Comedy and Kids Will be Kids

I know there's been a lot of upheaval about the genre of The Winter's Tale. I don't necessarily want to get into that right now, except to say that I think it is, at it's heart, basically a comedy. Comedy didn't always mean humorous - it's traditional theatrical meaning was simply "it has a happy ending." Which The Winter's Tale does. So, I'm using it as an excuse to post this video.

This is from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Abridged. I used to own it, but I lent my copy to someone else and he never gave it back.

Now, I want to switch gears briefly and talk about Florizel. One of my group members raised the question "Why didn't he just tell his dad about Perdita? His dad would have been cool with it." I don't know what Shakespeare was thinking, but it seems so obvious to me because I was Florizel.

When I was a teenager, it was a time. I was always having these big dramatic problems and everything was the end of the world. Some things were actually very serious - I struggled with depression for about three years before I told my mother and got help for it. It seems really obvious now for someone to say "Well, why didn't you just tell her? She was cool with it." In my crazy, emotional teenage mind, I thought that there was no way she'd understand what I was going through. I thought she'd be disappointed. I thought she'd be angry. I thought she'd think I was stupid or weak.

It seems likely to me that Florizel had thought his entire life that he was going to marry a princess and be king of the country, which is huge, burdensome responsibility. In some ways, he may have felt that any element of choice about his life had been taken away from him. Then, he meets this girl and she's awesome and he loves her immediately, but she's not a princess. As far as he knows, she's just some girl. By choosing her, he may have felt like he was ruining all the plans. When you're young, everything is heightened, and fear of losing something important drives people to do crazy things all the time. It seems to me that he didn't tell his dad because Florizel didn't want to risk anyone getting in the way and messing it up.