Structuralist Shakespearean Analyses: The Winter's Tale

The Winter’s Tale First Impressions

I enjoyed The Winter’s Tale a bit more than As You Like It. However, I jokingly noticed that I should be careful what I wish for because the vernacular in this play, specifically in its first half, struck me as occasionally being a bit overwrought. But I think this impression is attributable to the fact that Shakespeare hits the audience hard with the language early on before we’ve had a chance to get invested in the characters. I had this thought during Polixenes’ and Camillo’s exchange in Act I, scene ii – specifically when the former says, upon hearing that Leontes suspects him of cheating with Hermione, “O, then my best blood turn / To an infected jelly, and my name / Be yoked with his that did betray the Best!” (I.ii.503-504). However, I should note that this short speech, followed by Camillo’s reply, is, on its face, simply phenomenal dialogue.

Following up on strains from my As You Like It analysis, there are also definitely some homosexual overtones to The Winter’s Tale. While I observed this in the relationship between Hermione and Paulina, I also noticed it, strangely enough, with Leontes and Polixenes – particularly in Act I. I’m referring to the many invocations of their childhood and affection for one another, such as when Polixenes says, “We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’ th’ sun / And bleat the one at th’ other” (I.ii.85-86). Though I have other interpretations as to why Leontes suddenly becomes maddeningly jealous of Hermione and Polixenes, one possible reading could be that he begins to realize his homosexual desires for Polixenes and consequently lashes out. I know that this is a common occurrence, both anecdotally and from my familiarity with gay literature – that budding feelings of homosexual attraction are often sublimated in the form of irrational aggression because the latter is easier for one to express (and is a redirected form of self-loathing for having said feelings in the first place). I think this interpretation might be borne out because, like in As You Like It, two men, in this case, Polixenes and Camillo, one of which is implicated in a homoerotic dynamic, choose to run away together to escape the consequences of the society in which they find themselves. Coupled with the fact that this story is set in Ancient Greece, with all of its homosexual connotations, I think it’s entirely plausible that Shakespeare intended this to be a dynamic at play in the narrative.

While on the subject of Ancient Greece, it is interesting to note that even though Leontes is so incredibly disagreeable in the story, Shakespeare writes him in the tradition of the Greek tragic hero (at least in the first half of the play) in that he is the protagonist whose downfall is brought about by some flaw in his character. It, therefore, seems odd that, despite also being the antagonist of the story, Shakespeare still portrays him as a kind of hero. This subject also got me thinking about the question posed by Janet Spens in “Characteristics of Elizabethan Drama,” wherein she asks, “why should a picture of the misfortunes of someone in whom we are thus interested afford us any satisfaction?” (Spens). It’s been some time since I’ve read Aristotle’s Poetics, the seminal text on dramatic devices like the tragic hero, so I’m not entirely sure what he would say about the matter. However, I recently re-read Edmund Burke’s Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful, and he actually addresses this. In short, he believed that feelings mimetic of displeasure incite the greatest aesthetic reaction in humans because displeasure is tied to fear, which is tied to sublimity. I’m not sure how well-supported this is from the perspective of something like analytic philosophy, but I think it provides insight into the question of why the audience is nonetheless meant to root for Leontes in the end. Shakespeare might have been trying to see if he could get the audience to stand firmly behind a really unpleasant protagonist, thereby inspiring a deeper feeling of katharsis when the story comes together and in his favor in the end

Speaking of the conclusion of the play, I was also immediately struck by its parallels to that of Mozart's opera, Don Giovanni. I even began wondering if the two works might have informed one another, as I know Tirso de Molina wrote the play upon which it's based around the same time that Shakespeare wrote The Winter's Tale. Like this play, Don Giovanni contains a single, incongruous instance of magic in the plot, which comes to a head in the work's final scene. Similarly, it comes in the form of an anthropomorphic statue; however, unlike in Shakespeare's play, the sculpture ultimately spells the ruin of the main character because he refuses to repent for his sins. Shakespeare presents the inverse -- Leontes repents halfway through the play once the Oracle at Delphi's message is read to the court (III.ii.170-174). When the action eventually comes back to him, after he has lived sixteen years in what can be described as a corporeal hell, he finds salvation in this anthropomorphic statue, in that he is reunited with Hermione and his daughter, and the three supposedly live "happily ever after."

Perhaps it was because of my association with the aforementioned opera and the fact that most of the scholarship around it that I’m familiar with interprets the Commendatore as a metaphor, but I read Hermione’s reincarnation as holding metaphorical or psychological significance rather than actually the result of any literal witchcraft on the part of Paulina. Like with other literary works that deal with living art, such as The Picture of Dorian Gray, I also interpreted this as Shakespeare commenting on the mimetic nature of aesthetic representation and how lines between reality and fiction can sometimes get blurred. This trope is often employed when one of the characters in the story is in the throes of psychological turmoil/madness, as is the case with Leontes. I thought that this interpretation was somewhat borne out by the fact that Hermione’s reincarnation is preceded by music (V.iii.124). I draw this connection because music has long been associated with the breakdown of reason, the symbolic order, and reality -- something that I believe has evolutionary roots actually, as music would have predated humanity’s capacity to signify.  

