Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 5)

Part 5 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:13 Wes: Welcome to part five of our discussion of the Winter's Tale. And parts five and six. We will be discussing acts four and five. So we just got done discussing act three and some of the action. We, with Hermione and Paulina, noted that they use language in a different and more persuasive way and talked a little bit about the concept of evidence and the oracle and all that stuff. And now we are going to get a very different scene, I guess, at the end. We already moved to the desert. The end of Act 3, we moved to the desert of Bohemia. But now we're going to fast forward 16 years and Shakespeare will directly apologize to us for that. For just taking a big shortcut there and having. Well, I guess his shortcut is, the way he handles this is to have the personification of time come out and tell us that he's going to be sliding over 16 years. Time begs forgiveness and essentially says, but think about it. I'm so powerful, I can overthrow law and, and custom. You know, laws change, customs change over time. Time is powerful enough. In other words, I'm going to apologize for this trick of fast forwarding, but as the personification of time, I can do that. It's a very funny way of excusing himself by personifying time. 1:44 Erin: If only Shakespeare were a screenwriter, he could just say, here is a title card that says 16 years later. Something like that. Instead, he has to do this whole song and dance. 1:54 Wes: I guess he could have had someone come out with a card. Is there a way to do this without that? How would you clue the audience in? It would probably emerge from context. That's true, but the groundlings might not like that. They might start throwing things. Is there anything else of significance to get from the section on Time? 2:15 Erin: Well, you know, we get a little pre figurement of, you know, as we have all along, of some of the, what do we want to call it, horticultural imagery that's gonna come up throughout Act 4. So time says, I turn my glass and give my scene. Such growing as you had slept between. This image of things growing, of profundity, of profusion, I think is gonna be important in this pastoral act. And then in line 24 time says to speak of Perdita now grown in grace, equal with one. This idea of grace and growing, coming together. Presumably she's growing more and more like her mother, Hermione, because Hermione is the image of the figure of grace in the. I almost said in the film, figure of grace in the play. So, yeah, I think hints of this are shooting up here. They're sprouting. And it'll come to full flower maybe later in Act 4, Scene 4, I think is why. 3:11 Wes: Right, right, right. 3:13 Erin: But one of the things that I think I've come to understand about Act 4 and it's kind of unnecessary length. I don't know if this is too early to give a bird's eye view of the entire act. It's just that the length is doing some work here to help us shift tonally. It's providing some insulation, if you will, from the tragedies that have just occurred. Because people have just died in, you know, grievous ways. And now we have to forget our troubles and get happy. So something about the length, I think, is helpful. And even this speech by time, maybe it's oddity and maybe the fact that it isn't just a title card is helping that prolongment as we shift into something different here. 3:53 Wes: Yeah. Is this his long. I mean, it's not his longest. Hamlet is his longest. This strikes me as a very long play. But I didn't really check that to 4:00 Erin: see it is one of the longest. One of the longer. I don't think it's. 4:04 Wes: Okay. I'm looking now, I'm looking at the stats, and it seems like there's a lot of other much longer plays. So why does it feel so long? It's kind of in the middle, so. No way. 4:14 Erin: Really? I thought it would be in the top, say, quarter of, I guess. 4:18 Wes: No, I guess you're right. It is in the top quarter. But Hamlet's longest, Richard iii. Coriolanus. Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Othello, King Lear, Henry V, Troilus and Cressida. Henry iv. So I just read all of them. Yeah, the two Henry IVs are longer. So act four is very long. So I don't know. Yeah, I didn't analyze this specifically, but I. You know, I suppose it feels longer because in a way, it is two plays divided by 16 years. And we transition to a much different place as well in Act 4, you know, we saw a little bit of Bohemia in Act 3, but that was the desert. And now, apparently Bohemia includes a little bit of English countryside as well, because that's the way it actually feels. And it's important, right, that we are making this transition to something pastoral, something rustic. It's important that Perdita now be a shepherd's daughter and that she will be the mistress of the sheep shearing. It's a context of renewal and animal husbandry. Is that. I don't know why. That's just something. Let's leave that part out. Yeah. It's the context of renewal and rebirth and the birds and the bees, so to speak. And we're going to try and figure out in these last two parts of our discussion, how that recompenses everything that's gone before and what the deeper connection is between Leontes's jealousy and difficulty with the concept of gratitude and, you know, problems not just with Hermione, but his own child and his relationship with Polixenes. And finally, if I, you know, if my thesis has any weight, this whole concept of the relationship between mind and world. I think we want to try to figure out how all of this rustic context and these young, how that kind of renewal will pay all of that off. 6:27 Erin: You're reminding me that. That, you know, the transition actually comes a little bit sooner. Or maybe we just glossed over this at the end of the last episode. It's difficult to say now, but Act 3, Scene 3, is really, I think, the transition, it's one between. The hinge point is the famous exit pursued by a bear. Did we talk about that? Yeah, we did talk about that. Okay. And then the transition into prose, which is as obvious a shift of tone as anything, perhaps, but you're putting me in mind of the Shepherd In Act 3, Scene 3, around line 107108, the shepherd referring to what the clown has just reported to have seen. His son, the clown has reported to have seen, which was not only Antigonus being eaten, but then everyone in the ship becoming flap dragoned by the sea. A word that I'm not gonna put into every single poem I write, not really. But anyway, the description of what's happened to both to Antigonus and his apparent dismemberment by this bear, and of the ship getting flap dragoned about, of course, has