Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter’s Tale

Summary

It is a critical commonplace that The Winter’s Tale is an ill-made play: its very editors deride it. A recent apologist, S. L. Bethell, after posing the question “Why is his dramatic technique crude and apparently incoherent? answers with the bold suggestion that Shakespeare was trying to be funny: instancing several examples in the Florizel-Perdita-Camillo-Autolycus-Shepherd-Clown sequences of IV, iv, he concludes: “. . . surely this is a deliberately comic underlining of a deliberately crude technique. Considering now the play as a whole, are we not justified in suspecting a quite conscious return to naive and outmoded technique, a deliberate creaking of the dramatic machinery?”

These conjectures may seem valid in the study, but have no force on the stage. Shakespeare's stage-craft in this play is as novel, subtle and revolutionary as it had been a few years before in Antony and Cleopatra, but in an entirely different way: just as he had then found the technical path to an actual and life-sized world—to the drums and tramplings of the Roman Empire—so,in The Winter's Tale he hit upon a means of entry into the fabulous world of a life standing (as Hermione says) in the level of dreams.