The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare

not my business, that’s his mystery. I did certain things like freezing the action; I used that method from the beginning of the play. There’s a feeling about the beginning of the play whereby people are clinging on to joy, clinging on to memories, whether of the nine months they’ve all been having this marvelous time hanging out in Sicily or of their childhood—they’re hanging on to something. I dramatized that by using a lot of freeze-frames, allowing Antigonus and Camillo to walk around and look at beautiful things frozen intime, which allowed me dramatically to use the same device when Leontes starts to go. We froze on Polixenes and Hermione, so Leontes could get within literally inches and look into her eyes, examine in a scientific way how she positioned her hand, whether it was ambiguous, all of those things. If you look through Shakespeare’s canon, I think the most violent emotion he explores is sexual jealousy. It’s corrosive, it’s lethal, it’s obscene. Whether it’s Othello, whether it’s the father to the daughter in
Romeo and Juliet
, whether it’s
The Winter’s Tale
, it’s an obscene, uncontrollable emotion. It’s also completely irrational: the handkerchief?! The handkerchief is as absurd as the palm paddling in
The Winter’s Tale
. They’re tiny things but they are the matter upon which these catastrophes rest.

    8. Court celebrations (with balloons) suspended in the freeze-frame moment of jealousy, Leontes isolated as Hermione paddles Polixenes’ palm: Adrian Noble’s 1992 production.
    Gaines: I came to rehearsal knowing it because I have felt it, been hit by it, as many people have—you turn a corner and see something you don’t expect. The suddenness is completely realistic. Yes, Leontes goes further than most people: he goes mad, he is insane with jealousy. I went into rehearsal trusting Shakespeare—and in this playand in this passage in particular, he gives the actor everything he needs in the punctuation alone, forcing us to a place of teetering, breath-knocked-out-of-you imbalance: “Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a forked one!— / Go, play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I / Play too.” Thoughts spill one into the other, with three mid-stop lines within one verse line. You can hardly take a breath, you can hardly think because this fit comes upon you as if you’re struck by lightning. The thoughts are heaped one upon another—Shakespeare’s writing at this moment is like a cyclone and it whirls you around. Meeting Leontes in rehearsal is like meeting that part of ourselves that we don’t want to remember, that we hope never to meet again, but whom we
do
know. And there was no one in rehearsal who hadn’t been there. It was overwhelming working that scene, overwhelming and ultimately thrilling—because it is life itself. There’s no mask. When played well, there’s no actor performing in it. It is life, it is shocking and cataclysmic, a terrifying journey into the abyss of the soul.
    â€œI have
tremor cordis
on me: my heart dances, / But not for joy, not joy.” I don’t in any way see this as a fairy-tale moment. Perhaps it happens because he is a king, because he has only himself to answer to. But more important than being a king is being a frightened man. Because there’s also terror that lives in jealousy, the terror of being a cuckold, of the shame and the humiliation of it. Something inside Leontes, some dark place that’s always been there, is triggered in that moment, [thinking] “When I lose love, there is no world for me to hold on to. If I lose the people I trust, then my life is a sham, my kingdom is a sham, my child must be a bastard.” I think that’s the key: when he believes himself betrayed by the people closest to him, his first instinct is to destroy. None of us are that far away from being Leontes,