Das Wintermärchen

After rereading Hermione's trial scene from The Winter's Tale, I tried to apply my focus (Germanic) to it.  It was hard.  I read that scene in German, and didn't learn anything new (that applied to the play, I did notice some very interesting things about the text of the play, but that is more historical linguistics, and probably uninteresting to anyone but myself)

Then I started researching the history of this play in Germany.  In addition to finding the following clip, of a fun student version of the play from the Universität Bielefeld,


Angriff des Bären aus Shakespeares Wintermärchen

Compagnie Charivari | Myspace Video

A Sad Tale's Best for Winter

I have finished the play The Winter's Tale, and I rather enjoyed it.

It seems to me that Shakespeare is continuing themes he addressed in Othello, with jealousy and irrationally reacting to perceived wrongs.  I feel sorry for poor Leontes, but in this play he has no Iago to blame, his jealousy is all his own.  His reaction to what he sees is all his own.

I found an interesting thin on Wikipedia when doing some cursory research.  I will have to look up the source that is cited and follow up on this, but on Wikipedia it says :

Eric Ives, the biographer of Anne Boleyn (1986),^[4] believes that the play is really a parallel of the fall of the queen, who was beheaded on false charges of adultery on the orders of her husband Henry VIII in 1536. There are numerous parallels between the two stories – including the fact that one of Henry's closest friends, Sir Henry Norreys, was beheaded as one of Anne's supposed lovers and he refused to confess in order to save his life – claiming that everyone knew the Queen was innocent. If this theory is followed then Perdita becomes a dramatic presentation of Anne's only daughter, Queen Elizabeth I.

( Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn 2004:421: in spite of other scholars' rejection of any parallels between Henry VIII and Leontes, asserts "the parallels are there", noting his article "Shakespeare and History: divergencies and agreements", in Shakespeare Survey38 (1985:19–35), p 24f.)

Pursued by a Bear

Last year, for New Play Project's Bad Play Project, where playwrights were encouraged to write purposely bad plays, I wrote a play based off of that famous (infamous?) stage direction in The Winter's Tale.   Since I am reading that play again, I thought I'd share that (bad) play with you here:


Pursued by a Bear

Scholar: Good evening and welcome to tonight's scholarly look at The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare.  I'll be your scholar and host, Professor Geoffrey Spencer Hall.  We begin tonight where we left off yesterday, with Act III, Scene 3, the sea coast of Bohemia: a shipwreck.
This scene is possibly one of the more famous of this somewhat less than famous work by the Bard.  Here we met Antigonus, a lord of Sicilia, carrying the infant daughter of King Leontes, who has been banished by the mad king who suspects the child of being the issue and evidence of adultery on the part of his wife and queen.  Antigonus cannot bear to see the young innocent child killed, so he has a plan: he will leave her on the shore in the hopes that someone will find her.  And just as he is abandoning her we have the most famous stage direction ever written:  "Exit, pursued by a bear."

(Enter Antigonus, running, pursued by a bear)