The Eastbourne Opera and Dramatic Society produce an annual open-air Shakespeare in the Italian Gardens near the seafront. This year, the play chosen was The Winter’s Tale. It’s a difficult one, hard at the start to understand what is going on, so some adaptations were to be expected:
- There were the usual sex-changes to accommodate a company that has rather more females than were usual in Shakespeare’s time. Camillo became Camilla, the Shepherd and the Clown and Autolycus all changed from male to female parts. These changes had no essential impact on the play.
- Father Time was doubled (Father and Mother) and introduced the action in every act (in rhyming couplets), together with a rather older than usual Mamillius who read from his big book of Winter's Tales. This helped to explain what was about to happen, which I thought was a very good idea. TWT starts very quickly, in media res, and it takes most newcomers to the play some time to work out who's who and why Leontes gets so jealous so quickly.
- The oracle bearers were turned into a comedy double act. They were very funny.
- The bear who pursued Antigonus was turned into a giant teddy bear who roared at the audience and danced and was a figure of fun (rather dark humour, given that he ate Antigonus).
- Once we’d got the first half out of the way, the pastorals added extra song and dance, particularly adding comedy singing and dancing. Of course, the biggest applause came for the comedy and the dance.
- There were two statues at the end: both Hermione and Mamillius returned to life.
None of these changes made a negative impact on the play. But I found myself wondering: what would Shakespeare think? On the one hand, he was a great adapter of other people’s material, and I am sure he wouldn’t have cared that his work is now so much adapted. He saw theatre as entertainment, and the inclusion of the pastoral scenes in this play (not to mention the coups de theatre of the ‘exit pursued by bear’ - Shakespeare stole this idea from another play of the time - and the statue coming to life) show this.But on the other hand, I suspect that by the time Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale, he was beginning to see himself as a more serious playwright. He understood the need to keep the masses entertained and this is why he put the comedy pastoral scenes into The Winter’s Tale, and why he added a masque to The Tempest, and why he added the procession of dead kings and the comedy porter even to Macbeth, and why at the end of Hamlet the stage is littered with corpses. But I think he found the expectation of song and dance irksome (Elizabethan plays were much more like modern panto and commonly ended with a jig, even when the drama was a tragedy). This is maybe the man who invented Falstaff but he also killed him off, probably when the company clown Will Kemp left. Post-Falstaff, Shakespeare writes fewer comedies and tries to keep the clowning within bounds and within character. I think he would have thought that a single Shepherds’ Dance and the brilliant Autolycus would have been sufficient. EODS, however, wanted to showcase the talents of their cast and therefore added extra singing and dancing. Actors love to sing and dance!
The biggest problem with outdoor venues (apart from midges!) is acoustics and, while most of the actors projected well, one or two spoke too softly and too hurriedly, and couldn’t be heard.
The biggest problem with outdoor venues (apart from midges!) is acoustics and, while most of the actors projected well, one or two spoke too softly and too hurriedly, and couldn’t be heard.
Nevertheless, despite this being one of the lesser-known Shakespeare plays, the audience enjoyed themselves thoroughly.
The principal source of The Winter’s Tale is the 1588 prose romance by Robert Greene (the playwright who dismissed Shakespeare as an “upstart crow”) called Pandosto in which Pandosto, King of Bohemia, accuses his wife Bellaria of adultery committed with his childhood friend, the King of Sicilia. His pursuit of this unfounded charge leads him to send his infant daughter out to sea to die and causes the death of his son and Bellaria (who definitely dies, there is no revival of a statue in this tragedy). His daughter drifts to Sicilia and is saved and raised by a shepherd. Dorastus, the Prince of Sicilia, falls in love with Fawnia, unaware that she is a Princess, and they run away to marry. They land in Bohemia, where Pandosto unwittingly falls in love with his daughter Fawnia. At the end of the story, after Fawnia's identity is revealed, Pandosto commits suicide out of grief for the troubles he caused his family (and perhaps at his incestuous feelings towards Fawnia).
Pandosto itself may have been adapted from The Clerk's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales which itself may have come from Boccaccio's Decameron (via Petrarch, whom Chaucer knew).
A 1607 revival of Pandosto was called Dorastus and Fawnia. Given the performance history of TWT, it may well have been written after Shakespeare saw this revival.
Apart from changing the names and reversing Bohemia and Sicily (causing the geographical problem of Perdita being landed on the landlocked ‘coast’ of Bohemia), Shakespeare’s major changes were to turn the whole thing into a comedy by saving Hermione and Leontes from death and to add the characters of Paulina and Antigonus.
In Act Four, Florizel appears in peasant's disguise at the start of the scene and after he has been recognised by his father (so the disguise didn't work, although Florizel doesn't recognise his dad who is also in disguise), Florizel changes clothes with Autolycus to ... disguise himself as a peasant, and Autolycus is now dressed as a courtier to impress the Clown and the Shepherd. The EODS version (and the Branagh company production) managed this by having Florizel appear at the very start of the scene in his court clothes, change into peasant garb and then, after the blow up with Polixenes, change back into court clothes so that he could then exchange these clothes with Autolycus. But none of that is in the text.
Apart from changing the names and reversing Bohemia and Sicily (causing the geographical problem of Perdita being landed on the landlocked ‘coast’ of Bohemia), Shakespeare’s major changes were to turn the whole thing into a comedy by saving Hermione and Leontes from death and to add the characters of Paulina and Antigonus.
Shakespeare's most famous stage direction ('Exit, pursued by bear') may itself have been inspired (or copied) from a play called ‘A Most pleasant Comedie of Mucedorus the Kings Sonne of Valentia, and Amadine the Kinges daughter of Aragon’, commonly called Mucedorus, which was first performed around 1590 and became one of the most performed plays of its age; it was performed for both Queen Elizabeth and King James I. A revised and expanded version was published in 1610 with additional scenes. The original version began with a character running across the stage, pursued by a bear (from whom he is, off-stage, rescued). The adapted version has the clown enter backwards, frightened by a bear “or some devil in a bear’s doublet”), only to trip over it (an ‘it’s behind you’ moment) and then flee from it. Shakespeare, of course, used the bear to removed Antigonus, thus ensuring that no-one knew where Perdita was (the ship they travelled on was sunk, off-stage) so no rescue could be attempted.
Problems with The Winter's Tale
In Act Four, Florizel appears in peasant's disguise at the start of the scene and after he has been recognised by his father (so the disguise didn't work, although Florizel doesn't recognise his dad who is also in disguise), Florizel changes clothes with Autolycus to ... disguise himself as a peasant, and Autolycus is now dressed as a courtier to impress the Clown and the Shepherd. The EODS version (and the Branagh company production) managed this by having Florizel appear at the very start of the scene in his court clothes, change into peasant garb and then, after the blow up with Polixenes, change back into court clothes so that he could then exchange these clothes with Autolycus. But none of that is in the text.
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