become funny already. Like, this is already kind of a joke. So anyway, the clown reports this back to the shepherd, and the shepherd says, heavy matters, heavy matters. But look thee here, boy. Now bless thy. Thou metst with things dying, I with things newborn. Heavy matters, heavy matters. Is almost kind of funny in itself. Reminds me of. Is it 80s slang to say like, oh, that's heavy, man. It's real heavy. It must be, right? Because we were talking about. Oh, I think back to the future Doc makes a comment about whether or not things have more mass or weight in the future because Marty keeps saying, that's heavy, man. And so anyway, the transition here in the Shepherd's Speech is signaled for us before time even enters with thou met' st with things dying. I with things newborn. And I'm wondering if this is a little bit of a. You know, it's literally a turn signal within the text to say that was tragedy. Right. Tragedy is meeting with things dying. Comedy is something about being reborn. Something about. Well, I said reborn, which is an interesting mistake, but newborn may be reborn too. Something about birth seems inherent to comedy. Maybe. What is that? The birth of laughter? Something about maybe surprise being inherent to comedy. I'm not sure. I haven't thought that through. 8:56 Wes: You know, the comedies generally get the young lovers together in general. Usually people are hooked up by the end of a comedy. So comedy, strictly speaking, is just. Just means a happy ending. And typically an ending that unites spouses or lovers. Right. In tragedy, everyone dies. In comedy, everyone pairs up. And sex and death essentially provides the engine for birth. Yeah, exactly. So the engine of renewal. And why do we. Yeah, I think it's a good question. Why is that in particular associated with hijinks and laughter and funniness? Why is it the romantic comedy typically, and not the romantic drama? I guess if there's drama, people are not getting along, essentially. But in any case, yeah, I think that's a really good point. We get the turn signal, as you put it in the text, that we're gonna go to what is newborn and reborn. This scene reminded me of. Of the Tempest in that Miranda witnesses a shipwreck which turns out to be the cargo of that shipwreck includes her future husband, includes her father's enemies, but also her future husband. And when she sees it, she feels this tremendous empathy and talks about how much it hurt her to. I forget the exact words, but to see this happening to these people, in this case, the clown, the son kind of sees it as a joke, or it's played not for empathy and not for sympathy, but for. For laughs. And it's interesting in that it kind of inverts that scene in the Tempest. Perdita, of course, is just a baby at these. This point, and she can't. And she's. You know, the shipwreck is of the. Has something to do with the Past, not with the future. Right. The shipwreck kind of in for Miranda is a forward looking event and her father has essentially brought these people or had a role in bringing these people to the island. In this case, it's a way of casting off the past. It seems like kind of a harsh fate for Antigonus, but symbolically it seems important that the past be shipwrecked, so to speak, or gotten rid of. 11:19 Erin: Is Miranda, remind me, is she watching it happen like we're watching her her watch this shipwreck happen, or does she report it? 11:26 Wes: She's reporting it to Prospero, if I remember correctly. 11:32 Erin: Okay, so similar situation here where we don't see the clown see it, but he comes back and reports it almost immediately thereafter. That kind of ruins my little thesis, but I think it still holds true. I'm thinking about, is it Mark Twain who said that comedy equals tragedy plus time? I'm wondering if I could tie that together. 11:52 Wes: Or is it Alan Alda? 11:55 Erin: Yeah. 11:57 Wes: Hal Holbrook, I don't know. Is that Mark Twain? 12:00 Erin: I think it might be. 12:01 Wes: Okay. 12:02 Erin: But yeah. What Woody Allen movie was that in the Alan Alda was that Crimes and Misdemeanors? 12:08 Wes: Yeah. 12:09 Erin: Yeah. I was just wondering if there was a difference maybe in tone between the Miranda and the clown scenes because Miranda was seeing live, as it were, and the clown is reporting it. But that doesn't hold up. But I do think it's interesting that so much in the second half of the play is reported to us after the fact. Even the reconciliation that'll come in Act 5, spoiler alert. That is reported to us. 12:34 Wes: Shakespeare's much criticized for that. 12:36 Erin: Though I can't quite make a distinction between Miranda and the clown here in terms of how they report the show Shipwreck on a literal level. I mean, we have time. Time as a body or a person, a body of people or a person coming in and putting just some distance between. And this is maybe what I'm trying to suggest about the length of Act 4. The fact that it seems so incredibly long and this insulation that we need from the tragedy, we literally just need a little bit of time in order to think that what the something tragic can actually turn into something funny. 13:11 Wes: I think we do need a sense of the passing of time. Insulation, I think, is a good is a good word. It's not enough just to cut to some scene with a shepherdess or whatever, and we quickly infer that it's Perdita we need. Time's appearance itself is comic and Shakespeare is giving A, you know, he's poking fun at himself to some extent. So he takes us out of the play a bit and then puts us. Lands us nice and soft back down in it with a different attitude. And as you point out, he's already done that with the pursued by bear bit and making fun of a scene at the end which might otherwise have been construed as tragic. It's pretty clever to make a comedy out of a tragic scene and then make that the seed of this rebirth. 14:02 Erin: I mean, I guess Antigonus death is funny. And we get this gruesome description from the clown, that the bear tore out his shoulder bone while Antigonus was still crying to him. Why is that funny? Or that the bear half dined on the gentleman? He's at it now. So he's still, as we speak, consuming Antigonus, who hopefully by this point is dead. But, you know, why is that funny? I'm thinking about, I don't know, something like, I'm a great fan of Buster 14:29 Wes: Keaton or Chaplin, you know, often the slapstick of dismemberment. 