William Shakespeare’s
The Winter’s Tale
A Study Guide
The American Repertory Theater
Institute for Advanced Theater
Training at Harvard University
Compiled by
Laura Henry
and Beck Holden
AMERICANREPERTORYTHEATER.ORG
Table of Contents
1
Who’s Who in The Winter’s Tale
2
making shakespeare dance: an interview with
director david r. gammons
4
A Tale of Two Worlds: Sicilia and Bohemia
6
Visual Imagination: Design and Imagery
8
Shakespeare’s Globe
10
Shakespeare Reclaim’d, Shakespeare Releas’d:
A Historical Overview
12
Questions for Discussion
13
Classroom Activities
who’s who in the winter’s tale
Leontes, king of Sicilia, husband of Hermione and
father of Mamillius. In a rage of jealousy, he makes
terrible mistakes that destroy his family.
Hermione, queen of Sicilia, wife of Leontes and
mother of Mamillius. Suffers the rage of Leontes.
Mamillius, son of Leontes and Hermione. After seeing
what Leontes does to his mother, he dies of grief.
Camillo, friend of Leontes and a member of his court.
He flees with Polixenes and becomes a member of the
Bohemian court.
Paulina, best friend of Hermione and wife of
Antigonus. She advocates for the queen throughout
the play.
Antigonus, member of Leontes’ court and Paulina’s
husband. Assigned a terrible task, he suffers the
consequences and never returns to Sicilia.
Polixenes, king of Bohemia. He is best friends
with Leontes until Leontes’ jealousy destroys their
relationship.
Shepherd, an old man who finds baby Perdita and
raises her as his own.
Shepherd’s Son, the old Shepherd’s son and
Perdita’s adopted brother.
Perdita, adopted daughter of the Shepherd, but in
reality daughter of Leontes and Hermione, and princess
of Sicilia.
Florizel, son of Polixenes and prince of Bohemia. He
is in love with Perdita.
Autolycus, a clever rogue and thief from Bohemia.
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Making Shakespeare Dance
an interview with Director David R. Gammons By Beck Holden
Beck Holden: You got your MFA in directing from the A.R.T. Institute, and you’ve
continued to have a relationship with this
theater. Could you talk a little about how
you think your aesthetic as a director has
been affected by the time you have spent
with the A.R.T.?
David R. Gammons: My first day in the
Institute, back in the fall of ’93, I was thrust
into the first rehearsal of Henry IV Parts 1
and 2, directed by Ron Daniels. Although
my position was “assistant director,” on the
first day Ron said to me, “Sit down, shut
up, and watch.” And that was fine. I actually knew very little about Shakespeare at
that point, so it was quite an education,
and I fell in love with Shakespeare. I fell in
love with those characters, and the language, and the worlds that can be created.
I also had the great pleasure of designing the set for Robert Woodruff’s Richard II
a few years later. That was a very long design process; we started at the end of the
summer for a show that was opening the
following May, so we were working on the
design for close to nine months. I learned
a tremendous amount about creating
spaces that tell stories. Woodruff is very
interested in the interplay between the
dramatic elements and the actual theater
itself. He told me early in that process that
he gets nervous if he can’t see the back
wall of the theater. That burned a really
permanent impression on me. Understanding the location of the action, the play, the
language, the poetry, within a real room is
one of Woodruff’s strongest abilities.
Those two projects were incredibly formative to me in thinking about my relationship to Shakespeare.
BH: You’ve actually directed a production
here where we can see the back wall of
the theater, and it’s a work by a playwright
whose plays were originally performed
on a bare stage. What do you think are a
contemporary director’s relationships and
responsibilities to Shakespeare and his theater traditions?
DG: I think I respond to Shakespeare’s
works for their visceral, immediate quality;
the language proposes worlds, actions and
events that don’t necessarily need elaborate sets and costumes to bring them to
life. Everything you need to know is right
there in the poetry. You can simply listen
to the words and understand where you
are and what’s going on.
