The Winter's Tale (Bloom's Shakespeare Through the Ages)

Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Hamlet Henry IV (Part I) Henry V Julius Caesar King Lear Macbeth The Merchant of Venice A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado about Nothing Othello Richard III Romeo and Juliet The Sonnets The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Twelfth Night The Winter’s Tale

Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages

the winter ’ s tale

Edited and with an introduction by

Harold Bloom

Sterling Professor of the Humanities Yale University

Volume Editor Paul Gleed

Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages: The Winter’s Tale Copyright © 2010 by Infobase Publishing Introduction © 2010 by Harold Bloom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information contact: Bloom’s Literary Criticism An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The winter’s tale / edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom ; volume editor, Paul Gleed.    p. cm. — (Bloom’s Shakespeare through the ages)   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-1-60413-707-1 (hardcover)   ISBN 978-1-4381-3159-7 (e-book)  1.  Shakespeare, William, 1564–1616.   Winter’s tale.  I.  Bloom, Harold.  II.  Gleed, Paul.   PR2839.W55 2010   822.33—dc22 2009038969 Bloom’s Literary Criticism books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Bloom’s Literary Criticism on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Series design by Erika K. Arroyo Cover design by Ben Peterson Composition by IBT Global, Troy NY Cover printed by IBT Global, Troy NY Book bound and printed by IBT Global, Troy NY Date Printed: February 2010 Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Contents q Series Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii

Volume Introduction by Harold Bloom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Biography of William Shakespeare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Summary of The Winter’s Tale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Key Passages in The Winter’s Tale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 List of Characters in The Winter’s Tale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Criticism Through the Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 t The Winter’s Tale in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. . . . 25 1670—John Dryden. From “Defence of the Epilogue,” contained in The Conquest of Granada. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 1725—Alexander Pope. From the preface to The Works of Shakespeare. . . 26 1753—Charlotte Lennox. From Shakespeare Illustrated. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 1756—David Garrick. From Florizel and Perdita. A Dramatic Pastoral in Three Acts, Altered from The Winter’s Tale of Shakespeare . . . . 29

t The Winter’s Tale in the Nineteenth Century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 1817—William Hazlitt. From Characters of Shakespear’s Plays. . . . . . . . . 33 1846—A.W. Schlegel. From Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 1863—Charles Cowden Clarke. From Shakespeare-Characters, Chiefly Those Subordinate. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41

t The Winter’s Tale in the Twentieth Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 1911—John Masefield. From William Shakespeare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58

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1918—Arthur Quiller-Couch. From Shakespeare’s Workmanship . . . . . . . 61 1947—George Wilson Knight. From The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71 1949—J.I.M. Stewart. From Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 1987—Stanley Cavell. From Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126 1998—Richard McCabe. “Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale”. . . . . . . . . . . . 150

t The Winter’s Tale in the Twenty-first Century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 2009—Mary Ellen Lamb. From “Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors: The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Old Wives’ Tales”. . . . . . . 157

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165

Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171

Series Introduction q Shakespeare Through the Ages presents not the most current of Shakespeare criticism, but the best of Shakespeare criticism, from the seventeenth century to today. In the process, each volume also charts the flow over time of critical discussion of a particular play. Other useful and fascinating collections of historical Shakespearean criticism exist, but no collection that we know of contains such a range of commentary on each of Shakespeare’s greatest plays and at the same time emphasizes the greatest critics in our literary tradition: from John Dryden in the seventeenth century, to Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, to William Hazlitt and Samuel Coleridge in the ninteenth century, to A.C. Bradley and William Empson in the twentieth century, to the most perceptive critics of our own day. This canon of Shakespearean criticism emphasizes aesthetic rather than political or social analysis. Some of the pieces included here are full-length essays; others are excerpts designed to present a key point. Much (but not all) of the earliest criticism consists only of brief mentions of specific plays. In addition to the classics of criticism, some pieces of mainly historical importance have been included, often to provide background for important reactions from future critics. These volumes are intended for students, particularly those just beginning their explorations of Shakespeare. We have therefore also included basic materials designed to provide a solid grounding in each play: a biography of Shakespeare, a synopsis of the play, a list of characters, and an explication of key passages. In addition, each selection of the criticism of a particular century begins with an introductory essay discussing the general nature of that century’s commentary and the particular issues and controversies addressed by critics presented in the volume. Shakespeare was “not of an age, but for all time,” but much Shakespeare criticism is decidedly for its own age, of lasting importance only to the scholar who wrote it. Students today read the criticism most readily available to them, which means essays printed in recent books and journals, especially those journals made available on the internet. Older criticism is too often buried in out-of-print books on forgotten shelves of libraries or in defunct periodicals. Therefore, many students, particularly younger students, have no way of knowing that some of the most profound criticism of Shakespeare’s plays was written decades or centuries vii

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ago. We hope this series remedies that problem, and more importantly, we hope it infuses students with the enthusiasm of the critics in these volumes for the beauty and power of Shakespeare’s plays.

Introduction by Harold Bloom q

I tend to teach The Winter’s Tale in terms of three characters: Leontes; his daughter, Perdita; and the wonderful Autolycus, comic rogue, wit, and haunting singer. That, alas, omits Hermione and other splendid roles, yet the thematic and rhetorical contrasts between the insanely jealous Leontes, the more than Proserpina-like beauty Perdita, and her outrageous fellow harbinger of spring, Autolycus, are rich entrances into this triumphant tragicomedy. Leontes, who beholds the spider in the cup even when it is not there, is Shakespeare’s most frightening study of paranoid sexual jealousy, surpassing Othello’s agonies, if only because there is so little foregrounding provided for Leontes’s madness. He is his own Iago. There is a suggestion of repressed homoeroticism in his idyllic boyhood with Polixenes, but his collapse lacks the symptoms of overdetermination that we might expect. Fundamentally his malaise is nihilism: Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career Of laughing with a sigh (a note infallible Of breaking honesty)? horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift? Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? And all eyes Blind with the pin and web, but theirs; theirs only. That would unseen be wicked? is this nothing? Why then the world, and all that’s in’t, is nothing; The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing; My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing.

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That last four-and-a-half-line passage gives us eight “nothing”s. King Lear’s Edmund and Othello’s Iago are cosmological nihilists who nevertheless do not match Leontes in his reductive madness. With magnificent rightness, Shakespeare heals this wound in nature doubly, first with the insouciant Autolycus singing his songs of summer and even more grandly with the vitalizing Perdita, sublimely wholesome in her direct sexuality. How Shakespeare must have enjoyed writing Autolycus into being: Clo. What hast here? ballads? Mop. Pray now, buy some: I love a ballad in print, a-life, for then we are sure they are true. Aut. Here’s one, to a very doleful tune, how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden, and how she longed to eat adders’ heads and toads carbonadoed. Mop. Is it true, think you? Aut. Very true, and but a month old. Dor. Bless me from marrying a usurer! Aut. Here’s the midwife’s name to ’t, one Mistress Tale-porter, and five or six honest wives that were present. Why should I carry lies abroad? Mop. Pray you now, buy it. Clo. Come on, lay it by: and let’s first see moe ballads: we’ll buy the other things anon. Aut. Here’s another ballad of a fish that appeared upon the coast on Wednesday the four-score of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids: it was thought she was a woman, and was turned into a cold fish for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her. The ballad is very pitiful, and as true. Dor. Is it true, too, think you? Aut. Five justices’ hands at it, and witnesses more than my pack will hold. Not even Montaigne could have bettered the motto of Autolycus: “for the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it.” And even John Keats could not achieve Perdita’s outcry to Florizel: O Prosperina, For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fall From Dis’s waggon! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses

Introduction by Harold Bloom

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That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady Most incident to maids); bold oxlips and The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one. O, these I lack, To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend, To strew him o’er and o’er! Perhaps the high art of Shakespeare nowhere else is so married to human and natural vitality as in The Winter’s Tale. No single person in the play is so endless to meditation as are Falstaff, Hamlet, Iago, Cleopatra, and the Edgar of King Lear. Yet the trinity of Leontes, Autolycus, and Perdita gives us an art too subtle for meditation. Nowhere else, even in Shakespeare, are we so wounded by wonder.

Biography of William Shakespeare q William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon in April 1564 into a family of some prominence. His father, John Shakespeare, was a glover and merchant of leather goods, who earned enough to marry the daughter of his father’s landlord, Mary Arden, in 1557. John Shakespeare was a prominent citizen in Stratford, and at one point, he served as an alderman and bailiff. Shakespeare presumably attended the Stratford grammar school, where he would have received an education in Latin, but he did not go on to either Oxford or Cambridge universities. Little is recorded about Shakespeare’s early life; indeed, the first record of his life after his christening is of his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582 in the church at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. He would have been required to obtain a special license from the bishop as security that there was no impediment to the marriage. Peter Alexander states in his book Shakespeare’s Life and Art that marriage at this time in England required neither a church nor a priest or, for that matter, even a document—only a declaration of the contracting parties in the presence of witnesses. Thus, it was customary, though not mandatory, to follow the marriage with a church ceremony. Little is known about William and Anne Shakespeare’s marriage. Their first child, Susanna, was born in May 1583, and twins, Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare, in 1585. Later on, Susanna married Dr. John Hall, but the younger daughter, Judith, remained unmarried. When Hamnet died in Stratford in 1596, the boy was only eleven years old. We have no record of Shakespeare’s activities for the seven years after the birth of his twins, but by 1592 he was in London working as an actor. He was also apparently well known as a playwright, for reference is made of him by his contemporary, Robert Greene, in A Groatsworth of Wit, as “an upstart crow.” Several companies of actors were in London at this time. Shakespeare may have had connection with one or more of them before 1592, but we have no record that tells us definitely. However, we do know of his long association with the most famous and successful troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. (When James I came to the throne in 1603, after Elizabeth’s death, the troupe’s name changed to the King’s Men.) In 1599 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men provided the financial backing for the construction of their own theater, the Globe. 



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The Globe was begun by a carpenter named James Burbage and finished by his two sons, Cuthbert and Robert. To escape the jurisdiction of the Corporation of London, which was composed of conservative Puritans who opposed the theater’s “licentiousness,” James Burbage built the Globe just outside London, in the Liberty of Holywell, beside Finsbury Fields. This also meant that the Globe was safer from the threats that lurked in London’s crowded streets, like plague and other diseases, as well as rioting mobs. When James Burbage died in 1597, his sons completed the Globe’s construction. Shakespeare played a vital role, financially and otherwise, in the construction of the theater, which was finally occupied some time before May 16, 1599. Shakespeare not only acted with the Globe’s company of actors, he was also a shareholder and eventually became the troupe’s most important playwright. The company included London’s most famous actors, who inspired the creation of some of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, such as Hamlet and Lear, as well as his clowns and fools. In his early years, however, Shakespeare did not confine himself to the theater. He also composed some mythological-erotic poetry, such as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, both of which were dedicated to the earl of Southampton. Shakespeare was successful enough that in 1597 he was able to purchase his own home in Stratford, which he called New Place. He could even call himself a gentleman, for his father had been granted a coat of arms. By 1598 Shakespeare had written some of his most famous works, Romeo and Juliet, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Love’s Labour’s Lost, as well as his historical plays Richard II, Richard III, Henry IV, and King John. Somewhere around the turn of the century, Shakespeare wrote his romantic comedies, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Much Ado about Nothing, as well as Henry V, the last of his history plays in the Prince Hal series. During the next ten years he wrote his great tragedies, Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. At this time, the theater was burgeoning in London; the public took an avid interest in drama, the audiences were large, the plays demonstrated an enormous range of subjects, and playwrights competed for approval. By 1613, however, the rising tide of Puritanism had changed the theater. With the desertion of the theaters by the middle classes, the acting companies were compelled to depend more on the aristocracy, which also meant that they now had to cater to a more sophisticated audience. Perhaps this change in London’s artistic atmosphere contributed to Shakespeare’s reasons for leaving London after 1612. His retirement from the theater is sometimes thought to be evidence that his artistic skills were waning. During this time, however, he wrote The Tempest and Henry VIII. He also wrote the “tragicomedies,” Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. These were

Biography of William Shakespeare



thought to be inspired by Shakespeare’s personal problems and have sometimes been considered proof of his greatly diminished abilities. However, so far as biographical facts indicate, the circumstances of his life at this time do not imply any personal problems. He was in good health, was financially secure, and enjoyed an excellent reputation. Indeed, although he was settled in Stratford at this time, he made frequent visits to London, enjoying and participating in events at the royal court, directing rehearsals, and attending to other business matters. In addition to his brilliant and enormous contributions to the theater, Shakespeare remained a poetic genius throughout the years, publishing a renowned and critically acclaimed sonnet cycle in 1609 (most of the sonnets were written many years earlier). Shakespeare’s contribution to this popular poetic genre are all the more amazing in his break with contemporary notions of subject matter. Shakespeare idealized the beauty of man as an object of praise and devotion (rather than the Petrarchan tradition of the idealized, unattainable woman). In the same spirit of breaking with tradition, Shakespeare also treated themes that hitherto had been considered off limits—the dark, sexual side of a woman as opposed to the Petrarchan ideal of a chaste and remote love object. He also expanded the sonnet’s emotional range, including such emotions as delight, pride, shame, disgust, sadness, and fear. When Shakespeare died in 1616, no collected edition of his works had ever been published, although some of his plays had been printed in separate unauthorized editions. (Some of these were taken from his manuscripts, some from the actors’ prompt books, and others were reconstructed from memory by actors or spectators.) In 1623, two members of the King’s Men, John Hemings and Henry Condell, published a collection of all the plays they considered to be authentic, the First Folio. Included in the First Folio is a poem by Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson, an outstanding playwright and critic in his own right. Jonson paid tribute to Shakespeare’s genius, proclaiming his superiority to what previously had been held as the models for literary excellence—the Greek and Latin writers. “Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show / To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. / He was not of an age, but for all time!” Jonson was the first to state what has been said so many times since. Having captured what is permanent and universal to all human beings at all times, Shakespeare’s genius continues to inspire us—and the critical debate about his works never ceases.

Summary of The Winter’s Tale q

Act 1

The first act opens with a brief scene that establishes the intimate bond that exists between Leontes and Polixenes. Camillo discusses with a Bohemian lord the relationship between the two kings, the lord remarking of the friendship that “there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it” (1.1.28). This exchange lays the groundwork for the lengthy scene 2 that follows. Polixenes has been the guest of Leontes’s court for nine months, and his host pleads with him to stay a little longer. Polixenes, however, says he must return home. Having failed to convince his friend to extend his visit, Leontes encourages Hermione to try to persuade Polixenes to stay. Initially, Hermione’s attempt at persuasion falls short, but she quickly wins Polixenes over by lightheartedly stating that he will stay either as a guest or as a prisoner. Once Polixenes is committed to staying, Hermione asks him for stories of his boyhood growing up with Leontes. They were “as twinned lambs,” recalls Polixenes (1.2.69), contributing an early important image of innocence and childhood to the play’s thematic preoccupation with the passing of time. When Leontes asks if Polixenes has been won over yet, he is somewhat surprised that his friend will indeed stay after all: “At my request he would not” (1.2.89). A few lines later, as Hermione and Polixenes take each other’s hand and talk, Leontes seems suddenly struck by the intimacy of the pair. His aside, contained in lines 110 to 122, reveals his jealousy, seemingly flaring like a sudden spark, setting in motion the central dramatic action of the play and centuries of critical controversy. Time and again in the pages of this volume, critics, especially those writing before the twentieth century, portray Leontes’s apparently spontaneous jealousy as inexplicable, some even labeling the transformation as an inferior piece of dramatic writing as the sudden shift is ungrounded in adequate or credible motivation. The play, of course, has no shortage of defenders now, and in the latter sections of this volume, more recent critics will use and account for what had previously been viewed as a terrible flaw in much different ways. Nonetheless, as we hear for the first time the misguided and foolish passions of Leontes, the reader may be surprised and bewildered. Leontes’s distrust 



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quickly grows into the poisonous thought that Mamillius, his son, may not be his actual offspring. Pondering the physical likeness his son holds to him, Leontes nonetheless slides further into a state of paranoia. Once Polixenes and Hermione have retired to the garden, Leontes conjures a lurid and unseemly scenario of fantasies and fears. Hermione, Leontes raves, has been “sluiced,” “fished,” her “gates opened.” Leontes then calls Camillo to the stage, and the name-calling and delusional thinking continue. Much to Camillo’s disgust and disbelief, Leontes speaks of his wife as a “hobby-horse” and a “flax wench,” a common prostitute. Camillo tries to convince Leontes of his grievous misinterpretation of the reality of the situation but to no avail, and the king’s childlike anger is increasingly directed at the hapless Camillo: “I say thou liest, Camillo, and I hate thee” (1.2.302). Camillo’s attempts at reasoning with Leontes necessarily fail, and when Leontes orders Camillo to kill Polixenes, all Camillo can do is pretend to agree. Once Leontes exits, Camillo reveals in a brief soliloquy that Leontes is in “rebellion with himself ”—a key psychological insight—and that the order to kill Polixenes is unnatural and cannot be followed. Camillo believes he has no choice but to flee the court. Polixenes, entering, detects the sudden coolness of Camillo’s manner and reports that Leontes has just contemptuously ignored him. Polixenes demands to know what has caused his sudden loss of favor, and Camillo hesitatingly reveals “[Leontes] swears . . . that you have touched his queen / Forbiddenly” (1.2.414– 417). Having seen the visible hostility creeping into Leontes’s face, Polixenes senses troubled times ahead should he stay in Sicily. Along with Camillo, who is now in Polixenes’s service, the king leaves at once for Bohemia.

Act 2

The second act opens with a few moments of domestic intimacy: Hermione and Mamillius preparing for storytime. However, as Mamillius begins his story—a “sad” tale of “sprites and goblins”—the entrance of Leontes and his lords interrupts and recasts the winter’s tale the boy is telling. Leontes interprets the news of Camillo and Polixenes’s flight as confirmation of his suspicions and confronts Hermione. Emboldened in his doubts, Leontes quickly shifts from commanding that Hermione should not be allowed near Mamillius to bluntly charging that Polixenes is the father of the child she is currently bearing. Hermione eloquently and powerfully defends herself, but Leontes commits her to prison nonetheless. The lords, led by Antigonus, caution Leontes and carefully counsel him against such a decision. They are certain of Hermione’s fidelity, but Leontes retorts that they are dull and naïve. He then announces that he has sent two men to the oracle of Apollo to seek divine confirmation of his suspicions. Paulina visits Hermione in prison, in scene 2, and learns that she has given birth to a girl. Paulina offers to take the infant to Leontes, hoping the sight of the child might assuage his suspicions.

Summary of The Winter’s Tale



At the beginning of scene 3, Mamillius is unwell but appears to be recovering. Leontes is consumed by thoughts of revenge on Hermione, and Paulina’s arrival with the newborn stirs his anger further. As Paulina forcefully argues Hermione’s case, Leontes chastises Paulina’s husband, Antigonus, for failing to control his wife. Paulina’s attacks are pointed and unrelenting, railing against Leontes’s “weak-hinged fancy” (2.3.119). After Paulina’s exit, Leontes orders Antigonus to kill the child by fire, though as the scene closes, the baby’s fate is changed to abandonment in a distant wilderness instead.

Act 3

The third act begins at the oracle and raises anticipation for its judgment. Cleomenes and Dion, unaware of the oracle’s secret response to Leontes’s concerns, hope that good prevails as they return the sealed verdict to Leontes’s court. They marvel at the beauty and grandeur of the ceremonies performed at the temple of Apollo. Scene 2 is punctuated by numerous significant developments and revelations, including Hermione’s trial, the verdict of the oracle, the announced death of Mamillius, and the supposed death of Hermione, all culminating in Leontes’s painful realization of his grave errors in judgment and perception. At the “trial” of Hermione, beginning the scene, the queen mounts an eloquent defense of herself and her honor, pleading rationally that she showed Polixenes only the degree of affection that Leontes himself had requested. Anything less would have been, Hermione points out, “Both disobedience and ingratitude / To you and your friend” (3.2.66–67). When Leontes threatens her with death, Hermione retorts that “The bug which you would fright me with, I seek” (3.2.90); she claims that under the current circumstances she has nothing to live for. Finding that her logic and rational arguments are causing no change in her husband, Hermione requests the verdict of the oracle. The verdict is read and is unambiguous in its defense of Hermione and in its chastisement of Leontes. The divine assessment, however, is not enough for Leontes, who unhesitatingly refutes its validity. A servant then enters, interrupting the action to report the death of Mamillius, news that returns Leontes to his senses at last—“the heavens themselves / Do strike at my injustice” (3.2.144– 145). Hermione experiences an opposite reaction, seemingly leaving her senses and swooning in a corpselike state. Believing he has in a moment lost both a son and a wife, in the scene’s closing lines, Leontes speaks of immediate repentance and painful penitence to come in the years ahead. Though he finally and fully seems torturously aware of his own foolishness, Paulina berates him mercilessly. The action then shifts from Sicily to the pastoral world of Bohemia. Antigonus, fulfilling the orders of Leontes to abandon the infant in the wild, arrives on the coast, lamenting the task at hand. He reveals that Hermione had appeared to him in a dream and instructed him to name the child Perdita,



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meaning “lost,” and that, for his part in the child’s abandonment, he would be punished, never seeing his wife again. Thunder is heard, and Antigonus is chased, to meet his offstage death, by a bear. Meanwhile, a storm has wrecked Antigonus’s ship and stranded the crew off the coast. The Old Shepherd enters and finds Perdita, believing she is a changeling. He is soon followed by his son, the Clown, a term of the day suggesting a rustic or rube. They agree to take the infant home with them.

Act 4

The fourth act begins with the entrance of Time heralding the passing of sixteen years. Still in Bohemia, more than a decade and a half later, Camillo longs to return home to Sicily, but Polixenes pleads for him to stay. Talk soon turns to Polixenes’s son, Florizel, who has been little seen at court. They discuss how Florizel has been drawn to the Old Shepherd’s home and his “daughter of most rare note” (4.3.36). Concerned that all is not well, they plan to disguise themselves and visit the Shepherd’s home to investigate further. Autolycus, picking the pocket of the Clown, is introduced. The action ushers in the festive and much-celebrated sheepshearing of scene 4. Even when the play was out of favor in the eighteenth century and virtually every aspect of it lampooned and derided, the beauty and pastoral poetry of this scene was greatly admired (see David Garrick’s “rewrite” of the play based largely on just this scene in the volume’s section on eighteenth-century criticism). The scene is a long one, with incidents of narrative importance representing only a small fraction of it. Much of the scene is propelled by the force of Shakespeare’s writing and hailed for its depiction of ordinary folk enjoying the celebration of summer’s abundance. Dancing and festivity intermingle with Autolycus’s gulling of the rustics with the sale of his trinkets and ballads. As the scene progresses, Polixenes becomes an unfestive, repellant force, as his efforts to thwart the budding relationship of Florizel and Perdita (who, to the best of Polixenes’s and everyone else’s knowledge, is the daughter of a shepherd, not the daughter of the king of Sicily) reach a crisis point. Polixenes unmasks himself and forbids the marriage, threatening the Old Shepherd with a traitor’s death for his role in the romance (lines 405–410). He bars Florizel from visiting Perdita, threatening the girl of “enchantment” with death should she break this new commandment. After Polixenes leaves the stage, Perdita is heartbroken that the discovery she long feared has at last been made. Florizel, however, is determined that they will stay together, even if that means taking flight and leaving Bohemia (450–455). Camillo offers his guidance, urging them to go to Sicily and present themselves to Leontes. This is, he argues, a much safer and more cautious plan than simply running off to a random, unknown destination. However, though Camillo has good intentions in this scene, he hopes to exploit the opportunity as his chance to see Sicily once again (495–501; 645–650). His plan is to tell

Summary of The Winter’s Tale



Polixenes of the couple’s flight and travel with the king in pursuit to Sicily. The intermingling of Camillo’s speech with Autolycus’s boasting (584–602) suggests a commonality or a connection between these two figures.

Act 5

The fifth act opens in Sicily, with Leontes still performing a “saint-like sorrow” (as one of his lords calls it) for his sins. Cleomenes and Dion, Leontes’s courtiers, try to persuade Leontes to remarry and produce an heir, but Paulina advocates ferociously against this advice: “There is none worthy / respecting her that’s gone” (5.1.34–35). Florizel and Perdita arrive at court, and Leontes is struck by the resemblance Florizel bears to the younger Polixenes. However, no sooner has Leontes greeted the young lovers than news arrives that Polixenes is also in the city and demanding the arrest of his son. Florizel pleads with Leontes to intervene with Polixenes on their behalf, and the scene closes with Leontes agreeing to advocate for the young pair. The second scene of the fifth act marks a shift in the narration’s mode, as Shakespeare relies on the potentially undramatic device of telling and describing rather than showing and enacting on the stage. The powerful meeting that occurred between the two kings is related and the emotional discovery of Perdita as Leontes’s daughter. As some critics have suggested, Shakespeare may have adopted this course as a matter of economy, in order to condense the action into a series of exchanges between characters who had witnessed aspects of the remarkable scene. Alternately, Shakespeare may have been concerned that, structurally, staging the reunion would lessen the dramatic impact of the play’s final scene and the resurrection of Hermione. The act’s third and concluding scene is set at Paulina’s house, where she has promised to unveil a statue of Hermione. When Leontes sees the life-sized rendering, he is struck by its likeness, though he notes that “Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems” (5.3.27–28). With this revelation, Shakespeare suggests that the miracle about to unfold, Hermione’s return to life, though powerful, cannot undo or stem the overwhelming force and power of Time, cannot bring about total reconciliation or reestablish familial bliss in the face of the decay and loss that have preceded any potentially happy ending. Leontes continues to marvel at the artwork, longs to kiss the statue, and Paulina toys with her audience by threatening to draw the curtains around the statue in case it is stirring passions too great and painful. Promising that her art is not a dark one, she suggests she can animate the statue and bring it to life. To the sounds of musical accompaniment, Hermione appears to move slowly back to life, followed by an insistence on not dwelling on any reasonable and rational explication of the magical events just staged. Such details will, Paulina asserts, “trouble / your joys” (5.3.130–131). This concluding scene operates in reverse

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of the preceding scene that involved telling what has happened as opposed to actually showing it on the stage. Here, in an important inversion, showing and enacting are privileged over telling. Though the spirit of romance prevails in the play’s final moments, beneath the veneer of miracle, wonder, and wish fulfillment, the difficulties that have marked the relations of the two clans still exist.

Key Passages in The Winter’s Tale q

Act 1, 2, 130–148

Thou want’st a rough pash and the shoots that I have, To be full like me: yet they say we are Almost as like as eggs; women say so, That will say anything but were they false As o’er-dyed blacks, as wind, as waters, false As dice are to be wish’d by one that fixes No bourn ’twixt his and mine, yet were it true To say this boy were like me. Come, sir page, Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain! Most dear’st! my collop! Can thy dam?—may’t be?— Affection! thy intention stabs the centre: Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicatest with dreams;—how can this be?— With what’s unreal thou coactive art, And fellow’st nothing: then ’tis very credent Thou mayst co-join with something; and thou dost, And that beyond commission, and I find it, And that to the infection of my brains And hardening of my brows. This passage follows Leontes’s initial expressions of jealousy, exploring the suspicion as it begins to take shape seemingly in an instant. It is a fevered and somewhat disconnected speech that mirrors the erratic logic it attempts to outline. Having just asked Mamillius “art thou my calf?” (to which the innocent boy replies: “Yes, if you will, my lord”), Leontes begins by saying that his son lacks the horns of the cuckold (a husband betrayed by his unfaithful wife). Despite this difference, Leontes continues, he and his son do indeed resemble each other strongly; or, rather, a strong resemblance has been observed by women, and women, Leontes’s troubled mind suggests, cannot be trusted. They are as unreliable and inconstant as the winds or the oceans. 11

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These slanderous observations give way in the middle of the passage to a much more complex—but still disoriented—attempt by Leontes to understand the nature of the passionate jealousy that has seized him. Leontes’s sudden surge of jealousy has been much assailed by critics of the play as shoddy craftsmanship on Shakespeare’s part. The reasonable and understandable motives required to compel a character to act (a fundamental aspect, these critics assume, of storytelling) appear absent here. Leontes instead lurches from normalcy and civility into manic jealousy with a sudden “too hot, too hot.” Modern critics, equipped with the language of Freud and psychoanalysis, have attempted to explore this sudden behavioral shift more as a psychic aberration rather than a lapse in Shakespeare’s handling of basic dramatic structure. Explanations or justifications for Leontes’s rapid transformation need not stray too far into the realms of clinical diagnosis and psychological malady, however. Shakespeare, from the beginning of his career, had been interested in the shifting, unstable nature of identity and feeling, echoes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses influencing his literary creations. Just as the four lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream vacillate in their love for one another, so too does Leontes unexpectedly fall through the cracks of reason. Shakespeare at times attempted to portray people as prone to arbitrary acts and spontaneous lapses of self-possession—this may, in fact, be the play’s main subject and thematic preoccupation. By introducing one character’s sudden descent into all-consuming jealousy, the two halves of the play become more tightly bound as a result. The magic and miraculous happenings that predominate, starting with Time’s entrance in the fourth act, is here paralleled by an equally mysterious occurrence, a quirk of human behavior. The great redemptive force denoted by the change that occurs to the statue of Hermione is anticipated by the negative transformation of Leontes the passage relates. After all, Leontes imagines the power of his passion to “make possible things not so held,” and he understands how his blazing imagination is “coactive” with the “unreal.” As he will put it later in the play, “All’s true that is mistrusted” (2.1.50). Here, the destructive aspects of the imagination and of the fantastical will be complemented and transformed by the restorative possibilities on display at the end of the play. Leontes’s quickly materializing passion is part of the play’s strategy and schematic of mirroring light and dark. The interplay of such elements emerges as a central motif of the play.

