(Above: King Leontes at what he believes to be the statue of his dead wife, overwhelmed at the resemblance.)
It is generally a good idea for a drama critic to see a play before he critiques it.
However, I’m going to be bold enough to say a few things about a play I didn’t see. Why? Read on.
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Last Sunday I had planned to go see a production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale produced by a small semi-professional theater company in St. Louis.
Let me begin by clarifying what I mean by “semi pro”.
In show biz, we seem to have three types of companies that produce live theater outside of high school or college settings:
COMMUNITY THEATER, or groups of amateurs who don’t get paid and who do shows either for the fun of it, or to hook up with folks other than their spouses. Their audiences are friends and family and members of the community and they usually rehearse every night for six weeks;
SEMI-PRO THEATER, or groups of actors who have more talent and experience than community theater folk, and who get paid, but whose pay amounts to perhaps $30 for a three weekend run (nine performances) of a show. I am not making this up. This is what most semi-pro companies pay their actors. Their audiences are friends and family almost exclusively, drawing hardly at all from the community in which they are located, and the troupe usually rehearses about half as much as a community troupe; and
PROFESSIONAL THEATER, or groups of actors who may or may not belong to the union, but whose non-union members get paid at least $100 per performance, whose audiences are general theater-goers, with no significant percentage of them being family and friends, the demands of production often requiring rehearsal time of as little as two weeks.
Now, the company that produced the show in question, The Winter’s Tale, is the only other troupe in St. Louis that I know of that claims to be “faith based“, but I am told they are rather vague about which faith upon which they are based. I am told (albeit third-hand) that this troupe is actively seeking Hindu and Muslim scripts. After all, we’re called to “believe”, and we all believe that “believe” is an intransitive verb, don’t we?
Anyway, I was a tad curious about this production because my friend Tom Leith of Credo of the Catholic Laity had arranged a discussion afterwards led by a local professor on the topic “What are the Catholic Elements in The Winter’s Tale?” Tom reports that the discussion went well, and that the professor, who is quite familiar with the scholarship of Joseph Pearce, is convinced that Shakespeare was in fact a Catholic and sees the obvious Catholic elements in this play, of which there are many. That’s good to hear.
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What is not good to hear is that the production was botched – at least in one crucial area. Again, I didn’t see it, and I can not speak on the acting, the costuming, the direction, the overall production – but I can speak on this.
Somebody along the way decided to bring Mamillus back to life.
To know how wrong – and how anti-Christian and frankly anti-literary this choice is – you must understand at least the general outline of the plot. King Leontes gets a wild notion that his wife is cheating on him. His rage leads to the death of his little son (from stress and a wasting away over the uproar about his mother) and his rage leads also to what the king believes is the death of his wife. Leontes is pretty well raving mad, beyond even Othello, until he learns that the Divine Oracle has revealed him to be in error. Knowing that his jealousy and madness had led to the death of his son and to what he thinks is the death of his wife, Leontes embarks upon sixteen years of heartfelt penance. At the end of the play, we all learn that the queen is not dead, that she has in fact been hidden away all this time, and in a striking scene where she poses as a statue that comes to life (although older than when the king accused her and with wrinkles), she is restored to Leontes, who is fully sorry for his sin, and overcome with joy at this apparent resurrection.
But the boy remains dead.
And the queen has wrinkles.
This is because sin has consequences.
Our faith is not a fairy tale. Christ died a bloody and horrible death because of our sin. When Catholics receive absolution in the confessional, they are still required to perform penance because sin is real and has consequences, even when forgiven. The Resurrection has won us new life, but our old life – including our concupiscence and the effects of our former sins – still remains. Indeed, the Risen Christ still carried his wounds. He carries them to this day, in Heaven.
To insert a stage direction or bit of business like bringing Mamillus back to life in Act Five so that Leontes gets to go right back to one big happy family serves no good purpose. It subverts the intention of Shakespeare, undoes one of the main points of the play, and frankly confuses the audience. With no dialogue indicating that Mamillus has been squirrelled away with his mother, the audience is left wondering why he comes out – now fully grown – and embraces his daddy beside the newly restored living “statue” of his mother. At least one audience member told me as much.
Now I’m sure the production wasn’t all bad. But this is a serious error and tells us – even those of us who didn’t see the play – that the director (or whoever made this choice) just didn’t get it.
God bless them all for trying, but I’m kind of glad I went to the Three Stooges movie instead.
Kevin O’Brien: I am greatly feared Joseph Pearce will impose some terrible penance on you for using “fairy tale” in a pejorative sense! A slip of the type-writer, surely? All followers of the StAR must know that in “On Fairy-Stories” Tolkien has declared that our faith IS a fairy-tale made real; that the “happy ever after” of fairy-tales foreshadows the unqualified happiness of the saved in Heaven–after sins have been absolved in Purgatory.
