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I’m Professor Farah Karim-Cooper, Head of
Higher Education & Research at Shakespeare’s Globe.
Today I have the pleasure of introducing
you to our 2018 Globe production of The Winter’s Tale,
directed by the excellent Blanche McIntyre.
Written somewhere between 1609 and 1611
when James I was on the throne and around the time
of the publication of the King James Bible,
this play revels in poetic metaphor, but also in myth
and in the ecstasies of excessive emotion
It's a play about friendship, old and new love, family,
truth, reconciliation; loss, recovery and
But also a play about time. The ideas that actually swirl around this play
will hit you deeply in the time we are actually living in.
Now, it was first performed at the Blackfriars
theatre - Shakespeare’s indoor playhouse
and then transferred to the Globe, where astrologer
and part-time misogynist, Dr Simon Forman
saw it in 1611. His account shows how much
he enjoyed the clown, Autolycus but also he
comments on the King’s illness - his jealousy—
which speaks to the way the play pulls us
between poles of emotion. But also how we move between tragedy and comedy.
There’s alot to say about this play.It’s genre, for instance-
it was written in the latter
part of Shakespeare’s career when the form
of tragicomedy was coming into its own. Even
though Shakespeare’s First Folio lists this
play amongst the comedies, scholars have since
referred to it as a romance, a tragicomedy
of course, and also as a late play.
I am thinking now of my friend Professor Russ Macdonald
He perhaps wrote the most beautifully about this play in his book Shakespeare’s Late Style.
when he describes how Shakespeare’s
language evolves at this time of his career stylistically,
Russ says, the language is characterised by
‘multiplicity, bravado, unusual music and
spontenaiety’ It is full of pace -he says,
but not in a metrical sense necessarily ,
‘rather speed of thought’. This makes sense to me because the play is concerned with the passage
of Time. In fact Time is personified onstage - in true Shakespearean fashion this iconic figure of
winged time appears to make audiences
marvel but also to move the plot along.
Because you can’t do 16 years in five acts.
Now I don’t have time to tell you the plot,
besides, I don’t want to. There’s some
serious plot twists and surprises and I don't want to spoil it if you don’t know
this play, make sure you have some tissues on hand,
because it’s extremely moving. Our programme
that you can access on our website and social
media platforms will tell you what you need
to know about the plot and this particular production. Now we have staged this play a few times in the
Globe’s life- but this 2018 production took
a slightly different take- the director Blanche
McIntyre wanted to emphasise the irrationality of emotion at the heart of the play by placing it in
what she called the most civilised and sophisticated era in history, which happened to be Sicily in the 12th
century. But let’s think about that irrationality for a moment - Shakespeare provides us with yet another
play that puts jealousy under a microscope;
we saw its tragic consequences a few years
earlier in Othello. In The Winter’s Tale,
the green-eyed monster appears again, but
this time it possesses Leontes, and the stakes
are high because he is a King; his emotional
convulsions will have wider ramifications
- becoming convulsions that are felt by the entire
state. Shakespeare’s source for the play
was an elizabethan novella called Pandosto:
The Triumph of Time by Robert Greene - Shakespeare's first critic. Our playwright was undoubtedly drawn to
the novels interest in this excessive irrational passion- in Pandosto it is described as a passion that ‘galls’
and it's referred to it as an ‘infectious sore’ 
Jealousy, he says is full of ‘suspicious
doubts, and pinching mistrust’ it is a ‘hellish passion’.
A 17th century pamphlet on love melancholy describes how jealousy works as it ‘insinuates itself into the
mind— and it ‘plays the Tyrant, and torments it - it is an ingenuious passion
that ‘hath the power out of an imaginary
evil to draw a true and real torment’.
But perhaps Shakespeare’s view is less bleak. The
role of Time helps us to see what work it
can do towards healing, towards forgiveness, and regenerating communities.
Speaking of regenerating communities...
Our doors are closed, but our hearts
and minds are still open, please do enjoy the
performance but donate to us if you can. Thankyou.
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