QQQ Act 3, 3, 103–123

Shepherd: Heavy matters! heavy matters! but look thee here, boy. Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn. Here’s a sight for thee; look thee, a bearing-cloth for a squire’s

Key Passages in The Winter’s Tale

13

child! look thee here; take up, take up, boy; open’t. So, let’s see: it was told me I should be rich by the fairies. This is some changeling: open’t. What’s within, boy? Clown: You’re a made old man: if the sins of your youth are forgiven you, you’re well to live. Gold! all gold! Shepherd: This is fairy gold, boy, and ’twill prove so: up with’t, keep it close: home, home, the next way. We are lucky, boy; and to be so still requires nothing but secrecy. Let my sheep go: come, good boy, the next way home. Clown: Go you the next way with your findings. I’ll go see if the bear be gone from the gentleman and how much he hath eaten: they are never curst but when they are hungry: if there be any of him left, I’ll bury it. Shepherd: That’s a good deed. If thou mayest discern by that which is left of him what he is, fetch me to the sight of him. Clown: Marry, will I; and you shall help to put him i’ the ground. Shepherd: ’ Tis a lucky day, boy, and we’ll do good deeds on’t. Exeunt This passage captures the blending and interplay of comedy and tragedy that characterizes The Winter’s Tale: “thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn.” The play can be seen as a meditation on the notions conveyed in this particular line: the cycles of life and the steady, inevitable passage of time that both destroys and creates. An infant begins her life onstage while an old man violently loses his life offstage. The bear has naturally been seen by many critics as emblematic of a kind of wild and untamable nature—along with the storm that wreck Antigonus’ ship and crew—and that this intensifies the idea of a natural, organic world that is both a nurturing cradle and a ferocious predator to each of us in turn. In this way, the bear becomes another embodiment of the figure of Time about to enter the action at the beginning of the next act. Others have more pragmatically noted that Shakespeare may have simply been creating an opportunity to interject a crowd-pleasing element into his play, a live bear, a common feature of popular entertainment on London’s South Bank, where many theaters were located. The passage, preoccupied with the ebb and flow of life throughout, closes with a barbed, funny, and sad joke. Having just discussed the likely progress of the bear in eating Antigonus, as well as some makeshift burial arrangements for

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what remains of the old courtier, the Shepherd and his son depart the stage with the line: “ ’Tis a lucky day, boy, and we’ll do good deeds on’t.” What is perhaps most fascinating about how The Winter’s Tale merges comedy and tragedy, however, is the romance context. The juxtaposition of the infant Perdita and the dying Antigonus emerges as a blunt summation or condensation, in a single dramatic moment, of the realities that underpin existence and of the cycles and forces that govern human lives. As if to temper and soften the grim aspect of this rapid life-death transition, the play is couched, ultimately, in the possibilities of miracle and magic. The Old Shepherd’s speech, after all, quickly turns from his remark on things both dying and newborn to the promises of fairies and fairy gold. The world of the play—like our own—is one in which people are born, grow old, and die. To counterbalance this strain of realism are the romance and fantasy that Shakespeare also integrates into his play. The magical and miraculous overlap with and numb the pain contained in the world of reality. The passage signals the play’s embrace of the ethereal and its temporary rejection of the fatal cycle just witnessed. “Let my sheep go,” says the Old Shepherd, turning his back on the responsibilities and symbols of the everyday.

QQQ Act 4, 1, 1–32

I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error, Now take upon me, in the name of Time, To use my wings. Impute it not a crime To me or my swift passage, that I slide O’er sixteen years and leave the growth untried Of that wide gap, since it is in my power To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour To plant and o’erwhelm custom. Let me pass The same I am, ere ancient’st order was Or what is now received: I witness to The times that brought them in; so shall I do To the freshest things now reigning and make stale The glistering of this present, as my tale Now seems to it. Your patience this allowing, I turn my glass and give my scene such growing As you had slept between: Leontes leaving, The effects of his fond jealousies so grieving That he shuts up himself, imagine me, Gentle spectators, that I now may be

Key Passages in The Winter’s Tale

15

In fair Bohemia, and remember well, I mentioned a son o’ the king’s, which Florizel I now name to you; and with speed so pace To speak of Perdita, now grown in grace Equal with wondering: what of her ensues I list not prophecy; but let Time’s news Be known when ’tis brought forth. A shepherd’s daughter, And what to her adheres, which follows after, Is the argument of Time. Of this allow, If ever you have spent time worse ere now; If never, yet that Time himself doth say He wishes earnestly you never may. This speech marks one of the play’s most remarkable and memorable moments. The appearance of Time onstage to herald the passing of sixteen years is to many modern audiences an effective device, but for earlier generations of playgoers and critics it was an unwelcome intrusion that for many highlighted the faults of The Winter’s Tale. Many of the critics in the initial selections included in this volume lament that Shakespeare fails to observe the classical unities of time and place in The Winter’s Tale, the idea that a play’s action should occur in one location and unfurl over the course of no more than twenty-four hours. The appearance of the figure of Time, thus, becomes potentially emblematic of those “failures” of time management on Shakespeare’s part. In the eighteenth century, actor and writer David Garrick produced a popular and successful version of the play without including the entire first half of Shakespeare’s text and, of course, the appearance of Time. The action took place entirely in Bohemia on the day of the sheepshearing festival. To omit Time’s presence, however, arguably removes from the play its central character, its main actor. The Winter’s Tale is a prolonged and concentrated ref lection on the effects and meanings of time; so it is more than fitting that Time’s embodiment should take to the stage. Time’s lines serve several functions beyond merely suggesting the temporal realm ever looming over human life. The passage begins with a brief reminder of the oscillating nature of chance and fate explored moments earlier in the dialogue between the Old Shepherd and the Clown. Moreover, as many observe, Time functions as a chorus here, reporting what has happened to the characters and what the setting will be when the action resumes. Thus, Time’s appearance serves a practical function in furthering and advancing the plot. But the bulk of Time’s lines are dedicated to defending his appearance onstage, asking that we “Impute it not a crime” that he appears and, by extension, that Shakespeare is breaching the Aristotelian unities that informed classical

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drama. The passage, then, can be interpreted as an expression of dramatic theory, a call for invention over convention and a reminder, as Ezra Pound would write of the artist’s calling many centuries later, to “make it new.” “It is in my power,” reports Time, “To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour / To plant and o’erwhelm custom.” Time serves as a figure of artistic change, a reminder that the cycles of creation and erosion that govern life should also steer art away from dusty orthodoxy and dogma toward new ways of thinking and creating instead. Nonetheless, he suggests, the new and avant-garde will eventually become the stale conventions of the future, eventually in need of replacement and transformation themselves.

QQQ Act 5, 3, 123–156

Hermione: You gods, look down And from your sacred vials pour your graces Upon my daughter’s head! Tell me, mine own. Where hast thou been preserved? where lived? how found Thy father’s court? for thou shalt hear that I, Knowing by Paulina that the oracle Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserved Myself to see the issue. Paulina: There’s time enough for that; Lest they desire upon this push to trouble Your joys with like relation. Go together, You precious winners all; your exultation Partake to every one. I, an old turtle, Will wing me to some wither’d bough and there My mate, that’s never to be found again, Lament till I am lost. Leontes: O, peace, Paulina! Thou shouldst a husband take by my consent, As I by thine a wife: this is a match, And made between’s by vows. Thou hast found mine; But how, is to be question’d; for I saw her, As I thought, dead, and have in vain said many A prayer upon her grave. I’ll not seek far— For him, I partly know his mind—to find thee An honourable husband. Come, Camillo, And take her by the hand, whose worth and honesty Is richly noted and here justified By us, a pair of kings. Let’s from this place.

Key Passages in The Winter’s Tale

17

What! look upon my brother: both your pardons, That e’er I put between your holy looks My ill suspicion. This is your son-in-law, And son unto the king, who, heavens directing, Is troth-plight to your daughter. Good Paulina, Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely Each one demand an answer to his part Perform’d in this wide gap of time since first We were dissever’d: hastily lead away. Exeunt This is yet another episode from the play that riled critics for centuries. Many found the idea to be ludicrous that Hermione might play dead, hide in Paulina’s house for sixteen years while Leontes pitifully lamented his errors, finally emerging in a gimmicky, stage-managed event. If the debate centers solely on realism and plausibility, of course, the scene is all but indefensible in that regard. But Shakespeare indicates in the scene that we should not be thinking in those precise terms. The predictions of the oracle, the appearance of Time onstage, and removing the play’s action to the festive and pastoral world of Bohemia all strongly indicate that the play has abandoned the language of realism in search of other aesthetic discourses through which human life may be explored. Nonetheless, without the familiar and safe grounding of realism to rely on, this scene and its meanings are as difficult to reach as they are rewarding. Paulina’s claim to those around her, at the heart of the episode, that they are “precious winners all,” is particularly noteworthy. Concrete details about the events transpiring are specifically and deliberately withheld, and so her assertion becomes the absolute statement of the episode. Certainly, on one level, the play embraces the conventions of comedy and romance in moving toward a fully restorative ending. Against remarkable odds (in the case of Florizel and Perdita) and counter to reason itself (in the case of Hermione and Leontes), the couples have been safely brought together. Even Paulina is awarded a husband to ensure no one is left alone at the feast of comic reconciliation. But critics have registered at least two major challenges to this harmonious picture. First, some have argued that the aging of Leontes and Hermione, represented in the text most vividly by Leontes’s surprise at the wrinkles on Hermione’s statue, encourages us to think that the couple’s remaining time with which to enjoy their miraculous reunion may be limited. This mitigates the initial joy prompted by their reuniting and makes the comic resolution more limited and less satisfying than it initially seems. The essential nature of the resolution, with its reliance on the motifs of magic and miracle, forces us, upon reflection, to see not happiness in the conclusion of the play but sadness. The characters on the stage may indeed be “winners all,” but in reality the dead do not rise and those who have ventured

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off to other parts of the world are not necessarily returned to the fold. In this way, the play is an indulgence, a fantasy whose initial joy dissipates into wistful melancholy as the dream fades and the audience meditates on the ramifications and potential far-reaching results of what has just transpired.

List of Characters in The Winter’s Tale q Leontes: The king of Sicily; Leontes’s sudden attack of jealousy is at the heart of the play’s developing narrative. He accuses Hermione of infidelity with Polixenes in the first act, and the play partially charts his journey of atonement and absolution. Hermione: Wife of Leontes and innocent victim of his suspicions, Hermione is likely intended to be an idealized Renaissance woman, chaste and obedient to the point of seeming dead. Her “return” from the dead, however—the details of which are kept deliberately mysterious—have prompted literal-minded critics to pose questions about the character of a woman who could conceal herself for sixteen years in order to punish a repentant husband. Mamillius: Son of Leontes and Hermione, his innocence stands in sharp contrast to his father’s dark suspicions. As many critics have discussed, Mamillius becomes the embodiment of youth in a play that is concerned with time and generations. Some of these critics remind us that Mamillius is, by the end of the play, the central “loser,” the child sacrificed on the altar of Leontes’s destructive passion. Resurrection from death is not a miraculous rite reserved for him. Perdita: Daughter of Leontes and Hermione, she is abandoned to the coast of Bohemia on the orders of her father. Her discovery by the Old Shepherd, unlikely union with Florizel, and eventual return to her family make up a significant component of the play’s narrative thread influenced by magic and miracle. As she is portrayed in the sheepshearing scene, Perdita, like her mother, is an idealized emblem of womanhood but also a festive “queen of curds and cream,” as Camillo dubs her. Camillo: A chief lord of Leontes’s court, Camillo was much admired by readers of the play during the age of moral criticism. They saw in him an example of admirable behavior and stability in a play that otherwise offered little in those regards.

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Antigonus: Another lord in Leontes’s court, Antigonus emerges as an ambiguous figure and is, as some see it, punished for his faults with one of the most notorious death scenes in all of Shakespeare. How are we to feel about this otherwise congenial old man who follows dutifully Leontes’s barbaric orders to abandon Perdita and is torn to pieces by a bear as a result? Paulina: Wife of Antigonus, Paulina is one of the play’s most remarkable creations. One critic has likened her to a midwife figure, a kind of surrogate or stand-in figure for the dramatist who births or brings about the miraculous restoration at the play’s close. She is a sharp-tongued presence, prodding and poking Leontes’s emotional and psychological wounds for years after his wrongdoing, only to have harbored Hermione the whole time and conspired in the deferral of the couple’s reconciliation. Polixenes: King of Bohemia, Polixenes is an innocent object of Leontes’s jealousy in the first half of the play but in the second half assumes the classic role of antagonist by becoming the “blocking” character standing between two young lovers, Perdita and his son Florizel. Florizel: Son of Polixenes and eventual husband of Perdita, Florizel is seen by many critics as a symbolic replacement of Mamillius at the play’s end in order to complete the restoration of Leontes’s family. Throughout the play, this idealizing and fervent young man helps embody the theme of generations that is also discussed in depth by many critics of the play. Autolycus: Some have argued that Autolycus fits awkwardly into the play, not clearly forwarding the narrative in any way. Given this observation, Shakespeare possibly had comic and/or thematic intentions for including him in the cast of characters. The knavish, trickster figure cheats the rural folk out of their pennies in return for trinkets and songs. Significantly, like the play itself, his shift to inhabiting a pastoral realm is preceded by a fall from grace in the world of the court and the halls of government, and now he wanders as a representative of the untamed and unchecked festive spirit that so deeply informs the play’s latter acts. Old Shepherd: This rustic figure, the man who finds the infant Perdita and raises her in Bohemia, embodies the pastoral spirit of Bohemia. Clown: Son of the Old Shepherd and fulfilling a similar thematic function, the clown’s exchanges with Autolycus are some of the wittiest in the play.

List of Characters in The Winter’s Tale

21

Time: Time’s remarkable, once condemned and now commonly heralded, appearance in the play functions in a variety of ways, from offering a choruslike exposition to serving as an emblem of new and avant-garde dramatic sensibilities.

Criticism Through the Ages

q

The Winter’s Tale in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries q

Though there are reports of early successes for productions of The Winter’s Tale, it is clear that by the second half of the seventeenth century the play had developed a reputation for outlandishness and eccentricity. Included in this section, the great Alexander Pope goes as far as to express doubt that Shakespeare wrote very much of the play at all, so little of it seeming worthy of his genius. In the first of the selections, John Dryden writes: “I suppose I need not name Pericles, Prince of Tyre, nor the historical plays of Shakespeare: besides many of the rest, as the Winter’s Tale . . . ,” all seem to him “grounded on impossibilities.” Maurice Hunt points out the implications of Dryden’s dismissive “I suppose I need not name” as evidence of an already entrenched perception of and bias toward The Winter’s Tale—along with a group of other plays by Shakespeare—as clumsily fantastical. This critical position should perhaps come as no surprise. From the Restoration to the eighteenth century, the fashions of stagecraft underwent significant changes. The result was a style of drama often referred to as neoclassical, the conventions of which were rooted in the principles of Aristotle’s Poetics. These principles were centered on Aristotle’s ideas of decorum, including rigorous rules for employing elements of space and time. The principles demanded a kind of focus and concentration of dramatic action into short periods of time (not the amount of time it took to perform the play but rather the amount of time covered by the play’s story; the pure ideal was a story arc of no more than one day) and space (a single location was preferable). These principles and conventions were widely known in Shakespeare’s day (referenced most notably by Sir Phillip Sidney in his Defence of Poesy) but not rigorously heeded or followed. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, Aristotle’s dictates had migrated from dramatic theory into dramatic practice. We can easily see, then, why The Winter’s Tale would appear fundamentally flawed to such an age. By the second half of the eighteenth century, several reworkings of the play had appeared onstage, stripping it of its unacceptable and indecorous components. Several passages from one such reimagining of The Winter’s Tale, David Garrick’s Florizel and Perdita, are included in this section. 25

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However, as Dryden’s writings indicate, it was not merely Shakespeare’s liberal use of time and space that prompted criticism during this period. The plot was widely seen as eccentric or badly rendered. A number of episodes from the play drew particular ire and, in some cases, ridicule. The preservation and resurrection of Hermione, for example, was frequently cited as an embarrassing narrative resolution, while the death of Antigonus at the hands of the now infamous bear seems to have become a symbol of the play’s perceived narrative faults. Charlotte Lennox’s response to the play provides a witty and admirably comprehensive attack on the play’s “paltry story.”

1670—John Dryden. From “Defence of the Epilogue,” contained in The Conquest of Granada Dryden (1631–1700) was a preeminent man of letters in the Restoration period. His most celebrated plays include Marriage a-la-Mode (1672) and All for Love (1678). The following brief excerpt comes from an essay critiquing the drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. “I profess to have no other ambition in this essay,” Dryden writes, “than that poetry may not go backward, when all other arts and sciences are advancing.” A significant part of Dryden’s critique centers on the issue of plotting, and it is on this count that, to him, The Winter’s Tale fails to satisfy.

But the times were ignorant in which they [the dramatists of Shakespeare Age] lived. Poetry was then, if not in its infancy among us, at least not arrived to its vigor and maturity: Witness the lameness of their plots; many of which, especially those which they writ first (for even that age refined itself in some measure), were made up of some ridiculous incoherent story, which in one play many times took up the business of its age. I suppose I need not name Pericles, Prince of Tyre, nor the historical plays of Shakespeare: besides many of the rest, as the Winter’s Tale, Love’s Labour Lost, Measure for Measure, which were either grounded on impossibilities, or at least so meanly written, that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious part your concernment.

QQQ

1725—Alexander Pope. From the preface to The Works of Shakespeare Pope (1688–1744) was one of the major writers of the eighteenth century. His works include The Rape of the Lock (1712) and his 1734 Essay on

The Winter’s Tale in the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries

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Man. In the following brief excerpt, Pope subscribes to the view of The Winter’s Tale that dominated in this period.

. . . had Shakespeare published his works himself (especially in his latter time, and after his retreat from the stage) we should not only be certain which are genuine but should find in that are the errors lessened by some thousands. If I may judge from all the distinguishing marks of his style and his manner of thinking and writing, I make no doubt to declare that those wretched plays, Pericles, Locrine, Sir John Oldcastle, Yorkshire Tragedy, Lord Cromwell, the Puritan, and London Prodigal, cannot be admitted his. And I should conjecture of some of the others (particularly Love’s Labor’s Lost, The Winter’s Tale, and Titus Andronicus) that only some characters, single scenes or perhaps a few particular passages were of his hand. It is very probable what occasioned some plays to be supposed Shakespeare’s was only this: that they were pieces produced by unknown authors or fitted up for the theater while it was under his administration; and no owner claiming them, they were adjudged to him, as they give strays to the lord of the manor . . .

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1753—Charlotte Lennox. From Shakespeare Illustrated Lennox (ca. 1727–1804) wrote novels, poems, plays and criticism. Her most celebrated and best-known novel, The Female Quixote (1752), was written around the same time that she published the study of Shakespeare’s relation to his sources excerpted here. In this section, Lennox compares Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale to its source text, Robert Greene’s prose Romance Pandosto (1588). Lennox wittily assails Shakespeare’s narrative inventions, including the “good-natured” bear that kills Antigonus but makes possible the events of the play that follow.

All this conversation [between Hermione and Polixenes in 1.2] passes in the presence of Leontes, who from hence takes occasion to be jealous, and passes in an instant from the greatest confidence, security and friendship imaginable, to the last extremity of jealousy and rage. What wonderful contrivance is here? The legerdemain [trickery], who shows you a tree that buds, blossoms and bears ripe fruit in the space of five minutes, does not put so great a cheat on the senses as Shakespeare does on the understanding; for this jealousy of one minute’s growth we see take root before our eyes, and so far from there being the smallest progression in the several actions of budding, blossoming and bearing ripe fruit, that we have the first and the last at one and the same instant.

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The extravagant effects of the King’s rage and jealousy are carried far enough in all confidence in the novel, and Shakespeare is not a whit more moderate; only he has altered a circumstance which entirely destroys the little probability the novelist had preserved in the relation. In the story, the King being in own mind firmly persuaded of the Queen’s guilt, orders her to be imprisoned, and the daughter that was delivered of in the prison to burn; at the intreaties of his courtiers he reverses the sentence past on the child, and commands it to be exposed in a boat, but declares that his queen shall die. She insists upon being confronted with her accusers, whereupon she is brought to trial; but finding she was likely to meet with no justice in a court over-ruled by the power of her husband, she on her knees protests her innocence and intreats the King to consult the oracle of Apollo concerning the crimes of which she was accused. This so reasonable a request being made in open court, the King could not refuse it, and therefore sends ambassadors to Delphos; who return with the answer of the God; which, being read, declares her innocence, and the King is satisfied. Shakespeare makes the King in the height of his frenzy of jealousy send himself to the Oracle of Apollo, and in the meantime commit the most barbarous cruelties on his Queen and child. How inconsistent is this! Why does he consult the Oracle if he is resolved to proceed to extremities before the answer arrives? The request comes very naturally from the Queen in the novel, and the King’s compliance with it is very well accounted for, but in the play nothing can be more absurd than that the King should be reasonable enough to consult voluntarily with the gods concerning the infidelity of his wife; and while the answer was expected, and her guilt yet doubtful, punish her with as much rigor as if the Oracle had declared her an adultress. Here again the paltry story has the advantage of the play. Let us go on and examine a few more incidents. . . . . . . In the play, Antigonus, who is bound by oath to leave the child in some desert place quite out of its father’s dominions, is warned in a dream by its unhappy mother to call the infant Perdita, and carry it to Bohemia, and leave it there. Antigonus obeys, and this done, it is absolutely necessary he should never return to Sicily, otherwise it may be discovered where the princess is left, and all the future adventures would fall to the ground, therefore a bear rushes out of the woods and devours him; the good-natured bear, as it should seem, resolved not to spoil the story, passes by the little princess, who is to make so great a figure hereafter, and a convenient storm arising, splits the ship in which she was brought thither, so that all the sailors perishing, though they were near enough the shore to have saved themselves, no one is left to carry back any account of the affair to Sicily, and thereby prevent the adventures which are to follow.

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All this is very wonderful: Shakespeare multiplies miracle upon miracle to bring about the same events in the play, which chance, with much more propriety, performs in the novel.

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1756—David Garrick. From Florizel and Perdita. A Dramatic Pastoral in Three Acts, Altered from The Winter’s Tale of Shakespeare Garrick (1717–1779) was a key figure in eighteenth-century English theater. His reworking of The Winter’s Tale, titled Florizel and Perdita, significantly reduces and restructures the action of Shakespeare’s play in order to better reflect the theatrical tastes of the day. Garrick’s revisions give insight into what his age liked about Shakespeare’s original and what it did not like; in this sense, Garrick’s play is a work of creative criticism. As discussed in the introduction to this section, the eighteenth century highly valued the dramatic unities of place and time that stipulated a play’s action should occur in one location and its narrative unravel in a dramatic time of no more than a day, conventions that are sensationally disregarded in The Winter’s Tale. Garrick, then, attempts to construct a version of the play, using a mixture of Shakespeare’s text and his own additions, that honors these conventions by setting the action in Bohemia on the day of the sheepshearing festival (from act 4 onward in Shakespeare’s text). Garrick drops the first half of Shakespeare’s play entirely, the jealousies of Leontes along with the death of Antigonus and the appearance of Time. Instead, Leontes travels to Bohemia sixteen years after the apparent death of Hermione to seek forgiveness from Polixenes, Camillo, and Paulina (who in Garrick’s version had fled with Polixenes). The events of Shakespeare’s first half are reported to us in dialogue at the start of Garrick’s revision. The first passage is from Garrick’s “Prologue,” heaping praise on Shakespeare but also highlighting the need for fundamental changes to The Winter’s Tale in order to please his audience’s “taste.” Garrick’s final claim, however, is gloriously ironic. The second passage is one of Garrick’s additions to the text. Leontes has been traveling to Bohemia but is caught in a storm—much like the one that destroys the crew of Antigonus’s ship in Shakespeare’s original, right down to the eyewitness descriptions from the Clown. Leontes arrives, miraculously saved, on the shores of Bohemia. The passage

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The Winter’s Tale and narrative alterations it represents allow Garrick to maintain the unity of place, but the lines also function to demonstrate Leontes’s emotional suffering. This is a challenge, as Garrick must represent this inner state without having depicted the events of the first several acts of Shakespeare’s play. The third and final passage is an additional song added by Garrick to his sheepshearing scene. In Shakespeare’s original, act 4, scene 4 already contains several songs and dances, so the addition of an entire song—longer than any in Shakespeare’s original scene—indicates Garrick’s desire to intensify the festive nature of the scene. The song is a simplistic espousal of rustic life—the values apparently on display in the original scene that were so attractive to Garrick—over more cosmopolitan ways of living.

This Shakespeare! Shakespeare! Oh, there’s nothing like him! In this night’s various, and enchanted cup, Some little Perry’s mixed for filling up. The five long acts, from which our three are taken, Stretch’d out to sixteen years, lay by, forsaken. Lest then this precious liquor run to waste, ’Tis now confined and bottled for your taste. ’Tis my chief wish, my joy, my only plan, To lose no drop of that immortal man! Leontes: Say’st thou Bohemia? Ye gods, Bohemia! In every act your judgments are sent forth Against Leontes!—Here to be wreck’d and sav’d Upon this coast!—Al the wrongs I have done, Stir now afresh within me—Did I not Upon this coast expose my harmless infant— Bid Polixenes (falsly deem’d the father) To take his child—O hell born jealousy! All but myself most innocent—and now Upon this coast—Pardon, Hermione! ’Twas this that sped thee to thy proper heav’n; If from thy sainted seat above the clouds, Thou see’st my weary pilgrimage thro’ life, Loath’d, hated life, ’cause unenjoy’d with thee— Look down, and pity me. Come, come, my good shepherds, our flocks we must shear; In your holy-day suits, with your lasses appear:

The Winter’s Tale in the Seventeeth and Eighteenth Centuries

The happiest of folk, are the guiltless and free, And who are so guiltless, so happy as we? We harbour no passions, by luxury taught; We practice no arts, with hypocricy fraught; What we think in our hearts, you may read in our eyes; For knowing no falsehood, we need no disguise. By mode and caprice are the city dames led, But we, as the children of nature are bred; By her hand alone, we are painted and dress’d; For the roses will bloom, when there’s peace in the breast. That giant, ambition, we never can dread; Our roofs are too low, for so lofty a head; Content and sweet chearfulness open our door, They smile with the simple, and feed with the poor. When love has possess’d us, that love we reveal; Like the flocks that we feed, are the passions we feel; So harmless and simple we sport, and we play, And leave to fine folks to deceive and betray.

