You Gods, Look Down

A recent trip to the theater got me thinking about my great-grandfather’s adultery. The play I saw, The Winter’s Tale, is commonly called one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” that is, a play where some people have a problem with the ending. (For example, when my Shakespeare reading group finished All’s Well That Ends Well, we said, “Well, we didn’t like the way that ended at all!”) The problem is probably with my capacity to appreciate Shakespeare, rather than with Shakespeare’s facility as an author. Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur. Be that as it may, The Winter’s Tale just doesn’t quite sit right with most people. Leontes kills his wife and orders a faithful retainer to see that his newborn daughter meets a gruesome fate. Then, sixteen years later, after an invocation of the gods, the dead are revealed to be alive, the lost are found, and everyone gets a happy ending. There’s something too neat about this: few people would judge that even despite sixteen years of “Th’ effects of his fond jealousies so grieving / That he shuts up himself,” Leontes has earned his redemption.

My city’s local troupe of thespians, the Rochester Community Players, recently gave a great gift to the world by performing an adaptation of The Winter’s Tale that brought into focus the tragic elements of the play. “Adapting” Shakespeare usually means making it worse to no purpose. But in this instance, David Kensek, the director, made one inspired change: he took the opening line of Hermione’s prayer, “You gods, look down, / And from your sacred vials pour your graces / Upon my daughter’s head!” from Act V, scene iii, forty lines from the end of the play, and moved it to the beginning as a prologue. Time, already a speaking character in Shakespeare’s original, answers the prayer by sending Perdita back in time to witness the events that preceded her birth.

Kensek explains in the program notes that giving Perdita an intimate knowledge of her family history was an “exploration of redemption” which poses the question of whether it is good, or even possible, to forgive and forget. This exploration “helped us find a rare unwritten voice in Shakespeare’s canon.” The adaptation was also somewhat shortened: the comedic elements were scaled back (including the famous stage direction: “Exit, pursued by a bear”), but the result was to make the run-up to the great reunion in Act V a fast-paced dramatic cascade. Perdita, fleeing her lover’s father in fear of her life, returns to the court of her royal birth. One by one the play’s major characters make their way into the chapel where stands the uncannily lifelike statue of Hermione, Perdita’s mother.

The audience remembers this setting from the prologue: it is where we heard the prayer to the gods that made Perdita a spectator to her prehistory. The Perdita who stands now before the statue of her mother is a different woman from the girl raised as a shepherdess of Shakespeare’s original: she knows in each detail the sins of her father, the innocence of her wronged saintly mother whom she once watched give her birth, and “the noble combat that ’twixt joy and sorrow was fought” in the heart of each person standing in that room. King Leontes is asked whether he would like the curtain to be drawn over the image of his slain wife, whose statue wounds him with the memory of his past wrongs: “No, not these twenty years.” Perdita, carrying within her the visions that Time bequeathed her, gets up and says the same: “So long could I / Stand by, a looker-on.” The lights went down, and the play was over.

Two or three people in the audience, perhaps because they respond to cues with the diligence of avid theater-goers, immediately began clapping to tell the rest of us (barbarians) that now the play has ended and so it’s time to clap. We politely joined in the round of applause as the cast came out for curtain call to make their final bow. One person began to get up to start a standing ovation—perhaps she knew a member of the cast?—realized no one was going to follow her, and shifted back down into her seat. When Leontes and Perdita took the stage, the decibel level intensified in proportion to the number of their lines, but I, too, saw that I would be the only one to give a standing ovation, and did not rise because I did not want to appear too over-eager. The polite applause ended, and the woman sitting next to me appeared somewhat miffed: she paid full price for her ticket but didn’t get her happy ending. I, an inveterate lover of catharsis, sank deep into thought in order to make a judgement on whether I liked what the director did to Shakespeare’s play.

I love it. One friend of mine criticized the adaptation for removing the Catholic themes of redemption and forgiveness which Shakespeare had added to Robert Greene’s 1588 Pandosto, but I think there’s always something valuable about exploring the drama of raw human experience. Afterwards, I found the director and handed him a Sharpie: “Would you sign a program for me?” Somewhat taken aback, he found a flat surface: “I’ve never done this before.” I was filled with the distinct sense that my desire for some token to make memory of the feeling birthed by his art may be the first such request he has received, but will certainly not be his last. I then relayed to him the story of my great-grandfather.

I’ve done a fair bit of family history research. It’s not unusual for me to tell a new acquaintance: “By the way, you’re my eleventh cousin.” Last year, the 1950 census became public, and it allowed me to piece together more of a story that has long captured my curiosity in the worst way. My great-grandfather, the first Mottola born in the United States, married in a Protestant church despite his Catholic background, and later ran off to Tennessee with another woman, abandoning not only his wife but also my grandfather and his siblings. In 1940, he entered a civil marriage with this new woman, herself a divorcée, and died in 1946. The 1950 census, like Father Time himself, revealed to me what happened next: the second Mrs. Mottola was living in the house of a daughter by her first marriage, and, lo and behold, in that same house lived also my step-great-grandmother’s first husband! Three years after that, she married for a third time—to my great-grandfather’s brother.

Children in every age have had occasion to forgive the imperfections of their parents, but now like never before—not only because of the Internet, but also thanks to the unflagging efforts of the Mormons to collect all human knowledge related to the dead—we can watch the drama of our families unfold down through the centuries. Perhaps the only people who have ever had to come to terms with the sins of their long-deceased forebears are those of royal lineage, and those who think of the Church as their Mother. And so like Perdita, with knowledge that does not properly pertain to me, I must learn to forgive, not only myself and those I know who’ve wronged me, but all those who came before and whose sins have brought about the promised wrath of God, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon their children unto the third and fourth generation.”

After thanking the director again, I found the actress who played Perdita. I’d seen her in enough plays over the years that she gave me a big hug and thanked me for coming. I regaled her with the same sorry tale of my great-grandfather, and we got to talking about the play’s theme of forgiveness. She contrasted the ending of the adaptation with the original, where the statue reveals herself to be, in fact, Hermione, not dead at all but alive, full of mercy for her husband who wrought such grievous wrongs. What did I think this version brought to the table?

It was the first time I had tried to articulate why this meant so much to me, so I took a pause of awkward, almost monastic, length in formulating my response. “In Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Ivan insists to his youngest brother, Alexei, ‘I must see, with my own eyes, the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer.’ Shakespeare gave us the vision of Time. That will all happen at the end of time,” I said, waving my left arm in a broad gesture to dismiss this fact as being so remote as to have no present relevance. “Everyone will have the chance to forgive their murderers. But we’re like Perdita. We don’t get to see that yet.”

We don’t get to see that yet, to see the moment when Leontes, and we, who have not earned our redemption, are forgiven anyway. We only get to stand by, lookers-on at the memorials to the wrongs that unfold around us. We have to live in the present to decide whether or not to forgive in the present.