14:35 Erin: Yes, yes. But also the fact that so often their films are about men that are down and out. Lots of Buster Keaton shorts begin with him losing his job and being out on the street, and then a series of misfortunes happen to him. And for some reason they're funny because there's a slapstick element to it. But if we were to take that same premise and say, you know, an Italian neorealist film like Bicycle Thieves, you know, everything goes wrong and that's a tragedy. He loses whatever. These films all follow this trope, but Right. Of like one terrible thing after another happening to some poor schmuck, you know, and why is it funny in a Keaton film? And it's tragic and sad and heartrending in something like Bicycle Thieves, you know, there's a very fine line and some of it is just Keaton's movements, like the way his body moves and. Yeah, the little slapstick kind of jokes that punctuate everything. So is that what this comes down to? That Shakespeare, this great writer of wonderful lines and everything, all he has to do is kind of turn Antigonus into a slapstick buffoon. And that's what makes the difference. 15:44 Wes: I think the slapstick is part of it. And also we are taken out of the play a bit because it's a bit abrupt and farcical. And in fact, this is one of the things it'll is described later on in the play as something like an old Tale or. Right, an old wives tale or a Winter's Tale. This is one of the things that draws our attention to the fact that we ought not to take all of this too seriously. We've been drawn into the tragic frame. We've really been drawn into a kind of psychologically realistic narrative up to this point. And now we're being hit on the head and told that actually this is just a silly old wives tale. And I think from that perspective. It's easier to look at this in a more comic context. On top of the way the. You know, the clown's funny descriptions and all that stuff. Reading this, I found the clown and the shepherd's reactions to be strange. The act ends with the shepherd saying. Tis a lucky day, boy. And will do good deeds on it. Of course, they've just found gold. But they've also just found a child. An abandoned child. That is now going to become a daughter. I guess it depends on your point of view. Whether you see that sort of thing as lucky. Especially in the context of the person who's obviously brought the baby being killed. Along with all of his crew. So they're describing something unfortunate as something that's from their perspective. 17:16 Erin: Certainly lucky for the baby. Who would have otherwise died of exposure. 17:20 Wes: So. Right, of course. Yeah. But in any case, you know, the next scene two, we don't, you know, we're not going to get the countryside quite yet. We're now in the palace. 17:32 Erin: This is the wife swap portion of the Camillo is. I see him as like a serial monogamist now. He's been Polixenes's BFF for 16 years. Years, yeah. He's filled the friend vacuum that Leontes left for Polixenes. 17:48 Wes: Yeah. This scene is mainly just exposition. And I didn't take a lot of notes on it. You know, we learned that Camillo wants to return. Polixenes wants him to stay. Then we get introduced to Florizel of late, much retired from court. Does that remind you of anyone? Little Prince Hal? Action going on here. It's less frequent to his princely exercises. And hanging out with the shepherd and his hot daughter. So we find that out. And then we find out that they're gonna go disguised. They're gonna go to see what's going on in disguises. Is there anything that's more than exposition in this scene? 18:22 Erin: I think just one thing, which is. Polixenes says that he fears that Perdita or this shepherd's daughter. Is the angle that plucks our son thither. So this is Just another twist of this fishing metaphor that's been running all the way through. Now, she, the vixen, is the angler and Florizel is the fish. But of course, they're going to go on their own fishing expedition to get information and by putting on disguises. This is some heavy comedy signaling from people who, you know, the last time we saw them were fleeing for their lives from Sicilia. So. 18:56 Wes: Yeah, women with their angles, with their ulterior motives. 19:00 Erin: So many angles. That's right. 19:02 Wes: Part of that angle involves having curves, ironically. Sorry. 19:07 Erin: Oh, yeah. 19:10 Wes: Curves for angles. But in any case. So now, going into scene 4.3, we're going to have to try to make sense of Autolycus. Am I pronouncing that the way you pronounce it? 19:24 Erin: Yes. 19:25 Wes: And so he's a scoundrel and a robber, but he seems to be an age agent of fortune, a mercenary of fortune. He's an agent of some of the good things that happen in the play, even though he's trying to fleece. People talk about someone with an angle. 19:43 Erin: I never realized until you said this that he's basically just Han Solo. Like he come. 19:48 Wes: He comes in. Yeah, that's interesting. He has a more kind of lower class feel in a way than Han Solo. And I don't know, that's a great comparison, kid. I just want my money, kid. Yeah, right. 20:02 Erin: If Han Solo was also like, I 20:04 Wes: will take you to the. Wherever you need to go, get in my ship. 20:09 Erin: Exactly. And if he was also helping Luke and Leia get together as a couple, which would be a bad thing for their children. But anyway, right. So when he comes in, we have daffodils begin to peer. Things are. Things are coming up out of the ground. He's announcing that spring is here. But it seems like with this intrusion of music, of course, music is also something else we could talk about as a feature of Shakespeare's comedies, maybe of comedy in general. I don't know. Maybe I should think of it not as gaining layers, but as shedding layers. Right. We're going from kind of cold Sicilia, maybe, into this warm spring of bohemia. So we're shedding layers of this trapped tragedy. When Autolycus comes in, that's really when the fun starts. That's really when the comedy happens. With the song. 20:57 Wes: Yeah. It's much easier, you know, if you see a good performance of this. It's much easier to grasp on the written page. When I start to see the songs, my eyes glaze over a little bit. And I have. And it Was the same thing with J.R.R. tolkien. Okay, where's the violence? Where's the violin? Oh, no. Now we've got Tom Bombadil to doing an enormous song here. I do love musicals, so seeing it performed, it's really great. And it really adds, of course, this comic element and this musical element if it's done well. I really like this, the way this is done in the BBC and you know, lines like for the red blood rains and the winter's pale. I really love that, the idea that there's something as winter fades when spring arrives, that there's something bloodlike involved. I'm thinking of the sun. But what does he mean there? Yeah, I think the more literal meaning is people being red blooded and desire and rebirth and all of that. Blood, in other words, is associated not just with tragedy and death, but birth is