Women and Victorian Theatre Book

Something for Shakespeare In The Park, maybe?

"Good my Lord, be cured of this diseased opinion, and betimes, for 'tis most dangerous."

That is the well-meant advice Camillo gives the delusional King Leontes, whose whims and flawed imagination are about to destroy his family and his kingdom. Needless to say, the all-powerful king does not listen. The drama unfolds with predictably disastrous effects, as the most powerful person is at the same time the most self-indulgent, paranoid and mentally underdeveloped. His entourage, knowing the danger of speaking truth to power, resigns itself to the doctrine:

"I dare not know, my Lord."

The main plot is one of jealousy and impulsive decisions, but there is a deeper, sadder truth underneath the raging king's machinations.

"A sad tale's best for winter", king Leontes' young son tells his mother, before both become victims of the "tremor cordis" that deprives the king of his judgment.

What happened?

The king's good friend Polixenes wants to leave after a stay at the court, and Leontes fails to convince him to prolong his visit. He therefore asks his wife, Hermione, to do her best to talk him into staying, and when she succeeds, he can't believe it is due to her rhetorical skills. Instead, he believes that his friend and wife have an affair.

As absurd as it may sound, Leontes perseveres in this position, to the point of charging Hermione with treason, while claiming to support a "just and open trial".

The justice and openness, however, turn into "fake news" and "alternative truths" when the oracle (the higher power of the law), does not confirm the king's delusion, but frees his innocent wife of all accusations. Leontes overrides the law, acting according to his emotionally unstable mind, but with full executive power:

"Your actions are my dreams. You
Had a bastard by Polixenes
And I but dreamed it. As you
Were past all shame - Those
Of your fact are so - so past
All truth."

Reading this during the sad winter's tale that is unfolding in our world of 2017, I feel almost nauseous. It is painful to see the bizarre misogyny that leads men in most of Shakespeare's plays to destroy women's and children's lives because they can, despite often being ethically and intellectually as well as psychologically weaker than the Shakespearean women.

They are however physically stronger and at the centre of executive power, and this is not something I can shrug off anymore, putting it under the heading "Something that people used to think over 400 years ago".

This is still very much the status quo in (too) many parts of the world.

When Virginia Woolf imagined the career of a talented, fictional sister of Shakespeare's, in her essay A Room of One's Own, she showed all the obstacles that the Shakespeare sister would have stumbled over to make her fail where her male counterpart succeeded, simply for being a woman. Had she shown the rhetorical skills of Hermione, men would have accused her of plagiarism, of adultery, or something else, maybe "unwomanly" behaviour.

Men, in Shakespeare's world, take what they want, when they need it, and think later:

"I am a feather for each wind that blows", King Leontes says.

Of course he is punished for overthrowing the higher law of the oracle. Sixteen years - that gap of time - he has to expiate his rash behaviour, before the tragedy turns into comedy, and he deserves a second chance, reunited with his daughter, and with his wife, magically come alive again in an Pygmalionesque act of turning art into life.

All's Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare seems to say, and his cast walks off stage with the promise of filling in "the gap of time", telling each other the stories of their lives during those miserable sixteen years of pain, until Leontes' reason sets everything right again.

I can't help disagreeing. I see the tragedy unfolding with perfect clarity. I admire the accuracy with which Shakespeare depicted the folly of the powerful, surrounded by friends, but besieged by his own poisoned mind. I can see the helplessness and despair of women, children and servants who are without protection against this abuse. And I can see some kind of reconciliation at the end of the tunnel, after "a gap of time". BUT!

It is not all well that ends well. There is the sacrifice of the young son, who listened to his mother's sad winter's tale, not knowing that he had reached the premature winter of his own short life. And there is good-hearted Antigonus, who saves the baby girl Perdita, Leontes' child, which he wants to see killed in the delusion that it is his friend's bastard. Antigonus dies, earning long-lasting fame for his dramatic departure:

"Exit, pursued by a bear!"

Even if tyranny does not last, it is not acceptable to let mad, hormone-driven narcissistic old men exert power until time makes them more reasonable from within themselves.

Whenever an environment is created where people feel "they dare not know", with all that implies of actual (secret) knowledge, it has already gone too far, and something must be done, without "a gap of time". Collective amnesia or ignorance is not an option!

Unfortunately, Shakespeare's first three acts, labelled tragedy, were more convincing and realistic than the last two, the comedy which needs a "deus ex machina" Pygmalion moment to force a happy end.

What can be done? We can't rely on Shakespeare's genius to write a better ending to the tragedy of madness and power, can we?

But he, as always, saw it clear and put it into unforgettable language!

Recommended to: THE WORLD! (For we have more madmen - and women - than we can bear!)

Exeo, pursued by a (night)mare!