Granville Barker's Production of The Winter's Tale (1912)

Abstract

Granville Barker's 1912 production of The Winter's Tale is considered to be a landmark not only in the stage history of the play but also in the history of Shakespeare production. Dennis Kennedy writes that is one of the four or five most important Shakespeare productions of this century and that as the first of them has an undeniable place in the theatre history of our time.1 Although the historical evidence will be re-assessed in this study, it would be time ill spent to attempt to add any new information about the performance to the wealth of detail amassed by Dennis Bartholomeusz, J. L. Styan, Norman Marshall, and Kennedy among others. Rather, an attempt will be made to re-evaluate the production in the context of the period and to account for the great success that it has enjoyed among theater historians. William Poel (1852-1934) and Edward Gordon Craig (18721966) are often taken as the revolutionary figures in Shakespeare production during the early twentieth century. From 1894, Poel and the Elizabethan Stage Society had been performing Shakespeare in Elizabethan costumes on bare platform stages in an attempt to re-create the original conditions of production of Shakespeare's texts. Poel established a tradition of amateur performance which eschewed the lavish realism of the Victorian actor managers and re-established Shakespeare's texts without the cuts and interruptions of stage action that had become customary during the nineteenth century. Although Poel cut lines from the plays, he did not cut scenes, and his productions tended to vindicate the stageworthiness of Shakespeare's plays while concentrating attention on the stage action and the interaction of the characters.2 While Poel attempted to return Shakespeare's plays to the context of the Elizabethan theater, Edward Gordon Craig moved towards a modernist style. Like Poel, rejecting the realism of the