bloody and people's cheeks get flushed. You imagine young maidens with their red cheeks and you imagine young people with their red bloodedness and Americans with their red bloodedness. Just kidding. As in I'm a red blooded American. I think that's another hinge between tragedy and comedy, the concept of blood, which can be taken in a different way. 22:31 Erin: No, I'm just thinking about maybe there's something here about the kind of hibernation or that this power kind of like requires rosiness to follow it or something like that. 22:40 Wes: Yeah, I mean, the winter's pale. It almost makes me imagine a cheek. And then the. Whether you apply makeup or you hit your cheeks to bring out a little color, color is now, you know, and of course we can think of flowers blooming. We can think of this in. In many ways. But a colorless world becomes colorful. Things are frozen over, things are hibernating, including the bears, up to a point. Till they kill you. 23:05 Erin: Yeah. 23:07 Wes: And now everything is blooming, everything's coming out. So why, you know, why is the thief and the scoundrel the person to kind of announce spring here and sexual passion? He's someone who trucks in deception. And some of it is just outright pickpocketing. And some of it is he's getting people, later we will see him get people to buy these songs which are themselves essentially old wives tales, outlandish tales, you know, that he claims are true. But he knows how to manipulate people into buying them because they're designed to be bought for one's mistress. So I guess maybe, maybe I'm answering my own question here, which is that, you know, it's suitable for him to be the one to announce wants spring because he's a deceiver. Because in a way, sex sells, so to speak. And that's one of the. His means of manipulating people. And also in general. Right. He's selling trinkets and these songs and things that men can use to please their mistresses. But in general, it speaks to the plumage of spring and these characteristics that are the result of sexual selection. In other words, why are the flowers out? Why are the flowers so beautiful? Why are the birds so beautiful? Why this is all the result. You might think of them as the kind of nature's trinkets or decorations that are designed to produce. They have the function of producing sexual attraction. And whether or not you think of that as well, that's very superficial. Or maybe there's something profound about it. Here it is, suitably, I think, the deceiver who represents that. I don't know. 24:56 Erin: I like that a lot. No, it does. You're also illuminating for me, something interesting, I think, that's happened in his song, which I didn't notice before, which is, you know, we just talked about. For the red blood rains and the winter's pale in line four, in line five, it's followed by the white sheet bleaching on the hedge. And then we have the birds singing and everything. And then, as you mentioned, Autolycus will say, my traffic is sheets, obviously ballads, but also, of course, bed sheets. And, you know. Cause he's a randy guy. Right. So the winter's pale, that image of whiteness. And as you're suggesting, a sort of, you know, a sheet of ice over things then becomes the white sheet bleaching on the hedge. I guess I'm interested in this idea of whiteness or of pallor becoming for Autolycus, the pallor then kind of stained with a blush. Or the sheet, the ballad sheet, brought to life by the text that then colors it. Right. 25:58 Wes: Or brought to life in the actual performance of singing or in the performance. 26:01 Erin: Absolutely right, yeah. Which would put us in mind of what's going to happen later with the statue becoming animated, coming to life. Right. So we could think of maybe a written text by that same token. Right. As being like the statue, which needs the actress to animate it. This is actually reminds me of something I saw in a really great Stella Adler lecture where she talked about. I think it was one of her great lectures on Chekhov plays where she talked about how she's suspicious of anyone who says that they like to read plays, which I count myself as someone who likes to read plays, but she says that Basically, the play is like a dead thing. And if you're not seeing it in performance, then you're not actually seeing. Reading the play is not actually experiencing the play like it needs to be performed. The thing on the page is just a dead thing. It's not even. It's only like 50% there. 26:53 Wes: Yeah. 26:54 Erin: This transition, too, between four and five lines. Four and five. I'm thinking about, you know, when does whiteness mean death and pallor and snow and rhyme? And when does it mean cream and bedsheets and freshness and light and virginity? Right. That's then ripe for the blush to enter. When does it mean the statue? And when does it mean the living woman or the written word and the performed play? 27:20 Wes: Yeah, no, that's. That's great. You're giving me a connection to one of the other themes here because. Yeah, I like this idea that the written word, in a sense, is something desiccated. You know, where you add water. Water. And then it becomes something. Or it's like a code of some sort, like a record where things are latent, but then you have to put the needle down and it becomes music. And some people can do that in their imagination. I have a bit of trouble translating the play in my imagination and to. I thoroughly enjoy it, but it's also. I more enjoy seeing it performed. Well, I guess there are two different forms of enjoyment because I can pay more attention to the language when I'm reading. And I miss a lot of it in the. In the performance. You know, it's a matter of how we bring things to life. We bring them to life with our imagination. But one can al. You know, someone can bring them to life with a performance. And it seems to go for language in general. Someone speaks to us and it's just words. It's just sounds until we as interpreters can do something with that. And we had talked before about the. Thank you. You being a cipher and how it is that something purely mental or linguistic or something like that could recompense physical reality. The hospitality given to a guest, the inadequacy of the mind to the world. And I think there is something of that here. So that something, in a way, language is like something dormant and pale or something that's. That's hibernating and it's little winter cave or something like that, until it can be given an interpretation by another mind. And then there's always the perils involved in that interpretation. If you're paranoid, it could be construed in a way that makes you psychotically. Jealous, as with Leontes. So Springtime, in a way, is a different type of interpretation. It's the antithesis of the jealous interpretation. It takes what's desiccated and then it produces something bountiful out of that, something generous. 