Even as Shakespeare’s late masterpiece, The Winter’s Tale, continues to grow in critical esteem, New Yorkers have been able to see only five major productions of it over the past quarter-century, none of these on Broadway, where it was last staged in 1946. It returned to the Delacorte Theater as part of the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park this past July and August, directed by Daniel Sullivan, with Raúl Esparza and Lily Rabe starring in the lead roles of Leontes and his wife, Hermione. Playgoers may also remember Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish version that came to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1995. It’s no surprise that The Winter’s Tale had long interested Bergman, for the play might well be subtitled Scenes from a Marriage—his 1973 miniseries exploring the decade-long disintegration of a relationship.
In The Winter’s Tale, the marriage of Leontes and Hermione is under even greater pressure, with accusations of adultery, a battle over custody, the threat of an illegitimate child, the death of a young son distraught over his parents’ strife, and the abandonment of an infant girl. It’s an unusual focus, as Shakespeare rarely wrote about the tensions of married life, especially with young children involved. When he wrote The Winter’s Tale he himself had been married for close to three decades, in a union that had survived the death of a young son and extended periods of separation. While there is much else in this play that defies easy summary, the center of attention, from beginning to end, is a fractured marriage.
Aside from the reviews that run when a show opens, tattered Playbills and fading memories are all that remain of a production after it ends. And playgoers never see it take shape—a special way to get to know a play, which I’ve profited from as a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at the Public Theater since 2012. Early on in rehearsals this summer I was struck by how thoughtfully Esparza and Rabe were wrestling with their daunting roles. I asked if they would be willing to share their experience, and they agreed to do so; Sullivan gave his blessing.
What follows draws on conversations over the course of rehearsals and previews this summer, and focuses on the three long and gripping scenes in which the two actors appear together. As the play opens, King Leontes’s childhood friend Polixenes plans to return to his own kingdom after an extended visit. When Leontes asks Hermione to persuade him to stay longer, she does so and prevails, triggering an irrational jealousy in Leontes. Sure that she has been unfaithful with Polixenes, Leontes imprisons her and, convinced that the infant born during her imprisonment is not his, orders that the baby daughter be abandoned in the wilderness.
James Shapiro: Each of you is confronted in the opening scene with challenging speeches that will shape your characters and their fates. Lily, few lines in the play feel more contemporary than Hermione’s response to her husband’s urging her to ask Polixenes to extend his visit: “I had thought, sir, to have held my peace until/You had drawn oaths from him not to stay. You, sir,/Charge him too coldly.” When we spoke about it during the first week of rehearsals, you said that her opening words “can be playful” but also that they contained “a touch of impatience.” How have your thoughts about these first words changed over time, and what does this suggest about the kind of marriage Hermione and Leontes have?
Lily Rabe: I think Hermione has a tremendous and innate sense of freedom and moves through the world with a certain kind of ease—not that she is free sexually, but I think her nature is to be incredibly aware of everyone in the room, and to make everyone feel included. She is good at loving people, welcoming them, seeing them, making them feel seen. That line is, in some sense, a kind of tease, but it’s also the truth; it’s a test, a nudge, but a loving one, and inclusive of both Leontes and Polixenes. Even if it’s a subconscious threat to Leontes, her inclusivity can be threatening, because it is a quality that cannot be pinned down or contained.
Shapiro: Raúl, what is running through your mind when she says that—and does it feel like your marriage to Hermione is already under strain?
Raúl Esparza: Confusion. I don’t think I am being cold. I know how to speak to my childhood friend. I don’t want him to go. There’s a small sense of testing him, seeing if he cares about me as much as he says he does. There’s comfort in his being with us. Hermione and I have been distant for a bit lately, though nothing more than my usual moodiness. She’s pregnant. I’m tied to the responsibilities of the throne. I have a twinge of feeling like I’ve done something incorrectly. And that perhaps she knows my friend, and myself, better than I do. I have a fundamental insecurity about myself. Polixenes is a better man than I am. Hermione, whom I adore, is someone I am barely worthy of.
Shapiro: What follows may be the knottiest passage in all of Shakespeare. Raúl, can you talk about your approach and your choices in speaking these lines? Where does his jealousy come from? How do you avoid coming across as monstrous, as some actors have deliberately played him?
Can thy dam?—may ’t be?—
Affection, thy intention stabs the center.
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat’st with dreams—how can this be?
With what’s unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow’st nothing.
Esparza: The verse has been the most useful tool in approaching this passage. There is no character, there is only the language I speak. Here the scansion is fragmented. Breathing with the lines and letting them hiccup and skip almost causes me to hyperventilate. And then there he is: his panic, his racing mind, embodied in me by the words.