In keeping with an analysis of how The Winter’s Tale concludes, I was particularly struck by this work’s format in general. I know that it’s considered one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays” partially because of it. Still, it was fascinating that what seemed like the tragic ending of the action occurred halfway through, followed by a happy, comedic ending. It also occurred to me that this work might present some casting difficulties, as it initially seems like it’s a vehicle for Leontes, much like Hamlet or Othello are for their titular characters. However, he is then absent for most of the second half of the play, and the newly introduced principals, Perdita and Florezel, take over a good bulk of the stage time. The production I listened to still saved top billing for Leontes (it was a radio production from the ’50s that starred John Gielgud). However, the play itself made me think again of opera. Specifically, Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serial or French Grande Opera, in that their spotlight and ensuing technical demands are pretty egalitarian. 

One of the other works that I thought of in reading the play, starting in act IV, was Oedipus Rex. I had this association because the audience begins to realize that Perdita, who was abandoned as a child by Leontes and grew up not knowing her royal heritage, will mature and fall in love with someone who, by dint of his own genealogy, is going to prove problematic. Although, as I mentioned in referencing Don Giovanni, Shakespeare presents the inverse of Sophicles' play, in that once her identity is revealed, the story’s conflict gets resolved.

Lastly, while on the subject of dramatic structure, reading about the different forms of Elizabethan drama in Spens’ article gave me some more insight into Shakespeare’s creative process and how it relates to my own. I tend to love writing in very strict musical and poetic forms, partly because they help organize me and give some nascent form to the blank page. I think it can be easy (at least for me) to assume that Shakespeare wrote all these momentous works out of thin air. It’s just really illuminating to see the ways, like with any composer, that this isn’t entirely accurate and that his creative process, as astounding as it was, was likely more relatable than one might initially think. And that, in a way, he was merely drawing upon the forms and strains of discourse of his time, albeit bringing them to unseen heights.

Works Cited

Burke, Edmund. “Of the Sublime.” On the Sublime and Beautiful, Harvard Classics, Boston, MA, 1909, https://www.bartleby.com/24/2/107.html. Accessed 15 Jan. 2022.

Shakespeare, William. “The Winter's Tale.” The Folger Shakespeare, Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/the-winters-tale/.

Spens, Janet. Elizabethan Drama. London: Metheun & Co. 1922. Shakespeare Online. 19 Aug.

2009. http://www.shakespeare-online.com/playanalysis/tradegyvscomedy.html.

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The Moral Implications of the “Mad King” Trope in The Winter’s Tale

            On its face, the moral of The Winter’s Tale is that salvation is possible through repentance, for after 16 years of seeing the folly of his ways and dealing with the repercussions of his actions, Leontes is finally reunited with his wife, Hermione, and daughter, Perdita. However, in Shakespeare’s characteristic fashion, he conveys so much more than this through his characterization of Leontes, who fits the “mad king” trope perfectly. When viewed through a structuralist lens, it becomes clear that Shakespeare makes further comment on the nature of Leontes’ downfall and later salvation – one that cautions against the tyranny of obsessive predication. This message has parallels throughout time, stretching from Ancient Greek myth to the 20th century in the work of postmodern author Italo Calvino in his short story, A King Listens. 

The action in The Winter’s Tale stems from a seemingly inscrutable thought that gets planted in Leontes’ brain in Act I, scene ii. When Hermione takes Polixenes’ hand in an act of friendship, Leontes becomes convinced that the two are having an affair. He says, “to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, / As now they are… O, that is entertainment / My bosom likes not, nor my brows” (I.ii.146-147,149-150). This moment is a prime example of the literary tradition of a sovereign figure reading meaning into phenomena wherein said meaning is not instantiated. The association between a sovereign and predication (something that Leontes does in his categorization of Hermione’s and Polixene’s relationship as romantic) stems from the fact that, in the act of predication, one concept must be rendered subservient to another. When taken to its extension, this means that the cognitive subject is the only entity that cannot be predicated -- however, one holds onto this sovereignty, as Leontes demonstrates, at a cost.

Italo Calvino writes similarly about a king who is paralyzed by his obsessive categorization of various sounds throughout his kingdom/castle. He interprets everything as the murmurings of rebel forces trying to usurp him and consequently lives a terrible, paranoid existence confined to his throne. While describing this setup, the narrator of the story asks, “Does some story link one sound to another? You cannot help looking for a meaning, concealed perhaps not in single, isolated noises but between them, in the pauses that separate them” (Calvino). Like Leontes, his paranoia eventually leads to his isolation. Because they interpret malice in every commonplace occurrence, both are left to wander their castles (in the case of Calvino’s king, in an auditory sense) alone, indefinitely until they come to terms with this madness that has seized them.

