The winter fairy tale

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Mary Anderson as Hermione, photograph by Henry Van der Weyde, 1887

The Winter's Tale ( Early Modern English The Winters Tale ) is a play by William Shakespeare . It is about the consequences of the jealousy of King Leontes towards his wife Hermione, covers a narrative time of approx. 16 years and takes place in Sicily and in a pastoral fantasy world, which is mentioned in the play Bohemia. The work was probably written around 1610, the first performance is documented for 1611, and it first appeared in print in the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare's main source is Robert Greene's novel Pandosto, or the Triumph of Time from 1588. Because of its happy outcome, the winter fairy tale was assigned to the comedies. More recently, it has been included in the group of romances along with other works because of the rather gloomy basic conflicts that characterize these pieces.

action

Leontes, King of Sicily , suspects his pregnant wife Hermione of infidelity with their mutual friend Polixenes, the King of Bohemia . He instructs Lord Camillo to poison Polixenes, who is visiting Sicily; Camillo promises obedience, but then reveals the plan to his victim and they both flee Sicily. Meanwhile, Leontes has his wife thrown in jail. In order to ascertain their guilt, he has the oracle of Delphi questioned. In the meantime, Hermione gives birth to a baby girl in dungeon, but Leontes does not recognize her as his own child. Instead, he orders Lord Antigonus to release it in the wild. Leontes opens a lawsuit against his wife on charges of adultery and conspiracy related to the escape of Polixenes and Camillos. He declares his wife guilty and imposes the death penalty when the oracle's (alleged) answer arrives, exonerating Hermione, Polixenes and Camillo with atypical clarity, but portraying Leontes as a jealous tyrant who will remain without an inheritance as long as that lost, cannot be found again. Immediately after the proclamation of the oracle, the king was informed of the death of his little son Mamilius. Hermione collapses and is pronounced dead. Meanwhile, Antigonus has abandoned Hermione's little daughter on the Bohemian coast , where she is found by a shepherd and his son. Antigonus himself is killed by a bear before he can reach the ship that will bring him back to Sicily. Sixteen years go by. The daughter of Leontes and Hermione grows up with the Bohemian shepherds under the name Perdita. The young girl and Polixenes' son Florizel are in love with each other, but he keeps the improper love a secret from his father. At a sheep shearing festival, where the funny pickpocket and ballad singer Autolycus is also up to mischief, the two lovers are watched by Polixenes and Camillo in disguise. After the angry father has revealed himself, Florizel decides to flee to Sicily with Perdita. When the escape is discovered, they are followed by both Polixenes and the old shepherd, Perdita's supposed father. The circumstances of Perdita's discovery are now known at Leontes' court. Leontes recognizes his missing daughter in her and is reconciled with Polixenes. Paulina, the widow of Antigonus, leads everyone to a (supposed) marble statue of Hermione, which suddenly comes to life when Hermione rises from the pedestal: the Sicilian royal couple is reunited.

Literary templates and cultural references

The Hermiones statue comes to life - drawing by Henry Stacy Marks, mid-19th century

Shakespeare's main source was the very popular at that time prose romance Pandosto. The Triumph of Time , also known as The History of Dorastus and Fawnia , by Robert Greene , first published in 1588 and then in five more editions before The Winter's Tale was made. Shakespeare probably had known this work for a long time, but did not use the latest edition of 1607 for his play, which can be proven by the choice of words in various places.

In his dramatization of the romance of Greene, Shakespeare changes most of the names, streamlines the events and swaps the scenes of Bohemia and Sicily, whereby the former does not mean the Central European country, but a pastoral fantasy world on the Mediterranean. In contrast to the original, which follows Shakespeare quite closely as a whole, he does not let the queen die in the end, but uses a deception of the dramatic characters and the audience with a false report. In Greene's romance, the king is irascible, vicious, and ruled by his passions. He even tries to force his unknown daughter Fawnia to be at his will and ends up killing himself. In Shakespeare's play, Leontes is filled with deep remorse for his jealousy. In this way, Shakespeare's final reconciliation with Hermione not only links the two levels of time and action in the play, but also intertwines them through inner consistency. At the same time, with the survival of the queen and the reunification, Shakespeare avoids the complicated and unconvincing ending of the original, in which the king commits suicide despite the happy outcome. In addition, Shakespeare creates an extraordinary theatrical effect with the statue scene he invented in the last act and closes his play with a comedy-oriented final scene that goes with the main idea of ​​reconciliation.

