Belatedly finishing up the shows I saw in New York before I left town, I’m going to say a few too-brief words about an excellent production of The Winter’s Tale that was part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s celebrated residency this summer at the New York Armory on Park Avenue.

The Winter’s Tale is one of my favorite plays. I don’t have the time right now to go into all the reasons; a year ago, in my write-up of the Stratford production, I started out saying I don’t have time to talk about all my ideas about the play, and wound up spending almost the entire length of the post doing exactly that. I could do the same now, but instead, I’ll give you my strongest impressions from the production, particularly the things I learned that I hadn’t known before.

The overwhelmingly dominant image of the production is a pair of towering bookcases. For the entire first act they loom ominously over the proceedings. Then, after the trial, when Leontes has finally been forced to confront the madness of his charges, and the consequences of that madness in the deaths of his entire family (Mamillus definitively, Perdita presumptively, Hermione … well, there you are required to awake your faith), just as Leontes leaves the stage, the bookcases topple over onto each other, the books avalanching out onto the stage, a vivid image of the fall of Leontes’s house (marred only by the fact – presumably driven by safety concerns – that Leontes watches this collapse from just offstage, rather than the house tumbling around his head).

And the books stay there, littering the floor, for the remainder of the play. When, sixteen years later, we meet a penitent Leontes at his wife’s tomb, he picks among the piles for reading matter, wrapped in a gray blanket of grief. But the books are there for the Bohemian interval as well. In Bohemia, though, they are transformed into so much paper rubbish; the very Wicker-Man-ish dancers at the outrageously bawdy sheep-shearing-festival dance are clad in crumpled sheets – men of paper rather than men of hair – and even the trees have pages for leaves. There’s an allusion to Autolycus’s ballads there,  as well as a frame-breaking reminder that this is The Winter’s Tale – that what we are seeing is a kind of fairy story – but I sense a larger metaphor behind.

The suggestion behind the design, I came to feel, is that Leontes’s is a studied folly, a disease he caught of reading too many books about this sort of thing rather than from observation of life. I haven’t fully unpacked that idea, but it strikes me as an extremely potent one. The observations that Leontes uses to justify his jealousy are, after all, laughable. This production plays that fact up – where in some productions there is an overheard line to misconstrue or a gesture meant in friendship to misinterpret, to minimally explain Leontes’s madness, in this production there is nothing (unless I missed it) provided by way of a jumping-off point. Leontes just loses it. Decorously at first – Greg Hicks makes a very civilized jealous king – so that you almost might miss it, Leontes simply loses his mind. But his madness takes the form of spinning a scenario, almost pre-packaged from another source, and the looming bookcases are very suggestive in this regard.

Indeed, it’s worth thinking about Leontes as another one of Shakespeare’s “writer/director” figures, who manipulate the other characters in the play through a scenario of his design. The Duke in Measure for Measure is one of these; Prospero is another; Iago a third, at least with respect to Othello; it’s a common Shakespearean theme. Camillo assumes Leontes must have a Iago of his own, but there is no one. Leontes manipulates himself into this mess. And yet, he’s also manipulating everybody else into the tragedy that, for whatever reason, he wants to inhabit. My primary evidence for this is that Leontes withholds from all his interlocutors essential exculpatory evidence regarding Camillo’s flight that he, Leontes, knows.

Leontes, right after his jealousy erupts, unpacks his heart to an astonished Camillo, and then orders Camillo to murder Polixenes, Leontes’s friend and fellow monarch, whom Leontes suspects with his wife, Hermione. Instead of following out this command, Camillo flees with Polixenes. Leontes interprets this flight as evidence that Camillo was compact in treachery with Polixenes and Hermione, and he holds up Camillo’s flight as a bit of irrefutable evidence of his right suspicion to all his vassals who try to dissuade him. But he never tells them of his order to murder Polixenes. Had he done so, he surely knows that they would respond by telling him that this was why Camillo fled: so as not to commit a horrible crime that he, Leontes, woudl surely repent of when he returned to sanity. He hides this exculpatory evidence because he doesn’t want them to be able to out-argue him. He wants the tragedy to proceed. It’s madness, but yet there’s method in it.

Nobody manipulates Leontes into jealousy. Rather, he manipulates everybody else to get to that trial scene. (He’s no doubt confident that the oracle will speak in riddles that he can interpret to his liking, but for once the oracle speaks with utter clarity, and he is check-mated.) But where did he get this scenario from in the first place? The bookcases, perhaps, hold the answer to that. Why do any of Shakespeare’s manipulative writer/directors undertake to create the dramas that they do? Why, for that matter, are we sitting in the audience? Presumably, to find a drama, a sense of life, that they – we – cannot find in life itself. So too, perhaps, with this civilized, successful, but not normally very dramatic bourgeois king, Leontes. This is why he holds to his madness so strongly, even though he can see it is destroying not only his family but himself. Because this is his contribution to the bookshelves. This is the story he has inside him, and he will write it with his own life’s blood, because it feels to him like the only creative thing he’s ever done. And a sad tale’s best for winter, anyway.

And so, when the pages are ripped out to adorn the trees (perhaps also an allusion to Orlando’s poetry in As You Like It – another play that starts with tragedy at court, then moves to comedy in the rustic “green world”), the dancers – even the bear – this is life breakout out of the boundaries of text, and hence of the tragic scenario.

There, you see – I’ve wound up doing what I said I wouldn’t, rambling on about the play. This was a very fine production all around – in addition to Greg Hicks’s Leontes, I’d call out Darrell D’Silva as a vigorous and charming Polixenes; Gruffudd Glyn, an adorable dunce as the Young Shepherd; Brian Doherty as an exceptionally foul Autolycus; Tunji Kasim as a determined and convincingly royal Florizel; and Noma Dumezweni as an unusual Paulina, a cat who doesn’t actually need to use her claws, because she knows we know she has them. I didn’t feel from either Kelly Hunter’s Hermione or Samantha Young’s Perdita the kind of sexual vivacity that I generally associate with these characters, but on the other hand this Perdita looked so strikingly like her mother that for once the first recognition scene, with her father, made instant visual sense. And I enjoyed very much one emendation to the text – Antigonus, in this production, does not exit pursued by a bear; rather, he himself pursues the bear, charging at him to distract him from the bawling infant Perdita, thereby saving the girl’s life at the cost of his own.

This was a Winter’s Tale that I’ll be thinking about for a long time. I only wish I’d had the chance to see director David Farr and leading man Greg Hicks in their Lear as well.