The fact that the dynamic that these two sovereigns engage in leads to isolation is borne out in two ways in The Winter's Tale. The most significant is that Leontes’ accusations lead to Hermione’s and Mamillius’ deaths, as well as Perdita’s estrangement. However, Leontes’ isolation is foreshadowed in several ways leading up to this. One such instance is when he remarks, “Camillo and Polixenes / Laugh at me, make their pastime at my sorrow. / They should not laugh if I could reach them, nor / Shall she within my power” (II.iii.26-29). On one level, this is just an instance of Leontes recapitulating what has happened in the story: Camillo and Polixenes have escaped to Bohemia. However, this line can also be read as one of the many instances of Leontes’ madness isolating him – he “cannot reach” his former friends and wife.  

  Another way to conceptualize the madness Leontes and Calvino's king have in common is that they project their inner lives to the external world. In the latter case, Calvino writes, "The palace is the body of the king. Your body sends you mysterious messages, which you receive with fear, with anxiety. In an unknown part of this body, a menace is lurking, your death is already stationed there; the signals that reach you warn you perhaps of a danger buried in your own interior" (Calvino). Paulina actually uses similar language when she implores Leontes to excise "The root of his opinion, which is rotten" (II.iii.114), for in doing so, she labels the internal source of the madness that germinated his thoughts about Hermione and says that it will eventually lead to his similar decay, much like the narrator in Calvino's story says. When one compares Leontes with, say, Othello, who has similarly unfounded suspicions regarding his wife's impropriety, the source of Othello's rabid doubts is external in the form of Iago. However, for Leontes, this is not the case, and the sources of his fears are entirely concave. Consequently, Shakespeare implies that his downfall is of his own making.

This conflation with the internal and external is also one way to conceptualize madness – something that can, in the case of acute psychosis, result in the immixture of fantasy with reality, self-harm as a result of the redirection of externalized anger to the self, or the consumption of bodily waste. Some of these inclinations manifest in the case of Leontes, in that he initially orders the death of (who he would later realize is) his daughter – someone who is metaphorically/genetically an extension of himself. Additionally, it is the oracle of Apollo whose council Leontes seeks in determining whether his beliefs about Hermione are founded, and Apollo “from the time of Homer onward… was the god of divine distance… the god who made men aware of their own guilt and purified them of it” (Britannica). By way of this association, Shakespeare intimates that Leontes is not just attempting to be vindicated or absolved by Apollo’s avatar but that he is attempting to get distance from himself and restore order to his intrapsychic state.

The scene in which the repercussions of Leontes’ “madness” come to a head is also quite illuminative as to Shakespeare’s moral message of The Winter’s Tale. In this scene, Leontes is not only king and prosecutor but also judge in Hermione’s trial. In other words, his sovereignty is absolute, much like that of Calvino’s king. In A King Listens, the narrator notes, “Voluminous bundles of secret reports are turned out daily by electronic machines and laid at your feet on the steps of the throne. It is pointless for you to read them: your spies can only confirm the existence of the conspiracies, justifying the necessity of your espionage” (Calvino). Like with Leontes, this is a perfect manifestation of circular logic and an instance of a king assuming absolute power in his mad state. It is here, though, that Leontes’ world comes crashing down around him – arguably because it is the moment where he becomes most despotic. It is also telling that, upon Hermione and Mamillius’ death, he orders their bodies to be buried in a single coffin. This desire could be interpreted as him once again conflating the internal with the external world and, based upon the hell that he subsequently lives through for the next 16 years, could also be read as a desire to bury himself.

Though it may appear that Shakespeare conveys the age-old message that when one repents for their sins, they can find salvation, further analysis of The Winter’s Tale reveals that there is much more going on in it than this. Through Shakespeare’s subtle characterization of Leontes and the complex plot arch of the play itself, he warns against the pitfalls of paranoia and obsessive predication and how this ultimately leads to the isolation of the cognitive subject. Like Calvino’s king, it is only when he confronts himself and surrenders his faculties for a moment to beauty and awe in the form of Hermione’s statue that he is released from the prison of his own making. 

Works Cited

Calvino, Italo. “A King Listens.” Translated by William Weaver, Italo Calvino in China, Calvino Chinese Station, 2010, http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2010/11/a_king_listens_en.html.

Shakespeare, William. “The Winter's Tale.” The Folger Shakespeare, Folger Shakespeare Library, https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/the-winters-tale/.

The Editors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. “Apollo.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 30 Oct. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Apollo-Greek-mythology.