"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Louis A. Markos

As a mortal man living in a fallen world, I must often remind myself that, though existence on earth is essentially tragic, that tragedy is inscribed within a universe that is, finally, comic. It all will end, so the Bible tells us, not with a death but a marriage, not with judgment but with the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. It is only because our world has been subjected for a time to futility that tragedy holds the central place; when the end comes and all the veils are ripped away, we shall see that it was love, always love, that has moved and will continue to move history on to its final and happy ending. I know that this is true, yet often I doubt, and when I doubt, I turn invariably to that poet who, alone of all bards, knew the inner workings of both tragedy and comedy: William Shakespeare.

Let us begin then with that play which represents the culmination of Shakespeare's early comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Nearly all critics believe the play was written very close in time to Romeo and Juliet, and indeed, there are similarities in the plot. Both plays present us with a pair of young lovers (Lysander and Hermia, Romeo and Juliet) who are divided from each other by the tyrannies and prejudices of their elders. Romeo and Juliet ends with the tragic death of the ill-starred lovers, and for a while, it seems that Hermia and Lysander will suffer the same fate. But no, all is fixed up by a group of meddling fairies and a sudden change of heart on the part of Theseus, King of Athens. Now, to the cynical who have little patience for comedy, the ending of A Midsummer Night's Dream will seem foolishly and even vulgarly contrived. But to those who know better in their heart, it will not seem so. The plot of this, Shakespeare's most wonderful and magical comedy, does not end happily because it is contrived or poorly plotted or melodramatic, but because the plot moves in accordance with a world and an ethos that is structured in a specific sort of way.

At the very outset of the play, Theseus announces his upcoming marriage to Hippolyta, an Amazon maiden whom he has defeated in battle. In preparation for his nuptials, he instructs one of his aids to

Theseus, as ruler of the world of the play, is proclaiming before the play even begins that it will be a comedy, that it will have a happy ending no matter what mistakes the characters make in the interim. The pale companion (death) is not to be invited to their ceremony, and the sorrow and melancholy that attend such events as the death of Romeo and Juliet are to be confined to the world of the cemetery. Even his harsh treatment of Hippolyta, which precedes the action of the play and is thus outside its scope and ethic, is to be transposed into joy and romance. Thankfully for us and our world, the ruler (and author) of this raised stage on which we act out our lives made a similar proclamation at the very outset of the human drama: "And God saw every thing that He had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day." Then, presto, the lights dim and the curtain opens. Soon after, there is a fall, and we flee to the cities as the lovers in the play flee to the forest, but still, through it all, the magic of that first speech, the subtle charm of those primal words ("very good") stays with us in our plight and guides us to the happy end that must be.

As we move into the middle years of Shakespeare's prolific life, we encounter a second play that mimics even more fully the comic nature of our universe. That play is Much Ado About Nothing, and it adds to the lighter world of A Midsummer Night's Dream a fuller sense of innocence lost and regained. In the play, an ardent and guileless pair of lovers are nearly destroyed by a villain who taints the mind of the groom-to-be. The villain, Don John, fools the lover (Claudio) into thinking his beloved (the fair Hero) has been unchaste. In response, Claudio publicly rebukes Hero as an "approved wanton" and refuses to marry her. As this play too takes place in a comic world, the truth comes out in time, the villain is captured, and the lovers are reunited, but with a twist. Prompted by the Friar, Hero pretends to have died of grief, and her death is proclaimed throughout Messina. Soon after, Claudio discovers that he has accused Hero falsely and, begging a penance of her father, is told that he must first weep at Hero's "tomb" and proclaim her innocence and then marry Hero's cousin without seeing her face.

At the wedding, after Claudio pledges his love to the veiled bride, Hero removes the veil and reveals that it is she (not her fictional niece) whom Claudio has married. She then speaks:

Here, expressed in words of simple profundity, is the very essence of the biblical journey from innocence to corruption to restored purity, from life to death to rebirth--the story of a world defiled by sin but redeemed by love and of creatures who broke their initial covenant with their spouse, but who, after tears shed and penance done, were reunited in a second, greater wedding. Again, the end must be happy; in fact, so insistent is the joy of the marriage celebration that, when news is brought that Don John has been captured, the happy guests decide to postpone his punishment until the following day. Nothing, nothing must spoil their bliss.