Pygmalion and Galatea, oil painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme , 1890

In his work, Shakespeare uses the potential of the sudden twists and turns dictated partly by the plot of Greene's romance and partly created by himself in order to present the audience with a wealth of spectacular surprise or revelation scenes in his dramatization. The dramatic climax in the last scene of the piece, in which, unlike Greene's original, Hermione's statue comes to life as a memorial, achieves its strong theatrical effect not only from the surprise, but also from the fulfillment of a series of expectations that were subliminally fed by numerous verbal signals. The animation of the "statue" Hermione not only takes up a typical motif of the courtly masquerades, but also represents a new variant of the ancient myth of Pygmalion and the ivory statue of the beautiful Galatea created by him and animated by Aphrodite's grace. This was in Shakespeare's time Mythical narrative well known and popular as a symbol for the illusory power of art, which is able to recreate reality. In addition to the sensational effect, in the last scene of his play Shakespeare also initiates a discussion about the relationship between art and life.

While in Greene's story the events are left to chance at decisive points, Shakespeare endeavors to link the action at least partially through causality. For example, Perdita is not abandoned in a boat on the open sea like Fawnia, but brought to Bohemia by Antigonus on purpose. Conversely, Florizel and Perdita are not brought to Sicily by chance in a storm, but are deliberately directed there by Camillo. In contrast to Greene, who makes Pandosto's distrust of Bellerina believable through various details, Shakespeare dispenses with a motivation for the protagonist's jealousy. While the jealousy of King> Leontes> (the characters have different names in the source) is not completely unfounded with Greene and does not arise suddenly, since "Hermione" and "Polixenes" do not commit adultery in his romance, but in an ambiguous relationship of trust standing, Shakespeare's Leontes is seized by his jealousy like an illness. From one moment to the next, he is a different person to the audience and those involved; his jealousy simply exists as a determining factor for no apparent reason.

In structural terms, Shakespeare also enlarges the stage company with a series of characters below the royal family and expands the role of Camillo in order to provide suitable interlocutors and reference persons for the main royal characters, who in Greene mainly speak about themselves in stilted speeches. In this way, the high-handed edicts or judgments of the king are no longer in a contextless social space, but affect all characters who react either with resistance or with obedience.

In spite of the extensive plot, Shakespeare also bases his work on a strict symmetry, unlike Greene. At first Leontes fell into a blind frenzy; later Polixenes gets angry when his son wants to marry the shepherd's daughter without his consent. Similar to Lear's outburst of anger towards his daughter Cordelia, he is driven by hurt vanity, but not arrogance, when he threatens the poor shepherds Perdita grew up with with death because he believes they had cast a spell over his son.

Between the men ruled by their passion, Camillo stands as a representative of reason, who prevents the impending calamity of both Leontes and Polixenes. The male main characters also face three women who embody three moral principles. Hermione shows herself as the invariably faithful and patient lover who corresponds to the Griseldis type popular at the time ; Perdita embodies the archetypically innocent girl and Paulina represents the energetic woman who even stands up to the king.

The jealousy motif at the center of the plot in The Winter's Tale is ultimately not tragically resolved by a clash, but rather in a romance through separation and later reunification. As in As you like it, the idyllic pastoral sphere functions as the healing medium in which the disrupted order can be restored.