I think that the director’s responsibility
to the playwright is to have ideas about
the play. To say, “I love your play! It makes
me think of things. It sparks my imagination.” A play is not a set of instructions
that, if you follow carefully enough, will
lead you to the truth of the play in production. A play is a work of art, and as
a work of art, it’s open to interpretation
and response. Shakespeare’s great gift
to us is this poetry that’s fluid and moving and changing. When I hear someone
say, “Shakespeare would roll over in his
grave,” I think, “No, if Shakespeare’s rolling
over in his grave, it’s because he’s doing a
dance down there.” Any great playwright
hopes that their plays have that openness.
If there were only one way of doing these
plays, we wouldn’t keep doing them 400
years later.
They’re also indestructible. The genius
of the poetry of Shakespeare is you can
throw it into the blender, put it on puree,
and the beauty still shines through. You
can chop it up, you can move it around,
you can set it on the moon, and Shakespeare’s genius still emerges and inspires
us. I think of Shakespeare as a kind of contemporary for us; I think that it’s our duty
to make his plays feel timely and relevant
and connected to the images, objects, and
actions of our own world.
BH: Could you talk a little bit about your
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vision of time and space in this production? For instance, we’re both in Sicilia and
literally here on a blank stage.
DG: Well, that’s sort of fundamental to
my view of the theater: the magic of the
theater is that two contradictory things
can be simultaneously true. The actor is
him or her real self—their real human body,
their real human voice, their identity, their
history, their memory, all the things that
make them who they are—and, at the same
time, they are this character, this invention
of Shakespeare’s, this collection of words,
language, and ideas that Shakespeare bequeaths to us. We hold those two ideas in
our mind together, and in their interaction
we really experience the character.
Similarly, in terms of space, we acknowledge that we are in this real room, be that
the mainstage of the Loeb Drama Center
or the music room of Revere High. We’re
really here! We are not in some anonymous void, we’re in this room, and it has
walls and windows and doors, and it’s
made out of materials and textures and
colors. Simultaneously, we’re in this invented place, we’re in the land of Bohemia,
which has its own qualities. The electricity
that gets generated by two different things
being simultaneously true, that’s always
exciting to me.
BH: The Winter’s Tale has a similar duality: on the surface it’s set in a pagan world
where people worship Apollo, but there are
also explicit references to Christianity and
Renaissance artists.
DG: A student asked me about this recently. I was speaking about the play at Concord Academy, and someone asked, “How
do you deal with the anachronisms that
are inherent in this play?” And this play is
fraught with contradictions, anachronisms
and things that don’t quite add up. That is
the license of the playwright and the great
liberation of the imagination. This ain’t
realism, folks! It’s a play! It’s a story. It’s
art. It’s not the real world. Taking that cue
from Shakespeare, seeing him so liberally
bending his own rules for dramatic effect,
we say, “Thank you, Shakespeare, I too will
bend the rules for dramatic effect!” So, we
enter a world that might be lit by candles
and florescent tubes. We enter a world
where people can listen to things on an
old victrola, but also can videotape things
with a digital video camera. We acknowledge that we can be in another time and
be in the present if it’s in the service of the
storytelling.
BH: One of the ideas you had in your
director’s notes is “Magic = Faith + Imagination.” Could you elaborate on what that
phrase means to you, and what magic
means in the world of this play?
DG: This play is famous for this incredible event at the end, when the statue of
Hermione comes back to life. Right before
this happens, Paulina famously says, “It is
required you do awake your faith.” The
characters in this play have held their faith,
in certain cases for a tremendous amount
of time, holding onto the hope that the
oracle will be proven true, that what is lost
will be found. That is what happens, and
it creates the reconciliation at the end. It’s
a magical moment. It’s a truly theatrical
moment. It’s one of the most memorable
in Shakespeare. When that frozen statue
suddenly lifts its head and steps down
from its pedestal, life is renewed and reconciliation can happen because we’ve held
faith.
Getting back to the imagination, everything we see onstage is fundamentally
an act of the imagination. We invite the
audience into a collaborative act of the
imagination. I actually get insulted sometimes when I go to see a play and I’m not
being asked to use my imagination, when
everything is spelled out, with a hyperrealistic set and hyper-realistic acting. I
think, “Am I not allowed to imagine where
we’re going? Imagine this world?” I’d like
to think that the act of theater is an act of
the imagination for everyone—not just for
the actors, the director, the designers, but
also for the audience.