The jealousy comes from nowhere. Throughout rehearsals I kept trying to find the “why” behind what starts to consume me here. I discovered that it was liberating to let go of this. There is no “why.” It just is. We have all experienced irrational jealousy. It strikes suddenly. We have all then sought the evidence to support this awful pain. I know I am deluding myself. I balance the knowledge that this is “nothing” with the opposite, if I feel this “it” must be “something.” Aha, there’s the proof. It is an awful logic, but it is logical.
Shapiro: In your second scene together, Hermione is brought from prison to be tried for adultery and treason. Leontes and Hermione engage in a fierce exchange for close to a hundred lines, airing a marital dispute in a very public forum. Perhaps their sharpest exchange occurs mid-scene, when Hermione says: “You speak a language that I understand not./My life stands in the level of your dreams,/Which I’ll lay down.” Lily, could you talk about what those powerful but opaque lines mean for you?
Rabe: The words “which I’ll lay down” hold so much for me. Hermione is on trial for her life and doesn’t believe she is going to live. It is her honor she is fighting for. And tied to her honor, she is fighting to protect the truth of what her life has been, of the kind of life she has led, how she has led it—and fighting for that to exist beyond her death, and not vanish, as her life will, because of Leontes’s false accusations, his whims, his insecurity, his abuse of power. The truth of who she is—that is her legacy for her children, a “derivative from me to mine.” “The level of your dreams” to me is the thing that she has had to live so much of her life by, as she has been in a kind of fawning relationship with a narcissist—his fantasies, his fragile ego, his moods, his paranoia. All of that, which has governed so much of her life, and the lives of others she has loved, she is letting go of. She is laying it down.
Shapiro: Raúl, I love hearing your retort to her words, night after night: “Your actions are my dreams.” What is Leontes trying to convey in these five words?
Esparza: It changes every night. What you have done is my nightmare. Or: What I imagine you have done haunts me every moment of the day. I can’t stop thinking about everything you do and everything you may have done. I can’t stop obsessing over who you really are, who I thought you were. Or: Polixenes has fled. The child exists. I am not imagining these things. A veil has lifted, and I see clearly now through my previous happy dream.
Shapiro: The Delphic oracle confirms Hermione’s innocence. But she collapses at trial’s end when news arrives that their young son, Mamillius, has suddenly died. Sixteen years pass. A penitent Leontes, who believes his wife is long dead, refuses to remarry. And in the play’s final scene, he and his long-lost daughter Perdita are invited by Paulina to see a recently finished statue of Hermione. They, and we, watch as it comes to life. (Shakespeare is ambiguous here about how supernatural Hermione’s return to life might be, making it appear magical and having Paulina invite all to “awake your faith,” but also hinting at more plausible explanations.)
The text remains unclear about the extent to which they then reconcile. For most of the play’s stage history, productions ended in the couple’s warm embrace—until the Hermione of Lillah McCarthy was likely the first to break with that tradition at the Savoy Theatre in 1912. How has your thinking about this moment changed during rehearsals?
Esparza: Lately I have noticed a constant repetition of the words “affliction” and “grace” in the play. Every character is afflicted. Every character receives grace. I don’t think of this as a moment of reconciliation. I think of it as a moment of grace. Grace is unearned. It comes from outside of us. I am given grace by the extraordinary Paulina; there is so much love for Hermione and Leontes in her actions. I am given grace by the presence of Polixenes and Camillo. And then there is the magnificence of my daughter restored to us, also by inexplicable grace. This suggests to me that the winter is ending, there is a break in the clouds. It contains possibility, but it doesn’t contain resolution.
Rabe: As far as what is ahead for Hermione and Leontes, it is just the beginning of a new life, and I think it is living with the uncertainty, the enormous risk in beginning again, that is most important and most tangible.
Shapiro: Opening night is fast approaching, and I imagine your choices are close to locked in. As the play draws to an end, Hermione briefly takes both Leontes and Polixenes by the hand before letting go of both and embracing Perdita. What are you experiencing in that final moment?
Rabe: To me, the thing that keeps Hermione alive, or brings her back to life, however an audience member wants to look at it, is the hope—not the guarantee—that her daughter remains living. That is enough. It would be enough for sixteen years, it would be enough for a hundred years. The one thing I know about the next chapter of my life is that I will be with and get to know my daughter. And with her comes the memory of my son, who will always be with me. I get to have my beloved friend Polixenes back. I also get to be with Paulina, who has helped to keep me alive, and given me hope; the bond between those two women is indescribable.
Esparza: Nothing is ever locked in. Staging may be set, but every performance is different because the audience (or the sky or the sounds of the city) finishes the work with you. And with Lily, who is a truly great actor, every night I find something new in the scenes we share. Recently, when she takes my hand, it has been a feeling that I am seen and the door is open to come to her. When Hermione lets go and embraces our daughter, I feel a breath lifting in me. In that breath, something broken is beginning to mend.