Similar to later in Cymbeline , Shakespeare also addresses the problem of social class differences in The Winter's Tale in a peculiarly ambivalent form. On the one hand, the shepherds are portrayed as stupid or foolish, on the other hand, the king's son Florizel, as a youthful hero, is ready to marry Perdita, the supposed shepherd's daughter, against his father's will. Apparently, in The Winter's Tale , Shakespeare puts the natural nobility in opposition to the social rank and relativizes it, as is also expressed in the conversation between the disguised Polixenes and Perdita about the ennobling of nature (IV, 4; 87-97) However, this is because Perdita ultimately turns out to be the king's daughter.

In addition, Shakespeare's play contains a metonymic statement in a typical romance form : Leontes' problem reflects the breaking of patriarchal power by the uncertainty caused by women with regard to the power principle of genealogical origin determined by men . While Leontes and Polixenes were best friends in the idyll of childhood, the entry into the adult world of intersexual sexuality now appears as a fall from grace. If the woman has the necessary and positive function of reproduction on the one hand, she is also seen as a diabolical seductress. With regard to the question of the legitimacy of the succession to the throne, which depends entirely on the marital fidelity of the woman, the work takes on a contemporary historical meaning by discreetly expressing James I's concern for the legitimacy of his own descent and thus the previous legitimacy of his claim to power is thematized by Elizabeth I , who had named him as her successor. In the Böhmenhandlung, the problem of control over the royal offspring and the question of aristocratic marriages as well as the role of love relationships within this network of interests are addressed as a complement. Here, too, a specific reference to James I and the policy of marrying his three children cannot be ruled out, as the renowned Shakespeare scholar and editor Stephen Orgel assumes in his analysis of the work.

Dating and text history

First folio edition 1623

The date of origin of the work can almost certainly be dated to 1610/1611. On May 15, 1611, Simon Forman, a physician, astrologer and theater enthusiast, attended a performance of the play at the Globe Theater and made notes about this performance, which have come down to us. Ben Jonson's mask play Oberon, the Faery Prince , from which Shakespeare took over the country people's dance in Act IV, the so-called "Dance of the Satyrs", was played for the first time on January 1, 1611. Even if it was a later addition, the earliest date for the completion of The Winter's Tale is very likely to be the second half of 1610. At the time of the first documented performance in January 1611, the piece was evidently new and is therefore located between Cymbeline (1609) and The Tempest (1611). Stylistic similarities with these two works also confirm such a temporal allocation. A performance of The Winter's Tale on May 16, 1611 is also documented ; There is also evidence of further performances at court in 1612/1613 and 1618.

A four-high print of the work is not known; the first surviving text edition in the complete edition in the First Folio from 1623 is of extremely good quality and is considered reliable and error-free. Most likely, a fair copy by Ralph Crane, the professional scribe of the Shakespeare drama troupe, was used as the artwork, which he probably made based on the autograph draft version of the author.

Reception and work criticism

The plot and the ensemble of characters in The Winter's Tale are more fundamentally in the tradition of European romance than in any other Shakespeare drama. Despite the complexity and diversity of the fund of romances dating back to the time of Hellenistic late antiquity, they still have a number of basic elements and structures in common: The plot shows the love and adventures of princely or royal characters and extends over many years and spacious rooms. The romances are set partly in a courtly, partly in a rural Arcadian environment; the characters' lives are determined not so much by their own actions as by the coincidental coincidences of fate. Most of the time the plot is built up episodically and at the end brings a number of people back together on separate paths towards reconciliation.

In Cymbeline with the inclusion of British prehistory and The Tempest with the short plot time and the narrowly outlined island space, Shakespeare only makes use of a part of this romantic structural inventory, while in The Winter's Tale he uses all the elements of the basic scheme.

The genre of romances not only includes a specific repertoire of materials and motifs, but also contains a clear convention scheme. The world of romances differs significantly in structure and functionality from real life, but also from other fictional worlds. It therefore does not correspond to the expectations of the audience or the recipients towards an author who has previously written plays like Hamlet or King Lear .