29:22 Erin: You're making me want to provide a reading or a connection, which I. Which I don't quite have. It's just burgeoning to Autolycus's obsession with money and pickpocketing. Because that money seems to me to be part of this kind of universe of latency that you're talking about here. I'm sorry. Thinking too, about the fact that when he meets the clown, the clown is going out to get ingredients for the. For the feast. Right. So the ingredients have to come together to produce the final. 29:50 Wes: And he's trying to figure out what things cost and does he have enough. Do some calculation. 29:57 Erin: Maybe the money that in the end, you know, Autolycus then decides to. When he does decide to help, when he is kind of spurred toward a good deed, which in a way seems to. I mean, he's not terrible guy, he's kind of roguish and funny and charming and all those Han Solo qualities. Right. But in the end, when he decides to actually do the good deed. I want to, but I can't quite make the connection between this idea of money's latency and then actually putting it to use. Being put in towards a good, towards an action, towards actually producing something. 30:27 Wes: I like that, though. The thief is taking this currency which only has value in exchange in a kind of human interaction. But in general, he's the rogue. Right. And he could be more like an Iago. He could be doing very destructive things within the play. But his roguishness has a invisible hand quality to it. His selfishness is going to actually serve a higher good. So, yeah, I get your association. I can't spell it out on the fly any better than you just did. But this, that. I like that phrase that you. Universe of latency. I love this one line. The. Oh, where is it? The kite. When the kite builds. 31:09 Erin: Yes. 23. 31:10 Wes: Right. When the kite builds. Look to lesser linen. The lesser linen being the thing that the ballads are written on the sheets. Although, again, there's the double entendre. You see the bird? Right. I guess it's a bird of prey getting high in the sky. Right. And I understand that he's speaking of a bird of prey there. Kidding. And that this is an association of spring. And so you imagine this happening over maybe a sheet. Thinking back to the earlier part of the song, of the sheet being out on the line. Bleaching or bleaching on the hedge. But something here about. We're thinking of the sheets as what the ballads are written on. Something about the bird of prey. I don't know. I feel like I'm also. I'm missing something. Except for the association of the bird of prey with spring. Something high. You know, of course, the over overall import of that line is there's something high and noble about that. But that's his signal to do something lowly so that he's being induced by that noble event into his. You know, it's now the time for me to start stealing. It's now time for me to start getting people to buy these ballads. And maybe it speaks to something about the high and noble passion of love and how one can make use of that, right? One can traffic in unconsidered trifles. When people start getting randy, when their cheeks start getting flushed, when they start getting loving the deceiver, that's the time for the deceiver to make his move and prey on that. 32:36 Erin: And he's also part of that sexual economy as well, right? Because as a bird of prey, the question is, what might he be snapping up? You know, like, lock up your wives kind of. Is that all of sorts inherent to this idea of the kite? 32:50 Wes: So he says, snapper-up of unconsidered trifles. And in my text it says, points to his rags. I had said before, said he was considered selling the trifles. So I was misreading that. Later on it'll be trinkets that he sells. So. So he's dumpster diving, essentially. He's picking up used things. And when people are moving out on September 1st of their apartments, he's there to. To pick up or he's doing. He's going thrift shopping. So anyway, I'm reminded that Macklemore song, which is about thrift shopping. 33:22 Erin: Anyway, oh, I can't help you there, 33:25 Wes: you know, and then the little, little remark about the gallows at the end, him being terrified of beating and hanging. So his revenue is the silly cheat. He's telling us that he's. He's not running around killing people and he's doing more minor crimes. And then the. The clown comes in and the clown, of course he's gonna. He's gonna pretend to be hurt so that the, you know, when the clown taunt tries to help him, he can rob him. Maybe we should move on to scene four. Now, I find the language to be Quite difficult in this scene. It really took me a while to decipher something. And in general, that seems to be the way with these late plays. Much more. I think we've already mentioned that. Much more syntactically complicated in general, but here quite. Involves quite intricate. 34:19 Erin: I attributed the difficulty of Leontes's speeches towards the beginning of the play to the tortured thoughts that he's having and the way that he tries to work out. You know, he wants to get to the predestined answer which he has decided upon. Right. So he has to kind of take this circuitous route mentally to get him there. Here, these speeches between Florizel and Perdita, the difficulty is indicative of a dance or of trying to kind of impress each other or maybe just of having a lot of speaking of latency, maybe a lot of, like, latent sexual energy that they're channeling into these over, overdone, overwrought kinds of turns of phrase. I don't know. I think you're right that the style is just indicative of Shakespeare's. Of his late style overall. But I think it kind of fades in and out. You know, sometimes we get a smoother read and then we'll come to a particularly gnarly patch after a while of coasting, you know. So I guess I'm looking for the reason as to why this would be occurring in a scene which would. If we had to guess, we would say, oh, a scene between two lovers where they're declaring their love for each other and they're just being happy. That would, you know, if I had to guess, maybe that would be a coasting scene in terms of the difficulty of language. Instead, it's gnarly, as I said, or flowery. 35:36 Wes: Ornamental. 35:37 Erin: Flowery. That's. That's much better. 