In the playbill from the Shakespeare theatre, there were director's notes for each play being performed this season. The notes for "The Winter's Tale" caught my interest. I thought they were well written.
The notes began with a quote from T.S. Eliot, from his Poetry and Drama, 1951: "It is a function of all art to give us some perception of an order in life."
The director went on to say of both "The Winter's Tale" and "The Tempest", two of Shakespeare's very late works:
"Out of the dangerous chaos [that is] human experience, both plays find a redeeming shape ... in the case of The Winter's Tale, the play is suffused by a sense of time and the great cycles that loom over our fleeting journey here on earth: the change of the seasons, youth and age, birth and death - endless growth, decay and regeneration.
"But for all its cyclical rigor, time is also the balm that allows for forgiveness, reconciliation and redemption. Thus, the remorseless calendar is checked by the momentary and the personal, reminding us again of the unlikely miracle of our own brief consciousness."
Well put, Herr Direktor. Art can lend order to the chaos of life which it often portrays, just as time can heal the wounds of life which it often inflicts.
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