Simon Forman, the Elizabethan 'figure caster' or astrologer, noted in his journal that, on 11 May 1611, he saw The Winter's Tale at the Globe playhouse. He gives a brief account of the plot but makes no comment on performances or staging. Autolycus must have registered strongly with him as he concludes with a warning to himself to, "Beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning fellows." We know from court records that the play was performed before King James on 5 November later that year, and again sometime between December 1612 and February 1613, as one of many plays performed in celebration of the marriage of the Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine. There are several other records of court performances between 1618 and 1634 but, for the following hundred years or so, the play clearly did not please and it was no longer performed.
By the time The Winter's Tale was written, Shakespeare and his fellow King's Men had begun to use the indoor Blackfriars Hall as a theatre in addition to their long-established outdoor playhouse, the Globe. It is likely that their productions moved between the two venues, adapting to the particular conditions of each. In either case, a simple, uncluttered playing space allowed for swift, fluid action and a concentration on language. Music, fine costumes and appropriate props helped the action on. Shakespeare would have relied on his gifted and highly accomplished boy players to bring the roles of Hermione, Paulina and Perdita (as well as those of the shepherdesses, Mopsa and Dorcas) to life. It is impossible to know how the Jacobean productions obeyed the famous stage direction in Act 3, Scene 3: "Exit, pursued by a bear". There were, of course, real, live bears available at the neighbouring bearbaiting houses on the South Bank next to the Globe playhouse. But, thrilling though such a spectacle might be, the logistics surely argue against it. The presence of a bear, unrestrained by chains, on the thrust stage of the Globe would imperil the safety of players and audience alike, to say nothing of the risks involved when the play was performed before the King at court. Perhaps it is most likely that Shakespeare knew he could rely on a life-like costume with a physically talented actor inside.
In the eighteenth century, the play found favour only in heavily adapted form. In 1754 Macnamara Morgan's The Sheep-shearing, or Florizel and Perdita was a great success at Covent Garden, omitting everything but the Bohemian love pastoral. David Garrick followed suit at Drury Lane, two years later, with his Florizel and Perdita, a Dramatic Pastoral. Garrick did retain the characters of Hermione and Leontes, playing the latter role himself. His version made much of the climactic statue scene, even though Hermione did not appear elsewhere in his play.
It was not until John Philip Kemble's production, at Covent Garden in 1811, that Shakespeare's plotline was played out fully. From then on, the play was regularly presented on the London stage, although the text was much reduced as the Victorian audience's love of spectacle demanded ever-more elaborate machinery and time-consuming scene changes. Charles Kean's production, at the Princess's Theatre in 1856, one of the longest-running and most popular of the century, illustrates this fashion for breathtaking stage pictures and theatrical antiquarianism. Kean cut from the text any references inconsistent with the period of the Delphic oracle and produced a visually stunning picture of the ancient Greek world. The sheep-shearing feast was attended by a corps de ballet and, according to one contemporary viewer there were, in all, three hundred people onstage. Kean's theatrical magic could, however, be deceptive so perhaps that number is exaggerated. The set of the trial scene was modelled on the ancient Greek theatre at Syracuse in Sicily. Kean had hundreds of spectators painted in perspective on the backdrop artfully harmonizing with the living actors to create an illusion of multitudes.
William Charles Macready won high praise for his performances as Leontes over two decades at Drury Lane and Covent Garden, from 1823 to 1843. He brought a bold and thrilling emotional realism to the role. "His eyes seemed to devour the figure before him" as he beheld the statue, according to Helen Faucit, who played Hermione to his Leontes in the 1830s. As a young actress, performing the role for the first time, she was overwhelmed by the intensity of Macready's portrayal – clearly he had held himself in check during their rehearsals. This is how she described the experience in Blackwood's Magazine, 1 January 1891.
"His passionate joy at finding Hermione really alive seemed beyond control. Now he was prostrate at her feet, then enfolding her in his arms… The hair, which became unbound, and fell on my shoulders, was reverently kissed and caressed. The whole change was so sudden, so overwhelming, that I suppose I cried out hysterically, for he whispered to me, "Don't be frightened my child! Don't be frightened! Control yourself!" All this went on during a tumult of applause that sounded like a storm of hail… it was the finest burst of passionate speechless emotion I ever saw…"
Such was the power of the statue scene, even without Macready's spinetingling performance, that it became a popular scene to be included on its own in the varied programmes of theatrical entertainment on offer throughout the nineteenth century. In a production at the Lyceum in 1887 the roles of Perdita and Hermione were doubled for the first time by Mary Anderson. This requires some editing of the text, as well as skilful quick changes and a stand-in for Perdita in the statue scene, but is still sometimes done in modern productions.
At the Savoy Theatre in 1912, Harley Granville-Barker restored the full text of the play in an imaginative and highly original production. Recapturing the swiftness and pace of the Jacobean theatre, he used a thrust stage with simple sets of white and gold. The design was influenced by the paintings of Picasso and Matisse, with costumes inspired by Giulio Romano, the Italian Renaissance artist mentioned in the play, and Leon Bakst's designs for Diaghalev's ballets. Granville-Barker revived the Elizabethan convention of directly addressing the audience. He likewise broke with tradition in choosing not to crowd the stage with supernumeraries for the trial scene; instead, his actors addressed the theatre audience as the members of the assembled court. As Leontes, Henry Ainsley was not afraid to portray an ignoble, perverse neurasthenic, pitiably at the mercy of his paranoia. This, again, defied customary practice. The reviewer of the Westminster Gazette (29 September 1912) described Ainsley as follows:
"His displays of physical frenzy are fascinatingly ugly; the passion is so much on him that one is even astonished as the King's moderation. The effect is powerful, rather horrible, very real, and quite consistent with every word of the part."
At the Phoenix Theatre in 1951, Peter Brook directed a popular and long-running production, in which John Gielgud returned to the tradition of playing Leontes with a noble, poetic dignity. The costumes were English Tudor in Sicilia and suggestive of Thomas Hardy's Wessex in Bohemia. Time appeared in a snowstorm to take the play into its next phase. A little earlier, the bear, too, had emerged from the whirling snow. The passage of Time was clearly marked in the fifth act appearance of the beautiful Hermione of Diana Wynyard: her hair was now snow white.
An imaginative interpretation of the bear came in Michael Bogdanov's 1990 modern dress production for the English Shakespeare Company. Here, Michael Pennington's elegantly suited, urbane Leontes had erupted with fury and bitterness against his loved ones. As Antigonus laid the baby carefully down on the seashore, Leontes silently strode down behind his crouching figure. Standing behind him, Leontes slowly withdrew one hand from behind his back to reveal a huge bear's paw, armed with ferocious claws. This he drew down the back of the unsuspecting Antigonus who dropped to the floor before him.
Annabel Arden's production for Theatre de Complicite in 1992 responded with enormous imagination and creativity to the richness of the play. Her small company of actors doubled and tripled parts with unflagging energy – Kathryn Hunter, for example, expertly played Mamillius, Time, Paulina and the Old Shepherd. In fact, she played Time as Mamillius, climbing out from under a garden table laden with pots of green shoots, in the little boy's striped pyjamas. Simon McBurney's Leontes (brilliantly doubled with the Old Shepherd's foolish son) rivalled those descriptions of Macready in the fine excess and thrilling emotional bravery of his hard-won reunion with his wife.
Jane Howell directed the play in 1980 for the BBC TV series, with Jeremy Kemp as Leontes and Anna Calder-Marshall as Hermione.