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The Winter’s Tale in the Nineteenth Century q Though we must be careful not to turn individual statements about a piece of literature into a complete or generalized history of its reception, a new way of talking and thinking about The Winter’s Tale clearly emerges in the nineteenth century. The more established criticisms persisted, but in the romantic period the play found a warmer reception. After all, if much about the play was fundamentally at odds with the aesthetic values of neoclassicism in the eighteenth century, with its desire for purity of form, The Winter’s Tale was more reflective of the romantic period’s core values of beauty and imagination. The play embodies these two tenets with its boundless sweeps of emotion, time, and fantasy. Each of the critical statements included in this section reveals increasingly bold defenses of The Winter’s Tale. These romantic critics leave behind what they perceive as the pedantic and nit-picking approaches that were the hallmark of preceding generations. For them, Shakespeare’s very escape from “realism” and decorum opens up boundless artistic possibilities. Charles Cowden Clarke brings to mind Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” when he refers to the sheepshearing scene as “like a Grecian bas-relief.” It seems that the romantics found in The Winter’s Tale exactly what Keats observed in the timeless figures of his urn: beauty and truth.

1817—William Hazlitt. From Characters of Shakespear’s Plays Hazlitt (1778–1830) was a foremost literary critic of his age. In his remarks here on The Winter’s Tale, Hazlitt shuns the commonplaces of the previous century and stresses the “beauties” he finds in the play. He even comments on the skill with which Shakespeare conveys Leontes’s passion, a departure from the standard fixation with the inadequate motivation fueling the king’s sudden descent into jealousy.

We wonder that Mr. Pope should have entertained doubts of the genuineness of this play. He was, we suppose, shocked (as a certain critic suggests) 33

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at the Chorus, Time, leaping over sixteen years with his crutch between the third and fourth act, and at Antigonus’s landing with the infant Perdita on the seacoast of Bohemia. These slips or blemishes, however, do not prove it not to be Shakespeare’s; for he was as likely to fall into them as anybody; but we do not know anybody but himself who could produce the beauties. The stuff of which the tragic passion is composed, the romantic sweetness, the comic humour, are evidently his. Even the crabbed and tortuous style of the speeches of Leontes, reasoning on his own jealousy, beset with doubts and fears, and entangled more and more in the thorny labyrinth, bears every mark of Shakespeare’s peculiar manner of conveying the painful struggle of different thoughts and feelings, labouring for utterance, and almost strangled in the birth. For instance: ‘Ha’ not you seen, Camillo? (But that’s past doubt; you have, or your eye-glass Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn) or heard, (For to a vision so apparent, rumour Cannot be mute) or thought (for cogitation Resides not within man that does not think) My wife is slippery? If thou wilt, confess, Or else be impudently negative, To have nor eyes, nor ears, nor thought.—’ Here Leontes is confounded with his passion, and does not know which way to turn himself, to give words to the anguish, rage, and apprehension which tug at his breast. It is only as he is worked up into a clearer conviction of his wrongs by insisting on the grounds of his unjust suspicions to Camillo, who irritates him by his opposition, that he bursts out into the following vehement strain of bitter indignation: yet even here his passion staggers, and is as it were oppressed with its own intensity. ‘Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses? Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career Of laughter with a sigh? (a note infallible Of breaking honesty!) horsing foot on foot? Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift? Hours, minutes? the noon, midnight? and all eyes Blind with the pin and web, but theirs; theirs only, That would, unseen, be wicked? is this nothing? Why then the world, and all that’s in’t, is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia’s nothing, My wife is nothing!’

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The character of Hermione is as much distinguished by its saint-like resignation and patient forbearance, as that of Paulina is by her zealous and spirited remonstrances against the injustice done to the queen, and by her devoted attachment to her misfortunes. Hermione’s restoration to her husband and her child, after her long separation from them, is as affecting in itself as it is striking in the representation. Camillo, and the old shepherd and his son, are subordinate but not uninteresting instruments in the development of the plot, and though last, not least, comes Autolycus, a very pleasant, thriving rogue; and (what is the best feather in the cap of all knavery) he escapes with impunity in the end. The Winter’s Tale is one of the best-acting of our author’s plays. We remember seeing it with great pleasure many years ago. It was on the night that King took leave of the stage, when he and Mrs. Jordan played together in the afterpiece of the Wedding-day. Nothing could go off with more éclat, with more spirit, and grandeur of effect. Mrs. Siddons played Hermione, and in the last scene acted the painted statue to the life—with true monumental dignity and noble passion; Mr. Kemble, in Leontes, worked himself up into a very fine classical frenzy; and Bannister, as Autolycus, roared as loud for pity as a sturdy beggar could do who felt none of the pain he counterfeited, and was sound of wind and limb. We shall never see these parts so acted again; or if we did, it would be in vain. Actors grow old, or no longer surprise us by their novelty. But true poetry, like nature, is always young; and we still read the courtship of Florizel and Perdita, as we welcome the return of spring, with the same feelings as ever.   ‘Florizel. Thou dearest Perdita, With these forc’d thoughts, I prithee, darken not The mirth o’ the feast: or, I’ll be thine, my fair, Or not my father’s: for I cannot be Mine own, nor anything to any, if I be not thine. To this I am most constant, Tho’ destiny say, No. Be merry, gentle; Strangle such thoughts as these, with anything That you behold the while. Your guests are coming: Lift up your countenance; as it were the day Of celebration of that nuptial which We two have sworn shall come.   Perdita. O lady Fortune, Stand you auspicious! Enter Shepherd, Clown, Mopsa, Dorcas, Servants; with Polixenes, and Camillo, disguised.   Florizel. See, your guests approach. Address yourself to entertain them sprightly,

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And let’s be red with mirth.   Shepherd. Fie, daughter! when my old wife liv’d, upon This day, she was both pantler, butler, cook; Both dame and servant: welcom’d all, serv’d all: Would sing her song, and dance her turn: now here At upper end o’ the table, now i’ the middle: On his shoulder, and his: her face o’ fire With labour; and the thing she took to quench it She would to each one sip. You are retir’d, As if you were a feasted one, and not The hostess of the meeting. Pray you, bid These unknown friends to us welcome; for it is A way to make us better friends, more known. Come, quench your blushes; and present yourself That which you are, mistress o’ the feast. Come on, And bid us welcome to your sheep-shearing, As your good flock shall prosper.   Perdita. Sir, welcome! [To Polixenes and Camillo.] It is my father’s will I should take on me The hostess-ship o’ the day: you’re welcome, sir! Give me those flowers there, Dorcas.—Reverend sirs, For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep Seeming, and savour, all the winter long: Grace and remembrance be unto you both And welcome to our shearing!   Polixenes. Shepherdess, (A fair one are you) well you fit our ages With flowers of winter.   Perdita. Sir, the year growing ancient, Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o’ the season Are our carnations, and streak’d gilly-flowers, Which some call nature’s bastards: of that kind Our rustic garden’s barren; and I care not To get slips of them.   Polixenes. Wherefore, gentle maiden, Do you neglect them?   Perdita. For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature.   Polixenes. Say, there be: Yet nature is made better by no mean, But nature makes that mean: so, o’er that art

The Winter’s Tale in the Nineteenth Century

Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock; And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. This is an art Which does mend nature, change it rather: but The art itself is nature.   Perdita. So it is.1   Polixenes. Then make your garden rich in gilly-flowers, And do not call them bastards.   Perdita. I’ll not put The dibble in earth, to set one slip of them;1 No more than, were I painted, I would wish This youth should say, ’twere well; and only therefore Desire to breed by me.—Here’s flowers for you; Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram; The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun, And with him rises, weeping: these are flowers Of middle summer, and, I think, they are given To men of middle age. You are very welcome.   Camillo. I should leave grazing, were I of your flock, And only live by gazing.   Perdita. Out, alas! You’d be so lean, that blasts of January Would blow you through and through. Now my fairest friends. I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might Become your time of day; and yours, and yours, That wear upon your virgin branches yet Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina! For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall From Dis’s waggon! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares and take The winds of March with beauty: violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes, Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady Most incident to maids); bold oxlips, and The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds, The fleur-de-lis being one! O, these I lack To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend To strow him o’er and o’er.

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  Florizel. What, like a corse?   Perdita. No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on; Not like a corse; or if—not to be buried, But quick, and in mine arms. Come, take your flowers; Methinks, I play as I have seen them do In Whitsun pastorals: sure this robe of mine Does change my disposition.   Florizel. What you do, Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, I’d have you do it ever: when you sing, I’d have you buy and sell so; so give alms; Pray so; and for the ordering your affairs, To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that; move still, still so, And own no other function. Each your doing, So singular in each particular, Crowns what you’re doing in the present deeds, That all your acts are queens.   Perdita. O Doricles, Your praises are too large; but that your youth And the true blood, which peeps forth fairly through it, Do plainly give you out an unstained shepherd; With wisdom I might fear, my Doricles, You woo’d me the false way.   Florizel. I think you have As little skill to fear, as I have purpose To put you to’t. But come, our dance, I pray. Your hand, my Perdita: so turtles pair, That never mean to part.   Perdita. I’ll swear for ’em.   Polixenes. This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever Ran on the green-sward; nothing she does, or seems, But smacks of something greater than herself, Too noble for this place.   Camillo. He tells her something That makes her blood look out: good sooth she is The queen of curds and cream.’ This delicious scene is interrupted by the father of the prince discovering himself to Florizel, and haughtily breaking off the intended match between his son and Perdita. When Polixenes goes out, Perdita says,

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Even here undone! I was not much afraid; for once or twice I was about to speak; and tell him plainly The self-same sun that shines upon his court, Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on’t alike. Wilt please you, sir, be gone? [To Florizel.] I told you what would come of this. Beseech you, Of your own state take care; this dream of mine, Being now awake, I’ll queen it no inch further, But milk my ewes and weep. As Perdita, the supposed shepherdess, turns out to be the daughter of Hermione, and a princess in disguise, both feelings of the pride of birth and the claims of nature are satisfied by the fortunate event of the story, and the fine romance of poetry is reconciled to the strictest court-etiquette. Note

1. The lady, we here see, gives up the argument, but keeps her mind.

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1846—A. W. Schlegel. From Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature Schlegel (1767–1845), a poet and important figure in the history of German romanticism, gained his intimate knowledge of Shakespeare by translating the playwright’s works into German. His Lectures provide keen insight into the plays. Here, Schlegel builds on Hazlitt’s praise of the play by specifically challenging standard criticisms of the play. On the contested matter of Leontes’s jealousy, for example, Schlegel asserts that Shakespeare is more interested in the effects of the emotion than its origins.

The Winter’s Tale is as appropriately named as The Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is one of those tales which are peculiarly calculated to beguile the dreary leisure of a long winter evening, and are even attractive and intelligible to childhood, while, animated by fervent truth in the delineation of character and passion, and invested with the embellishments of poetry, lowering itself, as it were, to the simplicity of the subject, they transport even manhood back to the golden

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age of imagination. The calculation of probabilities has nothing to do with such wonderful and fleeting adventures, when all end at last in universal joy: and, accordingly, Shakspeare has here taken the greatest licence of anachronisms and geographical errors; not to mention other incongruities, he opens a free navigation between Sicily and Bohemia, makes Giulio Romano the contemporary of the Delphic oracle. The piece divides itself in some degree into two plays. Leontes becomes suddenly jealous of his royal bosom-friend Polyxenes, who is on a visit to his court; makes an attempt on his life, from which Polyxenes only saves himself by a clandestine flight;—Hermione, suspected of infidelity, is thrown into prison, and the daughter which she there brings into the world is exposed on a remote coast;—the accused queen, declared innocent by the oracle, on learning that her infant son has pined to death on her account, falls down in a swoon, and is mourned as dead by her husband, who becomes sensible, when too late, of his error: all this makes up the first three acts. The last two are separated from these by a chasm of sixteen years; but the foregoing tragical catastrophe was only apparent, and this serves to connect the two parts. The princess, who has been exposed on the coast of Polyxenes’s kingdom, grows up among low shepherds; but her tender beauty, her noble manners, and elevation of sentiment, bespeak her descent; the Crown Prince Florizel, in the course of his hawking, falls in with her, becomes enamoured, and courts her in the disguise of a shepherd; at a rural entertainment Polyxenes discovers their attachment, and breaks out into a violent rage; the two lovers seek refuge from his persecutions at the court of Leontes in Sicily, where the discovery and general reconciliation take place. Lastly, when Leontes beholds, as he imagines, the statue of his lost wife, it descends from the niche: it is she herself, the still living Hermione, who has kept herself so long concealed; and the piece ends with universal rejoicing. The jealousy of Leontes is not, like that of Othello, developed through all its causes, symptoms, and variations; it is brought forward at once full grown and mature, and is portrayed as a distempered frenzy. It is a passion whose effects the spectator is more concerned with than its origin, and which does not produce the catastrophe, but merely ties the knot of the piece. In fact, the poet might perhaps have wished slightly to indicate that Hermione, though virtuous, was too warm in her efforts to please Polyxenes; and it appears as if this germ of inclination first attained its proper maturity in their children. Nothing can be more fresh and youthful, nothing at once so ideally pastoral and princely, as the love of Florizel and Perdita; of the prince, whom love converts into a voluntary shepherd; and the princess, who betrays her exalted origin without knowing it, and in whose hands nosegays become crowns. Shakspeare has never hesitated to place ideal poetry side by side of the most vulgar prose: and in the world of reality also this is generally the case. Perdita’s foster-father and his son are both made simple boors, that we may the more distinctly see how all that ennobles her belongs only to herself. Autolycus, the merry pedlar

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and pickpocket, so inimitably portrayed, is necessary to complete the rustic feast, which Perdita on her part seems to render meet for an assemblage of gods in disguise.

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1863—Charles Cowden Clarke. From Shakespeare-Characters, Chief ly Those Subordinate Charles Cowden Clarke (1787–1877) was primarily a Shakespearean scholar, though his published work addressed a variety of authors and subjects. He also wrote and published poetry. In the following selection, Cowden Clarke launches the most vigorous defense yet seen of the play, condemning the “technical prudery” of those who quibble over its indecorous implausibility. For Cowden Clarke, the play is a masterful and “sensuously appealing” display of imagination’s power.

The general plot and incidental circumstances of “The Winter’s Tale” are more varied, exciting, and sensuously appealing than perhaps any other of Shakespeare’s plays. The jealousy of Leontes, which occasions the distressful portion of the story, is not, like the jealousy of Othello, cautiously and gradually introduced, artfully developed, fanned, heightened, and exasperated to its awful climax of assassination and suicidal punishment; but it bursts forth at once with a sudden explosion, it partakes more of the character of a paroxysm of disease; and it as quickly subsides into the humility of self-reproach, and the very abandonment to a meek and pliant repentance. The character of Leontes is essentially that of a weak man; his contrition is not more extreme and pitiable than his rage; and no one knew better than Shakespeare that the one is almost invariably the consequent of the other. In these contrasted impulses, nothing can be more opposed than the two natures of Leontes and Othello. Both are jealous men, both pursue the same cruel course, both are touched with remorse; yet, from their several intellectual conformations, as the one (Othello) never wholly loses our sympathy, not to say even our respect; the other (Leontes) never commands them. In the laying forth of this character, some writers have objected that the jealous change brought forth in his disposition and conduct is too sudden and too extreme, and that there appears no previous indication to render plausible so complete a subversion of his ostensible ordinary nature. It is, no doubt, an unusual course with Shakespeare to introduce abrupt, as well as violent antagonisms in character; he more commonly, nay, indeed,

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he almost constantly allows a dormant passion to germ and sprout forth, and effloresce by slow degrees, so that we recognise and accompany the alteration from its first development to its conclusion. Nature herself, however, has her anomalies, her freaks, her caprices; and that person’s observation and knowledge of character have made no great strides in acquirement, that cannot verify the most remarkable as well as sudden transformations in the conduct of certain individuals, and which, not unusually, have arisen from some casual and slight inducement. Such mental transfigurations almost uniformly take place in highly excitable and impulsive natures; and it is to be observed that this was precisely the component of the mind of Leontes, whose every action betrays the weak and unstable man. As therefore, there was not the time allowed in the progress of the drama for his passion of jealousy to be gradually pre-indicated, we may fairly give the poet the advantage of it extempore explosion. We are to bear in mind that the passion of Othello forms the great master-feature of the tragedy, and there is no episode to sever its interest; it is one integral history. The episode in “The Winter’s Tale”—the history of Perdita and her Florizel—bears almost equal sway of importance with the serious and pathetic portion; the original cause of it, the jealousy of Leontes, could not therefore have been brought to occupy a larger space in the combined plot. Upon the causes and consequences of Leontes’s passion, Schlegel makes the following remark. He says:—“It is a passion with whose effects the spectator is more concerned than with its origin, and which does not produce the catastrophe, but merely ties the knot of the piece. In fact, the poet might perhaps have wished to indicate slightly that Hermione, though virtuous, was too active in her efforts to please Polixenes, and it appears as if this germ of an inclination first attained its proper maturity in their children.” But the German critic should have perceived that Hermione’s “efforts to please Polixenes” were all made at the immediate instigation of her husband, and that it was, in fact, to please Leontes, that she endeavoured to please Polixenes, and induce him to prolong his stay. Any one carefully perusing that opening scene, will discern, from Hermione’s words and bearing—playful, gracefully winning, the lady-hostess persuading a guest to remain—that she is merely acting in consonance with her husband’s expressed wish. The very constancy of her reference to him through all her speech to their visitor, bears testimony to the pure singleness of his noble wife. The character of Hermione is that of the truly classical heroine of a tragic drama; she is worthy of the Greek Muse, a perfectly regal woman, who claims our homage, respect, and esteem by reason of her station, conduct, and social virtues, and, of course, our sympathy on account of the persecution she endured, and her unmerited sufferings. I know not, however, whether this feeling be not enhanced by the one indication she manifests of being a really feminine creature—that of forgetting her own individual affliction, and falling senseless at the news of the death of her son, Mamillius. But the pervading and

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substantive quality in Hermione’s character is that of a grand and unqualified magnanimity, taking the course of invincible firmness and constancy. Wronged by her husband’s hideous suspicions, outraged by a public attainder, mock trial, and imprisonment, wounded through the persons of her children by his inhuman decrees, she consigns herself to a living grave. Finding remonstrance worse than fruitless, seeing that it exasperates him, she takes refuge in a proud, indignant silence, sternly willing it to be eternal. Her conduct throughout is consistent in lofty courage and self-respect. Her first emotion, upon finding herself the object of her husband’s wild accusations, is sheer surprise and incredulity. “What, is this sport?” she exclaims. Her second is honest, indignant refutation of the groundless charge, and reliance upon her husband’s belief in her word:— “But I’d say he had not, And I’ll be sworn you would believe my saying, Howe’er you lean to the nayward.” Her third a burning denial of the calumny, checked by a remembrance of what is due to him who is her accuser:— “Should a villain say so, The most replenish’d villain in the world, He were as much more villain: you, my lord, Do but mistake. Her next speech is a mingling of implied conscious innocence and resolute patience—a patience which can afford pity for its mistaken impugner:— “How will this grieve you, When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that You thus have publish’d me! Gentle my lord, You scarce can right me throughly then, to say You did mistake.” And her concluding words, as she withdraws, are full of the most lofty selfassertion, with magnanimity of quiet rebuke:— “Beseech your highness, My women may be with me; for you see My plight requires it. [To them.] Do not weep, good fools, There is no cause; when you shall know your mistress Has deserv’d prison, then abound in tears

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As I come out. This action I now go on Is for my better grace. [To him.] Adieu, my lord, I never wish’d to see you sorry; now, I trust I shall.” This is accurately the utterance of a woman with whom the usual feminine resource of tears and lamentings forms no part of her character. Hermione is peculiarly self-concentrated, self-reliant, and uncomplaining. She says of herself:— “Good, my-lords, I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are—the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have That honourable grief lodg’d here, which burns Worse than tears drown.” A weeping woman would not have fallen senseless on hearing of the death of her child; but Hermione is exactly and entirely the woman to make that grand speech of self-justification which she does upon her trial, pleading her own cause, courageously maintaining her innocence, calmly and confidently appealing to her husband’s own conscience for her honourable acquittal: and, when all is useless, bowing to the full tide of her misfortunes, and shrouding herself beneath self-imposed death-in-life as the sole reprisal upon his injurious, his heinous treatment. As an extraordinary piece of consistency in character-painting, it were well noted that in the concluding scene of the play, when Hermione is restored to her husband Leontes, her reconciliation with him is marked by silent action, not by words. We learn from the bystanders that she “embraces him,” and “hangs about his neck,” on coming down from the pedestal where she has enacted her own statue—but she utters no syllable. Words of tenderness and fond sentences were not for the mouth of a woman who had shown her enduring consciousness of the injuries she had sustained, by a sixteen years’ sequestration of herself from his side. For Hermione there was nothing but a demeanour that should speak for itself; and she accordingly throws herself mutely into his arms, that his heart may comprehend all that hers would say to it. This is the eloquence of magnanimity in tacit evidence, perfectly befitting the majesty and self-respective dignity of Hermione’s character. The slight and fleeting sketch of the little prince, Mamillius is remarkably beautiful both in character and treatment. His conversation with his father, whose jealous ravings he cannot comprehend, is conceived in the perfection of dramatic incident; and what a touch of art, and of nature too, at the moment

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when the king, his father, is writhing with suspicion of his queen’s dishonesty, to put those words into his little, unconscious mouth, “I am like you, they say.” In that simple scene, too, (the 1st in the 2d Act,) with his mother and her ladies, Shakespeare seems to have got at the very heart of childhood-nature—as he did of all other nature. The child says to one of the ladies who invites him to come and be her playfellow— “No, I’ll none of you; You’ll kiss me hard, and speak to me as if I were a baby still.” As a set-off against the pathetic incidents in the play, we have the bright creation of the enchanting Perdita, than whose love with her Florizel (the young prince, and son of Polixenes) we shall scarcely find anything more fresh and youthful, and nothing more pastoral, yet princely and refined. The grouped scene at the sheep-shearing is like a Grecian bas-relief; and her speeches to the guests are finer than anything of the kind, either in the old or the new world of poetry. Such is the address to her lover, accompanying the presentation of a coronal of flowers, and which, though familiar as household words, should never be alluded to without reviving:— “Now, my fairest friend, I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might Become your time of day. * * * * * * * * * O Proserpina, For the flowers now, that, frighted, thou let’st fall From Dis’s waggon! daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes, Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength—a malady Most incident to maids; bold oxlips, and The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one. Oh, these I lack To make you garlands of; and, my sweet friend, To strew him o’er and o’er!   “Flo. What! like a corse?   “Per. No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on; Not like a corse; or if,—not to be buried, But quick, and in mine arms.”

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Well might the enraptured Florizel exclaim, “What you do still betters what is done!” He has already told her— “I bless the time When my good falcon made her flight across Thy father’s ground.” In the same scene with these two young princely creatures, (the 3d of the 4th Act,) there is another touch of loveliness and natural emotion. The old lord, Camillo, and Polixenes, Florizel’s father, have attended the sheep-shearing, disguised, and are watching the love-making of the young couple. Camillo says:— “He tells her something That makes her blood look out.” With his usual thought and consistency in the classification of character, it is to be observed that in that of Perdita, Shakespeare never compromises—he never even loses sight of her royal descent; and the manner in which he has indicated that self-assertion and wilfulness of nature (the usual concomitants of royalty) are as remarkable as they are amusing. Polixenes makes the observation— “This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever Ran on the greensward; nothing she does or seems But smacks of something greater than herself, Too noble for this place.” Her first self-betrayal occurs at the sheep-shearing feast, where, like a true scion of the class administered to, and the not-administering class, she neglects the guests, and receives the rebuke from her old foster-father, the Shepherd:— “Fie, daughter! when my old wife liv’d, Upon this day she was both pantler, butler, cook; Both dame and servant; welcom’d all, serv’d all; Would sing her song, dance her turn; now here, At upper end o’ the table; now i’ the middle; On his shoulder, and on his—her face o’ fire With labour; and the thing she took to quench it, She would to each one sip. You are retir’d As if you were a feasted one, and not The hostess of the meeting.”

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Here we have the royal instinct of dignity in “exclusiveness.” Again, in the conversation with Polixenes upon the culture of the “streaked gilly-flowers,” of which she cares not to “get slips for her garden;” when he asks, “Wherefore, gentle maiden, do you neglect them?” She answers,— “For that I have heard it said, There is an art that, in their piedness, shares With great creating Nature.   “Polix. Say there be, Yet Nature is made better by no mean, But Nature makes that mean: so, over that Art, Which you say adds to Nature, is an Art That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock; And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. This is an art Which does mend Nature,—change it rather: but The art itself is Nature.   “Per. So it is.   “Polix. Then make your garden rich in gilly-flow’rs, And do not call them bastards.   “Per. I’ll not put The dibble in earth to set one slip of them.” Here we have a specimen of royal and—with the meekest deference be it suggested—of womanly obstinacy. She has not an argument to face the king’s; but having once said she cared not to grow them, she sticks to her text:— “I’ll not put The dibble in earth to set one slip of them.” Very regal, too,—the giving no reason for her resolution. Lastly, for the royal instinct as conveyed in her self-assertion of equality— and this the most remarkable example. When King Polixenes has forbidden their union, and then threatens her with death if she “open their rural latch to her lover’s entrance;” after the king has gone, she says:— “I was not much afear’d; for once or twice I was about to speak, and tell him plainly, The self-same sun that shines upon his court, Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike.”

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Shakespeare never would have put that speech into the mouth of a commoner. Scan him and sift him as we may, we always detect a “foregone conclusion” in his most evanescent shades of character. The finest indication that Perdita gives of her greatness and constancy of heart, is in the quiet answer she makes to the old lord, Camillo, who is setting before the two young lovers the trials of adversity they must encounter in their projected flight from Bohemia. The old friend concludes his dissuasion with these words:— “Prosperity’s the very bond of love; Whose fresh complexion, and whose heart together, Affliction alters.” Perdita simply replies:— “One of these is true: I think affliction may subdue the cheek, But not take in the mind.” That is true heroism; and it is the heroism of a young heart. But not only the queen-mother’s steadfastness of temper with repose of manner are renewed in Perdita’s speech and conduct, but the personal likeness to Hermione is denoted by an exquisite touch that Shakespeare could not fail to add upon a favourable occasion. In the 1st scene of the 5th Act, where Leontes is looking upon his daughter, unconscious that she is such, and standing there in maiden youth and loveliness, the faithful Paulina recalls him to himself, with the half rebuke:— “Sir, my liege, Your eye hath too much youth in’t: not a month ’Fore your queen died, she was more worth such gazes Than what you look on now.   “Leon. I thought of her. Even in these looks I made.” There is a parallel scene in the 1st scene of the 5th Act of “Pericles,” even more touching in its eloquence, where the king, staring upon his daughter, Marina, has his belief in her worth confirmed by the living picture she presents to his soul of his dead wife, Thaisa. The glorious old poet Chaucer—and it is delightful to bring two such natures in unison—has a passage, in his own simple beauty of style, indicating the like creed of native sympathy in resemblance.

