Winter’s Tale Revisited
The first time I read The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare, during my sophomore year of college, it made me angry.
The story, in a very tiny nutshell, is the account of a husband’s sudden descent into jealousy, which wreaks havoc on his family, ruins his life, kills his wife and son, banishes his infant daughter, and exiles his best friend.
Yes, Shakespeare is quite the master of tragedy, but the injustice and unexplained delirium in The Winter’s Tale offended my collegiate sensibilities.
The play opens with childhood best friends Leontes and Polixenes discussing Leontes’ request to have his friend extend his holiday in Leontes’ kingdom. Polixenes begs off (because he has his own kingdom to attend to and he worries that he’s already stayed away too long).
Leontes and Polixenes, A Winter’s Tale, Kenneth Branagh Theatre Company, London (2015)
Despite Leontes’ best efforts, he can’t convince his friend to stay, so Leontes enlists his pregnant wife, Hermione, to help him make the case. She successfully does the job, and as Leontes praises her convincing words, Hermione responds that she spoke just as well in marrying Leontes. She’s a class act and a devoted wife.
Immediately thereafter, without cause or provocation, Leontes’ paranoid brain takes over and he imagines not only that Hermione is sleeping with Polixenes, but that she is carrying his child. (Yes, there is the heavy irony that if Hermione had not done what her husband asked in persuading his best friend to stay, he would have never gotten the idea that Hermione was unfaithful. Double injustice!)
In a bizarre rage, Leontes imprisons Hermione, claims the child in her belly is not his, makes plans to poison his best friend, and absolutely goes off the rails.
“Is this nothing?
Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing:
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.”
This is where I almost stopped reading. There was no reason why Leontes turned into a crazy person. There was no history of paranoia, no greed, no evidence that Hermione was unfaithful, no backstory about the best friends being frenemies - it was simply Leontes convincing himself that the terrible thing he was afraid of was really there.
But it wasn’t.
There was no evil little Iago whispering lies and turning Leontes against his wife, as was the case in Othello. Leontes did this to himself. (Triple injustice!)
At least Hamlet could blame his insanity on the loss of his father, but here, Leontes had everything he ever wanted, and he literally threw it away on a fear-filled delusion.
Needless to say, A Winter’s Tale irritated me immensely, and I hastily forgot about it by the end of the semester.
Many years later, I came across Jeanette Winterson’s wonderful book, The Gap of Time, which is a very personal and modern retelling of The Winter’s Tale.
I had no recollection of the original story, just a vague sense of annoyance at the title, The Winter’s Tale. However, I do love Shakespeare, and many years had passed, so I gave this new version a try, hoping I might learn something in the process.
I did.
The Gap of Time (and maybe even an actual gap of time) did the trick. Fortunately, Jeanette Winterson’s contemporary take on the story made much more sense to me than the original. Essentially, she reminded me of the ways in which we all lie to ourselves every day, creating sad or scary stories with no basis in reality.
In college, I could only view Leontes as a stupid jealous husband who refused to listen to reason. Now, I saw him as the complicated human Shakespeare must have intended. I realized all of the ways that I took my little pebbles of fear and turned them into paralyzing boulders.
Maybe Leontes’ behavior wasn’t so unusual, after all.
How often do we focus on the worst thing that could happen, and then run with it even though friends and family plead with us to count our blessings?
Is Leontes any different?
Hmmm.
With that perspective, I now see Leontes as just another example (albeit extreme) of someone making a mountain out of a molehill. Unjustified, perhaps, but not uncommon.
Fortunately, The Winter’s Tale is one in which Shakespeare offers the message of forgiveness rather than tragedy. Hermione, once dead, but memorialized in stone by her friends, is reunited with Leontes when her statue comes to life sixteen years later (hence, the gap of time). She, unaltered by the unjust and ill-mannered treatment of her crazy husband, forgives Leontes for his actions. Their banished daughter, Perdita, who had been raised by a shepherd during her sixteen-year exile, marries the son of Polixenes, and in the process, reconciles the two best friends.
Revisiting The Winter’s Tale has caused me to be more understanding of the unfounded fearful stories I tell myself, and the ones that others tell, too. The Winter’s Tale isn’t really about injustice or insanity, it’s about forgiveness.
And now I don’t begrudge Leontes his happy ending.
“Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely
Each one demand an answer to his part
Perform’d in this wide gap of time since first
We were dissever’d: hastily lead away.”
