“A sad tale’s best for winter. What then is the value of the comic elements of The Winter’s Tale?”

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Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale

“A sad tale’s best for winter.  What then is the value of the comic elements of The Winter’s Tale?”

        The Winter’s Tale is a play of extremes of character, mood and genre, the play therefore cannot easily be categorised.  As a result, in considering a question such as this we must be conscious of the fact that we are measuring the comic elements’ relative value against, for example, the tragic or romantic sides of the play.  The comedy must therefore be gauged in the context of the piece as a whole.  Contextually, comedy was of course very important in contemporary live performance as it is today on stage.  It is often easy to forget that a playwright can and will blend genres, a technique that modern critics will often explain away as a method to increase tension.  For example, it has been said that the comedy of the drunken porter in Macbeth does not vitiate but rather increases the tragic momentum.  These sorts of effect are undoubtedly achieved; this fact does not however diminish the spontaneous comic value of a moment in a live performance.  The term ‘tragicomedy’ has been has been employed to describe The Winter’s Tale and plays similar in genre-structure to, such as Pericles, Prince of Tyre.  These plays tend to have more than just a glimpse of relieving comedy; the humour usually has a significant role in the development of the play and its ideas.

        Shakespeare conforms to his own, and classical tradition, with his approach to seasonal changes, in fortune, “No enemy / But winter and rough weather”2, and tone as the plot progresses into the fourth act of The Winter’s Tale.  The court of Sicilia is the setting for the tragic suspicions of Leontes; the subsequent flight of Polixenes and Camillo; the trial of Hermione and the fates of the two children, Mamillius and Perdita.  The playwright designates Sicilia to be the land that is set in the audience’s mind as wintry, bleak and ill fortuned in the first three acts of the play.  The second episode, in the pastoral setting of the Bohemian countryside contradicts the harsh tragedy of Sicilia, by introducing shepherds, clowns, rogues and young lovers.  Shakespeare’s introduction of these stock comic figures, classically optimistic images and his adoption of the pastoral backdrop is as formulaic as a fairy tale, which is indeed the effect the playwright is trying to create.

The only real humour in Sicilia is Mamillius’ playful flirtation with the first and second ladies in the first scene of the second act.  His elaborately adult description, “I learned it out of women’s faces,” of what he believes to be eyebrows that “become women best” is childishly amusing but can be seen as little more than a playful mock, perhaps ingratiating Mamillius with the audience before his tragic death.  It could be said that this image of a comic child in an extremely grown-up and humourless environment is meant to look out of place.  Perhaps Shakespeare’s vision of childhood is meant for that of the carefree Bohemian countryside, not that of the central pressure of being heir to the Sicilian throne.  His playful admission that “A sad tale’s best for winter” shows his regular childish love of fantasy.  However this also perhaps suggests the imprint of adult time restrictions on his young mind and his love for spring and humour, trapped inside the bleak, grown-up winter of jealousy and deception is not a just place for the young prince.  It could be said that much of the humour in Bohemia derives from a childish sense of comedy that is lacking in Sicilia.  Childhood could be seen as the ‘spring’ of life, where comedy and vivacity prevail over responsibility.  Autolycus of course possesses a certain air of a timeless traveller and Peter Pan-esque, ever-young quality that can easily be associated with childhood.

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        The optimism and comedy in fact truly begin with Perdita’s survival and adoption; this ensures for an audience that the play is not destined for misery but for a new beginning, “thou met’st with things dying, I with things newborn.”  The baby’s discovery by the Old Shepherd is comic given his rural innocence and admiration for the child, “A very pretty bairn-a boy, or a child, I wonder?”  The shepherd’s soliloquy is completely opposite in nature to those of Leontes in the first three acts of the play.  Where Leontes’ are to convey his true jealousy, the shepherd’s takes ...

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