ARTS
HIGH SCHOOL FALL PLAY NOVEMBER 21–23, 2019
In previous director’s notes, I have suggested that, in essence, Shakespearean comedy is about “standing on the brink of tragedy and then dodging the bullet.” Well, The Winter’s Tale is not a comedy, but it is not a tragedy either. In fact, we don’t really know what to call it. By the end of his career, Shakespeare was defying genere; scholars tend to refer to his final plays simply as “the late plays”—or sometimes as Romances. By romance, they do not mean romantic, but something more like fantasy. In
18 | ENSWORTH ENSIGHTS
Shakespeare’s day, a winter’s tale was synonymous with an old wive’s tale, or a fairy tale. It was a fable—an unlikely and incredible story—one that dealt with essential questions and essential truths. Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale exists in a fantasy world that is as capable of darkness as it is of light. It is a world where accidents and errors unfold at a pace and on a scale that is utterly shocking, but it is a world where redemption and grace can always
rush in with equal force. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which we have also performed twice, is about going to bed wanting what you don’t have—and likely don’t deserve—and then waking up in the morning and finding it laying in your lap, no idea how it got there. In the world of The Winter’s Tale, we are going to be asked to be a bit more mature; we are going to be kept wanting for longer than the space of a dream, and if we do indeed receive grace, it is not going to come while we are sleeping.
