Winter & Wolfgang
Sunday, July 20th by scott malia
Marin Shakespeare Company is tackling history this season, but not in the ways you might expect. There are no Henrys to be found nor any Richards nor Johns. There are no speeches about English wars that have been reinvented as some kind of commentary on current events. Instead, the company has chosen two plays (one Shakespearean, one not) that both use history in different ways as inspiration for their dramatic plots. Though you might not initially think of Shakespeare’s category-defying The Winter’s Tale and Peter Shaffer’s intense, twentieth-century drama Amadeus as companion pieces, it turns out that the two have some striking parallels.
Many people have long speculated that, happy ending aside, The Winter’s Tale is a kind of allegory of Henry VIII’s disposal of his eleven-fingered second wife, Anne Boleyn. Indeed, a jealous king’s claims of adultery followed by his wife’s death seem to support this notion. Where the play differs is in its marked shift in tone in the second half of the play (which famously jumps sixteen years). Amadeus is also based on historical figures, albeit more directly. The fictionalized tale of the personal and professional relationship between composers Mozart and Salieri won Tonys and Oscars aplenty in its stage debut and subsequent film version. Where people take issue with Amadeus is in the accuracy of its portrayal of the animosity between the two men (who may have been friendlier to each other in real life) and its suggestion that Salieri murdered Mozart. While it makes for a nice Othello-ish plot device, it may not have really happened. The question is if audiences know to take these plays with a grain of salt, how much does historical fidelity really matter?
