Isaac Asimov - Asimov’s Guide To Shakespear. Volume 1

The Poet and the Painter arrive to get their share of the gold by pretending selfless love of Timon, but Timon overhears their plotting and drives them away.

Then come Athenian Senators, pleading with Timon to take over the leadership of the city's forces in order to turn back Alcibiades, who is battering at the city's walls, but Timon states bitterly that he doesn't care what Alcibiades does to Athens. Shakespeare now makes use of still another anecdote in Plutarch.

He announces one favor he will do Athens. He has a tree that he is about to chop down, but he urges the Senators to announce to all Athenians who wish to take advantage of the offer to:

—Act V, scene i, lines 212-13

Timon dies, unreconciled to the end, and Athens must surrender to Alcibiades.

This did not happen quite so in history.

Rather, Alcibiades finally fell out with the Spartans (the story is that he was a little too familiar with one of the Spartan queens and the Spartan King resented it) and returned to Athenian allegiance. They welcomed him back because the war was going more and more badly and they needed him. In 407 b.c. he made a triumphant return to Athens and in that sense, Athens might be viewed as having surrendered to him.

The Athenians, however, could never bring themselves to trust him, and the next year he was exiled again, this time permanently.

The play does not go that far. It ends with the reconciliation, as Alcibiades says:

—Act V, scene iv, lines 56-58

Alcibiades lets himself be placated and reconciled, where Timon did not, and it is plain that the former is displayed as the preferable course.

Timon is dead by then, but the epitaph he wrote for himself is brought in and Alcibiades reads it-Timon's final word (taken from Plutarch).

—Act V, scene iv, lines 72-73

The winter's tale is a romance. It has no historical basis whatever and none of the events it describes ever occurred; nor are any of its characters to be found in history, however glancingly. Nevertheless, its background lies in the pre-Christian Greek world. I therefore include it among the Greek plays.

It seems to have been one of Shakespeare's latest plays, too, having been written as late as 1611. The only later play for which Shakespeare was solely responsible was The Tempest.

The play opens with two courtiers exchanging graceful compliments. The scene is set in Sicilia (Sicily) and one of the courtiers, Camillo, is native to the place. The other is a vistor from Bohemia.

The occasion is a state visit paid to Sicily by the King of Bohemia, and there may be a return visit in consequence. Camillo says:

—Act I, scene i, lines 5-7

There is a queer reversal here. Shakespeare takes the plot from a romance written in 1588 by the English writer Robert Greene, entitled Pandosto. The Triumph of Time. In Greene's original romance the story opens with a visit of the King of Sicily to Bohemia, rather than the reverse. This reversal is carried all through the play, with the King of Sicily in The Winter's Tale playing the role of the King of Bohemia in Pandosto, and vice versa.

Did Shakespeare make a casual slip of the pen to begin with and then carry it through because he was too lazy to take the trouble to correct it? Or did he have some good reason?-I suspect the latter.

The King who is being visited behaves, in the first portion of the play, as an almost psychotically suspicious tyrant. Should this king be the King of Bohemia, as in Greene, or the King of Sicily, as in Shakespeare?

Suppose we look back into history. In 405 b.c., just ten years after the ill-fated Sicilian expedition of Athens (see page I-140), a general, Dionysius, seized control over Syracuse, the largest and strongest city of Sicily. By 383 b.c. he had united almost the entire island under his rule.

Dionysius is best known for the manner in which he kept himself in power for thirty-eight years in an era when rulers were regularly overthrown by palace coups or popular unrest. He did so by unending suspicion and eternal vigilance. For instance, there is a story that he had a bell-shaped chamber opening into the state prison, with the narrow end connecting to his room. In this way, he could secretly listen to conversations in the prison and learn if any conspiracies were brewing. This has been called the "ear of Dionysius."

He arrested people on mere suspicion and his suspicion was most easily aroused. Naturally, he left the memory of himself behind in most unsavory fashion and though he died in peace, he is remembered as a cruel and suspicious tyrant.

If Shakespeare had to choose between Bohemia and Sicily as a place to be ruled by a tyrant, was it not sensible to choose Sicily?

Of course, King Leontes of Sicily, the character in the play, is not to be equated with Dionysius. The Sicilian tyrant of old may simply have made Sicily seem the more appropriate scene for tyranny, but there all resemblance ends and nothing in the play has any relationship to the life of Dionysius.

Nevertheless, because of this tenuous connection between Leontes and Dionysius, and the fact that Dionysius lived a generation after Timon, I am placing this play immediately after Timon of Athens.

As for Bohemia… Later in the play there will be scenes of idyllic pastoral happiness in the kingdom of the visiting monarch. Shall that other kingdom then be Sicily, as in Greene, or Bohemia, as in Shakespeare?

To be sure, in ancient times Sicily was an agricultural province that served as the granary of early Rome. It might therefore be viewed as an idyllic place in contrast to citified and vice-ridden Rome itself. However, Sicily was also noted for its brutal wars between the Greeks and Carthage and, later, the Romans and Carthage. Still later, it was the scene of horrible slave rebellions.

What of Bohemia by contrast? The Bohemia we know is the westernmost part of modern Czechoslovakia and is no more a pastoral idyll than anywhere else. This Bohemia is inhabited by a Slavic people, in Shakespeare's time as well as in our own, and its origin, as a Slavic nation, dates back to perhaps the eighth century, something like a thousand years after the time of Dionysius.

This discrepancy in time did not bother Greene, or Shakespeare either, and would not bother us in reading the play. However, is it necessarily our

the winter's tale 149

present real-life Bohemia that Shakespeare was thinking of? Was there another?

Shortly after 1400, bands of strange people reached central Europe. They were swarthy-skinned nomads, who spoke a language that was not like any in Europe. Some Europeans thought they came from Egypt and they were called "gypsies" in consequence. (They still are called that in the United States, but their real origin may have been India.)

When the gypsies reached Paris in 1427, the French knew only that they had come from central Europe. There were reports that they had come from Bohemia, and so the French called them Bohemians (and still do).

The gypsy life seemed gay and vagabondish and must have been attractive to those bound to heavy labor or dull routine. The term "Bohemian" therefore came to be applied to artists, writers, show people, and others living an unconventional and apparently vagabondish life. Bohemia came to be an imaginary story land of romance.