In relation to “The Winter’s Tale”: if I remember my Shakespearean critical controversies correctly (it’s been a while) “The Winter’s Tale” is seen as a “problem play”, in part because of a jar between fairy-tale elements and more realistic aspects. The most notorious example being the uncharacteristic and under-motivated homicidal rage of Leontes. In defense of the decision to bring back Mamillus, perhaps it was thought that there was a jar between the unqualified joyousness at the end of the play, and the fact that Leontes has still killed his son. I think the tension would be best left as a flaw in Shakespeare’s play, but I can see their point.
In relation to the whole “Shakespeare as Catholic” thing: obviously I welcome the evidence that Shakespeare, the man, was a Catholic. Yet I would have to say that, if so, he was a bad Catholic. For as an unprejudiced student of the plays, with no axe to grind, I have to say that the greatest poetry (“To be or not to be”, “To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow”) and the greatest scenes in the great tragedies (Lear on the blasted heath, Edgar leading the blind Gloucester)–Shakespeare’s “deepest thrusts”, as Robert Lowell puts it– is not only not Catholic, but not in any sense Christian. This of course does not mean that Shakespeare the man couldn’t have got to Heaven. But to set him up as some sort of model Catholic, as an exponent of the faith like Dante, seems to me very dubious.
I agree that bringing back Mamillus undermines the play. It’s a tragi-comedy, not a comedy.
Have you seen the PBS Great Performances rendition of King Lear staring Ian McKellen?
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/king-lear/watch-the-play/487/
Dear Andrew,
You make some interesting points. As to the utter power of the poetry of despair in Shakespeare, look at “Tomorow and Tomorrow” for instance. Yes, this is a gripping and stunning assertion of nihilism, and in that sense it is far from Christian, but it is spoken by a character who has given his life to sin. There’s no question Macbeth the character is not a Christian man, but is “Macbeth” the play a Christain play? In other words, how does Macbeth’s great poetry of despair fit in context with the larger story the play unfolds?
I think many folks confuse the speeches of certain characters in the plays with the plays themselves, or with Shakespeare himself. “To thine own self be true,” for example is not at all what “Hamlet” is about; it’s almost the antithesis of what the play is about.
Likewise, I would argue that “Macbeth” shows us with a fascinating clarity the effects of sin, of what happens when we jettison God and become our own gods – and the result is horrific – horrific especially from the Christian point of view the drama takes.
To Kevin O’Brien,
I thank you for your considered response to my post, as also I thank Joseph Pearce for his subsequent comments. I do take your point that structurally “Macbeth” is “set up” to show the punishment of evil. Still, I’m not entirely convinced it actually does so, in large part because of the conclusion.
I have seen several productions and film versions of “Macbeth”, and in each one the end, especially Malcolm’s final speech, has been not just anti-climactic–which is perhaps inevitable–but slightly comic. “So thanks to all at once and each one,/Whom we invite to see us crowned at Scone”. I mean, seriously? Is this the best the greatest writer in the English language can come up with to celebrate the triumph of good over evil? Coming so soon after the powerful speech of Macbeth, I think it is Macbeth’s nihilism and defiance which the audience take away as the lasting impresssion. Similarly with “King Lear”: in my opinion the strongest impression is of Cordelia’s death and Lear’s final collapse, which, as the horrified Dr. Johnson wrote, is “contrary to the natural ideas of justice, to the hope of the reader, and, what is more strange, to the faith of the chronicles”.
My general point about Shakespeare is, I guess, a version of Blake’s verdict on Milton, that he “wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at true liberty when of Devils and Hell, because he was of the Devil’s party without knowing it”. Not, I hasten to say, that I think Shakespeare was “of the Devil’s party”, exactly, nor do I, like Blake, believe that would be a good thing. However the glory and difficulty of imaginative writing is that it comes from the whole man, not just conscious thought but the imagination, the unconscious, feelings. So in a work of art there is not only the conscious intent of the author to consider, but what he unconsciously sympathizes with, what he is able to make come imaginatively alive, what he is able to write his best lines about. I believe that there was a lot more buzzing round in Shakespeare’s head than just Catholicism–though doubtless that was one element–and that this variety and confusion is reflected in his plays.
Nevertheless, when I disagree with a Shakespeare expert such as yourself, and a Shakespeare scholar such as Joseph Pearce, I must concede that I might well be wrong. So I will now retire from the debate until I can get hold of some of these new “Catholic Shakespeare” works, and learn the error of my ways!