An essential difference is first of all in the aspect of plausibility: In contrast to Greene's original, Shakespeare's romance clearly expresses its own fairytale-like character; A story is played that - as the audience knows from the start - could not have happened in real life. Accordingly, as in modern genres such as fantasy or science fiction , the recipient records the piece under an “as if” concept or condition.

The title of the piece already refers to winter stories for the dark winter evenings, which - whether funny or sad - will report wonderful things and give the recipient the reassuring feeling that these are just fantasy stories that stop at the end of the narrative or presentation process to exist.

A reference to the fairy tale character of the play can be found in The Winter's Tale not only in the title, but also in the drama itself, when the Second Nobleman points out that what happened in Bohemia and Sicily was as incredible “as a old fairy tale "(" this news which is called true is so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion: "; see V, 2; 28f.).

In addition to the miraculous or seemingly miraculous happening, the fairytale quality of the romances also includes the suddenness of the events that change everything. Everything happens suddenly and unprepared; nothing develops gradually. For example, Leontes is suddenly attacked by his jealousy for no apparent reason or Antigonus is unexpectedly eaten by a bear. The potential of sudden twists and turns and spectacular surprise scenes, which Shakespeare fully exploited, culminates in the statue scene at the end, in which the supposed marble statue of Hermione comes to life.

The Shakespeare criticism, which since the 19th century has primarily focused on the analysis of the development of individual characters in Shakespeare's dramas or at least attaches great importance to character development and motivation, has found it difficult to assess and interpret Drama characters who suddenly find themselves in extreme psychological situations without any previous development or explanation. Against this background, a play like The Winter's Tale, despite its theatrical appeal, is viewed by many Shakespeare critics and interpreters as a step backwards from previous tragedies. Shakespeare, as it is sometimes said in the work criticism, is primarily oriented towards contemporary public tastes and primarily serves a fashionable public interest of the time, without conveying a deeper or serious meaning with the play.

As in the other later works, however, Shakespeare proceeds in The Winter's Tale according to the usual double strategy of simultaneously delivering theatrical entertainment and a more in-depth discussion of the problem areas connected with the plot. Fairytale-likeness does not necessarily mean a loss of thematic seriousness or depth, but only implies a change to a different focus or mode of observation. So the thematic focus in The Winter's Tale shifts from the question of how the problem situation arose to the question of what it looks like if the problem situation suddenly exists.

This can be seen most clearly in the problem area of ​​jealousy, which Shakespeare dramatically deals with in both Othello and The Winter's Tale . Othello shows how the protagonist, who initially trusts his wife unconditionally, is led step by step into the extreme of fatal jealousy by the schemer Iago using latent prejudices. In contrast, The Winter's Tale fades out the path to jealousy; the interest is exclusively in the end point. The thematic focus is on Leontes' alienation from himself as well as on the different reactions of the courtly circles to a ruler who is out of his mind, loses his relationship with reality and makes his relationship crisis a public matter. So Camillo tries to counteract with all available diplomatic means and flees when he does not succeed. Paulina, on the other hand, openly resists the king, while Antigonus, her husband, shows obedience and submits to the autocratic and unreasonable will of the monarch.

With the sudden end of his jealousy, Leontes transforms himself again and remains a different person until the end, who is now marked by grief and guilt. Sudden changes and cuts are characteristic of the entire piece. The changes of location, time leaps and milieu changes dictated by the history of romances are not downplayed by Shakespeare, but instead emphasized. Particularly accentuated is the deep cut (“ that wide gap ”, IV, 1; 7) between the first part, which takes place in Sicily until the newborn child is abandoned, and the second part with the continuation in Bohemia, which is half a generation in time is settled later. In order to illustrate the long interruption and to convey what has happened in the meantime, the time itself appears on the stage before the fourth act. The main characters change with the location: Florizel, Perdita and Autolycus appear as new people for the audience. Likewise, the level of style changes, since prose is spoken in Bohemia for the time being, as does the dramatic mode, since the plot now becomes comedy.