3
A Tale of Two Worlds
Sicilia and Bohemia
By Beck Holden
Sicilia
The first half of The Winter’s Tale, set in Sicilia, depicts a complete tragedy, beginning
with King Leontes’s jealousy and ending with Queen Hermione’s apparent death. Comedy
rarely creeps in—the only comic scene is when Queen Hermione’s ladies tease the young
Mamillius (cut from our production). Even that scene has a pall cast over it, as Mamillius
informs his mother “a sad tale’s best for winter.” Moments later, Leontes breaks up the
merrymaking to arrest Hermione. Mamillius’s comment also tells us this part of the story is
set in winter, the time of year when days are shortest and nights longest. Sicilia is a dark,
humorless world where the warmth and playfulness of Hermione—who Shakespeare’s full
text points out is Russian, a foreigner—gets mistaken for a sure sign of adultery.
Did you know that the real, historical Bohemia doesn’t actually have a coastline?
No one is really sure why or how Shakespeare made this mistake. It’s just one of
many factual errors in The Winter’s Tale.
This is one director’s attempt to explain Shakespeare’s geography flub:
“In [the source that inspired The Winter’s Tale] Leontes is King of Bohemia, and Polixenes is King of Sicilia. Had Shakespeare adhered to the novel, Perdita would have been
taken to the coast of Sicilia, and geography would not have been outraged, but for some
reason unknown—probably absence of reason—he reversed the situation, and brought
down upon his head the charge of geographical ignorance.” - Charles Kean, 1856
4
Bohemia
After completing the tragedy, Shakespeare unexpectedly brings us to Bohemia. As the
bear chases Antigonus away, two clowns suddenly mount the stage, take up the abandoned Perdita, and change the course of the play for comedy and romance. After Time’s
monologue comes a scene with King Polixenes talking to Camillo in prose—an extremely
odd scene for Shakespeare, since prose is typically the low language, used for clowns, not
kings. If even the King is speaking in prose, it illustrates just how rustic this world really is.
After that the clever thief Autolycus appears, who seems to hijack the second half of the
show, appearing in four scenes.
After him comes the sheep-shearing. Elizabethan shepherds considered June the best
time to shear sheep, so the play has moved from the shortest days to the longest, the
coldest to the hottest. The setting within the country has changed sharply as well: in
Sicilia, everything happens around the palace, while in Bohemia, most of the scenes are in
the rural countryside.
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Visual Imagination
Design and Imagery
Some selections from director
David R. Gammons’ visual
research, which directly inspired
the interpretations of the worlds
of Sicilia and Bohemia.
The World of Sicilia
*Birdcages. White doves.
*Jagged black rocks. White marble
statues.
*Candlelight. Haze. Cold.
*Tuxedos. Gowns. Velvet, Satin,
Leather. *Long lines. Elegant cuts.
*Control. Power. Madness. Secret Desire. Suffocation. Danger. Struggle. Force.
6
The World of Bohemia
*Trailer park by the sea. 1960s beach party.
*Bug zapper. Chili pepper lights.
*Bikinis and Board Shorts. Trucker caps & wife beaters.
*Celebration, Heat, Freedom, Desire, Danger, Delirium.
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Shakespeare’s Globe Top. Drawing of the interior of the Swan
Theater. 1596. Bottom. The reconstruction of
Shakespeare’s Globe in London.
By Laura Henry
From 1599 to 1642, the Globe Theatre and its company, then known as
the King’s Men, presented the plays of
Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The
Globe was a round, open-air amphitheater, with a covered stage that extended
into its interior yard. For a penny, spectators, dubbed “groundlings” by Hamlet,
could stand on all sides of the stage, right
below the action. For two pennies, more
refined patrons could sit in stalls around
the sides. The nobles preferred to sit in
the lords’ rooms, high above the crowd,
where they could see, and more importantly, be seen. Everyone, from stable boy
to lord, came to the theater. As you can
imagine, this construction made for a dynamic place to see theater, where people
of all classes and origins rubbed elbows.
