Day 21: What I Learned: The Winter's Tale

I love this image from a Berkshire production of The Winter's Tale.

I've read a fair bit of literary criticism of The Winter's Tale this past week (and not all of it on Wikipedia!) but I'm just going to tell you what I personally thought of it. Don't cite me in your essays, kids. I'm not a good source.

First of all, I loved this play. It was one of my favourites as a teenager (back when I read a lot of Shakespeare) and even though I didn't remember anything about it until I re-read it this week, I can still see why. It's still one of my favourites. It's sad, it's messy, it's a tad unresolved, and in its surrealism it's actually quite real.

King Leontes is a moody, jealous asshole who has way too much power to act on his moods. Most jealous boyfriends and abusive husbands don't have the power of an entire court and army behind them but if they did, I can imagine quite a few of them behaving like Leontes does. He casts out his wife and children on the flimsiest of suspicions (mostly because he's grumpy and paranoid) and there's nothing she can do to reason with him. Although everyone agrees that he's paranoid, irrational and just plain wrong, the only one who stands up to him with any vigour is Paulina, another woman. There's a lot that's relatable about this. Women may have more power in society now than we did in Shakespeare's day, but some things never change. There are a lot of irrational Leonteses out there.

What I particularly love about this play is that Leontes never becomes sympathetic. Sure, he's repentant (sort of) and sure, he gets his wife back (sort of) in the end, but it's not like we're rooting for him. We're just glad that Hermione and Perdita are both alive and well. And let's face it, that had nothing to do with Leontes.

I also noticed that almost every male character in the play (except for Florizel and maybe Camillo) at some point threatens to kill, maim or abandon a woman. In most cases it was rhetorical, or to prove some point (like "if the queen can't be trusted, no woman can...therefore I'm going to kill my wife and daughters"...WTH??) but it's still striking, especially considering how dramatically King Leontes himself acted on those sentiments. For me, it makes me think about the relationship between the violent words said in passing and the violence that people actually commit, particularly against women. Again, the least violent characters are the most sympathetic, so I feel Shakespeare may have been making a point about the power men have over women and how unjust that can be. Am I projecting? Maybe. But he also included a scene in which the shepherdesses are offered dildos to buy, so maybe he was making a point about the need for female empowerment after all.

Okay, I'll leave it there. Once the discussion starts going into "dildos" it's hard to keep focus.