Just finished reading Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale." The more I thought about it the more I was displeased by the play. Couldn't quite put my finger on why.
Listened to this podcast this morning and I think this is
what seemed wrong about the play.
Here is the full episode
The Prancing Pony Podcast, episode 1
Round about 35 minutes in they have a discussion about Coleridge's "willful suspension of disbelief"
This rather embodies my criticism of, what I think, is a
nodding of Shakespeare - a C-line play - a "B-side" or "rent
payment".
In the podcast the hosts read from Tolkien's essay "On
Fairy Stories" where he addresses Coleridge's disbelief and disagrees with
it. Tolkien writes that a piece of artwork that allows disbelief to arise
very quickly falls apart:
“the moment disbelief arises the spell is broken, the magic… or rather, art… has failed”
Contrary to Coleridge Tolkien suggests that in art “we are not suspending disbelief… we are engaging in a secondary world into which the mind can enter.”
A secondary world, though, has to be a consistent world, Tolkien notes
“inside that world what we read is true to the laws of that world”
Without consistency within its own laws the artwork allows disbelief in the audience to emerge and it is disbelief that permits distraction, breaks the spell, and causes the world to fall apart.
He goes on to say that in such falling apart we
...make excuses for why the art isn’t working for us; we criticize it; we “try to find what virtue we can in an art which has in fact failed”
But essentially such an allowance for disbelief is a "Fundamental failure of subcreation".
Art that does not have consistency within itself is failed
art.
So if, for instance, Shakespeare wanted to create a tragedy
- fine, stick to the rules: great man does stupid thing, people die, great man
falls from greatness and perhaps learns something. If for instance he
wanted to create comedy - fine, bad thing happens at beginning, but by grace,
providence, fortune or whatever things work out and lead to a climax of
reconciliation and joy. If he wanted even to mix the two elements - fine,
I guess, real tragedy at the beginning narrowly averted by sacrificial acts, or
by great generosity, or by epiphanic recognition on the part of the
protagonists could work.
But to have such abysmal calumny, violence, death right at the beginning; a character (Leontes) who seems to go through a psychotic or schizophrenic episode (or perhaps porphyria); a woman who seems the paragon of virtue put to death and/or exile for 16 years - that's some heavy stuff.
To then throw in funny shepherds, giggling maidens, a precipitous change of heart in the protagonist, some romantic tension between the young, sixteen years of misery and inaction as king for the main character, a bear of suspect intentions - these stretch or break the realm of credulity, allow for comedy, questioning, distractions, and disbelief.
To wind up the mess with some narrated rather than dramatized reconciliation and a Metropolis-like transformation from robot to female - these are the signs of failed art.
Either the main
character does something awful and the play is about his slow and arduous climb
out of the pit of his own making, OR the character does something that seems
bad but narrowly skirts the realm of disaster through chance, providence, or
general human stupidity.
As it stands, though, I think The Winter's Tale falls into
Tolkien's category of "failed art" and I pronounce it
deadnamed. (exit pursued by a marmoset).