Performance history

Despite Ben Jonson's contemptuous allusions to the play in Bartholomew Fair , The Winter's Tale was a very popular play in the early days during the Restoration. This can be seen, among other things, in the numerous documented court performances in 1611, 1613, 1618, 1619, 1623, 1624 and 1634. Only then is a production of the original Shakespeare version at Goodman's Fields Theater in London in 1741 documented. With the exception of one Second performance in 1771 with the original text version, the work was then mainly played in adaptations in the 18th century. In doing so, it was essentially limited to what happened in the fourth and fifth acts, in order to meet the taste of the pastoral scene at the time and to satisfy the classicist demand for the three Aristotelian units of time, place and action.

The most famous of these arrangements, Florizel and Perdita: A Dramatic Pastoral , was created by the renowned actor and theater director David Garrick in 1758. This version also influenced the version of the final scene in the 1802 performance by John Philip Kemble , which introduced a series of much more faithful productions in the 19th century. Subsequent performances by William Charles Macready (1823), Samuel Phelps (1845/46) and Charles Kean (1856) were marked by a strongly historicizing tendency that largely ignored the fairy tale character of the play. The same applies to the very successful staging of The Winter's Tale 1887 in London with Mary Anderson for the first time in the double role of Perdita and Hermione, which was followed by a further 150 performances not only in England but also in the USA.

The famous British playwright, actor and theater director Harley Granville-Barker used The Winter's Tale in 1912 for the first of his attempts at the Savoy Theater in London, a Jacobean drama with the full text according to the rules of the time of its creation, in particular through non-stop, fast play and the accentuation of the to stage natural speech melody. However, this performance attempt was not well received by contemporary audiences.

Another milestone in the recent performance history of the work is the staging at the Phoenix Theater London in 1951 under the direction of Peter Brook with John Gielgud , one of the most outstanding English theater actors of the 20th century, as Leontes.

Since then, the play has been regularly performed on English stages by the Royal Shakespeare Company , for example 1969/1970 under the direction of Trevor Nunn at the Aldwych Theater in London, 1976 under the artistic direction of John Barton and Trevor Nunn, 1981 under the direction of Richard Eyre , 1985/86 with Terry Hands as director and 1992 under the artistic direction of Adrian Noble , then director of the Royal Shakespeare Company .

The first German translation of The Winter's Tale was published by Johann Joachim Eschenburg in his Shakespeare edition from 1775-1782; For the Schlegel-Tieck edition of 1832, Dorothea Tieck's work was translated into German with the assistance of August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck .

Above all, the poet and theater director Franz von Dingelstedt advocated a performance of the work on German stages . In 1859 he staged the piece in Weimar in his own free arrangement with music by the opera composer Friedrich von Flotow . In the period after 1878, the Meininger theater ensemble performed very successfully with the work in 35 cities. The Deutsches Theater Berlin had the play on its repertoire in 1906, 1935 and 1944; there were also performances in the Münchner Kammerspiele in 1917 and 1935 . The incidental music for the play was composed by Engelbert Humperdinck .

Text output

Total expenditure
English
  • John Pitcher (Ed.): William Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. Arden Series. London 2010, ISBN 978-1903436356
  • Susan Snyder and Deborah T. Curren-Aquino (Eds.): William Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007/2012, ISBN 978-0521293730
  • Stephen Organ (Ed.): William Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1996/2008, ISBN 978-0199535910
German
  • Ingeborg Boltz (Ed.): William Shakespeare: The Winter's Tale. English-German study edition. Stauffenburg, Tübingen 1986, ISBN 3-86057-553-8 .
  • Peter Handke (ed.): William Shakespeare: The winter fairy tale. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt / Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-40324-9 .
  • Frank Günther (ed.): William Shakespeare: The winter fairy tale. Bilingual edition. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-423-12758-9 .