Soon after completion of Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare entered into his great tragic period and composed, in less than a decade, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. Yet, Shakespeare did not end here. Toward the latter part of his life, as he entered his full maturity, he turned away from tragedy toward romance. His final plays are an odd mixture of tragedy and comedy, plays that seem to follow in their plots the seasonal cycles of the year. The best known of these is The Tempest, but the most profound, the most haunting is The Winter's Tale. In the play, Leontes, King of Sicilia, suddenly, and with no provocation, decides that his chaste and faithful wife, Hermione, has been having an affair with his old friend and companion, Polixenes (the King of Bohemia). Despite protestations of innocence from Hermione and the entire court, and despite an oracle absolving her of all guilt, Leontes clings to his baseless jealousy, even ordering that Hermione's new-born daughter (whom he now believes is the offspring of Polixenes) be taken out of the court and burned. Swift judgment strikes from above, and both Leontes' young son (Mamillius) and his wife fall into a swoon and die. Meanwhile, Antigonus, the Sicilian Lord instructed to kill Leontes' daughter, Perdita ("lost girl"), pities the babe and takes her to the shores of Bohemia, where she is found and raised by a simple shepherd.

Sixteen long years pass, years of remorse and penance for the rash Leontes who discovers his folly too late. Perdita, however, grows into a lovely maid and soon catches the eye of Polixenes' son, Florizel. Their love flourishes in the pastoral world of the Bohemian countryside, but when Polixenes learns that his son desires to wed beneath his royal blood, he forbids the marriage. The lovers flee to Sicilia, followed by Polixenes. In the end, Perdita's true identity is revealed, the lovers wed, and the old friendship of Leontes and Polixenes is restored. But the play does not end here. Paulina, wife of Antigonus and attendant to Hermione, who has spent the last sixteen years insuring that Leontes learn and feel the full weight of his crimes, reveals that an Italian sculptor has just completed a statue of Hermione. The statue is shown, and all marvel at how real it is, how like the true Hermione. Then, magically, the statue moves, and Paulina reveals to all present (including the audience) the startling news that Hermione is not dead but alive. All then rejoice, though pain is felt by Paulina, who learns now what she has long feared, that her husband, Antigonus, was killed by a bear but moments after he landed with Perdita on the shores of Bohemia. Yet, even here, sorrow is transmuted into joy, as Leontes grants her a new husband, the Sicilian Lord Camillo, who himself has been wounded much by the mad jealousy of Leontes.

What we encounter in this play is nothing less (and indeed somewhat more) than an allegory of the long biblical journey from Eden to the New Jerusalem, an affirmation that though summer has been lost and winter will be long, spring shall come again. It is already late autumn when the play opens, but we are given a glimpse of the innocent summer out of which the characters have grown. In an early speech, Polixenes describes his childhood friendship with Leontes:

As children, Polixenes and Leontes inhabited a pre-fallen world of Edenic innocence and joy, but they have moved now far from that Garden, and when, but moments after this speech, Leontes falls, unaccountably, into his strange fit of jealous rage, that innocence flees altogether and all their joys become corrupted. Many have pointed out similarities between the plots of The Winter's Tale and of that other great study of jealousy, Othello. The similarities are striking, but there is, of course, one major difference. There is no Iago in The Winter's Tale. Leontes' jealously is both baseless and without reason. But then so was Adam's decision to eat the forbidden fruit.