35:40 Wes: Lots of flowers, I mean. But I think your point is very important, which is that we have these different forms of rhetoric or ways of speaking in the play. And that includes the intricacies of Leonti's jealousy, but also the smooth writing, as I. That's the way I experienced it of Paulina's persuasiveness and Hermione's persuasiveness. Those are the people who speak very well in the play and powerfully. But now, the language of love. It seems to be that with the language of love, we're back to this intricate language which, if we think about it in terms of gnarliness or floweriness, is appropriate to what we described before as the sort of the outer exterior or charm involved in winning People over. And then also, you know, as we talked about in Much Ado About Nothing, it forms a kind of insulation as well. It's really charming to see this performed. The BBC, the performance I've recommended. The girl who's playing Perdita seems to be closely matched with her actual age in the play, which is, I think, 16. Right. So it's quite charming to see a 16 year old speak in this. They're speaking in a way that's quite formal, normal. And of course, Florizel is you give life to weeds and you're basically the personification of spring. And he's loading all these compliments onto her and she's demurring and saying, no, you're the high one, you're the prince. Yeah. He's just called her the queen of the sheep shearing it's very important that she's metaphorically royalty in the situation and he's not. Right, so he's royalty in real life, but in this particular context, she's royal and he's paying her homage and she's saying, no, you're the one who's the prince. And then that leads to, of course, worries about what happens when Polixenes finds out. But I find, yeah, I find again, the intricacy of the love language very charming. 37:32 Erin: Something you said there about the topsy turviness of this. It's also. There's a lot of irony here, of course, because we know that Perdita is the Princess of Sicilia, right? She does not know. So there's a little bit of, you know, maybe part of the thorniness is this circle within a circle within a circle of the fact that she is saying, for instance, in line seven, you, high self, the gracious mark of the land you have obscured with a swain's wearing. And me, poor lowly maid, most goddess like, pranked up. So pranked up. Pranked up. I know, I love that too. 38:08 Wes: It sounds like deception. It sounds very low. But, you know, the contrast with goddess. Just gotta love Shakespeare. 38:15 Erin: She really is like a Victor Victoria joke in here, you know, like a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. You know, she's a princess who thinks she's a shepherdess who's dressed up as a goddess. There's a complication here, and of course, I like what you point out about the formality as well, because they're in marriage negotiations and though they don't know it, they are both royal. So part of what they're doing is that they're unwittingly forging a kind of treaty. Right. These are affairs of state. The joining of two kingdoms is involved here. I wonder about that significance in light of this difficulty in the language or about any flirtation potential, marital negotiation as having subtextual. Everybody can drink at home. A kind of formality or a deadly seriousness to it, which this is performing in the. As you're saying, in the thorniness of the language and in the kind of thorniness of the irony of the situation and the fact that we're all. Oh, you know. You know what I could say about this, Right. We all are playing dress up. We all are kind of like making negotiations with each other and putting on various disguises. I mean, hopefully not for long. Right. But this is part of the art. Art of love or of wooing someone. 39:33 Wes: Yeah. This is part of the petals on the flower, the charms that you. That one uses to attract. But in this case, they're flirting. But also it's very courtly and it reflects their high station, the high. Including Perdita's high station, which she doesn't know about. But she, as is commented on in the play, doesn't really act like a shepherd's daughter. So it's just genetically, she has this air of a princess about her. It's not that she has the two buns on the side of her head so that we know she's a princess, even though she's down and out. Although she might, I guess, in some performances. But in any case, she's genetically royalty. And it looks like with the falcon, Florizel finds her because a falcon flies across the shepherd's ground. And you know, this is her also ancient signs of prophecies. It looks like he's been led there. I can't help thinking of the kite that Autolycus mentions as. In a way, as a sign of love, but. So Florizel counts that as a blessing. But they have something that is hanging over them that needs to be resolved. And as Perdita puts it, your resolution cannot hold when tis opposed by the power of the king. Or the resolution. Solution here is he's adamant that come what may, they are going to be together. And it's at that point where we get the entrance of all these people. Shepherd, clown, Mopsa and Dorcas, what great names. Yeah, the two women who are fighting over the shepherd's son, the clown. And then, of course, Polixenes and Camillo in disguise. And it's a very lovely scene with Perdita playing her role as mistress of the feast, or the sheep shearing. It starts out with the shepherd reminiscing about her mother and all the multiple roles that she would play in a time like this, and feeding people and getting up on tables and dancing or whatever. Yeah, very raucous. And I playfully chastises Perdita for not doing that. But of course, that again, she's a princess, and she acts that way naturally, so. And you get the sense he understands that. So in the end, he just encourages her to introduce herself. And then she gives that wonderful, you know, her speech about flowers. And she gives Polixenes and Camillo the flowers, that they're flowers of winter because they suit their ages. And then she says she doesn't really like the flowers of spring. We'll have to go to the specific things she says about. About. She gets very saucy. Actually, at this point, I think Polixenes asked her, why not? And let's go to this point. So Perdita says something that took me a while to puzzle out. Art, which in their piedness shares with great creating nature. So let's go to that. This is around 89, so she's listing. Give me those flowers there, Dorcas. Reverend sirs for you. There's rosemary and rue. These keep seeming and savor all winter long. Oh, it's Polixenes who says she well fits their ages with flowers of winter, winter. And then she says, so the year growing ancient, not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth of trembling winter. The fairest flowers of the season are carnations and streaked gillyvors, which some call nature's bastards. Of that kind are rustic gardens, barren, and I care not to get slips of them. And Polixenes