A final note on interaction of character. Falstaff's mere presence is a danger and Hands's Ford was largely successful in averting it by drawing the play's energy into his transformation. Before he changes he can be quite funny; his interviews with Falstaff were particularly well done. One saw the carefully composed Mr. Brooke (Ford) presenting a nicely Falstaffian proposition; meanwhile, Falstaff relished his possibilities and promising success, while Ford inwardly rebelled and very nearly lost his composure.

If this play is anchored in English manners and the English countryside, and if it is best rendered in this context, then The Winter's Tale is almost at an opposite pole. At least it was so produced by Trevor Nunn.

Any production of a play, particularly a play by Shakespeare, goes out on a limb. It offers one interpretation of an entity capable of an infinity of interpretations. T. S. Eliot thought this was bad, because it forced him to observe a rendering which was very likely different from his own. But it is good, too, because it brings the play closer to the audience and forces them, even if by its aberrations, to consider nuances and ramifications which often do not arise spontaneously from the text. Having mentioned this, one can consider the play.

The stage was a huge pristinely white box, which conveyed no sense of confinement. No props were used but the absolute essentials. Leontes and Polixenes, present on stage, functioned in a total and enveloping mutual awareness which was unbothered by relationships to other things, and this was true for every other group of characters.

Trevor Nunn fashioned The Winter's Tale as a modern fable of elegant simplicity. The neo-Edwardian dress and a few stage devices were the only indication of modernity. Nunn raised the words of Time which commence the fourth act to the level of a kind of incantation over the mystery of the play. Time says:

I that please some, try all, both joy and terror!

Of good and bad; that makes and unfolds error,

Now take upon me, in the name of Time,

To use my wings.

These words were spoken with exotic sonority in the blackness before the first act.

They of course are part of the very pivot of the play, coming as they do immediately after the Shepherd's incandescent words:

Now bless thyself; thou met'st with things dying, I

with things new born.

In context they function somewhat as does the prologue to Henry V, as an apology and craftsman's argument: "What the hell, if you really want to wait sixteen years come back and see if we're still here." But they also meant: "This play's message is timeless, and its people are such as have lived, live, and shall live."

Leontes's jealous rage is much similar to Ford's, but its consequences are far more serious. It is one of the traits which makes him timelessly human. As Shakespeare gives it to us, however, it develops with astonishing rapidity, and Nunn used an interesting device to lend credence to this development. There are two moments, in which Leonter sees Polixenes with Hermoine, that plant the initial seeds of jealousy.