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It is where Constance’s little son is brought into his father, King Alla’s presence; and we have the vivid sketch of the incident in two lines:— “Before Allá, during the meatë’s space, The child stood, looking in the kingë’s face.” The father is struck by the child’s look; and we all know the pertinacious gaze of a child; and he inquires:— “Whose is that faire child that standeth yonder?” Obtaining no satisfactory answer to his question, the story goes on to say:— “Now was this child as like unto Constance As possible is a creäture to be: This Alla hath the face in remembrance Of Dame Constance, and thereon musèd he, If that the childè’s mother were aught she That is his wife; and privily he sight, [sighed,] And sped him from the table that he might.” That touch of his sighing, and hurrying from the room to hide his emotion, is in the true dramatic feeling of nature and passion. Paulina, the attendant and companion of the Queen Hermione, is an example of what might be adduced as an “end-on” partisan. An American would call her a “go-ahead” friend. She never for one moment has a misgiving with respect to the conduct of her injured queen and mistress; neither does she pause to consider the critical nature of her own position in the court, or to swerve one jot from her purpose, when denouncing to the king his purblind jealousy and barbarous persecution of his consort. Paulina is a specimen of those headstrong women who, taking up the broad principle of a question or a cause, allow no minor point to sway or interfere with their course of action. It is this wedge-like character in women which makes them such perplexing opponents in a party-question. Shakespeare knew this quite as well as we do; and he had witnessed some remarkable examples of its truth in the party-feuds that arose out of the bloated injustice visited upon the worthy Katherine of Aragon, and the heart-burning triumph of Anne Boleyn, with the Protestant succession, to say nothing of the kidnapping and execution of the Scottish queen. There were “end-on” partisans enough in his time; and Margaret Lamburn, who in open court aimed a dagger at the heart of Queen Elizabeth, was a specimen of the Paulina species. There is another point in the female character that Shakespeare has exemplified with his usual felicity, in the conduct of Paulina. When a woman has once got

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the right end of the staff in a contest with a man, and has quelled her opponent, she does play the tattoo upon his skull with an amazing vivacity—and after he is down, too. When Leontes has come to a sense of his barbarity towards his queen, and is wallowing in the very slough of mean despondency, Paulina cannot forego the gratification of punching him in his maundering distress. He says:— “Whilst I remember Her and her virtues, I cannot forget My blemishes in them: and so still think of The wrong I did myself, which was so much, That heirless it hath made my kingdom, and Destroy’d the sweet’st companion that e’er man Bred his hopes out of.” Paulina answers:— “True, too true, my lord: If one by one you wedded all the world, Or, from the all that are, took something good To make a perfect woman, she you kill’d Would be unparallell’d.” His reply displays the very prostration of self-abasement:— “I think so. Kill’d! She I kill’d! I did so; but thou strikest me Sorely to say I did; it is as bitter Upon thy tongue as in my thought; now, good now, Say so but seldom.” It is observable that the only person in the play who encounters the severity of retributive justice is the lord Antigonus; and we scarcely regret his fate since he lent himself to the king’s cruelty (however unwillingly and by oath) to leave the infant Perdita on the desert sea-shore of a strange country; a savage hire,—and the wages he receives are as dispiteous, for he is devoured by a beast. This scene, which first introduces the old shepherd and his son, is distinguished by that mixture of the horrible and the ludicrous which no one ventures upon but Dame Nature and Shakespeare. The old man, who has been wandering about the seashore in the storm, searching for a stray sheep, stumbles upon the babe, and in his astonishment at the circumstance, calls out to his son, who immediately echoes his summons:—

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“What, art so near? [says the old shepherd.] If thou’lt see a thing to talk on when thou art dead and rotten, come hither. What ailest thou, man? “Clown. I have seen two such sights by sea and by land! but I am not to say it is a sea, for it is now the sky; betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin’s point.” It will be remembered how this same effect of a storm is described in Othello, where the persons talking are gentlemen and scholars. One speaks of the “windshak’d surge with high and monstrous mane;” and the other speaks of the “main and the aerial blue becoming an indistinct regard.” The clown, with his rustic imagination, has none but homely comparisons, and afterwards he talks of the “yeast and froth as you’d thrust a cork into a hogshead.” These are minutiae of consistency that have been often alluded to. The Clown goes on:— “Oh, the most piteous cry of the poor souls! Sometimes to see ’em, and not to see ’em: now the ship boring the moon with her main-mast. * * * And then for the land-service,—to see how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone—and how he cried to me for help, and said he was Antigonus—a nobleman!” “What care these roarers for the name of king?” says the Boatswain in the “Tempest;” but how horribly natural is this scene! The fact which was uppermost in the Clown’s mind—the tearing up of the man’s shoulder-blade—he speaks of first, and without any preface, and afterwards describes his name and quality. Then he goes on:— “But to make an end of the ship, to see how the sea flap-dragoned it; but first, how the poor souls roared, and the sea mocked them, and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him, both roaring louder than the sea or weather. “Shep. Name of mercy, when was this, boy? “Clown. Now, now! I haven’t winked since I saw these sights; the men are not yet cold under water, nor the bear half dined on the gentleman; he’s at it now! ” Well, they turn to the infant Perdita, and lifting up their hands and eyes at the golden treasure that Antigonus has left with her, the old man proposes to his son to take the “next way home;” and here Shakespeare cannot close the scene without a parting touch of rustic humanity, which he puts into the mouth of the Clown:— “Go you the next way with your findings; I’ll go see if the bear be gone from the gentleman, and how much he hath eaten. They are never curst [mischievous] but when they are hungry. If there be any of him left I will bury it.”

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This, in itself, is a trifling incident to notice, but a natural one, for the common people have a reverence, even to superstition, for the decencies of sepulture. Among the subordinate characters in “The Winter’s Tale,” the noblemen about the court of Leontes do not offer any distinguishing characteristic worth dwelling upon, unless it be the unparallelled one of their all taking side with their brother-courtier, and against the king! Camillo is a fine honest fellow, who mainly assists to bring the estranged parties to a union; and there is a naturally and artistically-contrived conversation among some “Gentlemen” in the 2d scene of the 5th Act, who are describing to each other the meeting of the two kings, the discovery of Perdita to be the daughter of Leontes, and, in short, the hurrying of the plot to its climax of efflorescence. The whole dialogue is perfectly graphic; and immediately upon the heels of it we have the introduction of the old shepherd and his son, who have received honourable preferment for their faithful nurture of the little princess—a capital specimen of low comedy. The bumpkins absolutely reel under their promotion and fine clothes. The son talks of the “kings and princes—our kindred ”—and, like a true lout, he does not see that they have condescended to him, but he instantly rushes on to their level, and so, with delightful humour, he rattles away:— “I was a gentleman born before my father, for the king’s son took me by the hand and called me brother, and the two kings called my father brother, and then the prince my brother called my father father, and so we wept, and there was the first gentleman-like tears that ever we shed.” Mopsa, one of the country wenches—and she and Dorcas are sisters of a class—is a type of that fraternity of women—both high and low—who have just sufficient brains to see their own mercenary interest in all they do, and not one jot else; who are just so acute as to turn to gain, to profit, all that they possess, while to their truest and most real advantages and privileges they are as obtusely blind as earthworms. A trinket, a bauble, engrosses such a woman’s soul to the exclusion of aught beside. She will go through any amount of meanness to wheedle a man into purchasing it for her, while, with it, he may beguile her of any amount of unworthy submission. The pedlar’s knacks and gaudy trash absorb Mopsa’s whole gloating vision; she never ceases pestering her swain to “buy” for her; she even gives up the darling delight of bickering and squabbling with Dorcas for the dearer delight of coaxing all she can out of her soft-skulled gallant. That he finds his account in “treating” her we gather from her own obtuse betrayals. In Mopsa’s eagerness for the pedlar’s tawdry laces and ribbons, with the fool’s price she blindly pays for them, believing that she gets them for “nothing”—that eternal pitfall of the fool-buyer!—“Getting a bargain for nothing!”—in Mopsa’s cupidity we have a symbol of those of her sex who, for a shawl, a bracelet, or a silk dress, sacrifice their dignity of spirit, their honesty of truth, their self-respect. They calculate that it costs them only a few fawning

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words—“only!” when in these are comprised the abandonment of women’s just claims to be the friend and “equal” of man, which they are everlastingly talking about, and using such miserable means to accomplish. And now talk we of that prince of quicksilver rogues—Master Autolycus. O thou type of all the nimble-fingered race that have plied in their vocation since the gallies and the gallows were instituted to teach men the principles of equitable adjustment, and accurately to know the distinction between “meum and tuum,” and not to confound and misapply the “golden rule of proportion.” Master Autolycus!—that rogue of rogues! that arch-rogue! that knave of knaves! that inexhaustible wag of a pedlar! that scampering rip of a wayfaring huckster! With what a light hand he disposes of momentous considerations! with what an easy style he settles questions of conscience! “Beating and hanging [he says] are terrors to me;—for the life to come, / sleep out the thought of it.” How skimmingly he relates that, “having flown over many knavish professions, he settled down in rogue;” and he is an adept in the profession he has settled down in, having made its principles his earnest study, and having taken his degree, F.F.D., (“Professor and Doctor of Thieving,”) thus he delivers to them “ex cathedra”—“To have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand is necessary for a cutpurse; a good nose is requisite also to smell out work for the other senses.” His ineffable disinterestedness in refusing donations is on a par with his dexterity in “raising the supplies;” for, upon having helped himself to what he wanted from the country fellow’s pocket, what ludicrous earnestness, and what sincerity, too, in declining the proffered bounty:—“Offer me no money, I pray you; that kills my heart.” What a zest, what intense relish he has in trickery! and what solemn horror of rectitude! when he has filched the shepherd’s purse, exclaiming after him:—“I’ll be with you at your sheep-shearing, too. If I make not this cheat bring out another, and the shearers prove sheep, let me be unrolled, and my name put in the book of virtue.” And then, at the prospect of mischief, he falls into a merry song, for very jollity of heart; the fun of the mischief being his “primum mobile”—his main principle of action. He has a positive and unmitigated contempt for right and justice, as being indeed poor and very shallow affairs—and dull;—so, with what a twinkle of the eye, and irrepressible drollery beneath all, he shows that the humour of the thing is to him the main point. Laughing, he shouts, “What a fool Honesty is!—and Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman.” He plumes himself upon his high-bred rascality in a strain of devout thankfulness, as he contemplates the simpleton-innocence of the two shepherds:—“How blest are we that are not simple men! Yet Nature might have made me as these are;—therefore I’ll not disdain!” What delicious gusto and relish! and what wit! Again—defending himself from the charge of rectitude—except by accident—“Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance.” And when he quits his pedlar

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clothes, and pedlar deportment, and has been promoted, with what magnificence of rebuke he charges the others not to misbehave themselves:—“And let me have no lying; it becomes none but tradesmen!” (O my beloved Willie! what a cordial philosopher wast thou!) Gines de Passamonte was a callous and vulgar prig compared with thee, my Autolycus; for, of a surety, thou wouldst have respected the romantic benevolence of La Mancha’s knight;—never wouldst thou, with a rascal ingratitude, have pashed that venerable face with the rude flint-stones, after he had delivered thee out of the hands of the ruthless alguazil. Compared, too, with thee, the renowned and much-belauded Du Val was a coxcomb and a dandy. He was a dancingmaster plunged into an ungenial element—the younger brother, mayhap, of some sleek do-nothing; and so he inherited the instinct of living by faith upon his species,—“taking no more thought than lilies” for the morrow,—sufficient for the day being the plunder thereof. That such a kiddy should have made his public exit from the Tyburn stage in an embroidered dress, bag-wig, ruffles, and fringed gloves, was befitting his “exquisite” nature. He walked his minuet in life, and he danced out of it with a caper and a “galop à la corde.” Happy for thee, my merry Autolycus, that thou wast not merely a natural rogue—a rogue in grain, thoroughbred from a long and legitimate ancestry; but that, with all thy small filchings—thy “quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles”— the serene villainy of thy face—the solemnity of thy adjurations, and the glibearnestness of thy protestations—thy romantic cheats—thy florid lies—thou hadst therewithal a lurking grain of good nature in thy composition;—that “salt preserved thee.” Thou wast, it is true, a confirmed and a solid thief; but then thou wast born as well as bred to that branch of the “conveyancing” profession; and couldst thou have changed the Ethiop skin of thy nature, thou mightst have become a distrainer for rent, or a surcharger of taxes—possibly, an informer; and then we should have missed all thy merriment. I am glad thou wast not hanged, my Autolycus! Such a destiny would have been a sorry climax to thy uncruel misdemeanours. Who but a churl could stop that throat, of which the shepherd’s hind, who comes running in, says, in an ecstasy of delight:— “O master! if you did but hear the pedlar at the door, you would never dance again after a tabor and pipe;—no, the bagpipe couldn’t move you. He sings several tunes faster than you’ll tell money. He utters them as though he had eaten ballads, and all men’s ears grew to his tunes. He hath songs for man or woman, of all sizes: no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves. He hath the prettiest love-songs for maids; * * * with such delicate burdens of “dildos” and “fadings,” “jump her” and “thump her,” [burdens of songwriters of the time.] And he hath ribands of all the colours i’ the rainbow; points, more than all the lawyers in Bohemia can handle, though they come

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to him by the gross; inkles, caddises, cambrics, lawns:—why, he sings them over as they were gods or goddesses. You would think a smock were a sheangel, he so chants to the sleeve-hand, and the work about the square on’t.” Perdita, the lady innate, says:—“Forewarn him that he use no scurrilous words in his tunes.” Then in he comes singing:— “Lawn as white as driven snow; Cyprus black as e’er was crow; Gloves as sweet as damask roses; Masks for faces and for noses; Bugle bracelet, necklace amber, Perfume for a lady’s chamber; Golden quoifs and stomachers, For my lads to give their dears; Pins and poking-sticks of steel, What maids lack from head to heel; Come, buy of me, come; come buy, come buy; Buy lads, or else your lasses cry: Come buy.” Go thy ways, thou merriest of vagabonds! I could better spare a much better man than thou, Autolycus, my pet thief. The probabilities and the possibilities, the imputed anachronisms, and the geographical blunders in “The Winter’s Tale,” have, I confess, never disturbed my rest—they never kept me awake at night. I leave the technical prudery of such objections to those dilettanti coxcombs in criticism, who, when they are contemplating Raphael’s cartoon of the Miraculous Draught of Fishes, pass over the face of the Messiah, and proceed to measure the proportions of the boat in which He is seated; and then triumphantly tell us, that to be able to sit in that boat were a miracle equal to the one that had just been performed. The delineations of character and passion in this play; the decoration of the poetry, consorting in tender beauty with the rural simplicity of the subject, always transport me back to that golden age when the imagination ran loose amid the odorous glades of poetry, unfretted and unjaded by the burrs and briers of low-thoughted cares and carking anxieties. He who takes us from the smoke and stir of everyday toil, and laps us in the Elysium of our boyish days—blood-stirring and hopeful—is a benefactor to his species; and to no mortal do I more owe this reminiscence, and gratitude for it, than to William Shakespeare.

The Winter’s Tale in the Twentieth Century q So far we have seen two approaches dominate criticism of The Winter’s Tale. Critics loosely term the first as “the neoclassical approach.” This approach is rooted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is associated with figures we have already met in this volume such as Dryden, Pope, and Lennox. Hallmarks of this approach include a preoccupation with neoclassical unities of time and place or laments over “far-fetched” or clumsy plotting. The broad view of this school is, of course, negative, asserting the play a failure. The second approach, what has sometimes been dubbed “the romantic approach,” blossoms in the nineteenth century (though no doubt reaches back to the very day of the play’s first production and the minds of certain members of that audience). We can associate this with Hazlitt, Cowden-Clarke, and other romantic critics. The preoccupation of this school is the play’s imaginative power and reach. Indeed, its beauty, its success, comes in no small part from the very things that make it a failure to neoclassical critics. Both these schools of thought make it into the twentieth century, though the neoclassical view is eclipsed by the end of the century. We see the two competing views in our first two readings from John Masefield and Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. It is, however, the romantic view that will grow and come to dominate in the twentieth century (and experience a genuine resurgence in the twenty-first century); in no small part, the lengthy essay by G. Wilson Knight, printed here in its entirety, can take some credit for this. He encourages us, through diligent formalist close reading, with a complementary use of myth-criticism, to not merely overlook the “faults of the play but to understand them as important tonal building blocks that help comprise the play’s beautifully indeterminate vision.” The neoclassical view of the play by the end of the twentieth century sees little to no life in print but no doubt continues as an important part of classroom discussions as students engage the work for the first time. In the second half of the twentieth century, the proliferation of literary theory produced a variety of different readings and engagements with the play, as it guaranteed for all of Shakespeare’s plays. At the close of twentieth century, for 57

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example, performance study approaches to Shakespeare (as the name suggests, a way of reading Shakespeare’s drama devoted to understanding through analysis of physical productions on stage or film) are particularly popular and successful. Richard McCabe’s essay on playing the role of Autolycus can be classified as a piece of performance study work, of course, and it is enlightening to hear an actor rather than a trained scholar discussing characterization; after all, who knows a character better than an actor who inhabits that role for a theatrical season. J.I.M. Stewart, included in this section, makes an early and compelling psychoanalytic reading of the play, suggesting that Leontes’s jealousy can be usefully explained using Freudian theory. We begin to see the “faults” now spoken of not just as beauties but as “puzzles” that are solvable. For Stewart, Leontes’s jealousy is rooted in an unconscious homosexual desire for Polixenes. Now, this is exactly the kind of reading that alienates some new students of Shakespeare and literature in general. This is too much, they might say, this stretches things too far. I encourage such students to read Stewart’s short essay with an open mind. It does not really matter, after all, whether this is the correct answer and solution to this particular Shakespearean puzzle (such surefootedness does not exist in our field), but it is a viable possibility and, more importantly, if rejected, it encourages readers to dig deeper in the text to find a “better” solution to the problem. We can see in the twentieth century, then, critics doing exactly this, digging deeper, moving beyond fault-finding and into problem-finding; the first shuts off critical enquiry while the second opens it up. The Winter’s Tale, along with a small number of other plays, such as All’s Well That Ends Well, suffered some scorn and neglect over the centuries, long seen by many as inferior lapses by the Bard; these works, however, have been rescued, so to speak, by critics in the second half of the twentieth century. In the case of The Winter’s Tale, the play is very much in the ascendancy, as we will see in the section “The Winter’s Tale in the Twenty-first Century.”

1911—John Masefield. From William Shakespeare Masefield (1878–1967) was a poet, playwright, and critic, publishing extensively thoughout the twentieth century. Carcanet Books has recently published new editions of his poetry, Sea-fever: Selected Poems (2005) and Reynard the Fox (2008). Here, Masefield stresses the beauty of the play and, in some ways, at the close of the excerpt, anticipates the much more detailed and sophisticated analysis of G. Wilson Knight three decades later. Both writers see in Shakespeare’s romance what Masefield calls “the fulness of the rolling world.”

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Written. 1610–11. Published, in the first folio, 1623. Source of the Plot. The story appears in Robert Greene’s romance of Pandosto. Shakespeare greatly improves the fable by completing it. Greene ends it. Greene makes the story an accident with an unhappy end. Shakespeare makes it a vision of the working of fate with the tools of human passion. The Fable. Leontes, King of Sicilia, suspecting that his wife Hermione is guilty of adultery with Polixenes, King of Bohemia, tries her on that count. He causes her daughter to be carried to a desert place and there exposed. The oracle of Apollo declares to him that Hermione is innocent, that he himself is a jealous tyrant, and that he will die without an heir should he fail to recover the daughter lost. The truth of the oracle is confirmed by the (apparent) death of Hermione and the real death of Mamillius, his son. Repenting bitterly of his obsession of jealousy he goes into mourning The little daughter is found by country people who nourish and cherish her. She grows up to beautiful and gracious girlhood. Florizel, the son of Polixenes, falls in love with her, and seeks to marry her without his father’s knowledge. Being discovered by Polixenes, he flies with her to the sea. Taking ship, the couple come to Leontes’ court, where it is proved that the girl is the lost princess. She is married to Florizel. Leontes is reconciled to Polixenes. Hermione completes the general happiness by rejoining the husband who has so long mourned her. * * *

Dr. Simon Forman, the first critic of this play, made note to “remember” two things in it, “how he sent to the orakell of Appollo,” and “also the rog that cam in all tottered like Coll Pipci.” He drew from it this moral lesson, that one should “Beware of trustinge feined beggars or fawninge fellouse.” The moral lesson is still of value to the world, and it is most certainly one which Shakespeare strove to impress. Shakespeare’s mind was always brooding on the working of fate. He was always watching the results of some obsession upon an individual and the people connected with him. He saw that a blindness falling upon a person suddenly, for no apparent reason, except that something strikes the something not quite sound in the nature, has the power to alter life violently. It was his belief that life must not be altered violently. Life is a thing of infinitely gradual growth, that would perfect itself if the blindness could be kept away. Any deceiving thing, like a passion or a feigned beggar, is a cause of the putting back of life, indefinitely. In this play, he followed his usual practice, of showing the results of a human blindness upon human destiny. The greater plays are studies of treachery and self-betrayal. This play is a study of deceit and self-deception. Leontes is deceived by his obsession, Polixenes by his son, the country man by Autolycus,

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life, throughout, by art. In the last great scene, life is mistaken for art. In the first great scene a true friendship is mistaken for a false love. It may be called the gentlest of Shakespeare’s plays. It is done with a tenderer hand than the other works. The name, A Winter’s Tale, is taken from a scene in the second act. Hermione sits down with her son, by the winter fire, to listen to his story. It is the last time she ever sees her son. He has hardly opened his lips when Leontes enters to accuse her of adultery. She is hurried off to prison, and Mamillius dies before the oracle’s message comes to clear her. The sudden shocks and interruptions of life, which play so big a part in the action of these late romances, have full power here. The winter’s tale is interrupted. The rest of the play results from the interruption. Much of it is very beautiful. To us, the wonderful thing is the strangeness of the tenderness which makes some scenes in the fifth act so passionate with grief for old injustice done to the dead. The cry of Leontes remembering the wronged dead woman’s eyes— “Stars, stars, And all eyes else dead coals,” is haunting and heart-breaking. All his longing of remorse gives to the last great scene, before the supposed statue, an intensity of beauty hardly endurable. The passion of remorse is a romantic, not a tragic passion. It is the mood which follows the tragic mood. Shakespeare’s creative life is like a Shakespearean play. It ends with an easing of the strain and a making of peace. It is said that an old horse near to death turns towards the pastures where he was foaled. It is true of human beings. Man wanders home to the fields which bred him. A part of the romance of this poem is the turning back of the poet’s mind to the Cotswold country, of which he sang so magically, in his first play, sixteen or eighteen years before. There are fine scenes of shepherds at home, among the sheep bells and clean wind. There is a very lovely talk of flowers— “daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength.” To Shakespeare, the magically happy man, the going back to them must have been a time for thanksgiving. But to the supremely happy man all times are times of thanksgiving, deep, tranquil and abundant, for the delight, the majesty and the beauty of the fulness of the rolling world.

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QQQ 1918—Arthur Quiller-Couch. From Shakespeare’s Workmanship Quiller-Couch (1863–1944) was an accomplished and prolific earlytwentieth-century critic, particularly remembered for his work on Shakespeare. In his analysis of The Winter’s Tale, Quiller-Couch defends Shakespeare against charges of inappropriately mixing tragic and comic modes, as well as breaching the unity of time—an effort Quiller-Couch calls an “honest failure” required by the play’s aim of depicting generational healing. However, while he finds Shakespeare innocent (or at least pardonable) on these grounds, Quiller-Couch maintains that there is nonetheless evidence of much “careless workmanship” from Shakespeare on display in the work. The critic’s subsequent charges in large part rehearse objections almost as old as the play itself (see Charlotte Lennox, for example, in the volume’s section on the eighteenth-century criticism).

The Winter’s Tale—Echoes of Pericles—Fusion of tragedy and comedy—Futility of hard definitions—False criticism of its structure—The author’s aim—An honest failure—The jealousy of Leontes—Some careless workmanship—The fate of Antigonus—The part of Autolycus—The recognition scene—Deliberate faëry—Weakness of the plot as a whole—The unapproachable love-scene.

(1)

Imagine a gallery hung with tapestries and having many side-doors to left and right with passages that lead into mysterious parts of the house; or a long garden alley out of which by-paths branch and are lost in glooms of shade and echoes of lapsing water, faint, unseen, at times distant and anon close at hand. At close of day in such a place, you will be haunted first by the uncanny feeling “I have been here—just here—before, either in this life or in some previous one,” and next by whispers, footfalls, shadows that form themselves at the crossways ahead and fade down them as soon as surmised. So, at the close of Shakespeare’s day, are we haunted as we follow The Winter’s Tale; and by many ghosts, but chiefly by the ghost of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Indeed (to speak fancifully a little longer of a play that cannot be criticised without fancy), I cannot read these two plays in close succession but I am constantly put in mind of Coleridge’s allegory, Time, Real and Imaginary, to give it a new application:

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On the wide level of a mountain’s head I knew not where, but ’twas some faëry place), Their pinions ostrich-like for sails outspread, Two lovely children ran an endless race—   A sister and a brother.   This far outstripped the other: Yet ever runs she with reverted face   And looks and listens for the boy behind:   For he, alas, is blind! O’er rough and smooth with even step he pass’d, And knows not whether he be first or last. Like Pericles, The Winter’s Tale slips a long interval of years between its third and fourth Acts, like Pericles employing a chorus to beg our forgiveness for the breach made in the sacred Unity of Time. They are yawning gaps, too: fourteen years in Pericles, sixteen in The Winter’s Tale. But of course we recognise them to be necessary as soon as we see what Shakespeare is trying to do; which is, to reconcile the mistakes, wrongs, sufferings of one generation of men and women in their hopes for the next. “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, but through their repentance and under God’s mercy the children’s teeth shall not be set on edge.” That is the recurrent task of our Shakespeare in these his last years, in the sun-setting— On the wide level of a mountain’s head (I knew not where, but ’twas some faëry place): and as yet Shakespeare, master of resources though he was, could hit on no device to avoid these gaps, having to present, in an action of some three hours, the children Marina and Perdita first as babes exposed, helpless as innocent, to the surge of the sea or the beasts of the forest, anon as maidens grown up to reunite parental hearts long astray, redeem inveterate wrongs, cancel old woes, heal the past with holy hope.

(2)

Critics have accused Pericles and The Winter’s Tale of this common fault: that each has a double plot which is also a separated plot—separated by the break between Acts III and IV. In a previous chapter we have examined the double plot of Pericles. In The Winter’s Tale, it is urged, the first three Acts made a complete independent tragedy. By the end of them the boy Mamilius is dead; Antigonus is dead; and—far worse—for aught we know Hermione is dead, of a broken heart. The words of the Oracle are fulfilled; and Leontes, childless as well as wifeless, is very righteously left to a lifelong remorse. Thus far

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Shakespeare has worked strictly in terms of tragedy; and the action, tragically conceived, has been tragically rounded off. Then (say the critics) in the last two Acts, after a supposed interval, Shakespeare tacks on a complete independent comedy, which, picking up the thread of the story at its most tragic point, conducts us out into a garden of pleasant romantic devices where old wrongs meet to be reconciled as in this world they never do and never are. I lay little store by this fault-finding. To start with, I think it unfair to drag Pericles into the comparison, since (as we have proved to our satisfaction) the first two Acts of Pericles are not Shakespeare’s work; and therefore in opposing its last two Acts against its first three the critics oppose them against work for twothirds of which he was not responsible; whereas in setting the last two against the first three Acts of The Winter’s Tale they are dealing with work for which he is wholly responsible. Here, if faulty workmanship be detected, Shakespeare and Shakespeare alone is to blame. Next, ruling out Pericles for this reason and taking The Winter’s Tale by itself, I find the fault-finders pedantic. They seem to me to be enslaved by stock definitions. “Here,” they say, “in Acts I, II, III, we have Tragedy; there, in Acts IV and V, we have Comedy. Therefore Shakespeare is guilty of the attempt to work into one drama two different stories in two separate categories of Art. Q. E. D.” Quite so. That is precisely what Shakespeare was attempting to do. In a world where Nature mixes comedy with tragedy and often shades one into the other indistinguishably, Art, if she be Nature’s mirror (as Shakespeare held), must always be impatient of hard definitions. They have their disciplinary uses: again and again while he is learning his trade they may restrain the artist from “mixing up things that differ”—which Horace rightly put in the forefront of his Ars Poetica as the prime offence against Art. But in the end they must be for him a matter of tact rather than of strict law which de minimis non curat. They are, after all, conventions: they are, at the best, inductions from the practice of great artists who have gone before; as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides preceded Aristotle, and but for them he would have had not only no theory but nothing to theorise about. As he goes on, the great artist with a sense of growing power conceives a desire to improve the best. At the same time he perceives that in Art, as in Nature, truth is a matter too delicate to be grasped by schoolmen. La Vérité consiste dans les nuances; and, in the division of labour between him and the critics, it is his, not theirs, to lead the way in discovery. Be this granted or not, no one can begin to understand Shakespeare’s later plays who does not perceive that they have one common and constant aim—to repair the passionate errors of men and women in the happiness their children discover, and so to renew the hopes of the world; to reconcile the tragedy of one generation with the fresh hope of another in a third form of drama which we may call ‘romantic’ if we will.

