THE MIRROR & THE CRYSTAL BALL On May 23, 1533, Catherine of Aragon, facing a papal commission and her husband, Henry VIII, prayed: “God, let me have justice.” Unable to give the king a male heir, she was banished from court, only to die in effective house arrest three years later. Henry’s next wife, Anne Boleyn, was tried for adultery and treason and sentenced to be “burned or beheaded at the King’s command.” Within four days, the command came. Henry’s fifth wife, Catherine Howard, met the same fate just six years later. Although seventy years had passed before Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale in 1611, the fatal degradation of Henry’s wives lived on in the popular imagination. Language from their trials, details of their accusations, and allusions to the daughters they left behind are woven into the play. In Leontes, Shakespeare focused Henry’s paranoia and insistence on absolute control upon a single queen, Hermione.
THE
WINTER’S
TALE
While The Winter’s Tale reflected familiar political narratives to Elizabethan audiences, it also eerily predicts the lived experiences of women over the following four hundred years; it is both a mirror and a crystal ball. While the phrase “toxic masculinity” didn’t enter the popular consciousness until the 1980s, patriarchal power has driven the course of history; it’s not just written into the bloodstained histories of the English royals, but into our everyday lives. Our Leontes’s aggressions and delusions are fueled by mundane and normalized attitudes of racism and misogyny. And still, The Winter’s Tale predicts something more than just centuries of suffering. After Leontes’s sixteen years of repentance comes a young couple determined not to make the mistakes of those who came before them. The end of the play shows us a world that has actually transformed, able to foster a true paradigm shift: a kind of magic we have yet to realize in the world as we know it.
—SOPHIE SIEGEL-WARREN, PRODUCTION DRAMATURG
Thursday, March 29 at 8PM Friday, March 30 at 4PM and 8PM Saturday, March 31 at 4PM Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel Street
The Studio Series productions are designed to be learning experiences that complement classroom work, providing a medium for students at Yale School of Drama to combine their individual talents and energies toward the staging of collaboratively created works. Your attendance meaningfully completes this process.
2 0 1 7– 1 8 S E A S O N