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By Root 5177 0

it is now not so much the heroine who is the chief disguised figure in the play as the wise, allseeing Duke of Vienna. At the play's outset he has pretended to go abroad, handing over the governance of Vienna to Angelo. But this has been a deliberate test, to see whether the virtuous young man is all that he seems. In fact the Duke has stayed in the city disguised as a humble friar, to observe and guide from behind the scenes all that follows. It is he who exposes Angelo's hypocrisy, and eventually confronts him with his guilt: to the point where Angelo is so contrite that he accepts that he must be put to death in punishment. This `recognition' and change of heart allows the Duke to pardon him, paving the way to the happy ending where Angelo and the heroine can be united. And it was this motif which Shakespeare was finally to return to in The Tempest, where again we see the unfolding of the entire drama guided from behind the scenes by an all-seeing `wise old man, the magician Prospero. But before that Shakespeare was to produce his last and most complex exploration of the theme of `the hero as dark figure' and the heroine who passes into eclipse.

The first three acts of The Winter's Tale are so bleak and death-laden that, as has often been remarked, the story seems to be shaping up into a tragedy rather than a comedy. The hero, King Leontes, conceives a baseless suspicion that his wife Hermione is having an affair with his best friend, King Polixenes. He tries to have Polixenes killed and throws his wife into prison, where she gives birth to a daughter. Becoming more and more possessed by darkness, Leontes orders that the child be taken out and abandoned, and hardens his heart to every indication that his wife is blameless; until eventually his son dies of grief and Hermione seemingly follows suit. At last, thinking his entire family is dead, Leontes comes to himself and recognises the full horror of what he has quite unjustifiably set in train; and at this point, the scene changes in dream-like fashion to `the sea coast of Bohemia'. We move at last out of the shadows of Tragedy into the recognisable world of Comedy. Leontes' little daughter Perdita, `the lost one, has been found by shepherds, like Chloe in Daphnis and Chloe, and has grown up to fall in love with Florizel, the son of Leontes' old friend King Polixenes. Polixenes, now cast in the familiar role of `unrelenting father', cannot agree to his princely son marrying a mere shepherd girl, and the lovers flee back to the court of Leontes, with angry father in pursuit. Here Perdita's true identity is discovered. Leontes is overjoyed to be reunited with his long-lost daughter (although this also revives his grief for his lost Hermione). And when Polixenes arrives it does not take long for him to make up his quarrel with Leontes, and for the two fathers to give joyful blessing to the union of their children. Finally Leontes is led to an uncannily lifelike statue of his dead wife. It turns out of course that Hermione had not died in prison but had merely been in hiding, and the statue is herself in disguise. Emerging from her long eclipse, she steps down to embrace her husband. Thus in every conceivable way the story ends happily.

In no other of his comedies has Shakespeare touched so sombrely on death and seeming death as a prelude to regeneration and the eventual victory of love and life. It was the conclusion of a long process of development in which he had steadily deepened his exploration of Comedy, making the issues at stake more and more serious, to the point where they had literally become a matter of life and death. Yet we may note that, at the very moment when Shakespeare reached such near-tragic depths, in a story about a husband separated by a terrible misunderstanding from his wife, he was in fact returning to the very theme which had launched the New Comedy nearly 2000 years before. The plays of Menander, such as the Epitrepontes, centred on precisely this basic situation of a husband and wife, or two lovers, rent apart by some dreadful misunderstanding