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Moreover—and for a minor point—it is not true of this particular play, The Winter’s Tale, that Acts I–III make a rounded play in themselves. A number of threads are deliberately left hanging. For example, while the doom of the Oracle has been exacted, its promise of hope yet waits to be fulfilled—The King shall live without an heir if that which is lost be not found. The pith of an oracular response lies always in the riddle, and this is the sole riddle in the answer brought by Cleomenes and Dion from Delphi. “That which is lost” is, of course, Perdita, as her name tells us: and the means of her putting away has already been introduced, and very carefully, into Act III. We do not know, to be sure, that Hermione lives: yet if, as members of the Globe audience, we know our Shakespeare of old, we ought to have guessed in Paulina’s protestations a something held up his sleeve. I grant that it takes a guess, and that Leontes must by no means be allowed to surmise the truth. But—to return to my main argument—if the critics be unintelligent who condemn the general structure of The Winter’s Tale, they multiply stupidity when they proceed to convert and use it in condonation of certain flagrant faults: as, for example, when they argue that because Shakespeare, by compressing two plots into one play, overcrowded the time at his disposal, therefore we must overlook the monstrously sudden growth of Leontes’s jealousy; that he left himself no room to develop rationally: or, for another example, as when Gervinus, to excuse the unworkmanlike trick by which Shakespeare scamps the recognition scene between Perdita and her father, sagely pleads that “The poet has wisely placed the event behind the scenes; otherwise the play would be too full of powerful scenes.” I shall return to both these examples. Just here I wish to say that, the purpose of these pages being less to give information about Shakespeare than to suggest ways of reading him by which we can increase for ourselves our profit and delight, I have no quarrel with any critic on the mere ground of fault-finding: for I hold that as a rule he does us better service who draws our attention to apparent faults than he who glosses them over with ready explanations or quick assurances that they are beauties rather than blemishes. If we can discover for ourselves that an alleged or an apparent fault is, or is not, a real fault, we bring off a critical success, however small: our first business in this world being to judge for ourselves. It is a historical fact that Shakespeare invited the applause of the Globe Theatre audience, and it should cost our modesty no great effort to rise to that average. Or we may forget the Globe audience and remember only that Shakespeare is addressing us. But, if we would be critics, our first task consists in discovering what the author is trying to do. This discovered, we understand where his true difficulties lie, and when we come upon an apparent fault in his work we can pretty easily determine whether to condone it—nay, perhaps even to admire it—as an honest attempt that has fallen short, or to condemn it for a piece of scamped and careless

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workmanship. Thus in The Winter’s Tale the gap between Acts III and IV comes of honest failure to do an extremely difficult thing, yet a thing well worth doing, which Shakespeare essayed again and again until at length, in The Tempest, he mastered it. But the play abounds in flaws far less venial.

(3)

I begin with the jealousy of Leontes. This is actually baseless as Othello’s: and it has far less excuse than Othello’s, for it lacks both a villain to suggest and circumstances to feed the delusion. It is a caprice of self-deception, a maggot suddenly bred in a brain not hitherto supposed to be mad. “During less than twenty lines,” says Professor Wendell, “Leontes is carried through an emotional experience which in the case of Othello had been prepared for by above two Acts and, when it came, occupied nearly two hundred and fifty lines. Lacking due preparative, it strikes us as monstrous.” Granted that Leontes, as contrasted with Othello, has a naturally jealous disposition—then, Why are we not warned of it? Camillo and Antigonus must surely, as observant courtiers, have sounded their master’s nature and detected its master-weakness. But Camillo, who opens the play, hints no such knowledge: it comes upon him in Scene 2 like a thunder-clap. Antigonus and all the rest of the courtiers are simply bewildered: Leontes strikes them as a man snatched out of his wits. And what of Hermione herself? She has been Leontes’ wife for several years, and an attentive wife. Yet she has no inkling at all of this masterweakness. The revelation of it in Act II, Scene 1, outrages not only her honour but her understanding. . . . Then, I say, if neither the courtiers nor Hermione have guessed, a fortiori we are not prepared. I ask any candid reader of the play if the surprise of Leontes’ insane jealousy does not hit him, as it hits every one on the stage, like a blow on the face? If, on the other hand, Leontes be not a man naturally jealous, the awakening of jealousy and the haste with which it possesses him shock probability no less. The apologists on this side are even more at fault. They can only suggest that Shakespeare lacked time and room to develop the change in the man. But I take up the little volumes of the Temple Shakespeare in which, for handiness, I have been re-reading his later plays. I note that The Tempest, a Court play, occupies 106 pages of print; Pericles, 116 pages; The Winter’s Tale, 147 pages; King Henry VIII, 148 pages; Cymbeline, 169 pages. Now, The Winter’s Tale, like Cymbeline, was written for the theatre: Dr. Simon Forman’s diary records that he witnessed a performance at The Globe on May 15th, 1611. A short while before, he had witnessed a performance of Cymbeline at the same house. If, then, for Cymbeline Shakespeare could be allowed a space of time correspondent with 169 pages of print, why in The Winter’s Tale had he to compress his action within a space less by 22 pages—or between one-eighth and one-seventh? We are dealing with workmanship, and this is an eminently

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practical question, as any playwright will tell us. Shakespeare had time, or could have found time, to make Leontes’ jealousy far more credible than it is. I maintain that he bungled it.

(4)

But the play abounds in careless workmanship. Let me follow up this really important flaw by instancing a few lesser ones: (a) The Oracle. “It seems,” says Coleridge, “a mere indolence in the great bard not to have provided in the oracular response (Act II, Scene 2) some ground for Hermione’s seeming death and sixteen years’ voluntary concealment;” and Coleridge even suggests how it could have been conveyed, in a single sentence of fifteen words. Shakespeare let the opportunity go. The resurrection of Hermione thus becomes more startling, but at a total loss of dramatic irony. (b) Prince Florizel in Act IV, Scene 4, appears in shepherd’s clothes. “Your high self,” Perdita tells him, The gracious mark o’ the land, you have obscur’d With a swain’s wearing. Yet before the end of the Scene he is exchanging a fine court suit for Autolycus’ rags. (This, by the way, would seem to argue some imperfection in the text as it has reached us; since obviously such a blunder could not have survived the first dress rehearsal. Yet, strange to say, The Winters’ Tale seems to be about the most carefully printed play in the whole of the First Folio.) (c) Next let us take the fate of Antigonus: and let me begin by quoting Professor Sir Walter Raleigh on the fate of this poor man, disposed of in “the most unprincipled and reckless fashion”: Up to the time of his sudden death Antigonus has served his maker well; he has played an important part in action, and by his devotion and courage has won the affection of all the spectators. It is he who saves the daughter of Hermione from the mad rage of the King. “I’ll pawn the little blood which I have left,” he says, “to save the innocent.” He is allowed to take the child away on condition that he shall expose her in some desert place and leave her to the mercy of chance. He fulfils his task, and now, by the end of the third Act, his part in the play is over. Sixteen years are to pass, and new matters are to engage our attention; surely the aged nobleman might have been allowed to retire in peace. Shakespeare thought otherwise; perhaps he felt it important that no news whatever concerning the child should reach Leontes, and therefore resolved to make away with the only likely messenger. Antigonus takes an affecting farewell of the infant princess; the weather grows stormy; and the rest must be told in Shakespeare’s own words.

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  Antigonus. Farewell; The day frowns more and more: thou’rt like to have. A lullaby too rough: I never saw The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour! Well may I get aboard! This is the Chase! I am gone forever! (Exit, pursued by a bear.) This is the first we hear of the bear, and would be the last, were it not that Shakespeare, having in this wise disposed of poor Antigonus, makes a thrifty use of the remains at the feast of Comedy. The clown comes in to report, with much amusing detail, how the bear has only half dined on the old gentleman, and is at it now. It is this sort of conduct on the part of the dramatist that the word Romance has been used to cover. The thorough-paced Romantic critic is fully entitled to refute the objections urged by classic censors against Shakespeare’s dramatic method; but if he professes to be unable to understand them, he disgraces his own wit. This is soundly said; and yet Sir Walter has not plumbed the deep damnation of Antigonus’ taking-off. Its true offence is against economy of workmanship. The bear is a naughty superfluity. Students of this play may find a little profit and much amusement in an acting version prepared by John Kemble for Drury Lane, in 1802. Let me quote the precedent passage as printed by Kemble; or rather a part of it, chiefly for the sake of its stage directions. Antigonus says: Blossom, speed thee well! There lie: (laying down the child ) And there thy character: (lays down a paper) There these: (lays down a casket) Which may, if fortune please, both breed thee pretty, And still rest thine—(Rain and wind ) The storm begins!1 There we behold the child Perdita laid with wealth in jewels and the evidence of her high parentage beside her. All we have now to do as a matter of stageworkmanship is to efface Antigonus. But why introduce that bear? The ship that brought Antigonus is riding off the coast of Bohemia and is presently engulfed with all her crew. The Clown sees it all happen. Then why, in the name of economy, not engulf Antigonus with the rest?—or, better still, as he tries to row aboard? I can discover no answer to that. If any one ask my private opinion why the bear came on, it is that the Bear-Pit in Southwark, hard by the Globe

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Theatre, had a tame animal to let out, and the Globe management took the opportunity to make a popular hit. (d) Next, for Autolycus: I challenge any one to read the play through, seat himself at table, and write down what Autolycus does to further the plot. Let me not deny the knave his place in the picture. That is appropriate enough, and delightful. But as a factor in the plot, though from the moment of his appearance he seems to be constantly and elaborately intriguing, in effect he does nothing at all. As a part of the story he is indeed so negligible that Mary Lamb in the Tales from Shakespeare left him out altogether. Yet Autolycus is just the character that Charles and Mary Lamb delighted in. Again I give you my private opinion: which is that Shakespeare meant to make a great deal of Autolycus, very carefully elaborated him to take a prominent and amusing part in the recognition scene, tired of it all, and suddenly, resolving to scamp the recognition scene, smothered him up along with it. (e) This brings us to the great fault of all: to the recognition scene; or rather to the scamping of it. To be sure, if we choose to tread foot with Gervinus and agree that “the poet has wisely placed this event behind the scenes, otherwise the play would have been too full of powerful scenes”; if, having been promised a mighty thrill, in the great master’s fashion, we really prefer two or three innominate gentlemen entering and saying, “Have you heard?” “You don’t tell me!” “No?” “Then you have lost a sight?”—I say, if we really prefer this sort of thing, which Gervinus calls “in itself a rare masterpiece of prose description,” then Heaven must be our aid. But if, using our own judgment, we read the play and put ourselves in the place of its first audience, I ask, Are we not balked? In proportion as we have paid tribute to the art of the story by letting our interest be intrigued, our emotion excited, are we not cheated when Shakespeare lets us down with this reported tale? I would point out that it nowise resembles the Messengers’ tales in Greek tragedy. These related bloody deeds, things not to be displayed on the stage. It is a question of simple anagnorisis—Leontes recognising Perdita as his child; and the Greek tragedians never weaken the dramatic effect of anagnorisis by removing it out of sight of the audience. Anagnorisis (Recognition) and peripeteia (Reversal of Fortune) are in fact the two hinges upon which all Greek drama turns. But apart from our own natural expectation, and apart from all rule of tragic workmanship, let us test Gervinus with his “otherwise the play would have been too full of powerful scenes” by what we know of Shakespeare; who never flinched from cumulative effect, but on the contrary habitually revelled in it. Did he suffer us to lose that breathless moment when Sebastian and Viola stand and gaze and con each the other, incredulous? One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons!

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Did he cast Lear’s recognition of Cordelia into oratio obliqua? Did he cut out anything from Macbeth or from Hamlet because “otherwise the play would have been too full of powerful scenes”? Or let us consider Cymbeline. In Cymbeline we hold our breath while Shakespeare accumulated no less than twenty-four dénoûements within the space of one final Act! And in Leontes’ recognition of his daughter there is nothing at all to weaken—rather everything to strengthen and lead up to and heighten—the great recognition of Hermione. Why, then, did Shakespeare shirk it? That I cannot answer, save by borrowing the words of Elijah: Cry aloud: for he is a god; either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is on a journey, or peradventure he sleepeth and must be awaked. —by which I mean no more than just this: The longer we consider these later plays that fall to be dated between the great tragedies and The Tempest, the more we are forced to feel that—to cast it in terms befitting the vagueness of the surmise—“something had happened.” I am not referring to that strange sunset atmosphere which so many have noted; nor to that sublime confusion of dates and places which some set down to carelessness, but which I believe to be part of the method which deliberately sets the story in a fairy haze, so that it belongs to no age but to all time. The anachronisms in The Winter’s Tale are as flagrant as those in Cymbeline. “Whitsun pastorals,” “Christian burial,” Giulio Romano, the Emperor of Russia, and Puritans singing psalms to hornpipes, all contemporary with the Oracle of Delphi—“the island of Delphi”! They jar us less than the anachronisms of Cymbeline, but only because Cymbeline professes to be history of a sort, whereas The Winter’s Tale but professes to be a tale: and Bohemia is as welcome to a sea-coast as Prospero to happen on a West Indian islet in the Mediterranean. “Faëry—deliberate Faëry” is the answer: “the light that never was on sea or land”—but do we not wish it was? Faëry—deliberate faëry: the nursery tale of Snowflake translated into Cymbeline, Danaë and the floating cradle translated into Pericles: the Princess turned Goose-girl, the disguised Prince, the clownish foster-father and foster-brother, translated into The Winter’s Tale. No: I am not thinking of these touches, which may as easily be beauty-spots as blemishes: but rather of those laxities of construction, of workmanship, with which maybe this paper has been disproportionately concerned: of the tours de force also, mixed up in Pericles and Henry VIII with other men’s botchwork, confused here, in The Winter’s Tale, with serious scampings of artistry.

(5)

Coming back to our strict enquiry into the workmanship of The Winter’s Tale, we must admit that the play never lodges in our minds as a whole, is never compact as (for instance) As You Like It, or Much Ado, or Twelfth Night, or Measure for Measure; or as Macbeth, or Othello, or even Antony and Cleopatra is compact,

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or as The Tempest is compact. It leaves no single impression. We think maybe of Hermione’s most noble rebuke: Adieu, my lord: I never wish’d to see you sorry; now I trust I shall. My women, come; you have leave. We think of her, grandly innocent, in the trial scene: or we see her, in the last Act, the statue made life, in the hush of the music, stepping down to forgive Leontes, brought to him, like Alcestis, from the grave, turning from him to stretch hands over Perdita who kneels: You gods, look down, And from your sacred vials pour your graces Upon my daughter’s head, then, catching her, holding her a little away, searching her eyes to make sure of bliss, Tell me, mine own, Where hast thou been preserv’d? Where liv’d? . . . Or again we think of Paulina, that admirable woman in Shakespeare’s gallery; prototype of Nurse Berry in Richard Feverel, with a touch of Madame SansGêne, and of that excellent scene in which she beards Leontes, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men cannot stay her tongue. But first of all, when The Winter’s Tale comes to our mind, nine out of ten of us think of the sheepshearing feast and Perdita handing flowers—gem of all pastorals: I would I had some flowers of the Spring that might Become your time of day: and yours, and yours, That wear upon your virgin branches yet Your maidenheads growing—O Proserpina, For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let’st fall From Dis’s waggon! . . . Daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes Or Cytherea’s breath; pale primroses, That die unmarried ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength—a malady Most incident to maids: bold oxlips and

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The crown imperial: lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one. . . . —never the total play; but ever separate scene after scene, and this the unapproachable one, in which Florizel and Perdita, no active persons in the drama, find themselves the centre of it, being young and innocent and in love. That is all, but it is enough. Love is enough: ho, ye who seek saving, Go no further, come hither! there have been who found it, And these know the House of Fulfilment of Craving. . . . These know the cup with the roses around it, These know the World’s wound and the balm that hath bound it: Cry out! the World heedeth not, “Love lead us home!” Note

1. Kemble is all wrong with his commas, as is the Cambridge text. The casket and papers cannot breed Perdita pretty. How should they? The right reading is, of course, “Which may, if fortune please, both breed thee, pretty, And still rest thine—The storm begins!”

QQQ

1947—George Wilson Knight. From The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays G. Wilson Knight (1897–1985) was a prolific critic whose many works on Shakespeare include The Wheel of Fire, a collection of essays on the tragedies; The Sovereign Flower; and the book from which the following chapter is taken, The Crown of Life. His analysis here takes in almost every scene of The Winter’s Tale in order and rises to a majestic crescendo, the beauty of which is almost worthy of the play itself. Wilson Knight argues that the play refuses to give up answers “on the plane of plot-realism” but rather, through feeling and thought, depicts “[l]ife itself, that creating and protecting deity whose superhuman presence and powers the drama labours to define.” But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come? Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die; and that

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The Winter’s Tale which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain: but God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body. All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes and another of birds. There are also celestial bodies and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also is the resurrection of the dead.

I Corinthians, xv. 35.

I

In The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare handles a similar narrative to that of Pericles with the infusion of a closer and more realistic human concern and a tightening of dramatic conflict. Pericles experiences a sense of evil followed by unmerited suffering; Leontes sins and endures a purgatory of guilt. Here the sackcloth and ashes of Pericles’ martyrdom are given a profounder relevance. The Winter’s Tale has had a poor showing in commentary, having seldom been regarded as more than an inconsequential romance with fine bits of poetry; while even those who, during recent years, have regarded it as a serious reading of human affairs, have avoided, or slurred over, as though un-at-home with its nature, the crucial and revealing event to which the whole action moves: the resurrection of Hermione. The play is in three main sections. The first is tragic; the second pastoral; the third must for the present be left undefined. There is a strong suggestion throughout of season-myth, with a balance of summer against winter. Evil passions, storm, and shipwreck are contrasted with young love and humour. Maturity and death are set against birth and resurrection. The action opens with a short prose dialogue between Camillo and Archidamus in which the simplicities of Bohemia are contrasted with the luxuries of Sicilia. The contrast is not later developed, and more important are the following remarks on maturity and youth. Leontes and Polixenes ‘were trained together in their childhoods’, though since separated by ‘mature’ responsibilities. (I. i. 24–35). The picture is completed by thought of the boy Mamilius:   Camillo. It is a gallant child; one that indeed physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh; they that went on crutches ere he was born desire yet their life to see him a man.   Archidamus. Would they else be content to die? (I. i. 4–2)

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Youth is conceived as a power; as a renewer of life and antagonist to death. Thus early is the central theme of The Winter’s Tale set before us. Polixenes also has a son whom he ‘longs to see’ (I. ii. 34), but Hermione presses his stay, asking about his and her own lord’s youth together and of their ‘tricks’ as ‘pretty lordings’. He answers:   Polixenes. We were, fair queen, Two lads that thought there was no more behind But such a day to-morrow as to-day, And to be boy eternal.   Hermione. Was not my lord the verier wag o’ the two?   Polixenes. We were as twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ the sun, And bleat the one at the other; what we chang’d Was innocence for innocence; we knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, no nor dream’d That any did. Had we pursued that life, And our weak spirits ne’er been higher rear’d With stronger blood, we should have answer’d heaven Boldly, ‘not guilty’; the imposition clear’d Hereditary ours. (I. ii. 62)

The ‘eternal’ consciousness of childhood is distinguished from the sin-born time-consciousness of man.1 Polixenes’ second speech defines a golden-age existence free from that ‘hereditary’ taint of fallen humanity which appears with the ‘stronger blood’, or passions, of maturity. Leontes, called from his reverie, excuses himself in similar terms; for he has been half-meditating and half-talking to Mamilius, calling him a ‘calf ’ and saying how he needs ‘a rough pash and the shoots that I have’ to be like his father (I. ii. 128–9):   Leontes . . . . Looking on the lines Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech’d, In my green velvet coat, my dagger muzzled, Lest it should bite its master, and so prove, As ornaments oft do, too dangerous: How like, methought, I then was to this kernel, This squash, this gentleman. Mine honest friend, Will you take eggs for money?   Mamilius. No, my lord, I’ll fight. (I. ii. 154)

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‘Calf ’, ‘kernel’, ‘squash’, ‘eggs’ (also ‘eggs’ earlier at I. ii. 131): impressions of young life—remember the frisking lambs of Polixenes’ speech—on various natural planes cluster. Polixenes, questioned as to his own ‘young prince’ (I. ii. 164), answers:   Polixenes. If at home, sir, He’s all my exercise, my mirth, my matter, Now my sworn friend and then mine enemy My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all: He makes a July day short as December, And with his varying childness cures in me Thoughts that would thick my blood.   Leontes. So stands this squire Offic’d with me. (I. ii. 165)

All humanity is compacted in the loved person, after the manner of Helena’s ‘Not my virginity yet . . .’ in All’s Well that Ends Well (I. i. 181). Childhood is shown as a redeeming force, subduing horrors. Mamilius is, at the play’s start, dramatically central. Defined mainly by what is said to, or about, him, and especially by Leontes’ by-play (‘What, hast smutch’d thy nose?’ at I. ii. 122), ‘my young rover’ (I. ii. 176) focalizes the poetry of boyhood and fills the stage. This poetry is, however, countered by Leontes’ rising jealousy conceived as evil in contrast to the golden-age of childhood. Leontes lives in the world of mature passion with attendant knowledge of evil, and consequent suspicion. More, his suspicion is an ugly thing, itself an evil; it is, practically, sin. The central emphasis in Shakespeare on conjugal trust and fidelity is patent: the deepest issues of good and evil are through it expressed. From Provençal lyric, through Petrarch, to Dante, romantic love is haloed with semi-divine meaning. At the Renaissance there is a further development: the romantic idea descends from fancy to actuality; it becomes practical, and therefore moral, in the ethic of marriage. 2 Now the dramatic implications of this change have received insufficient notice. Spenser’s doctrine of marriage-love is less important than Lyly’s dramatization of it: in Lyly the happy-ending love-drama, or love-ritual, not only releases drama from ecclesiastical domination but sets it firmly on a new course, which it follows still, thereby witnessing the unexhausted meaning, social and religious, of this persistent theme. In Shakespeare love-integrity is all but the supreme good, in both comedy and tragedy, the pattern being especially clear in Othello, with Desdemona as divinity and Iago as devil. Now, whatever our private social tenets, we must, in reading The Winter’s Tale, be prepared to accept the Shakespearian emphasis as a preliminary to understanding. Great poetry seldom leaps direct at universal ideas for their own sake; its ideas are

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housed in flesh and blood; and there is a logic of incarnated thought, a bloodcontact and descent from body to body, that does not necessarily correspond point by point to any conceptual chain. So, though Shakespeare writes here as a poet of the Renaissance as it specifically shaped itself in England with a plot-interest confined to suspicion of conjugal infidelity, the radiations set going concern the very essence of evil; sexual jealousy is shown as a concentration of possessiveness and inferiority developing into malice with Leontes’ suspicion aptly enough called ‘sin’ (I. ii. 283) and the whole argument considered a matter of ‘good and evil’ (I. ii. 303). But opposite the hero stands his own child, whose very being is a wisdom and an assurance:   Mamilius. I am like you, they say.   Leontes. Why, that’s some comfort. (I. ii. 207)

The boy has broken into one of his father’s interjectory paroxysms. The remark, and Leontes’ reaction, are simple enough; but the dramatic context is already so loaded with meaning that the simplicity reverberates beyond itself. The Winter’s Tale is more than a ‘morality’ play; and yet, with no loss of sharp human particularization, Mamilius stands before Leontes as Truth confronting Error. Leontes is shown as a man inwardly tormented. His misery expresses itself in short, stabbing sentences of great force: Too hot, too hot! To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances But not for joy; not joy (I. ii. 109)

His words jet from a similar nervous disorganization to that less vividly expressed in Macbeth’s Why do I yield to that suggestion Whose horrid image does unfix my hair, And makes my seated heart knock at my ribs Against the use of nature? (Macbeth, I. iii. 134)

Leontes’ early soliloquies contrast with his, and others’, conversation when a more reasonable intercourse is demanded; he can mask his feelings. But, left to himself, his anguish comes out in hisses, jets of poison, carried over by sibilants and thoughts of stagnant water:

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Gone already! Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a fork’d one! Go play, boy, play; thy mother plays, and I Play too, but so disgrac’d a part, whose issue Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamour Will be my knell. Go play, boy, play. There have been Or I am much deceiv’d, cuckolds ere now; And many a man there is even at this present, Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm, That little thinks she has been sluic’d in’s absence, And his pond fish’d by his next neighbour, by Sir Smile, his neighbour . . . (I. ii. 185)

The word ‘hiss’ occurs as a threat, drawing close. Hermione is ‘slippery’ (I. ii. 273). How poignantly the slime of this reptilian horror coiling round Leontes is countered by the little boy’s presence, leading to the ugly dexterity of the wit on ‘play’. The spasmodic jerks of his language reflect Leontes’ unease: he is, as it were, being sick; ejecting a poison, which yet grows stronger; something he has failed to digest, assimilate. Images of nausea pour out. His marriage is ‘spotted’, like a toad (cp. ‘most toad-spotted traitor’ at King Lear, V. iii. 140; and Othello’s ‘I had rather be a toad . . .’ and ‘cistern for foul toads to knot and gender in’ at Othello, III. iii. 270 and IV. ii. 60); and this defilement is to him ‘goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps’ (I. ii. 328–9). Our most virulent speech of disgust involves the much-loathed spider: There may be in the cup A spider steep’d, and one may drink, depart, And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge Is not infected; but if one present The abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides. With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. (II. i. 38)

The studied build-up of the preceding lines injects a maximum of force into that final, icy, reserve. Indeed, Leontes’ most vitriolic spasms get themselves out with a certain underemphasis, not unlike Swift’s general expression of nausea through meiosis; as though the extreme of satiric bitterness were always loath to risk suicide in the katharsis of luxuriant expression. Leontes’ paroxysms never enjoy Othello’s even swell and surge of fully developed emotion:

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Come, sir page, Look on me with your welkin eye: sweet villain! Most dear’st! my collop! Can thy dam?—may’t be?— Affection! thy intention stabs the centre: Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams;—how can this be?— With what’s unreal thou coactive art, And fellow’st nothing: then, ’tis very credent Thou may’st co-join with something; and thou dost, And that beyond commission, and I find it, And that to the infection of my brains And hardening of my brows. (I. ii. 136)

From the boy and his ‘welkin eye’—a phrase enlisting all great nature’s serenity and light—Leontes is being swiftly projected into instability; the universal ‘centre’ is gone, stabbed by this supposed ‘affection’ (i.e. growing love) of Hermione and Polixenes. The result is nightmare. The impossible has happened: worse, it is even now happening; the known creation has had dallyings with the ‘unreal’, the ‘nothing’, and thence given birth (as in Macbeth) to an only-too-real action of hideous obscenity in the visible order. We are close to Macbeth’s ‘horrible imaginings’ of his own as yet ‘fantastical’ crime, with ‘function smother’d in surmise’ until ‘nothing is but what is not’ (Macbeth, I. iii. 137–42). In both plays we have evil impinging as essential ‘nothing’, unreality, a delirium, which yet most violently acts on the real. Leontes’ whirling sequence rises to the powerful and revealing ‘infection of my brains’—thereby half-admitting his own now poisoned thinking—and then drops into an understress, almost euphemism, in ‘hardening of my brows’. And yet that last reserve again reflects a state the very opposite of repose: that of a man tense, nerving himself to believe, to endure— more, to be—the hideous thing. We are nearer Macbeth than Othello. This spasmodic, interjectory, explosive style, however, whirls itself once into a single rhythmic movement of towering excellence, developing the ‘nothing’ of our last quotation into a truly shattering reality. 3 ‘Is whispering nothing?’ asks Leontes of Camillo, and continues with a list of love’s advances, jerked out in rapid fire, and concluding: . . . Is this nothing? Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing; The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing; My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing.