asks why? For I have heard it said there is an art which in their piedness shares with great creating nature. What she's saying, and this I had to look up. 43:06 Erin: Up. 43:07 Wes: What she's saying is that these flowers, are they of summer or spring? I'm not the gillyvors, but in any case, the fairest flowers have been domesticated. They're multicolored and so pretty because they've been domesticated to be that way. Keep in mind that at the beginning, Florizel says, you can make flowers out of weeds. That's how wonderful you are. And she seems to be drawn to the weeds. Those are the flowers that she likes. So basically, when people domesticate the flowers, they're playing God, is what she's saying. Then Polixenes essentially says, but nature is what makes the horticultural art possible. You can make a weed produce a flower by grafting on a purebred plant. And that engineering improves nature, it's true, but that engineering is a product of nature. And of course, this is a sly reference to the idea that. That she herself is a weed who's going to be grafted on to Florizel. So then he says, so stop calling the gillyvors bastards. And of course, she, in a sense, might be considered a bastard, at least of fortune. And then she's very saucily says, well, I'm not going to plant them. That's like wearing makeup to get a boyfriend, is what she says. Let's go to that part because I love the way she puts it. That's something I had to look up. I'll not put the dibble in earth to set one slip of them no more than were I painted. I would wish this youth should say twere well and only therefore desired breed by me. It's like putting on makeup to make someone attracted to you. So she's, in a way, she's rejecting the deceptive element. You know, the trifles, the trinkets, the flowery blooms, the charms that produce attractions. She is interested in something more essential. She's drawn to the weeds. She may herself be a weed in some sense. It's all so beautifully done. 45:01 Erin: Yeah. It's funny how, as we've said, she's sort of genetically well behaved, sort of genetically royal. And she also has a genetic hatred for bastards, I suppose, that she's inherited from her father. You know, obviously, the irony of this scene is, of course, the. That she is advocating against the very thing she should be advocating for. And Polixenes is advocating for the very thing that he should be advocating against. Right. So Polixenes is fine with crossbreeding flowers and refreshing or using the baser stock to refresh the bud of nobler race. I'm partly paraphrasing there. Right. So he's fine with this in theory, but in practice he's going to get very upset when he finds out that Florizel is engaged to a shepherdess. And Perdita, you know, though she is very concerned about Florizel's family's disapproval, should be advocating for this mixing because this is what she wants to do herself or what she thinks is what she wants to do because she doesn't know that she's royal. I wonder about the significance of that irony and why the two are arguing at cross purposes. I mean, I think it's really funny that this is happening and delightful and I love Perdita's sauciness, as you say. And I love the fact that even after Polixenes gives her this whole speech about why, you know, he's this older man whose, even though he's dressed up, he must still kind of register as an older man and someone who maybe she should respect or something, that even after he gives her this pretty well thought out argument, she says, ah, I still don't buy it. 46:38 Wes: You know, she. 46:39 Erin: She's not moved by it, which I think is really funny because you expect her to come back and say, oh, you know, you're right. Instead she doubles down, which I love. I want to connect it back to this God and goddess idea, this idea that she's goddess like pranked up. And also the fact that, you know, I'm thinking about our previous conversations about sticky language or contagious language. Florizel says, calls her Flora. So a kind of connection to the derivation of his name. Or maybe Florizel comes from Flora, I'm not sure. Right. So he gives this idea that she's the goddess of flowers. She takes that and says, oh, she's just pranked up like a goddess. But in fact, the gods really haunt both Florizel and Perdita's speech throughout. I mean, she says, now Jove, afford you cause constant invocations of the gods in her speech. She'll say later, she speaks of Proserpina later on, who's Persephone? And obviously some of this has to do with the fact that Shakespeare is operating in this sort of liminal space between Christianity and this sort of old fashiony Roman mythology, right? That he often invokes in these romances. But it's significant because she's dressed up supposedly like a goddess and because Florizel then says in defense of his own love for her, that the gods themselves, humbling their deities to love, have taken the shapes of beasts upon them. Jupiter became a bull and bellowed, the green Neptune a ram and bleated, and the fire robed God golden Apollo, a poor humble swain, as I seem now. Their transformations were never for a piece of beauty rarer, nor in a way so chaste. Since my desires run not before mine honor, I swear I'm not just trying to get in your pants, in other words, I'm trying to connect all of this together, I suppose, and ask, because I don't quite have an answer, what does all of this grafting and cross breeding have to do with this idea of the gods assuming humble shapes to get with the people that they Love, obviously, on its face, these two things are running parallel to each other. The lofty gods are crossbreeding with the baser stock. But the necessity of transformation is the thing that goes beyond the parallel. Right? For the flower to be grafted. For the flower to be crossbred. The nobler race of flower does not have to pretend to be something baser in order to be grafted with weed, say. And also, how does that come together with this idea that actually there is no crossbreeding going on at all, that Perdita is royal? Do you see what I'm saying? And I don't even know how to express this well, much less tease out these various threads that are going on. So in other words, what is the play trying to say about all of this cross breeding? Presumably it's advocating against it, then. It seems to be advocating against this idea that one has to dress up or pretend to be anything other than one is, even though that the theme of disguise is a constant theme in. In Act 4. 49:49 Wes: So, you know, this thing that Florizel says about the gods is very odd because for the most part, the transformations, as far as I remember, would happen to facilitate rape. 50:00 Erin: That's another. Yes. I didn't even want to go there. 