literature

Web links

Commons : The Winter Tale  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikisource: The Winter's Tale  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See as far as Ina Schabert (Ed.): Shakespeare Handbook. Kröner, 5th rev. Edition, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-520-38605-2 , p. 468 f. and 470. See also Michael Dobson , Stanley Wells (Ed.): The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-870873-5 , p. 379. See also Ulrich Suerbaum : Der Shakespeare-Führer. Reclam, Ditzingen 2006, ISBN 3-15-017663-8 , 3rd rev. Edition 2015, ISBN 978-3-15-020395-8 , p. 204 f. and p. 207. See also Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (Eds.): William Shakespeare Complete Works. Macmillan Publishers 2008, ISBN 978-0-230-20095-1 , pp. 698 ff.
  2. ↑ See detailed Ulrich Suerbaum : The Shakespeare Guide. Reclam, Ditzingen 2006, ISBN 3-15-017663-8 , 3rd rev. Edition 2015, ISBN 978-3-15-020395-8 , p. 204.
  3. ↑ See more detailed Hans-Dieter Gelfert : William Shakespeare in his time. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-65919-5 , p. 387 f.
  4. ↑ Cf. Ina Schabert (Ed.): Shakespeare Handbook. Kröner, 5th rev. Edition, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-520-38605-2 , pp. 442-447, pp. 470 f. On contemporary political references, see also Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen (eds.): William Shakespeare Complete Works. Macmillan Publishers 2008, ISBN 978-0-230-20095-1 , p. 700.
  5. ↑ See on dating and text history Ina Schabert (Ed.): Shakespeare Handbuch. Kröner, 5th rev. Edition, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-520-38605-2 , pp. 442-447, p. 468; Ulrich Suerbaum : The Shakespeare Guide. Reclam, Ditzingen 2006, ISBN 3-15-017663-8 , 3rd rev. Edition 2015, ISBN 978-3-15-020395-8 , pp. 203 f. and p. 205 and Hans-Dieter Gelfert : William Shakespeare in his time. CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-406-65919-5 , p. 385. See also Stephen Orgel (Ed.): The Winter's Tale. Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press 2008, p. 81, and Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor : William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford University Press, Oxford 1987, ISBN 0-393-31667-X , p. 601, and Michael Dobson , Stanley Wells (Ed.): The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 2nd Edition, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-870873-5 , p. 379.
  6. ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : The Shakespeare Guide. Reclam, Ditzingen 2006, ISBN 3-15-017663-8 , 3rd rev. Edition 2015, ISBN 978-3-15-020395-8 , pp. 205 ff. See also Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen (Ed.): William Shakespeare Complete Works. Macmillan Publishers 2008, ISBN 978-0-230-20095-1 , pp. 699 ff.
  7. ↑ See Ulrich Suerbaum : The Shakespeare Guide. Reclam, Ditzingen 2006, ISBN 3-15-017663-8 , 3rd rev. Edition 2015, ISBN 978-3-15-020395-8 , pp. 206 ff. See also Ina Schabert (Ed.): Shakespeare Handbuch. Kröner, 5th rev. Edition, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-520-38605-2 , p. 469 f. See also Jonathan Bate, Eric Rasmussen (Eds.): William Shakespeare Complete Works. Macmillan Publishers 2008, ISBN 978-0-230-20095-1 , pp. 700 f. On the criticism of the work, see also the historical summary in Michael Dobson , Stanley Wells (ed.): The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 2nd Edition, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-870873-5 , p. 381.
  8. ↑ See the history of the performance so far the explanations in Ina Schabert (Ed.): Shakespeare Handbuch. Kröner, 5th rev. Edition, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-520-38605-2 , p. 471 f. and Michael Dobson , Stanley Wells (Eds.): The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford University Press, 2nd Edition, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-870873-5 , pp. 381 f. A comprehensive overview of the performance history of the work up to 1976 can be found in Dennis Bartholomeusz 's academic book: The Winter's Tale in performance in England and America 1611-1976. Cambridge University Press , Cambridge u. a. 1982, new edition as paperback 2011, ISBN 978-0-521-20660-0 .
  9. ↑ Cf. Ina Schabert (Ed.): Shakespeare Handbook. Kröner, 5th rev. Edition, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-520-38605-2 , p. 472.