The experience was also quite different than going to see a play today.
In short, it was rowdy. Playhouses were
located in the seedy parts of town, in
the same neighborhood as the taverns,
brothels, and bear baiting rings. Beyond
the notorious neighbors, the amphitheaters themselves probably held as many
as three thousand spectators. Inside,
prostitutes pranced through groundlings looking for clients; thieves, for
purses. Audiences frequently shouted at
the actors and were not afraid to voice
their disapproval. Some accounts even
describe crowds demanding to see an
entirely different play, if the one offered
wasn’t to their liking.
And, amazingly, companies like
Shakespeare’s had the ability to do just
that. Since people came to the theater
so often, troupes had to have constantly
changing repertoires. They kept plays in
a continuous rotation, performing a dif-
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ferent one every day of the
week and up to and beyond
thirty-five plays a year.
The stages in the Elizabethan playhouses were
also very different. The
companies used no scenery
at all and very few props.
Since there was no electric
lighting, plays had to be
performed during daylight
hours. As a result, a great
deal was left to the imagination of the audience; this
is why Shakespeare’s plays
often state very clearly the
location, time of day, and
other circumstances of the
scene. For example, how
would we know a storm was
about to begin if Antigonus
didn’t say, “I never saw the
heavens so dim by day”?
Was there a real bear in early
productions of The Winter’s Tale?
While some scholars say that the
bear must have been played by a
man, many others disagree. Records
show that two polar bear cubs, given
as a gift to King James, were actually
kept by a rival theater, and could
have been trained for use onstage.
Others suggest the company might
have borrowed beasts from nearby
bear-baiting rings – although it’s
uncertain whether these more
vicious animals could be trusted not
to actually maul Antigonus.
Claes Jansz. Visscher. “A view of London, 1625.” Notice the theaters in the bottom left-hand corner.
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Shakespeare Reclaim’d, Shakespeare Releas’d
A Historical Overview
By Beck Holden
Sketch of the Pyrrhic
Dance in Charles
Kean’s The Winter’s
Tale. 1856.
“A
man must either renounce every
principle of taste and decency and
burn the models of the ancients or else
agree that the dramas of Shakespeare are
monstrous.” Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard’s condemnation sums up the French
eighteenth-century response to Shakespeare. French intellectuals had strict
ideas about what made a good play: the
story should span a single day and be set
in a single location; a comedy should be
a comedy, a tragedy a tragedy; kings and
clowns shouldn’t share the same stage;
violence has no place onstage; and, above
all, the play’s action must never strain believability. Given these criteria, is it any
wonder that Shakespeare, with his fool
advising King Lear, his storm of violence
concluding Hamlet, and his plays spanning kingdoms, continents, and decades,
might strike Suard as savage?
Perhaps none of Shakespeare’s plays
would have seemed more savage than his
late romance The Winter’s Tale. King Leontes starts a loving husband, then turns
into a jealous tyrant almost instantly.
Three acts of tragedy in Sicilia melt away
to pastoral comedy in Bohemia. Sixteen
years pass with only thirty-two lines of explanation. And in the finale, a statue of
Leontes’s dead wife Hermione apparently
comes to life.
After enjoying fair success when it was
written, The Winter’s Tale vanished for
nearly a century, from 1642 to 1741. It began to recover popularity in the 1750s,
thanks to adaptations focusing on Florizel and Perdita’s love story. This shift
eased the critics’ problems by starting after the sixteen-year gap, while highlighting a story that appealed to the public’s
passion for pastoral romance. The SheepShearing (1755) eliminates Leontes and
Hermione entirely, paring the five-act play
down to twenty pages. The great English
actor David Garrick stitched together another version in 1756, the three-act Florizel
and Perdita. This one also begins sixteen
years later, when a shipwreck brings the
repentant Leontes to Bohemia.