Though this sinful and fallen world in which we live and suffer and die is by no means illusory (what Eastern religions call maya), it is an anomaly, a flaw in the greater weave of the universe. Things should not be as they are, yet they are: a result of our stubborn and perverse refusal to remain in a world of innocence. We hurt ourselves more than any avenging God could hurt us; we create our own misery, and we do so without cause or reason or logic. Adam and Eve, and we, their fallen heirs, are but so many types of the rash Leontes, so eager to kill our own joy, so ready to blot out an entire garden of delights and see only the dram of poison that lies in a spider no bigger than our thumb. And, sadly, when we do so, we not only wound ourselves, but bring death and destruction and decay to all that lie about us. When Hermione falls into her swoon of death, Paulina cries out, cryptically but accurately, "look down / And see what death is doing." It is not just death that Leontes has ushered in, but the slow and painful process of death, the endless rot that sits forever on the bud.

But oh, God be praised, we live in a comic universe. Even as darkness and death fall on Sicilia, a small ray of hope shines through. The oracle that Leontes so foolishly rejects ends with these riddling words: "the King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found." It is not much, I grant you, but it is something, a promise in embryo that the chance for renewal is possible, a seed of hope that spring will come. A seed, that is, not unlike that first seed of hope, that primal riddle contained in God's curse on the serpent: "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."

In Genesis, this seed is submerged for a while, putting down roots in the covenants made with Noah and Abraham and Moses, and sending forth its first tentative shoots in the Messianic prophecies of David and Isaiah and Jeremiah. Then, with the first coming of Christ, the season turns fully to spring and the plant breaks forth with joy. The turning point has been reached and the promise of an eternal summer, still far off but sure now to come, gleams ahead. A similar turning point occurs in the play, marked by a brief but lovely sentence. Shortly after the Bohemian shepherd happens on the abandoned Perdita, he is informed by his son of a terrible event he has just witnessed: the devouring of a man named Antigonus by a bear. In response, the shepherd picks up the babe and says to his son: "thou met'st with things dying, I with things new born." Just so, the angels in the tomb halt the grieving women with these words: "'Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen."

Then, as noted above, sixteen years fly by, and the play begins again on a lighter note of innocence and renewal. As in the Bible, there is at the end of the play a "great tribulation" that almost destroys the characters again (spurred on this time by the tyranny of Polixenes), but by now the initial (tragic) half of the romance has been left behind and the magic of the second (comic) half takes over. And magic is just the right word. In the final mystic scene when Hermione's statue comes to life, Shakespeare goes beyond the final scene of Much Ado About Nothing, with its revelation to Claudio that Hero is alive. No, this time Shakespeare plays a trick that is almost without precedent in the theater; he almost literally resurrects Hermione from the dead. Neither the characters nor the audience (only Paulina) know that Hermione still lives, and when that statue moves and breathes, we are as shocked and as exultant as Leontes himself. It is not enough in this world of ours (that though comic when viewed from beginning to end is more often tragic in the middle) to hide Hero for a few days and then bring her back; there must be a death and long years of waiting; there must be time for the seed to take root. That is why there are two actual deaths in the play (Antigonus and Mamillius) and why the reunited Leontes and Hermione are far older and wiser than the reunited Hero and Claudio.

In the closing lines of the play, Leontes turns to Paulina and says:

I have always believed (along with the Socrates of the Apology) that part of the joy of heaven will be found in comparing our earthly stories of pain and grief with those of our fellow redeemed. We shall share our winter tales of woe and rejoice together that we have made it here to the eternal summer of paradise. Lifted up to a timeless world beyond all cycles, we shall at last understand the mystery of the seasons and of the birth that springs from death.

And so, to all of you who have been wont to shed more tears at The Winter's Tale than at Othello, I say simply this: that good will win out in the end and that the seed which dies will sprout again. Jesus' most mystical and "literary" saying ("Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.") defines a world that runs in accordance with the laws and the conventions of Shakespeare's comedies and romances. Yes, my fellow fallen mortals, there will be pain in this world, and there will be death, but those very things, in the hands of that Great Comic Playwright who composed the universe, are but so many seeds that shall flower into joy.

Louis Markos is a Professor in English at Houston Baptist University and is the author of Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis can Train us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World (Broadman & Holman, 2003).