Shakespeare's Bohemia and Happy Endings

Having just come from Michael Greif’s Shakespeare in the Park production of The Winter’s Tale at the Delacorte, where he got acts 4 and 5 right (1 and 2 were a bust thanks to a weak Leontes, things began to improve in act 3), I’m struck by how useful this play might be to a discussion of aesthetic resolution and the politics of the happy ending.

The play, it seems, doesn’t just offer the pleasure of a happy resolution to a terrible series of injustices and failures of judgment - it makes that resolution the subject of the play’s philosophical inquiry. It defamiliarizes it, in other words, thus making its pleasure unique from other happy endings. By leaving the Bad News (acts 1-3, culminating in that dastardly bear) so awkwardly disjointed from the Good News (acts 4-5) through the clunky device of Time, the aesthetic artificiality of the latter is underscored. This is further effected by the roundabout means of the plot’s resolution—olyxenes’s random decision to spy, Autolycus’s random acts of intervention, the timing of Camillo’s desire to return home, etc.—all of which underscore the artificiality of the ending.

The scene with the statue, then, can be read as a represented wish fulfillment—of the audience’s desire for the represented to become the Real, for life to be just like a play with a happy ending. The statue, of course, being a work of art, offers only the image of happiness. Its transubstantiation brings the image into the real—with the simultaneous fact, of course, that it’s all still contained within a play. It would be as though we were staring at the shadows in Plato’s cave, wishing them to come to life, only to watch them suddenly walk free of the cave wall and walk into the light by their own accord. Curious to think of Winter’s Tale as concerned with similar thematic territory as the theatricalist Tempest, but perhaps that’s a useful avenue to pursue.

Can Winter’s Tale be related to other plays that seek for the represented to become the real—The Seagull, for example, or Sondheim’s Follies, or even, in the terms I argue in my published article, Gypsy? Not to mention much of the theatricalist tradition (I’m thinking particularly of Lope de Vega’s Acting is Believing).

What, then, to make of the pairing of fulfillment with melancholy in the play’s conclusion—fulfillment in that Hermione is brought to life, sadness in knowing that we have reached the limits of theatrical representation? Seduced as we may be by the theatrical illusion, we know that the dead do not, and never could, walk again.