(I. ii. 292)

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Nature’s ‘centre’ and ‘welkin’ (sky) in the boy’s eye (cp. ‘the eye of Heaven’ for the sun in Sonnet XVIII) were first (in our former speech) contrasted with ‘nothing’; here the nihilistic horror itself assumes validity equal to that of the ‘world’ and ‘covering sky’: this contrast or identity (as Leontes claims) is, as we shall see, basic. Great nature is here our final term of reference, to which even evil must appeal, somewhat as Hamlet, from the depths of his melancholia, admits the firmamental splendour. The victory of evil in Leontes’ soul, its rise in philosophical status, is thus here matched, though only for an instant, by a corresponding mastery of rhythm, rather as in Macbeth’s later speeches. One must beware of regarding tormented rhythms as a poetical goal. Possibly we over-rate Shakespeare’s rough-handling of language to correspond to the twists and jerks of psychic experience, not unlike the helter-skelter impressionism brought to a self-conscious art by the justly praised and influential Hopkins. One can often approve a poet’s disrespect to the tyrannies of rhythm and syntax; but there are dangers. Though Shakespeare indeed uses such a crammed, often cramped, manner elsewhere, the style is certainly most effective when expressing nightmare or disintegration: disrupted rhythms suit Brutus’ and Macbeth’s soliloquies before their half-intended murders ( Julius Caesar, II. i. 10–34; Macbeth, i. vii. 1–12). Shakespeare later allows himself more and more freedom in a manner which is perilously near to mannerism; and where no especial disorder, psychic or—as in a messengerspeech (as at Cymbeline, V. iii. 14–51)—physical is concerned, the result can irritate. With Leontes, however, the purpose has been patent; the disrupted style not merely fits, it explores and exposes, the anguish depicted. That anguish is hell. Leontes half knows, too, that it is sin. He goes to Camillo, if not for absolution, at least for confirmation and collaboration: I have trusted thee, Camillo, With all the nearest things to my heart, as well My chamber-councils, wherein, priest-like, thou Hast cleans’d my bosom: I from thee departed Thy penitent reform’d. But we have been Deceiv’d in thy integrity, deceiv’d In that which seems so. (I. ii. 235)

He wants Camillo to corroborate his own discovery. He is nervous, tentative; something intimate is, as the confessional phraseology hints, involved. But he is not asking advice; the least hint of disagreement rouses his fury. Indeed, he now positively wants his suspicions, which have become the dearest part of him, confirmed:

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  Camillo. Good my lord, be cur’d Of this diseas’d opinion, and betimes; For ’tis most dangerous.   Leontes. Say it be, ’tis true.   Camillo. No, no, my lord.   Leontes. It is; you lie, you lie; I say thou liest, Camillo, and I hate thee; Pronounce thee a gross lout, a mindless slave . . . (I. ii. 296)

The phrase ‘diseas’d opinion’ is exact: Leontes seems to admit disease, whilst insisting on his suspicion’s truth. Opposition raises a devil of self-defensive fury, rising to bombast and that type of vulgar abuse so often symptomatic of a semi-conscious guilt. His evil is self-born and unmotivated. Commentators have searched in vain for ‘motives’ to explain the soul-states and actions of Hamlet, Iago and Macbeth, without realizing that the poet is concerned not with trivialities, but with evil itself, whose cause remains as dark as theology: given a ‘sufficient’ motive, the thing to be studied vanishes. In Leontes we have a study of evil yet more coherent, realistic and compact; a study of almost demonic possession. He reacts violently to criticism: when Antigonus and others presume to argue, he shouts ‘Hold your peaces!’ (II. i. 138); and when he hears that Paulina is outside, Paulina who is to function throughout as his accuser, almost as his conscience, he starts ‘like a guilty thing upon a fearful summons’ (Hamlet, I. i. 148), as though recognizing his natural enemy: How! Away with that audacious lady! Antigonus, I charg’d thee that she should not come about me. I knew she would. (II. iii. 41)

The last words have the very accent of neurosis, blackening with defensive scorn the good onto which it projects its own evil. Leontes dimly recognizes that he is behaving as a tyrant, using position and power to bolster up and enforce on others a disease in himself. He is accordingly at pains to show himself as relying on his lords’ advice on condition that they do not oppose him: Why, what need we Commune with you of this, but rather follow

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Our forceful instigation? Our prerogative Calls not your counsels, but our natural goodness Imparts this . . . (II. i. 160)

He is insecure enough to want support, would convince himself of ‘natural goodness’; but, failing support, will go his own way. However, he has sent to the Oracle of Apollo for ‘greater confirmation’, realizing the danger of rashness and wishing to ‘give rest to the minds of others’ (II. i. 179–92). Tyrant though he be, he can still think constitutionally. Though absolutely certain, he is yet not quite certain that his certainty can maintain itself: paradoxes abound. He is on a rack of indecision: Nor night, nor day, no rest; it is but weakness To bear the matter thus; mere weakness. If The cause were not in being,—part o’ the cause, She the adultress; for the harlot king Is quite beyond mine arm, plot-proof; but she I can hook to me: say, that she were gone, Given to the fire, a moiety of my rest Might come to me again. (II. iii. 1)

In the full flood of anger, when his lords kneel, imploring him to spare the newborn child, he is indecisive and gives ground, muttering: ‘I am a feather for each wind that blows’ (II. iii. 153). We cannot admire him, as we admire Richard III, the later Macbeth, and Milton’s Satan, for a whole-hearted Satanism. Nor can we sympathize, as with Othello. The emotion aroused is rather a stern pity. He himself knows that to be mistaken in such a matter were ‘piteous’ (II. i. 181; cp. also III. ii. 235). More, it is almost comic: Antigonus suggests that the public scandal will raise everyone ‘to laughter’ (II. i. 197). Indeed, of all Shakespeare’s jealous husbands Leontes is nearest to Ford, existing in almost comic objectivity, though without one atom’s loss of tragic intensity. We have in him a sharp personification of the blend so obvious in the wider design. Tyranny and superstition are mutually related. Tyranny is the forceful domination of a person in the semi-evil, semineurotic, state of contemporary humanity. Were the tyrant purely integrated, his absolute control might be a good; hence the will in all royalist states to see the king as a superman of goodness and wisdom, and the theological equation of Christ = King. The tyrant, however, makes power serve personal error, opening the way for a number of illegitimate powers; at the extreme, superstitious belief regarding the manipulation of natural forces, and finally for beings of an infra-natural kind. In Shakespeare’s

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two full-length studies of tyranny in Richard III and Macbeth the emphasis on ill-omened creatures, witchcraft,4 and ghosts is thoroughly integral. Now Leontes has, without knowing it, entered this domain; and, by a transition well known to psychologists, tends to deny vehemently the name of tyrant, whilst seeing in his opposite, Paulina, the exact evil really lodged in himself. She brings from the prison, where his wife lies, Leontes’ new-born childdaughter, challenging him with utter fearlessness, reiterating the (to him—since he half fears its truth) maddening phrase ‘good queen’ (II. iii. 58) and finally stinging him to madness by actual presentation of the child. The opposition of childhood and evil, already made vivid by Mamilius, here reaches its maximum dramatic intensity and rouses in Leontes a devil that speaks directly in terms of black magic. Leontes now sees Paulina as a witch and as she presents the baby shouts: ‘Out! A mankind witch!’ (II. iii. 67). He is, as Paulina coolly observes, ‘mad’ (II. iii. 71). His storming gets more violent and excessively ugly: Traitors! Will you not push her out? Give her the bastard. Thou dotard! thou art woman-tired, unroosted By thy dame Partlet here. Take up the bastard; Take’t up, I say; give’t to thy crone. (II. iii. 72)

Notice the unchivalrous, ugly, scorn, the horror almost of woman as woman, in ‘Partlet’ and ‘crone’, the latter suggesting witchcraft; and also the continuation of our political emphasis in ‘traitors’, to be repeated again by ‘a nest of traitors’ (II. iii. 81), subtly suggesting, as does ‘Partlet’ too, a growing identity, in Leontes’ diseased mind, of creative nature with treachery. Against his words is Paulina’s more religious threat to Antigonus that his hands will be for ever ‘unvenerable’ (II. iii. 77) if he obeys; and her insistence that ‘the root’ of Leontes’ ‘opinion’ is ‘as rotten as ever oak or stone was sound’ (II. iii. 89), driving home once more the all-important contrast of Leontes’ crime with the stabilities of nature. After her exquisite description of nature’s handiwork in the child’s likeness to its father, Leontes’ reply is: ‘A gross hag!’ (II. iii. 107). The more perfect the good presented, the more black it rises before him; like Milton’s Satan, only without knowing it (as Macbeth knows it at the end and by so doing all but redeems himself), Leontes has said, ‘Evil, be thou my good’. His values are all transposed and Paulina deserves a witch’s death:   Leontes. I’ll ha’ thee burn’d.   Paulina. I care not; It is a heretic that makes the fire, Not she which burns in’t. I’ll not call you tyrant; But this most cruel usage of your queen—

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Not able to produce more accusation Than your own weak-hing’d fancy—something savours Of tyranny, and will ignoble make you, Yea, scandalous to the world.   Leontes. On your allegiance, Out of the chamber with her! Were I a tyrant, Where were her life? she durst not call me so If she did know me one. Away with her! (II. iii. 113)

Paulina’s phraseology (‘heretic’) is again orthodox and Christian. Leontes’ ‘on your allegiance’ echoes Lear’s scene with Kent (King Lear, I. i. 122–82), where the psychology of tyranny was, though less subtly developed, very similar. Notice Paulina’s reiterated emphasis on tyranny, and Leontes’ violent reaction. He fears the thought, half-recognizes its truth; though, with some justice, defending himself to himself, adducing rational evidence; trying to crush the summoning conscience whose outward projection is, throughout the play, Paulina. He has, however, sunk deep into paganism, witnessed by his intention to have the child ‘consum’d with fire’ (II. iii. 133). His emphatic desire to burn suggests a complex of tyranny and paganism, not to be finally distinguished from that semi-pagan fear of paganism which led to the tyrannic burning of supposed heretics and witches. There is in both a submission to fear and a desire to leave no trace of the dreaded thing: hence Leontes’ earlier thought that if Hermione were ‘given to the fire’ his peace of mind might return (II. iii. 8); and his recent threat to Paulina. Paulina, in opposition, represents the pure Christian conscience, together with common sense. Aligned with her are (i) the new-born baby and (ii) all those natural and human sanctities it symbolizes. Nature rules our play. Despite the court-setting, nature-suggestion has been, from the start, vivid, introduced by Polixenes’ opening lines: Nine changes of the watery star have been The shepherd’s note since we have left our throne . . . (I. ii. 1)

The following dialogue is sprinkled with natural imagery in close association with youth—in the description of the two kings as ‘twinn’d lambs that did frisk i’ the sun’ (I. ii. 67), the ‘unfledg’d days’ of boyhood (I. ii. 78), Leontes’ use of steer, heifer, kernel and squash. A general pastoralism rings in the ‘mort o’ the deer’ at I. ii. 119. Leontes sees his wife’s supposed love-making as a bird’s holding up of her ‘bill’ (I. ii. 183); and there are his more obvious animal-images

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of nausea already noted. Seasons, to be so important in the general design, are suggested by ‘sneaping winds’ at I. ii. 13 and twice actually mentioned: Polixenes’ son ‘makes a July’s day short as December’ (I. ii. 169), and we have Mamilius’ contribution to the play’s wintry opening in his unfinished story. ‘A sad tale’, he says, is ‘best for winter’ and continues:   Mamilius. There was a man—   Hermione. Nay, come, sit down; then on.   Mamilius. Dwelt by a churchyard. I will tell it softly; Yond crickets shall not hear it. (II. i. 24–30)

The ‘sad tale’ reflects the oncoming disaster; the boy’s words characterize his father, dwelling close (as is hinted by a revealing image at II. i. 150) to death; the broken story is itself a little tragedy. But here all tragedies are firmly held within Nature’s vastness. Hermione’s thought of how Polixenes may ‘unsphere the stars with oaths’ (I. ii. 48) repeats the manner of Antony and Cleopatra: compare, too, Camillo’s ‘among the infinite doings of the world’ (I. ii. 253) with the Soothsayer’s ‘in nature’s infinite book of secrecy a little I can read’ at Antony and Cleopatra, I. ii. 11. Nature here, however, whilst remaining vast, is normally less philosophically, more concretely, present. Three times already (I. ii. 137–9; I. ii. 293–4; II. iii. 90) we have found creation’s firmamental and earthly steadfastness contrasted with the hideous instabilities of evil; and throughout Leontes’ fall that solid ‘world’ and its ‘covering sky’ (I. ii 293–4; cp. also his ‘You’ll be found, be you beneath the sky’ at I. ii. 179) are our touchstones of reality. The close association of nature and human childhood has Christian affinities, and Christian tonings occur naturally among our positives. We have seen that Paulina employs them. When Polixenes calls Hermione ‘my most sacred lady’ (I. ii. 76), whilst admitting his own lapse, since childhood, into ‘temptations’, the adjective goes (as later at II. iii. 84 and V. i. 172) beyond formal courtesy. More direct is: O, then my best blood turn To an infected jelly, and my name Be yok’d with his that did betray the Best! (I. ii. 417)

—though the immediate comparison (as at Richard II, IV. i. 170, 240; and Timon of Athens, I. ii. 48–51) still serves a human purpose. But here is something quite new and characteristic, indeed, the most characteristic possible, of The Winter’s Tale. When the Gaoler doubts whether he should release the newborn baby from the prison without a warrant, Paulina answers:

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You need not fear it, sir: The child was prisoner to the womb, and is By law and process of great nature thence Freed and enfranchis’d . . . (II. ii. 58)

‘Freed’: how the word contrasts with the stifling atmosphere of Leontes’ own enslavement to evil and imprisoning of Hermione. It is precisely this freedom of ‘great nature’, unpossessive, ever-new, creative, against which Leontes’ tyranny has offended; and his offence is therefore also one against the natural order whose very laws are those of creation and freedom; and therefore, too, of miracle. ‘Great nature’ is our over-ruling deity—hence the broad phraseology of ‘your mother rounds apace’ (II. i. 16)—responsible for the miraculous perpetuation and re-creation of worn and sinful man. Mamilius’ likeness to Leontes is, as we have seen, emphatic; as when, looking on his son, the father remembers his own boyhood (I. ii. 154–61), or sees the boy’s smutched nose as ‘a copy out of mine’ (I. ii. 123); while Mamilius himself remarks: ‘I am like you, they say’ (I. ii. 208). The emphasis reaches a climax in Paulina’s presentation to the horrified Leontes of his new-born baby. We have had something similar in Mamilius’ play with the ladies and his talk of eyebrows (I. i. 7–15), but here is a greater passage: Behold, my lords, Although the print be little, the whole matter And copy of the father; eye, nose, lip, The trick of ’s frown, his forehead, nay, the valley, The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles, The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger: And thou, good goddess Nature, which hast made it So like to him that got it, if thou hast The ordering of the mind too, ’mongst all colours No yellow in’t; lest she suspect, as he does, Her children not her husband’s. (II. iii. 97)

Notice the pretty irony of ‘the trick of his frown’; Leontes’ ugly wrath at this instant is reflected in the baby’s puckered brow. Notice, too, the slight but important reservation as to whether Nature also orders the mind, less an assertion of difference than symptom of the will to drive natural supremity to the limit, in spite of traditional distinctions which are nevertheless remembered. Observe the exact and objective description of human lineaments, with a maximum of love’s intimacy, yet so purified of any clouding, or glamorous, passion

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or sentimentality that we are nearer to Blake’s ‘minute particulars’ than to the physical descriptions in Venus and Adonis; and yet the physical is even more intensely, though quietly, preserved; the speech is, of course, maternal rather than erotic. The identification, through love, is so complete that objectivity supervenes with a purity and realism the precise antithesis to the other objectivity of Leontes’ hideous command to carry hence ‘this female bastard’ (II. iii. 174), where the one adjective ‘female’ houses a whole philosophy of cynical materialism. Paulina’s speech lives the play’s doctrine on the sanctity of human creation and the miraculous doings of ‘nature’: it is thus deeply Christian. Such is the antagonist to Leontes’ sin and the tragedy it draws swiftly down; a thing already of such power that Hermione’s final resurrection shall be no madness. It is easy to see why Leontes’ possessing devil is so violently roused: it recognises its antagonist in the baby. The dark powers in Macbeth are similarly opposed by a crowned and tree-bearing child. So our dramatic conflict of delirious evil against the stabilities of nature works through conversations about boyhood and the stage-presence of the attractive Mamilius, to this final opposition, with Paulina as directing agent. Mamilius’ presence was always the more eloquent for his few speeches; and the apparently helpless new-born baby (in Wordsworthian phrase ‘deaf and silent’, yet reading ‘the eternal deep’ and ‘haunted for ever by the eternal mind’, in the Immortality Ode) is necessarily even more potent. Though often Christian in impact, the natural majesty explored is also in part Hellenic, relating directly to our controlling god ‘great Apollo’ (II. iii. 199), the sun-god, and his oracle at Delphos.5 Leontes sends ‘to sacred Delphos, to Apollo’s temple’ to solicit, in Christian phrase, the god’s ‘spiritual counsel’ (II. i. 182, 185). Cleomenes and Dion return awestruck, deeply impressed by the island’s (it is so considered) ‘delicate’ climate, the ‘sweet’ air and general fertility (III. i. 1–3; cp. The Tempest, II. i. 43–9, 55); and even more by the temple, the ‘celestial habits’ and ‘reverence’ of the ‘grave’ priests and the ‘sacrifice’ so ‘ceremonious, solemn and unearthly’; while the actual voice or ‘burst’ of the oracle was as a terrifying judgement, ‘kin to Jove’s thunder’ (III. i. 3–11: cp. the thunderous appearances of Jupiter in Cymbeline, V. iv. 93, and of Ariel in The Tempest, III. iii. 53). They pray that ‘great Apollo’ and the package sealed by ‘Apollo’s great divine’ may quickly turn all ‘to the best’ and disclose something ‘rare’ (III. i. 14–21); the word ‘rare’, used already at III. i. 13, being frequent on such occasions throughout this and other of the Final Plays (as in ‘rarest sounds’ at Pericles, V. i. 233). Apollo is both a nature-deity and transcendent; though a god of sun-fire (as is clear later), his revelatory voice makes the hearer ‘nothing’ (III. i. 11), the word already used to define Leontes’ ghastly experience. Apollo is as mysterious and as awful as Wordsworth’s gigantic mountain-presences; he is both the Greek Apollo and the Hebraic Jehovah. In him the play’s poetry is personified. Hermione is brought to trial. Leontes opens the proceedings with a disclaimer:

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Let us be clear’d Of being tyrannous, since we so openly Proceed in justice . . . (III. ii. 4)

His fear, as before, marks a recognition; the tyranny in his soul he would film over by a show of judicial procedure. Hermione’s defence is characterized by lucidity and reason; her ‘integrity’ (III. ii. 27) is in every syllable; she is expostulating as with a nervous invalid. She wields a martyr-like strength: But thus: if powers divine Behold our human actions, as they do, I doubt not then but innocence shall make False accusation blush, and tyranny Tremble at patience. (III. ii. 29)

She aims to increase his already obvious discomfort; that is, to appeal to his ‘conscience’ (III. ii. 47). She is being condemned by his ‘dreams’ (III. ii. 82); we should say ‘fantasies’. Her language grows more and more coldly convincing: Sir, spare your threats: The bug which you would fright me with I seek. To me can life be no commodity: The crown and comfort of my life, your favour, I do give lost; for I do feel it gone, But know not how it went. My second joy, And first-fruits of my body, from his presence I am barr’d, like one infectious. My third comfort, Starr’d most unluckily, is from my breast, The innocent milk in its most innocent mouth, Hail’d out to murder . . . (III. ii. 92)

Notice the vivid physical perception and nature-feeling in ‘first-fruits’ and ‘milk’; we shall find such phrases elsewhere. The calm yet condemnatory scorn of Hermione’s manner shows a close equivalence to that of Queen Katharine on trial in Henry VIII (II. iv.). Both are daughters of a foreign king suffering in a strange home. Hermione is ‘a great king’s daughter’ (III. ii. 40), daughter of ‘the emperor of Russia’ (III ii. 120–4): compare Henry VIII, II. iv. 13, 46; III. i. 81–2, 142–50. Both appeal, with a similarly climactic effect, to the highest known authority, Queen Katharine to the Pope and Hermione to the Oracle:

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. . . but for mine honour Which I would free, if I shall be condemn’d Upon surmises, all proofs sleeping else But what your jealousies awake, I tell you ’Tis rigour and not law. Your honours all, I do refer me to the oracle: Apollo be my judge! (III. ii. 111)

The request is granted by one of the lords: in the ritual of both trials the King is half felt as a subject before the majesty of law. So Cleomenes and Dion swear on a ‘sword of justice’ (III. ii. 125) that the ‘holy seal’ (III. ii. 130) is intact; and the package is opened. Hermione and Polixenes are cleared and Leontes revealed as ‘a jealous tyrant’, who must live ‘without an heir if that which is lost be not found’ (III. ii. 133–7). Truth is thus vindicated by the voice of supreme judgement accusing Leontes of lawless tyranny; but the devil in him is not easily exorcised. At first he will not submit; asserts blasphemously that ‘there is no truth at all in the oracle’ (III. ii. 141); probably seizes the paper and tears it to shreds, insisting that the trial continue, thereby revealing his utter subjection of justice to the egotistic will. But now, following sharply on his impious disregard, comes news of Mamilius’ death. No dramatic incident in Shakespeare falls with so shattering an impact; no reversal is more poignant than when, after a moment’s dazedness, Leontes’ whole souldirection changes: Apollo’s angry; and the heavens themselves Do strike at my injustice. (III. ii. 147)

Great nature, the giver of children, can as easily recall them: that nature is, here, the transcendent Apollo, who both guides and judges. Leontes’ crime, be it noted, is one of ‘injustice’. Hermione faints and is taken away by Paulina. Leontes next speaks two revealing phrases: ‘I have’, he mutters, ‘too much believed mine own suspicion’; he admits ‘being transported by my jealousies’ (II. ii. 152, 159). He has allowed himself to be temporarily possessed, dominated, by something in himself which, given power, has ‘transported’ him, that is, changed his nature as by magic (cp. ‘translated’ at A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III. i. 125). By this inward usurpation the essence of tyranny and injustice has lodged in him, only to be exorcised by the violent impact of his crime’s actual result: Mamilius’ illness was first brought on by Hermione’s disgrace (II. iii. 13–17). Now Leontes, having awakened from his delirious dream, speaks with a new simplicity:

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Apollo, pardon My great profaneness ’gainst thine oracle! I’ll reconcile me to Polixenes, New woo my queen, recall the good Camillo . . . (III. ii. 154)

But his punishment is not over. Paulina returns, and with a long speech of considered vehemence says exactly what wants saying, because now only can its import register: What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me? What wheels? racks? fires? What flaying? or what boiling In leads, or oils? what old or newer torture Must I receive, whose every word deserves To taste of thy most worst? (III. ii. 176)

Suggestion of tyranny here reaches its climax; though Paulina refers to ‘thy tyranny together working with thy jealousies’ (III. ii. 180), they are two aspects of one reality, one complex, from which Leontes’ actions have flowed. Paulina, comparing him to a devil (III. ii. 193), lists his crimes, with bitter irony suggesting (what is a half-truth) that they are none of them his fault; and concluding with news of Hermione’s death and a demand for vengeance from Heaven. Throughout, she is playing on his conscience; more—she is his conscience. Hermione, she says, is dead, and the man who could resurrect her must needs be worshipped as a god (III. ii. 208): But, O thou tyrant! Do not repent these things, for they are heavier Than all thy woes can stir; therefore betake thee To nothing but despair. A thousand knees Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting Upon a barren mountain, and still winter In storm perpetual, could not move the gods To look that way thou wert. (III. ii. 208)

The association of winter and penitence, though not itself new (see Love’s Labour Lost, V. ii. 798–815), assumes here a new precision. Paulina’s voice, so hated before, now matches Leontes’ own thoughts and is accordingly desired:

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Go on, go on; Thou can’st not speak too much: I have deserv’d All tongues to talk their bitterest. (III. ii. 215)

Rebuked for her forwardness, she answers: I am sorry for’t All faults I make, when I shall come to know them I do repent. (III. ii. 219)

She is, indeed, repentance incarnate: that is her dramatic office. Now she recognizes that Leontes is ‘touch’d to the noble heart’ (III. ii. 222), nobility, in the chivalric tradition, involving Christian virtues; but, in apologizing for reminding him of what he ‘should forget’, she only further defines her office; and the more she emphasizes and lists the sorrows she will not refer to, the loss of Leontes’ queen and children, as well as her own lord, the more she drives home on him his grief (III. ii. 223–33). He, however, prefers ‘truth’ to ‘pity’; would live into, perhaps through, the purgation of remorse; and ends speaking of the ‘chapel’ where his queen and son are to be buried, and where he will attend in sorrow so long as ‘nature’ gives him strength (III. ii. 233–43). His last words hold a subdued dignity; his speech is calm and lucid; he is now, as never before, kingly. No full-length Shakespearian tragedy reaches the intensity of these three acts: they move with a whirling, sickening, speed. Leontes is more complex than Othello as a study of jealousy and more realistically convincing than Macbeth as a study of evil possession. In him are blended the Renaissance, man-born, evil projected through Iago and the medieval supernaturalism of the Weird Sisters. He and his story also include both the personal, family, interest of Othello and the communal, tyrannic, theme of Macbeth, whilst defining their relation; that is, the relation of emotional and sexual unhealth to tyranny; hence the repeated emphasis here on ‘tyrant’ and the opposing concepts of justice and constitutional law. Macbeth’s crime is an act of lustful possessiveness to be contrasted (as I have shown at length in The Imperial Theme and The Shakespearian Tempest) with the creative kingship of Banquo in association with child-images and nature; while conjugal jealousy is a concentrated exaggeration of domestic ownership and domination, sexually impelled. Clearly each dramatic theme is enriched by mingling with the other, and indeed we find Leontes marking an advance in Shakespeare’s human delineation: the poetic and philosophic overtones of Hamlet, Lear and Timon are compressed into a study as sharply defined as the

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Nurse in Romeo and Juliet and as objectively diagnosed as Ford, Malvolio and Parolles. Hence the violent detonation.6 The play’s morality interest, though less surface-patent than that of Pericles, will be clear. But a warning is necessary. Though Shakespeare writes, broadly speaking, from a Christian standpoint, and though christianized phraseology recurs, yet the poet is rather to be supposed as using Christian concepts than as dominated by them. They are implemental to his purpose; but so too are ‘great Apollo’ and ‘great nature’, sometimes themselves approaching Biblical feeling (with Apollo as Jehovah), yet diverging also, especially later, into a pantheism of such majesty that orthodox apologists may well be tempted to call it Christian too; but it is scarcely orthodox. The Winter’s Tale remains a creation of the Renaissance, that is, of the questing imagination, firmly planted, no doubt, in medieval tradition, but not directed by it. There is a distinction here of importance. And now, as an echo to our court-tragedy, our action enters, as it were, the elemental background of all tragedy; the wild and rugged Bohemian coast, with threatening storm. We are behind the scenes, where the organizing powers fabricate our human plot. The skies are ominous, as though Heaven were angry at the work in hand (III. iii. 3–5), for Antigonus, exactly obeying Leontes’ command, has brought the child to this ‘remote and desert place’, where ‘chance may nurse or end it’ (II. iii. 175, 182). It is to be thrown on the mercies of nature: Come on, poor babe: Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens To be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say, Casting their savageness aside have done Like offices of pity. (II. iii. 184)

The ruling powers have, however, themselves taken charge, directing Antigonus to this fierce and rugged spot. ‘Their sacred wills be done’ (III. iii. 7), he says. He recounts how Hermione has appeared to him in a dream, ‘in pure white robes, like very sanctity’—again a forecast of Queen Katharine— so that he regarded her as a ‘spirit’ come from the ‘dead’; and tells how she directed him to leave the child in Bohemia. The dream was so convincing that it seemed more real than ‘slumber’; and he therefore deduces that Hermione ‘hath suffer’d death’ and that, the child being in truth Polixenes’, it is Apollo’s will it be left in his kingdom (III. iii. 15–45). He is wrong about the child, but right about Hermione; or again wrong as to both. His ghostly account, with its suggestion of present deity, is the more powerful for the inhuman grandeur of its setting. So, either ‘for life or death’, he leaves the baby upon

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the ‘earth’ of this inhospitable place; buries it, as a seed, to live or die, praying, ‘Blossom, speed thee well’; entrusting it to forces beyond man’s control, while hoping that the treasure he leaves may help to ‘breed’ it (III. iii. 40–8). The child is enduring, as it were, a second birth, with the attendant risks, the synchronization of storm and birth recalling Pericles. The spot is, as we have been told, famous for its beasts of prey. The storm starts and Antigonus is chased off by a bear. The incident is as crude as the sudden entry of pirates in Pericles. But, as so often there, Shakespeare is moulding events from his own past imagery. His recurrent association of tempests with rough beasts, especially bears (as at King Lear, III. iv. 9–11), is here actualized: the storm starts, the bear appears, and we have a description of shipwreck. We must take the bear seriously, as suggesting man’s insecurity in face of untamed nature; indeed, mortality in general. This scene is a hinge not only for the story but also for the life-views it expresses. We are plunged first into the abysmal smithies below or behind creation, in touch with ghostly presences and superhuman powers; but next, as one dream dissolves into another, we pass from horror to simple, rustic, comedy. We met a precisely similar transition in Pericles, where the fishermen fulfilled an office closely resembling that of the Shepherd and Clown here: in both homely rusticity is synchronized and contrasted with storm and shipwreck. There is, however, no satire here in the rustics’ talk, except for the Shepherd’s opening remark on the behaviour of men between sixteen and three and twenty, always ‘getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting’ (III. iii. 58–62), which recalls Thersites, whilst continuing our present obsession with birth and age; but there is no more of it. More important are the two lost sheep which he expects to find by the sea ‘browsing of ivy’ (III. iii. 68): it is somehow very reassuring to find the simple fellow at his homely job after our recent terrors with their appalling sense of human insecurity. Both the Shepherd and his son are thoroughly at home in this weird place; its awe-inspiring quality fades, as memory of nightmare before the heavy step and traffic of dawn. Bears are no terror to them, they know their ways: ‘they are never curst but when they are hungry’ (III. iii. 135). The scene wakes into semi-humorous prose, sturdy commonsense, and simple kindliness. There is the usual mismanagement of words typical of Shakespeare’s clowns, but the humour soon takes a new turn in the son’s exquisite description of the wreck and Antigonus’ death, subtly veiling the horror and removing its sting. Tragedy is confronted by comedy working in close alliance with birth: Heavy matters! heavy matters! but look thee here, boy. Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying, I with things new born. (III. iii. 115)

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The baby is found with a casket of gold. The Shepherd calls it a ‘changeling’ and attributes his luck to the ‘fairies’ (III. iii. 121–2). So the craggy setting is lit by the glow of ‘fairy gold’ (III. iii. 127). We have entered a new, and safer, world.