50:03 Wes: Yeah, Turning into a swan, right? It's Zeus that turns into. To someone rapes later. And he did a lot of that. 50:09 Erin: Europa and the bull. 50:10 Wes: Bull, yep. So Florizel is disguised to look lower than he is. She's disguised to look higher than she thinks she is, although she is just as high. And his argument is that, hey, look, I'm like a God lowering myself to be with a mortal. It's normal. Don't worry about it. It's not actually a very encouraging line of argument, if you have ask me. But even apart from the rape connotations, which, you know, Shakespeare is very familiar with Ovid, and he knows exactly what he's doing there. So then the question is, you know, why are we getting this idea of the grafting onto a weed or the crossing of low and high when we know that they are both high? And I've made this association between, you know, the lowness is the bare reality and the weed. And maybe it's more like winter and the highness I associate with the trappings associated with royalty. I'm thinking of Lear here. In the end, it's all just custom. What makes a judge? Well, they wear a robe is Lear's argument. And what makes someone royal versus not royal? I think the suggestion is that it's not real. A matter of nature, It's a matter of custom. Even though that runs against this idea that she is naturally a princess. But maybe we're just supposed to think that she's actually just good natured and in fact it's her. What seems to be high in her is precisely her weed status. She's been raised by a shepherd. Shepherd. She's honest, she's straightforward. Maybe if we think about it, maybe she is much like a shepherd's daughter. And maybe she's much closer in a way to reality than these others. She's more. She's closer to the performance than the language. She's closer to something real. And so we can think again of the advantages of reality over mind and language and the way she. She can instantiate that and so pay off. You know, what's grievous about the first half of the play is the lack of reality. First it's about the inability to repay hospitality with a thank you, and then it's about Leontes being cut off from reality. But Perdita is down to earth. She was not just, you know, she was put out to pasture. Not really to pasture, she was put out out, you know, to be exposed and to die that way. But in a way she's become creature of the earth. Maybe she actually says, by the way, she gives them summer flowers and says those are for men of middle age, I guess, because summer is in the middle. So to make it another association. I don't know if I'm really getting at your question, but the Winter's Tale kind of has the status of the flowery bloom, strangely enough. And if we associate that with a kind of charm, because. Because the ballads that Autolycus is selling are winter's tales. And it's the kind of thing you can use to win a lover. But it's also if it's a fairy tale to some extent, which I think is different, but related, you know, it's the kind of thing you tell to a child, but it's the type of thing that Mamillius himself is relating. And we wonder if, you know, when Mamillius tells his mom, I'm going to tell you a scary tale, you kind of wonder if everything that comes after right is just Emilius's story. But these fantasies are ways of deceiving ourselves, but they're also ways of loving, they're ways of establishing status. So I don't have any overarching conclusion about how all of that is related. I think we should leave that up to listeners. Have them tell us how all of that is related. 54:06 Erin: We gotta use that more often. 54:07 Wes: We do. We're gonna start soliciting questions from listeners. 54:17 Erin: Oh, I love that idea. 54:18 Wes: Some of the stuff. Yeah. 54:20 Erin: Well, your down to earthness. I was thinking along those exact same lines because I thought, well, you know, Perdita hasn't been. You know, she's neither the result of a grafting between higher and lower stock nor is her future marriage a grafting of higher and lower stock. Right. Because Hermione, we know, is the daughter of a king as well. So really, what has happened to her is she's been transplanted to richer soil to grow or healthier soil. So I like this idea that she's earthy, she's down to earth. Right. And that what's good in her could be the very fact that she's been raised by this shepherd in the sort of rich soil of what, I don't know, reality or something. Rather than the kind of stifling atmosphere of Sicilia. Besides the fact that her father wants to kill her. Not a great place, maybe to grow up. A lot of people die there. So with that in mind, you know, she seems, with this earthiness of hers to kind of take on both the earth and what the earth produces. She becomes kind of like spring itself. In this speech to Florizel where she wants to cover him with all these different types of flowers and she names a bunch of different ones that she wants to heap over him. 55:34 Wes: Yeah, I love that line. He's teasing and, you know. What do you mean? Like funeral flowers? Am I a dead man? Then she conjures up this idea of him suddenly turning into a hill or an embankment. Right. And the flowers springing from that which is beautiful. And then she gives an alternative, which is that he comes back to life. He's actually, no, but you're in my arms and quick. Which I think is evocative of him actually going from death to life in her arms. It's a very Cinderella moment, except it's not sleeping, it's from death. So I like that. And I think there's too many contradictions. It's confusing. Is winner representative of reality? Or if, you know, if the Winter's Tale is the superstitious, deceptive thing then is it the representative of the other, which is the representative of which? I think they're both representative of Both. Both, in a way, they're purposefully being mixed up. I think we're not meant to draw a solid conclusion one way or another, they're right. Just as a flower can be a flower of death or a flower of life, we're meant not to draw a single conclusion about the meaning here. These things can be interpreted differently and they mean different things depending on the context. And love and life and death are related. Related in this intricate way. And love and I don't know if hate is the word, but love and thieving or deception and. And all the rest. All right, unfortunately, we're going to have to end part five here. We are not quite through act four. We're going to finish that up in part six and then do quick act five as well. It would have been nice to have these line up with the ax, but that's not going to work. Either way, it happens. So. All right, thank you, thank you. And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.