In the nineteenth century, performance
practices gradually reclaimed Shake-
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speare’s original text as they explored the
play’s potential for extravagant spectacle—and it is a play that offers many opportunities for that. Charles Kean’s 1856
production began with a royal banquet,
reproducing Ancient Syracuse as accurately as possible with musicians, slaves,
and dancing girls. The production also
featured a procession bearing Hermione
to her trial on a litter, Apollo aboard a flying chariot during Time’s speech, and a
sheep-shearing festival with 300 dancing
shepherds and shepherdesses.
In 1881 theater manager William Poel
struck back against pictorial productions
by staging Shakespeare’s plays on an empty stage in Elizabethan garb, trying to discover the secrets of how they were played
in Shakespeare’s day. The Winter’s Tale
holds an honored place in Poel’s movement, thanks to Harley Granville-Barker’s
groundbreaking 1912 production. Barker
set the play on a blank white stage with
four towering Greco-Roman columns—
enough to hint at a location, while still
nudging the viewer to fill in the blanks.
While productions of The Winter’s Tale
have remained common, another recent
trend sees the wheel of time spinning
back to the 1700s, with Shakespeare’s
play inspiring a flood of new adaptations. This time, however, the adaptors
aren’t fixing Shakespeare’s failures; rather,
they’re inspired by this fantastical world
where Time itself is a character and statues of the dead come to life. For Randy
Weiner, Deirdre Murray and Diane Paulus, for instance, the play’s a story of love,
loss and repentance seemed so timeless
that it begged for contemporary music to
set it free. Drawing on funk, soul, gospel,
and blues, they created The Best of Both
Worlds, which follows an R&B icon whose
jealousy threatens to shatter his family and
friendships. Only a true gospel miracle
has the power to inspire forgiveness and
lead the repentant king towards redemption. The Best of Both Worlds will stake
its claim to a place in The Winter’s Tale’s
rich history when it opens this November
at the American Repertory Theater.
The court of Leontes in Granville-Barker’s The Winter’s Tale. 1912.
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Questions for Discussion
1. Characterize the two worlds of this play. According to Shakespeare, what is Sicilia like and what is
Bohemia like? Compare and contrast the two worlds
in this production. What did the production do to
show the differences between Sicilia and Bohemia,
and why was that choice made?
2. Do you think Leontes is justified in his jealousy? Is
there something going on between Hermione and
Polixenes, or is it all in his head? What are the implications of each possibility?
3. Why do you think Time appears as a character?
Why is time important in this play? What does the
play say about it?
4. The play is called The Winter’s Tale. What season
is it in each part of this play? How do the changing
seasons relate to the plot and themes?
5. Where do you think Hermione was? Was she dead
or alive? If alive, why did she wait so long to return
to Leontes?
6. Why do you think that Shakespeare chooses to
describe the reunion of the two kings and the discovery of Perdita, rather than show it? Do you think
it enhances or detracts from the story?
Want to learn more
about Shakespeare's
play?
Go online and check out
dramaturg Laura Henry's
talk on The Winter's Tale.
americanrepertorytheater.
org/wt-video
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classroom activities
Design:
Can you think of a different way to interpret the two
worlds of Sicilia and Bohemia? To update them to
our own time? Create your own design for Sicilia
and for Bohemia. Concentrate on what makes each
world unique. What does it look like? What kinds
of objects are in each country? What colors? What
sounds?
Direction:
If you were the director, how would you explain Leontes’ jealousy in a production? What would you do
to make it believable? Do you think you need to do
anything?
Writing:
At the end of the play, the characters leave the
stage to tell each other their stories about the last
16 years. We already know the story of Leontes and
Paulina, and the story of Perdita and Florizel – but
we don’t know Hermione’s real story. Decide what
you think that story is, and write out what Hermione
will say at dinner.
Composing:
This production made use of lots of different kinds
of music, including popular music of today. After
reading the play, identify the songs Shakespeare
incorporated into the plot. (For example, 4.3.1-22.)
What modern songs would you pick to replace
Shakespeare’s that would still maintain the right
mood and meaning? Are there other moments you
think could be enhanced by music, where there isn’t
a song in the Shakespeare? What songs would you
use then?
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