II

Time as chorus functions normally with certain obvious apologies recalling Gower in Pericles (IV. iv.), and at least one touch in Gower’s style: ‘what of her ensues I list not prophecy’ (IV. chor. 25). A crucial phrase occurs at the start: I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror Of good and bad, that make and unfold error, Now take upon me, in the name of Time, To use my wings (IV. chor. 1)

‘Make and unfold error’ links The Winter’s Tale to the earlier comedies which, though less deeply loaded with tragic meaning, regularly hold tragic reference in close relation to ‘error’, and finally drive the action to a formal conclusion in which mistakes are rectified. The Winter’s Tale presents a contrast of sinful maturity and nature-guarded youth in close association with seasonal change. But there is more to notice. Shakespeare’s genius is labouring to pit his own more positive intuitions, expressed hitherto mainly through happy-ending romance and comedy, against tragedy: they are to work as redeeming forces. The idyll of Florizel and Perdita will fall naturally into place: but romance in Shakespeare regularly enjoys the support, or at least the company, of humour. In Leontes Shakespeare’s tragic art has reached a new compactness and intensity; and now in our next scenes, he gives us a figure of absolute comedy, Autolycus. Richest humour offers a recognition of some happy universal resulting from the carefree stripping away of cherished values: elsewhere,7 I have compared such ‘golden’, or sympathetic, humour, of which Falstaff is an obvious example, with humour of the critical, moralistic, Jonsonian, sort, such as that Shakespeare touches in Malvolio. Falstaff, though utterly unmoral, yet solicits our respect, and in that recognition consists the fun. The fun itself is, moreover, in essence a lark-like thing; it will sing, or dance, and may elsewhere house itself in spring-frolic and lyrical verse, such as ‘It was a lover and his lass . . .’ introduced by Touchstone in As You Like It (V. iii). Autolycus is a blend of burly comedian and lyrical jester. He enters singing verses redolent of spring: When daffodils begin to peer,   With heigh! the doxy over the dale,

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Why, then comes in the sweet o’ the year   For the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale. (IV. ii. 1)

He is spring incarnate; carefree, unmoral, happy, and sets the note for a spring-like turn in our drama, reversing the spring and winter conclusion of Shakespeare’s first comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost. His following stanzas continue with references to country linen on the hedge (cp. Love’s Labour’s Lost, V. ii. 914), songbirds, tooth-ache, ale, the lark and jay, ‘summer songs for me and my aunts’, hay-merriment: it is a glorious medley of inconsequential realistic rusticity. Suddenly he comments in prose: I have served Prince Florizel and in my time wore three-pile; but now I am out of service. (IV. ii. 13)

He interrupts himself only to drop again into song—‘But shall I go mourn for that, my dear?’ Like Touchstone, and Poor Tom in King Lear, he has seen better days, but remains happy, his thoughts slipping naturally into song. He next explains his profession of minor thief, off the high road, as ‘a snapper up of unconsidered trifles’ (IV. ii. 26). His play with the Clown is supremely satisfying, and far more convincing than most stage trickery (e.g. Iago’s of Cassio, Roderigo and Othello). The Clown is presented as a thorough gull, though not inhumanly so, as is Sir Andrew or Roderigo. Every phrase tells. As the supposedly injured man is carefully lifted— ‘O! good sir, tenderly, O!’ (IV. ii. 76)—his purse is being delicately manoeuvred within reach; the victim’s attention is meanwhile firmly directed away from the danger-zone—‘I fear, sir, my shoulder blade is out’ (IV. ii. 78); and, when the business is successfully accomplished, there is the delightful double entendre. ‘You ha’ done me a charitable office’ (IV. ii. 82). Shakespeare’s last work often recalls the New Testament, and here we have, in Autolycus’ account of his beating, robbery and loss of clothes, a clear parody of the parable of the Good Samaritan, the pattern being completed by the Clown’s continuation, ‘Dost lack any money? I have a little money for thee’ (IV. ii. 83), and Autolycus’ hurried and anxious disclaimer, ‘No, good sweet sir: no, I beseech you, sir . . . Offer me no money, I pray you! that kills my heart’ (IV. iii. 85). There follows Autolycus’ description of himself with some rather ordinary court-satire and finally the delightful conclusion, crying out for stage-realization:   Clown. How do you now?   Autolycus. Sweet sir, much better than I was: I can stand and walk. I will even take my leave of you, and pace softly towards my kinsman’s.

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  Clown. Shall I bring thee on the way?   Autolycus. No, good-faced sir; no, sweet sir.   Clown. Then fare thee well: I must go buy spices for our sheepshearing. (IV. iii. 119)

‘Softly’ is spoken with an upward lilt of the voice. Autolycus is a sweet, smoothvoiced rogue. The Clown says his last speech to the audience with a broad grin on his vacant face. When he is gone, Autolycus takes one agile skip, then: Jog on, jog on, the footpath way   And merrily hent the stile-a: A merry heart goes all the day   Your sad tires in a mile-a. (IV. iii. 133)

The incident circles back to its start, enclosed in melody. It is all utterly unmoral, as unmoral as the scents of spring. This might well be called the most convincing, entertaining, and profound piece of comedy in Shakespeare. Such personal judgements are necessarily of doubtful interest, except to help point my argument that, so far from relaxing, Shakespeare’s art is, on every front, advancing. The sheep-shearing scene similarly sums up and surpasses all Shakespeare’s earlier poetry of pastoral and romance. It is, however—and this is typical of our later plays—characterized by a sharp realism. The Clown’s shopping list has already built a sense of simple cottage housekeeping and entertainment, with a suggestion of something out-of-the-ordinary in his supposed sister, Perdita: Three pound of sugar; five pound of currants; rice. What will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on. (IV. ii. 40)

His following reference to psalm-singing puritans sticks out awkwardly; more in place are the ‘nosegays’ and ‘raisins o’ the sun’ (IV. iii. 43–53), especially the last. Autolycus has already sung of the ‘red blood’ reigning after winter (IV. ii. 4), and soon our merry-makers are to be ‘red with mirth’ (IV. iii. 54). We are to watch a heightening of English country festivity, touched with Mediterranean warmth, something, to quote Keats, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provençal song, and sun-burnt mirth.

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So we move from spring to summer, under a burning sun. The sun has not been so honoured before.8 We have known the moonsilvered encounters of Romeo and Juliet and glimmering tangles of the ‘wood near Athens’; also the cypress shadows of Twelfth Night and chequered glades of Arden; but never before, not even in Antony and Cleopatra—a necessary step, where sun-warmth was, however, felt mainly through description, the action itself searching rather for ‘gaudy’ (III. xi. 182) or moonlit nights—never before has the sun been so dramatically awakened, so close to us, as here; and there is a corresponding advance in love poetry, compassing, though with no loss of magic, strong fertility suggestion and a new, daylight assurance: These your unusual weeds to each part of you Do give a life: no shepherdess, but Flora Peering in April’s front. This your sheep-shearing Is as a meeting of the petty gods, And you the queen on’t. (IV. iii. 1)

So speaks Prince Florizel. But Perdita’s answer witnesses both her country simplicity and feminine wisdom; she fears, as does Juliet, love’s rashness and insecurity. Indeed, all Shakespeare’s love-heroines, following the pattern laid down by Venus’ prophecy in Venus and Adonis (1135–64), are given tragic undertones; they have an aura of tragedy about them. Florizel’s love is more confident and showy (as usual in Shakespeare), but his use of mythology, as in ‘Flora’ above, has a new, and finely convincing, impact. He catalogues the gods who have disguised themselves for love: Jupiter as a bellowing bull, Neptune a bleating lamb and, giving highest poetic emphasis to our play’s supreme deity, the fire-rob’d god, Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain As I seem now. (IV. iii. 29)

‘O Lady Fortune’, prays Perdita in a phrase reminiscent of Pericles, ‘stand you auspicious’ (IV. iii. 51). Though she remains doubtful, her doubts, a mixture of shyness and hardheaded feminine realism, only make the poetry more poignant. So, too, do the many homely reminders, as in the old shepherd’s reminiscences of his dead wife’s busy behaviour as hostess on such festival days as this, cooking, serving, and dancing in turn, bustling about, ‘her face o’ fire’ (IV. iii. 60) with both exertion and refreshment. Now Perdita, following Thaisa at the court of Simonides (the repetition is close, both fathers similarly reminding their

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apparently shy daughters of their duties), is ‘mistress of the feast’ (IV. iii. 68; cp. ‘queen of the feast’ at Pericles II. iii. 17), and has to conquer her shyness. There follows Perdita’s important dialogue with Polixenes. She, rather like Ophelia in a very different context, is presenting posies according to the recipient’s age and offers the two older men (Polixenes and Camillo wear white beards, IV. iii. 417) rosemary and rue, which, she says, keep their savour ‘all the winter long’ (IV. iii. 75): notice the recurring emphasis on age and seasons. Polixenes, however (forgetting his disguise?), appears to resent being given ‘flowers of winter’ (IV. iii. 79) and Perdita gracefully apologizes for not having an autumnal selection:   Perdita. Sir, the year growing ancient, Not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o’ the season Are our carnations, and streak’d gillyvors, Which some call nature’s bastards: of that kind Our rustic garden’s barren, and I care not To get slips of them.   Polixenes. Wherefore, gentle maiden, Do you neglect them?   Perdita. For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating nature.   Polixenes. Say there be; Yet nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean; so, over that art, Which you say adds to nature, is an art That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race; this is an art Which does mend nature, change it rather, but The art itself is nature.   Perdita. So it is.   Polixenes. Then make your garden rich in gillyvors And do not call them bastards.   Perdita. I’ll not put The dibble in earth to set one slip of them No more than, were I painted, I would wish This youth should say, ’twere well, and only therefore Desire to breed by me. Here’s flowers for you; Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram;

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The marigold, that goes to bed wi’ the sun, And with him rises weeping: these are flowers Of middle summer, and I think they are given To men of middle age. You’re very welcome.   Camillo. I should leave grazing, were I of your flock And only live by gazing.   Perdita. Out, alas! You’d be so lean, that blasts of January Would blow you through and through. (IV. iii. 79)

Of this one could say much. Notice first, the continued emphasis on seasons at the opening and concluding lines of my quotation; the strong physical realism (recalling Hermione’s defence) in Perdita’s use of ‘breed’; and the phrase ‘great creating nature’ (to be compared with ‘great nature’ earlier, at II. ii. 60). The speakers are at cross purposes, since one is referring to art, the other to artificiality, itself a difficult enough distinction. The whole question of the naturalist and transcendental antinomy is accordingly raised. The art concerned is called natural by Polixenes in that either (i) human invention can never do more than direct natural energy, or (ii) the human mind and therefore its inventions are nature-born: both meanings are probably contained. Human civilization, art and religion are clearly in one sense part of ‘great creating nature’, and so is everything else. But Perdita takes her stand on natural simplicity, growing from the unforced integrity of her own country up-bringing, in opposition to the artificialities of, we may suggest, the court: she is horrified at dishonouring nature by human trickery. Observe that both alike reverence ‘great creating nature’, though differing in their conclusions. No logical deduction is to be drawn; or rather, the logic is dramatic, made of opposing statements, which serve to conjure up an awareness of nature as an all-powerful presence, at once controller and exemplar. The dialogue forms accordingly a microcosm of our whole drama. There is a certain irony, too, in Polixenes’ defence of exactly the type of lovemating which Florizel and Perdita are planning for themselves. Polixenes is, perhaps, setting a trap; or may be quite unconsciously arguing against his own later behaviour. Probably the latter. Perdita next turns to Florizel:   Perdita. Now, my fair’st friend, I would I had some flowers o’ the spring that might Become your time of day; and yours, and yours, That wear upon your virgin branches yet Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina! For the flowers now that frighted thou let’st fall

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From Dis’s waggon! daffodils That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty; violets dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes Or Cytherea’s breath; pale prim-roses That die unmarried ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one. O! these I lack To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend, To strew him o’er and o’er!   Florizel. What! like a corse?   Perdita. No, like a bank for love to lie and play on Not like a corse; or if—not to be buried, But quick and in mine arms. Come, take your flowers Methinks I play as I have seen them do In Whitsun pastorals: sure this robe of mine Does change my disposition. (IV. iii. 112)

Reference to the season-myth of Proserpine is natural enough; indeed, almost an essential. You might call Perdita herself a seed sowed in winter and flowering in summer. ‘Take’ = ‘charm’, or ‘enrapture’. Though Autolycus’ first entry suggested spring, we are already, as the nature of our festival and these lines declare, in summer. Note the fine union, indeed identity, of myth and contemporary experience, finer than in earlier Shakespearian pastorals: Dis may be classical, but his ‘wagon’ is as real as a wagon in Hardy. See, too, how classical legend and folk-lore coalesce in the primroses and ‘bright Phoebus in his strength’, a phrase pointing the natural poetic association of sun-fire and mature love (as in Antony and Cleopatra): the sun corresponding, as it were, to physical fruition (as the moon to the more operatic business of wooing) and accordingly raising in Perdita, whose poetry is strongly impregnated with fertility-suggestion (the magic here is throughout an earth-magic, a sun-magic), a wistful aside, meant presumably for herself. Perdita’s flower-poetry reaches a royal impressionism in ‘crown imperial’ and ‘garland’ suiting the speaker’s innate, and indeed actual, royalty. The contrasting suggestion of ‘corse’ quickly merging into a love-embrace (reminiscent of the love and death associations in Antony and Cleopatra and Keats) finally serves to heighten the pressure of exuberant, buoyant, life. The ‘Whitsun pastorals’, like our earlier puritans, though perhaps historically extraneous, may be forgiven for their lively impact,

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serving to render the speech vivid with the poet’s, and hence, somehow, our own, personal experience. Perdita’s royalty is subtly presented: her robes as mistress of the feast have, as she said, made her act and speak strangely. Florizel details each of her graces (IV. iii. 135–43), wishing her in turn to speak, to sing, to dance—as ‘a wave o’ the sea’—for ever. He would have her every action perpetuated, the thought recalling Polixenes’ recollections of himself and Leontes as ‘boy eternal’ (I. ii. 65). Florizel has expressed a delight in the given instant of youthful grace so sacred that it somehow deserves eternal status; when she moves he would have her, in a phrase itself patterning the blend of motion and stillness it describes, ‘move still, still so’. Watching her, he sees the universe completed, crowned, at each moment of her existence: Each your doing, So singular in each particular, Crowns what you are doing in the present deed, That all your acts are queens (IV. iii. 143)

As once before, we are reminded, this time more sharply, of Blake’s ‘minute particulars’. The royalistic tonings here and in the ‘crown imperial’ of her own speech (IV. iii. 12 6) not merely hint Perdita’s royal blood, but also serve to stamp her actions with eternal validity; for the crown is always to be understood as a symbol piercing the eternity dimension. We are, it is true, being forced into distinctions that Shakespeare, writing from a royalistic age, need not actually have surveyed; but Florizel’s lines certainly correspond closely to those in Pericles imaging Marina as a palace ‘for the crown’d Truth to dwell in’ and again as monumental Patience sitting ‘above kings’ graves’ and ‘smiling extremity out of act’ (Pericles, V. i. 123, 140). Perdita is more lively; time, creation, nature, earth, all have more rights here than in Pericles; but the correspondence remains close. Perdita’s acts are royal both in their own right and also because she is, in truth, of royal birth: This is the prettiest low-born lass that ever Ran on the green-sward. Nothing she does or seems But smacks of something greater than herself, Too noble for this place. (IV. iii. 156)

But this is not the whole truth. Later, after Polixenes’ outburst, she herself makes a comment more easily appreciated in our age than in Shakespeare’s:

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I was not much afeard; for once or twice I was about to speak and tell him plainly, The self-same sun that shines upon his court Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on alike. (IV. iii. 455)

The lovely New Testament transposition (with ‘sun’ for ‘rain’) serves to underline the natural excellence and innate worth of this simple rustic community; and only from some such recognition can we make full sense of the phrase ‘queen of curds and cream’ (IV. iii. 161). We may accordingly re-group our three royalties in terms of (i) Perdita’s actual descent, (ii) her natural excellence and (iii) that more inclusive category from which both descend, or to which both aspire, in the eternity-dimension. A final conclusion would reach some concept of spiritual royalty corresponding to Wordsworth’s (in his Immortality Ode); with further political implications concerning the expansion of sovereignty among a people. The lovers are, very clearly, felt as creatures of ‘rare’—the expected word recurs (IV. iii. 32)—excellence, and their love, despite its strong fertility contacts, is correspondingly pure. Perdita, hearing Florizel’s praises, fears he woos her ‘the false way’ (IV. iii. 151); while Florizel is equally insistent that his ‘desires run not before his honour’, nor his ‘lusts burn hotter’ than his ‘faith’ (IV. iii, 33). The statement, which appears, as in The Tempest later, a trifle laboured, is clearly central: Perdita, as mistress of the feast, insists that Autolycus ‘use no scurrilous words in’s tunes’ (IV. iii. 215). Our first tragedy was precipitated by suspicion of marital infidelity; and our young lovers express a corresponding purity. The action grows more rollicking, with a dance of ‘shepherds and shepherdesses’ (IV. iii. 165) in which Perdita and Florizel join. There follows Autolycus’ spectacular entry as musical pedlar, preceded by a rich description (IV. iii. 191–201) of his rowdy-merry catches and tunes (‘jump her and thump her’, ‘whoop! do me no harm, good man’). He enters all a-flutter with ribbons and a tray of good things and describes his absurd ballads to the awe-struck Mopsa and Dorcas. Though the words may not be scurrilous, the songs are ribald enough, one telling of a usurer’s wife ‘brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden’; and another sung originally by a fish representing a woman ‘who would not exchange flesh with one that loved her’ and had been metamorphosed in punishment (IV. iii. 265, 282). They are little burlesques of our main fertilitymyth, stuck in as gargoyles on a cathedral, and the two girls’ anxious enquiries as to whether the stories are true, with Autolycus’ firm reassurances, serve to complete the parody. Finally Autolycus conducts and joins in a catch, followed by another dance of ‘twelve rustics, habited like satyrs’ (IV. iii. 354), given by

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carters, shepherds, neatherds, and swineherds. Here our rough country fun, heavily toned for fertility, reaches its climax. But nature continues to provide poetry as refined as Florizel’s image of winter purity (winter is also present in Autolycus’ ‘lawn as white as driven snow’ at IV. iii. 220): I take thy hand; this hand, As soft as dove’s down, and as white as it, Or Ethiopian’s tooth, or the fann’d snow that’s bolted By the northern blasts twice o’er. (IV. ii. 374)

As in Keats’ ‘Bright Star’ sonnet, human love is compared to the steadfast gazing on earth, or sea, of heavenly light: He says he loves my daughter: I think so too; for never gazed the moon Upon the water as he’ll stand and read As ’twere my daughter’s eyes (IV. iii. 171)

This (with which we should compare the similar love imagery of Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. iii. 27–42) parallels Leontes’ picture of Mamilius’ ‘welkin eye’ followed by fears for the ‘centre’ (i.e. of the earth), forming an association of emotional and universal stability (I. ii. 137, 139); and also his later contrast and identification of ‘nothing’ with ‘the world and all that’s in it’ and the ‘covering sky’ (I. ii. 293–4). The universal majesty is continually imagined concretely as earth and sky facing each other, as in Leontes’ ‘plainly as heaven sees earth or earth sees heaven’ (I. ii. 315); it is the universe we actually know and see, without the cosmic, spheral, idealizing emphasis of Antony and Cleopatra and (once) Pericles. So Florizel, questioned by Polixenes, calls the universe as witness to his love: . . . and he, and more Than he, or men, the earth, the heavens, and all . . . (IV. iii. 383)

Should he prove false, then Let nature crush the sides o’ the earth together And mar the seeds within! (IV. iii. 491)

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Though reminiscent of nature’s ‘germens’ in King Lear (III. ii. 8), those ‘seeds’ belong especially to this, as to no other, play. The emphasis on earth’s creativeness is repeated: Not for Bohemia, nor the pomp that may Be thereat glean’d, for all the sun sees or The close earth wombs or the profound sea hides In unknown fathoms, will I break my oath To this my fair belov’d. (IV. iii. 501)

The sun, as the moon before, is thought as ‘seeing’; it is the ‘eye’ of heaven of Sonnet XVIII. The sun is constantly reverenced throughout The Winter’s Tale, either directly (as in ‘welkin eye’ etc.) or ‘the fire-rob’d god, golden Apollo’ (IV. iii. 29) and his oracle. Nature here is creative, majestic, something of illimitable mystery and depth (‘profound sea’, ‘unknown fathoms’); but it is never bookish. Nor is it dissolved into any system of elements. Earth, sea, sun and moon are felt rather as concrete realities of normal experience, nearer Renaissance commonsense than Dantesque or Ptolemaic harmonies, whilst housing strong classical-mythological powers. As for Polixenes’ brutal interruption, we recall Capulet, Egeus, York, Polonius, Lear: Shakespeare’s fathers are normally tyrannical and Polixenes has, according to his lights, cause. His threats, excessive as Capulet’s, drive home a contrast of social tyranny with rustic health, clinched by Perdita’s admirable comment already noticed: there is court satire elsewhere (as at IV. ii. 94–101; IV. iii. 723–6). Of course, this contrast works within, without disrupting, the prevailing royalism: apart from the old shepherd, the country folk are mainly represented by three fools and a knave. The pastoral interest slackens and significant passages become less dense as we become involved in the rather heavy machinery of getting everyone to Sicilia. Both Camillo’s tortuous scheme and Autolycus’ additions to it lack conviction, and we suffer rather as in Hamlet during Claudius’ and Laertes’ long discussion about the Norman, Lamond. There is, however, some purpose in the sagging action of Hamlet,9 whereas here we seem to be confronted by plot-necessity alone. About Autolycus’ lengthy fooling with the Shepherd and Clown there is, however, something to say. The dialogue not only protracts the sagging action, but rouses discomfort, Autolycus’ description of the punishments awaiting the rustics, though pictorially in tone here (involving ‘honey’, ‘wasps’, midday sun, flies: IV. iii. 16–25), being a trifle unpleasant. Resenting Autolycus’ fall from his first entry, one is tempted to dismiss the incident as an error. Autolycus is, however, being used to elaborate the vein of court satire already suggested by Polixenes’ behaviour; it is almost a

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parody of that behaviour. The pick-pocket pedlar, now himself disguised as ‘a great courtier’ (IV. iii. 777), becomes absurdly superior and uses his new position to baffle the Clown precisely as Touchstone the courtier-fool baffles William. His elaborate description of torments is extremely cruel; but then the court— Polixenes’ harshness fresh in our minds—is cruel. But we can still disapprove the subordination of humour to satire; and yet this very subordination serves a further purpose concerned with the essence of humour itself. Autolycus is first a composite of spring music and delightful knavery; during the sheep-shearing festival he is a source of rather ribald entertainment and catchy song. Next, he goes off to sell his wares, and on his re-entry recounts his successful purse-picking, which now, however, wins less approval in view of our accumulated concern for the simple people on whom he battens as a dangerous parasite. He is later by chance forced to dress as a courtier and further looks like making a good thing out of the two rustics and their secret. He is advancing rapidly in the social scale; the fates assist him. As he says, If I had a mind to be honest, I see Fortune would not suffer me: she drops booties in my mouth. (IV. iii. 868)

He is now all out for ‘advancement’ (IV. iii. 873). After donning courtier’s clothes, his humour takes an unnecessarily cruel turn. Something similar happened with Falstaff, who, a creature of pure humour (and also robbery) in Part I of Henry IV, becomes less amusing in Part II where he has advanced socially, wears fine clothes, and is tainted by a courtier’s ambition.10 He is himself subscribing to the very values which we thought he scorned and our source of humour to that extent weakened. The humorous parasite cannot afford to be too successful, any more than the saint. So with Autolycus: the merry robbertramp, as he makes his way, becomes less merry. His vices become less amusing as he indulges his lust for power; as his egotism expands, a cruel strain (compare Falstaff ’s attitude to his recruits and Justice Shallow) is revealed; and he is at once recognized as inferior to the society on which, as a happy-go-lucky ragamuffin, he formerly preyed for our amusement. More widely, we can say that the delicate balance of unmoral humour—and no finer examples exist than the early Falstaff and Autolycus—must be provisional only; it cannot maintain the pace, cannot survive as a challenge among the summery positives here enlisted against tragedy: Falstaff was, necessarily, rejected by Prince Hal. Moreover, just as the Falstaff of Henry IV becomes finally the buffoon of The Merry Wives of Windsor, so Autolycus’ last entry, when they have all arrived in Sicilia, and the Shepherd and Clown are rich and he a recognized knave, is peculiarly revealing: we see him now bowing and scraping to his former gull.11 Meanwhile, our

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humorous sympathies have passed over to the Clown, rather tipsy and talking of himself as having recently become a ‘gentleman born’ (V. ii. 142–64), so providing a new and richly amusing variation in social comment. The long scene (IV. iii) accordingly has a falling movement; from exquisite pastoral and the accompanying flower-dialogue, through robust country merriment to an all but ugly humour. The romance is to survive; not so Autolycus, who is to lose dramatic dignity. No one will accuse Shakespeare of lacking humour, but it is too often forgotten that his humour works within the limits set by a prevailing ‘high seriousness’.

