In each case Hermione speaks a line. then turns and (one judges from Leontes's following lines) flirts with Polixenes. Leontes then comments aside.

In this production, as soon as Hermione began her flirtation, the lights, formerly white, flashed to a muted blue. Hermione and Polixenes froze in their mutual endearments, and Leontes spoke his lines with deliberate, careful and muted rage.

These two moments were lifted out of time and lent a significance beyond the surrounding circumstances. They were tableaus, which might well have stood for similar incidents that Shakespeare did not have time to show. Nor were Hermione's attentions to Polixenes anything to be sniffed at: they were real, too real, and, even presented as normal incidents. would have been ample cause for jealousy. These moments gave him a king's share of time in which to corrupt his initially pure nature.

There were so many points at which this production dealt adequately with difficult problems that I cannot hope to deal with them all. One example: Antigonus is given by Leontes the unhappy chore of dispatching Hermione's newborn baby girl. He takes to ship with the idea of leaving it somewhere, and is directed by Hermione's ghost to leave it in the deserts of Bohemia. Now Antigonus, after leaving the baby, is supposed to be killed by a bear: his last words are:

A savage clamor!/ Well may I get aboard! This is the chase:/

I am gone forever./

(Exit, pursued by a bear.)

On the page this is really quite funny, not at all as it should be, as the audience soon learns from the Clown.

Nunn set the scene in the half-light and intermittent flashes of the storm, and had a huge (about 12 feet tall) and very realistic bear rise out of the blackness behind Antigonus, pick him bodily up, and carry him off, the final action drowned in a scream of loud and hopeless terror, amplified, so that it reverberated in the ear drums. The whole thing was terrifying and convincing, as it should be. The switch, then, to the Shepherd and his son the Clown, was entirely in keeping with the Shepherd's words.

Time, when he spoke his significant fourth act words, was seated on a throne enclosed in a cube of glass which had previously been behind the rear wall. Before Time spoke, the middle lower portion of the wall moved and this cube advanced the considerable distance out to the lip of the stage. Time, black, and, true to the sound of both his voice and name (Alton Kumalo), exotic, spoke without moving his body.

The cube then moved noiselessly back to the wall, the door slid shut, and the stage was clear. Before Hermione is revivified she appears as a statue. Nunn put her in the same cube Time had used behind a revolving mirror-this time it stayed upstage. Instead of drawing a curtain Paulina pushed a button, and the mirror revolved to reveal Hermione.

There is a clarity of both the parts and the whole in The Winter's Tale which was almost perfectly realized in this production. I have mentioned the most clearly molded transition of the play: this was carried off with brilliance: the first and second major parts, roughly defined as the tragic and the comic, blended into a whole which was exquisitely forceful.

Americans may have a chance to see more of the RSC on this side of the Atlantic in the future. The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. D. C. is interested in developing what Dr. Osborne B. Hardison. Director of the Folger, called in a recent telephone interview "the cordial will to talk" which now exists between the two organizations. The Folger. Dr. Hardison said. considers the RSC the finest Shakespeare troupe in the world, and would like, as part of the library's obligation to the public, to bring the troupe to America for more extensive tours.