The Winter’s Tale

Watch a man look at his wife's hand resting in his oldest friend's and, in the space of twenty lines, talk himself into certainty. No Iago whispers to Leontes; the poison is entirely his own, and Shakespeare gives him a language so knotted and feverish it barely parses, the sound of a mind eating itself. Ruin follows at full tragic scale, a queen on trial, an oracle defied, a newborn carried off to a wild coast where the most famous stage direction in English is waiting: Exit, pursued by a bear. Then the play does what no tragedy is permitted to do. Time walks on stage as a chorus, announces that sixteen years have gone, and the second half opens onto a sheep-shearing feast where a pedlar sings ballads and picks pockets and two young people fall in love in the sun. The Winter's Tale is Shakespeare asking whether something broken that badly can ever be mended, and the answer he stages in the last scene is so quiet, and so audacious, that the theatre stops breathing for it.