’ – an important word repeated throughout the play, as we will see later (1.1.24). Although separated by their familial and political duties, the kings have maintained their ‘loves’ over the years through letters, gifts and ‘loving embassies’, and have figuratively ‘embraced as it were from the ends of opposed winds’ (1.1.28, 30-1). Camillo’s language establishes the intimate, lasting relationship between the kings that shockingly unravels in the following scene. Archidamus and Camillo also relay that the Sicilian king’s ‘young prince, Mamillius’, holds ‘great promise’ as the future king, and as such ‘physics the subject’ or gives new life to the Sicilian people (1.1.34, 38-9). The courtiers say nothing, however, about the king’s wife, Hermione, or her pregnancy. What does their focus on Mamillius convey about the world of the play? How does this brief scene provide an important context for the impending tragedy of Mamillius’s death? We might also observe that though it is generally true that Shakespeare’s aristocratic characters speak in the more ‘elevated’ style of verse, Archidamus and Camillo speak in prose throughout this scene. Why might prose be a fitting medium for this conversation?

When I asked above what the focus on Mamillius’s future promise might reveal about the world of the play, I meant to refer broadly to the values or ethos of the society depicted in The Winter’s Tale. In addition to that broad perspective, it is also productive to consider more specifically what the text reveals or does not reveal about the time(s) and place(s) in which the play is set. Aside from naming the monarchies of Bohemia and Sicily, the opening scene tells us little about these places or about the epoch in which the play occurs. London theatre companies generally did not use scenery or historically accurate costumes that would allow an audience visually to place a play in a particular country or time period; an actor would have worn contemporary finery whether he was portraying a fifteenth-century English king, as in Shakespeare’s Henry V, or a sixteenth-century Venetian duke, as in Othello. Especially with comedies and tragicomedies, even when a play is set in a particular place, such as the Vienna of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare shows little concern for historically accurate detail. Hence the locales in The Winter’s Tale have little relation to the seventeenth-century political or cultural situations of...