III

Our final summing movement takes us back to Sicilia, where all the people foregather and the complications are resolved. Leontes is a figure of accomplished repentance. From now on religious phraseology is insistent, with strong Christian tonings: Sir, you have done enough, and have perform’d A saint-like sorrow; no fault could you make Which you have not redeem’d; indeed, paid down More penitence than done trespass. At the last, Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; With them forgive yourself. (V. i. 1)

His kingdom, as the oracle foretold, is, through his own sin, heirless (V. i. 10). The contrast in Macbeth between tyranny without issue and Banquo’s descendants may assist our response to Leontes’ punishment. Both heroes offend against creation and are accordingly themselves uncreative. Paulina stands beside him, a perpetual reminder, referring to Hermione as she you kill’d’ (V. i. 15):   Leontes. I think so. Kill’d! She I kill’d! I did so; but thou strik’st me Sorely to say I did; it is as bitter Upon thy tongue as in my thought. Now, good now Say so but seldom. (V. i. 16)

Paulina is here to personify Leontes’ ‘thought’. Cleomenes, who cannot be expected to consider her dramatic office, rebuffs her sharply; and Dion, in a speech (V. i. 24–34) loaded with regal and religious impressions (‘sovereign name,’ ‘his highness’, ‘royalty’, ‘holy’, ‘holier’), urges the King to marry to beget

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an heir. Paulina, however, demands respect to the gods’ ‘secret purposes’ and the oracle of ‘divine Apollo’, which asserted that Leontes should remain heirless till his child was found (V. i. 35–40); and he, wishing he had always followed her counsel, agrees, while further imagining Hermione’s return, in accusation. His remarriage, he says, Would make her sainted spirit Again possess her corpse and on this stage— Where we’re offenders now—appear soul-vex’d, And begin, ‘Why to me?’ (V. i. 57)

The world of sinful men is widely conceived; but also, ever so delicately, Hermione’s return is hinted. Paulina next suggests that had his dead queen ‘such power’ (V. i. 60) of return, she would have full ‘cause’ of anger. Were she, Paulina, the ghost, she would shriek, point to his second wife’s eyes, calling out, like the ghost in Hamlet, ‘Remember mine’ (V. i. 67):   Leontes. Stars, stars! And all eyes else dead coals. (V. i. 67)

Leontes sits almost tranced, in a state of other-worldly remembrance, all but outside the temporal dimension. Paulina continues to play with the thought of Hermione’s return. Leontes is not to marry unless another As like Hermione as is her picture, Affront his eye. (V. i. 73)

His new wife shall be, she says, older than the first: She shall be such As, walk’d your first queen’s ghost, it should take joy To see her in your arms. (V. i. 79)

Leontes enters into the grave game, willingly agreeing not to marry till Paulina bids him, and she clinches the compact, whilst further preparing for the resurrection:

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That Shall be when your first queen’s again in breath; Never till then. (V. i. 82)

Observe how carefully we are being prepared for the conclusion, our thoughts whetted, our minds subtly habituated, if not to its possibility, at least to its conceivability. On the entry of Florizel and Perdita our most important impressions concern Perdita herself, given the usual praise accorded these later heroines: she is ‘the rarest of all women’ (V. i. 112), a ‘goddess’ (V. i. 131), a ‘paragon’ (V. i. 153), or—exactly suiting our recurring impressionism of earth and sun—‘the most peerless piece of earth’ ‘that e’er the sun shone bright on’ (V. i. 94). She reminds the tactless but purposeful Paulina of that ‘jewel of children’, Mamilius (V. i. 117). She is a creature Would she begin a sect, might quench the zeal Of all professors else, make proselytes Of who she did but follow. (V. i. 107)

Earthly and transcendental impressions intermix in her praise. Both recur together in Leontes’: And you, fair princess—goddess! O, alas! I lost a couple, that ’twixt heaven and earth Might thus have stood begetting wonder as You, gracious couple, do. (V. i. 131)

Children, planted between heaven and earth, beget ‘wonder’, a word to be used later on for miraculous events. Children are copies of their parents: Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince; For she did print your royal father off, Conceiving you. (V. i. 124)

We remember Mamilius’ resemblance to Leontes and Paulina’s description of Leontes’ baby daughter. Children are nature’s miracles, and these two as welcome ‘as is the spring to the earth’ (V. i. 151). So Leontes prays that ‘the blessed

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gods’ may ‘purge all infection from our air’ whilst their stay lasts (V. i. 168), a phrase harking back to the description of Delphos, intimations of a transfigured nature matching our sense of a transfigured humanity. Man is, at his royal best, almost divine: You have a holy father, A graceful gentleman; against whose person, So sacred as it is, I have done sin. For which the heavens, taking angry note Have left me issueless . . . (V. i. 170)

The supreme punishment here, especially for a king, is to be left without natural issue; Florizel, however, lives, to render his father ‘bless’d’ (V. i. 174). Through the royalistic convention the poetry touches some truth concerning man, his high worth in the creative chain, his ultimate stature, that outdistances political concepts. This semi-divine essence is also dependent on the creative love-faith of the young pair. Disaster dogs them. After surviving ‘dreadful Neptune’ (V. i. 154), they hear of Polixenes’ pursuit. But, though ‘Heaven set spies’ (V. i. 203) on them; though the ‘stars’, in another typical image, will first ‘kiss the valleys’ (V. i. 206) before they be united; indeed, though Fortune appear as a ‘visible enemy’ (V. i. 216), their love is to remain firm. As Leontes gazes on Perdita, the stern Paulina remarks that his eye ‘hath too much youth in’t’ (V. i. 225), and reminds him of Hermione. ‘I thought of her’, he answers, softly, ‘even in these looks I made’ (V. i. 227). Leontes’ reunion with his daughter is presented indirectly by the gentlemen’s conversation: it has already been dramatized in Pericles and our present dramatic emphasis is to fall on Hermione’s resurrection. These gentlemen converse in a prose of courtly formality, leaving poetry to return in full contrast later. The scene is preparatory to the greater miracle and its style well-considered, introducing us lightly and at a distance to those deep emotions which we are soon to feel with so powerful a subjective sympathy. It strikes a realistic and contemporary note, using the well-known trick of laying solid foundations before an unbelievable event: we are being habituated to impossible reunions. Moreover, the slightly ornate decorum leads on to the formal, ritualistic, quality of the later climax. There is emphasis, as one expects, on Perdita’s innate and actual royalty ‘above her breeding’ (V. ii. 41) and a comparison of earlier events to ‘an old tale’ (V. ii. 30, 67; cp. V. iii. 117). The description, plastic rather than dramatic, serves to create a sub specie aeternitatis effect, and so further prepare us for the statue-scene:

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. . . They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: a notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say if the importance were joy or sorrow; but in the extremity of the one it must needs be. (V. ii. 12)

My italicized phrases are important. With the first compare the Poet’s comment on a painting in Timon of Athens: ‘To the dumbness of the gesture one might interpret . . .’ (I. i. 34): see also Cymbeline, II. iv. 83–5. The watchers are, to quote Milton, made ‘marble with too much conceiving’; made to share the frozen immobility of art. Leontes’ reaction to Hermione’s statue is to be similar. Next, notice the apocalyptic suggestion of ‘ransomed’ and ‘destroyed’: is the miracle a transfiguration of nature or wholly transcendental? Certainly it strikes ‘wonder’. Last, observe the indecisive reference to ‘joy’ and ‘sorrow’, which recurs again in description of Paulina: But, O! the noble combat that ’twixt joy and sorrow was fought in Paulina. She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband, another elevated that the oracle was fulfilled. (V. i. 80)

Exactly such a blend of joy and sorrow is to characterize our final scene. Though we are pointed to ‘the dignity of this act’ performed by kings and princes (V. ii. 88), it is all carried lightly, the dialogue following on with courtly fluency: One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes—caught the water though not the fish—was when at the relation of the queen’s death, with the manner how she came to it . . . (V. ii. 91)

And yet the easy, almost bantering, manner can, without losing its identity, handle the most solemn emotions justly, as in the account of Leontes’ confession: Who was most marble there changed colour; some swounded, all sorrowed; if all the world could have seen it, the woe had been universal. (V. i. 100)

As in ‘ransom’d’ and ‘redeem’d’ earlier, the drama is, as it were, on the edge of something ‘universal’: we watch more than a particular incident. Now this

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dialogue has been leading us on very carefully to its own little climax, directly preparatory to the play’s conclusion: No; the princess hearing of her mother’s statue, which is in the keeping of Paulina—a piece many years in doing, and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano; who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape: he so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer: thither with all greediness of affection are they gone, and there they intend to sup. (V. ii. 105)

For the general thought of art imitating nature’s human handiwork, compare the ‘nature’s journeymen’ of Hamlet’s address to the Players (Hamlet, III. ii. 38). Here the statue is already associated with ‘eternity’, regarded as the creative origin;12 ‘breath’ is to be important again. The implications of ‘eternity’ are semitranscendental in attempt to define that unmotivated power behind the mystery of free generation in nature and in art; indeed, implicit in freedom itself. The Gentlemen next refer to the statue as ‘some great matter’ already suspected from Paulina’s continual visits to the ‘removed house’ where it stands (V. ii. 117–20). We are made thoroughly expectant, attuned to a consciousness where ‘every wink of an eye some new grace will be born’ (V. ii. 124); a queer phrase whose country ease points the miracle of creation in time—there was a mysticism within Renaissance courtliness, as Castiglione’s book indicates—whilst recalling the apocalyptic phrase in the New Testament about men being changed ‘in the twinkling of an eye’. Both through Paulina’s dialogue with Leontes in V. i. and the Gentlemen’s conversation we have been prepared for the resurrection. But there are earlier hints, not yet observed. At Hermione’s death, Paulina asserted: If you can bring Tincture or lustre in her lip, her eye, Heat outwardly or breath within, I’ll serve you As I would do the gods. (III. ii. 205)

A warm physical realism is regularly here felt as essential to resurrection. Paulina is suggesting that it would need a Cerimon, in Christian thought Christ, to work the miracle: the possibility at least was thus early suggested. Later Florizel referred to just such superhuman power when, after calling vast nature and all men as witness, he swore:

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That, were I crown’d the most imperial monarch, Thereof most worthy, were I the fairest youth That ever made eye swerve, had force and knowledge More than was ever man’s, I would not prize them Without her love. (IV. iii. 385)

This close association of royalty (‘crowned’, ‘imperial’, ‘monarch’) with superhuman strength and wisdom may assist our interpretations elsewhere of Shakespeare’s later royalism, whose spirituality (to use a dangerously ambiguous word) was forecast in Romeo’s and Cleopatra’s dreams of immortal, and therefore imperial, love (Romeo and Juliet, V. i. 9; Antony and Cleopatra, V. ii. 76–100). The king is, at the limit, a concept of superman status. Florizel later addresses Camillo in similar style: How, Camillo, May this, almost a miracle, be done? That I may call thee something more than man, And after that trust to thee. (IV. iii. 546)

Another clear reminiscence of Cerimon, with suggestions of some greater than human magic; white magic. Now, as the resurrection draws near, we are prepared for it by Perdita’s restoration. St. Paul once seems, perhaps justly, to consider resurrection as no more remarkable than birth (see Romans, iv. 17 in Dr. Moffatt’s translation).13 Certainly here the safeguarding of Perdita is considered scarcely less wonderful than the resurrection of the dead. That the child should be found, says Paulina, Is all as monstrous to our human reason As my Antigonus to break his grave And come again to me. (V. i. 41)

Yet she is restored, as the Gentlemen recount, and human reason accordingly negated. Scattered throughout are dim foreshadowings of the miraculous. Nevertheless, death looms large enough still, in poetry’s despite: Paulina sees to that. When a gentleman praises Perdita she remarks: O Hermione! As every present time doth boast itself

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Above a better gone, so must thy grave Give way to what’s seen now. (V. i. 95)

The temporal order demands that the past slip away, that it lose reality; the more visible present always seems superior. Paulina resents this; and her remark may be aligned with both our early lines on boyhood never dreaming of any future other than to be ‘boy eternal’ (I. ii. 65) and Florizel’s desire to have Perdita’s every act in turn—speaking, dancing, etc.—perpetuated. All these are strivings after eternity. Paulina, moreover, here suggests that the gentleman concerned, who seems to be a poet, is himself at fault: his verse, which ‘flow’d with her (i.e. Hermione’s) beauty once’, is now ‘shrewdly ebb’d’ (V. i. 102). The complaint is, not that Hermione has gone, but that the gentleman has failed in some sense to keep level. Death is accordingly less an objective reality than a failure of the subject to keep abreast of life. This may seem to turn an obvious thought into meaningless metaphysics, but the lines, in their context, can scarcely be ignored. Throughout Troilus and Cressida (especially at III. iii. 145–84, an expansion of Paulina’s comment) Shakespeare’s thoughts on time are highly abstruse (see my essay in The Wheel of Fire); so are they in the Sonnets. Wrongly used time is as intrinsic to the structure of Macbeth as is ‘eternity’ to that of Antony and Cleopatra (see my essays on both plays in The Imperial Theme). As so often in great poetry, the philosophical subtlety exists within or behind a speech, or plot, of surface realism and simplicity. Now The Winter’s Tale is hammering on the threshold of some extraordinary truth related to both ‘nature’ and ‘eternity’. Hence its emphasis on the seasons, birth and childhood, the continual moulding of new miracles on the pattern of the old; hence, too, the desire expressed for youthful excellence perpetuated and eternal; the thought of Perdita’s every action as a ‘crowned’ thing, a ‘queen’, in its own eternal right (IV. iii. 145–6); and also of art as improving or distorting nature, in the flower-dialogue, in Julio Romano’s uncanny, eternity-imitating, skill. And yet no metaphysics, no natural philosophy or art, satisfy the demand that the lost thing, in all its natureborn warmth, be preserved; that it, not only its descendant, shall live; that death be revealed as a sin-born illusion; that eternity be flesh and blood. The action moves to the house of the ‘grave and good Paulina’ (V. iii. 1). The scene is her ‘chapel’, recalling the chapel of death at III. ii. 240, where Leontes last saw Hermione’s dead body. Paulina shows them the statue, which excels anything ‘the hand of man hath done’ (V. iii. 17); and they are quickly struck with—again the word—‘wonder’ (V. iii. 22). Leontes gazes; recognizes Hermione’s ‘natural posture’ (V. iii. 23); asks her to chide him, yet remembers how she was tender ‘as infancy and grace’ (V. iii. 27): O! thus she stood, Even with such life of majesty—warm life

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As now it coldly stands—when first I woo’d her. I am asham’d: does not the stone rebuke me For being more stone than it? O, royal piece! (V. iii. 34)

Sweet though it be, it remains cold and withdrawn, like Keats’ Grecian Urn. Yet its ‘majesty’ exerts a strangely potent ‘magic’ (V. iii. 39) before which Perdita kneels almost in ‘superstition’ (V. iii. 43). Leontes’ grief is so great that Camillo reminds him how ‘sixteen winters’ and ‘so many summers’ should by now alternately have blown and dried his soul clean of ‘sorrow’; why should that prove more persistent than short-lived ‘joy’? (V. iii. 49–53). Leontes remains still, his soul pierced (V. iii. 34) by remembrance. Paulina, however, speaks realistically of the statue as art, saying how its colour is not dry yet (V. iii. 47); half apologizing for the way it moves him, her phrase ‘for the stone is mine’ (V. iii. 58) re-emphasizing her peculiar office. She offers to draw the curtain, fearing lest Leontes’ ‘fancy may think anon it moves’ (V. iii. 61). The excitement generated, already intense, reaches new impact and definition in Paulina’s sharp ringing utterance on ‘moves’. But Leontes remains quiet, fixed, in an other-worldly consciousness, a living death not to be disturbed, yet trembling with expectance: Let be, let be! Would I were dead, but that, methinks, already— What was he that did make it? (V. iii. 61)

A universe of meaning is hinted by that one word ‘already’ and the subsequent, tantalizing, break. Now the statue seems no longer cold: See, my lord, Would you not deem it breath’d, and that those veins Did verily bear blood? (V. iii. 63)

As the revelation slowly matures, it is as though Leontes’ own grief and love were gradually infusing the thing before him with life. He, under Paulina, is labouring, even now, that it may live. The more visionary, paradisal, personal wonder of Pericles (who alone hears the spheral music) becomes here a crucial conflict, an agon, in which many persons share; dream is being forced into actuality. ‘Masterly done’, answers Polixenes, taking us back to common-sense, and yet again noting that ‘the very life seems warm upon her lip’ (V. iii. 65). We are poised between motion and stillness, life and art:

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The fixure of her eye has motion in’t, As we are mock’d with art. (V. iii. 67)

The contrast drives deep, recalling the balancing of art and nature in Perdita’s dialogue with Polixenes; and, too, the imaging of the living Marina as ‘crown’d Truth’ or monumental Patience (Pericles, V. i. 124, 140). Paulina reiterates her offer to draw the curtain lest Leontes be so far ‘transported’ (cp. III. ii. 159; a word strongly toned in Shakespeare with magical suggestion) that he actually think it ‘lives’—thus recharging the scene with an impossible expectation. To which Leontes replies: No settled senses of the world can match The pleasure of that madness. Let’t alone. (V. iii. 72)

He would stand here, spell-bound, forever; forever gazing on this sphinx-like boundary between art and life. Paulina, having functioned throughout as the Oracle’s implement, becomes now its priestess. Her swift changes key the scene to an extraordinary pitch, as she hints at new marvels: I am sorry, sir, I have thus far stirr’d you: but I could afflict you further. (V. iii. 74)

She has long caused, and still causes, Leontes to suffer poignantly; and yet his suffering has undergone a subtle change, for now this very ‘affliction has a taste as sweet as any cordial comfort’ (V. iii. 76). Already (at V. ii. 20 and 81, and V. iii. 51–3) we have found joy and sorrow in partnership, as, too, in the description of Cordelia’s grief (King Lear, IV. iii. 17–26). So Leontes endures a pain of ineffable sweetness as the mystery unfolds: Still, methinks, There is an air comes from her: what fine chisel Could ever yet cut breath? (V. iii. 77)

However highly we value the eternity phrased by art (as in Yeats’ ‘monuments of unaging intellect’ in Sailing to Byzantium14 and Keats’ Grecian Urn), yet there is a frontier beyond which it and all corresponding philosophies fail: they lack one thing, breath. With a fine pungency of phrase, more humanly relevant than

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Othello’s ‘I know not where is that Promethean heat . . .’ (Othello, V. ii. 12), a whole world of human idealism is dismissed. The supreme moments of earlier tragedy—Othello before the ‘monumental alabaster’ (V. ii. 5) of the sleeping Desdemona, Romeo in Capel’s monument, Juliet and Cleopatra blending sleep and death—are implicit in Leontes’ experience; more, their validity is at stake, as he murmurs, ‘Let no man mock me’ (V. iii. 79), stepping forward for an embrace; as old Lear, reunited with Cordelia, ‘a spirit in bliss’, says ‘Do not laugh at me’ (King Lear, IV. vii. 68); as Pericles fears lest his reunion with Marina be merely such a dream as ‘mocks’ man’s grief (Pericles, V. i. 144, 164). Those, and other, supreme moments of pathos are here re-enacted to a stronger purpose. Leontes strides forward; is prevented by Paulina; we are brought up against a cul-de-sac. But Paulina herself immediately releases new impetus as she cries, her voice quivering with the Sibylline power she wields: Either forbear, Quit presently the chapel, or resolve you For more amazement. If you can beho’d it, I’ll make the statue move indeed, descend, And take you by the hand; but then you’ll think— Which I protest against—I am assisted By wicked powers. (V. iii. 85)

The ‘chapel’ setting is necessary, for we attend the resurrection of a supposedly buried person; the solemnity is at least half funereal. Much is involved in the phrase ‘wicked powers’: we watch no act of necromancy. The ‘magic’ (V. ii. 39), if magic it be, is a white magic; shall we say, a natural magic; the living opposite of the Ghost in Hamlet hideously breaking his tomb’s ‘ponderous and marble jaws’ (I. iv. 50). The difference is that between Prospero’s powers in The Tempest and those of Marlowe’s Faustus or the Weird Sisters in Macbeth. The distinction in Shakespeare’s day was important and further driven home by Paulina’s: It is requir’d You do awake your faith. Then, all stand still; Or those that think it is unlawful business I am about, let them depart. (V. iii. 94)

The key-word ‘faith’ enlists New Testament associations, but to it Paulina adds a potency more purely Shakespearian: music. Shakespeare’s use of music, throughout his main antagonist to tempestuous tragedy, reaches a newly urgent

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precision at Cerimon’s restoration of Thaisa and Pericles’ reunion with Marina. Here it functions as the specifically releasing agent:   Paulina. Music, awake her: strike!     (Music sounds) ’Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach; Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come; I’ll fill your grave up: stir, nay, come away; Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him Dear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs:     (Hermione comes down) Start not; her actions shall be holy as You hear my spell is lawful: do not shun her Until you see her die again, for then You kill her double. Nay, present your hand: When she was young you woo’d her; now in age Is she become the suitor?   Leontes. O! she’s warm. If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating. (V. iii. 98)

‘Redeems’ (cp. ‘ransomed’ at V. ii. 16), ‘holy’ and ‘lawful’ continue earlier emphases. The concreteness of ‘fill your grave up’ has analogies in Shelley’s Witch of Atlas (LXIX–LXXI) and the empty sepulchre of the New Testament. Such resurrections are imaged as a re-infusing of the dead body with life. Hermione’s restoration not only has nothing to do with black magic; it is not even transcendental. It exists in warm human actuality (cp. Pericles, V. i. 154): hence our earlier emphases on warmth and breath; and now on ‘eating’ too. It is, indeed, part after all of ‘great creating nature’; no more, and no less; merely another miracle from the great power, the master-artist of creation, call it what you will, nature or eternity, Apollo or—as in the New Testament—‘the living God’. The poet carefully refuses to elucidate the mystery on the plane of plotrealism. When Polixenes wonders where Hermione ‘has liv’d’ or ‘how stol’n from the dead’, Paulina merely observes that she is living, and that this truth, if reported rather than experienced, would ‘be hooted at like an old tale’ (V. iii. 114–17; cp. ‘like an old tale’ at V. ii. 30, 67). Perdita’s assistance is needed to unloose Hermione’s speech; whereupon she speaks, invoking the gods’ ‘sacred vials’ of blessing on her daughter and referring to the Oracle (V. iii. 121–8). Leontes further drives home our enigma by remarking that Paulina has found his wife, though ‘how is to be question’d’; for, he says,

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I saw her As I thought, dead, and have in vain said many A prayer upon her grave. (V. iii. 139)

We are not, in fact, to search for answers on this plane at all: the poet himself does not know them.15 Certainly our plot-realism is maintained: Paulina reminds us that her husband is gone; and we may remember Mamilius. It is the same in Pericles. The subsidiary persons are no longer, as persons, important: the perfunctory marrying of Paulina and Camillo to round off the ritual might otherwise be a serious blemish. The truth shadowed, or revealed, is only to be known, if at all, within the subjective personality, the ‘I’ not easily linked into an objective argument. It is precisely this mysterious ‘I’ in the audience that the more important persons of drama, and in especial tragedy, regularly objectify. Now within the ‘I’ rest all those indefinables and irrationalities of free-will and guilt, of unconditioned and therefore appallingly responsible action with which The Winter’s Tale is throughout deeply concerned; as in Leontes’ unmotivated sin for which he is nevertheless in some sense responsible; with his following loss of free-will, selling himself in bondage to dark powers, and a consequent enduring and infliction of tyranny. The outward effects are suspicion, knowledge of evil and violent blame; with a final spreading and miserable knowledge of death (‘There was a man dwelt by a churchyard’—II. i. 28), leading on, with Paulina’s assistance, to repentance. Time is throughout present as a backward-flowing thing, swallowing and engulfing; we are sunk deep in the consciousness of dead facts, causes, death. Now over against all this stands the creative consciousness, existing not in present-past but present-future, and with a sense of causation not behind but ahead, the everflowing in of the new and unconditioned, from future to present: this is the consciousness of freedom, in which ‘every wink of an eye some new grace will be born’ (V. ii. 124). Hence our poetry plays queer tricks with time, as in the ‘boy eternal’ passage where consciousness is confined to ‘to-day’ and ‘to-morrow’: in Florizel’s dreams of immediate perfection eternalized; in thought of ‘eternity’ (which includes the future, being over-dimensional to the time-stream) as the creative origin; and in Paulina’s annoyance at the poet-gentleman’s ready submission to time the destroyer. Freedom is creation, and therefore art; and hence our emphases on art, in the flower-dialogue, in notice of Julio Romano’s skill, in the statue-scene; and here we approach a vital problem. It is precisely the creative spirit in man, the unmotivated and forward ‘I’, that binds him to ‘great creating Nature’, the ‘great nature’ by whose laws the child is ‘freed and enfranchised’ from the womb. (II. ii. 60–1): he is one with that nature, in so far as he is free. Our drama works therefore to show Leontes, under the tutelage of the Oracle, as painfully working himself from the bondage of sin and remorse

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into the freedom of nature, with the aptly-named Paulina as conscience, guide, and priestess. The resurrection is not performed until (i) Leontes’ repentance is complete and (ii) creation is satisfied by the return of Perdita, who is needed for Hermione’s full release. Religion, art, procreation, and nature (in ‘warmth’, ‘breath’ and ‘eating’) are all contributory to the conclusion, which is shown as no easy release, but rather a gradual revelation, corresponding to Pericles’ reunion with Marina, under terrific dramatic pressure and fraught with an excitement with which the watcher’s ‘I’ is, by most careful technique, forced into a close subjective identity, so that the immortality revealed is less concept than experience. Nor is it just a reversal of tragedy; rather tragedy is contained, assimilated, transmuted; every phrase of the resurrection scene is soaked in tragic feeling, and the accompanying joy less an antithesis to sorrow than its final flowering. The depths of the ‘I’, which are tragic, are being integrated with the objective delight which is nature’s joy. The philosophy of Wordsworth is forecast; for he, too, knew Leontes’ abysmal ‘nothing’; he too suffered some hideous disillusion, in part evil; he too laboured slowly for reintegration with nature; and, finally, he too saw man’s true state in terms of creation and miracle. The response, in both Wordsworth and Shakespeare, is a reverential wonder at knowledge of Life where Death was throned.16 The Winter’s Tale may seem a rambling, perhaps an untidy, play; its anachronisms are vivid, its geography disturbing. And yet Shakespeare offers nothing greater in tragic psychology, humour, pastoral, romance, and that which tops them all and is, except for Pericles, new. The unity of thought is more exact than appears: it was Sicily, at first sight ill-suited to the sombre scenes here staged, that gave us the myth of Proserpine or Persephone. The more profound passages are perhaps rather evidence of what is beating behind or within the creative genius at work than wholly successful ways of printing purpose on an average audience’s, or an average reader’s, mind; but the passages are there, and so is the purpose, though to Shakespeare it need not have been defined outside his drama. That drama, however, by its very enigma, its unsolved and yet uncompromising statement, throws up—as in small compass did the little flower-dialogue too—a vague, numinous, sense of mighty powers, working through both the natural order and man’s religious consciousness, that preserve, in spite of all appearance, the good. Orthodox tradition is used, but it does not direct; a pagan naturalism is used too. The Bible has been an influence; so have classical myth and Renaissance pastoral;17 but the greatest influence was Life itself, that creating and protecting deity whose superhuman presence and powers the drama labours to define. Notes

1. One must, however, read no special meaning into Shakespeare’s use here of ‘behind’ to denote the future. A similar use occurs at Hamlet, III. iv. 179, perhaps

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with a stage-sense of events awaiting their entrance. For a reverse, more normal, thought of a backward past see The Tempest, I. ii. 50. 2. To use Mr. C. S. Lewis’ crisp summing up in The Allegory of Love, ‘The romance of marriage’ succeeds ‘the romance of adultery’. 3. Shakespeare’s use of ‘nothing’ is variously important. Repetitions of the word carry a weight of dramatic meaning at Hamlet, III. iv. 130–2 and IV. v. 173; All’s Well that Ends Well, III, ii. 77–105; and King Lear, I, i. 89–92 and I. iv. 142–50. Compare also King Lear I. ii. 32 with Othello, III. iii. 36. In Macbeth it helps to characterize a nightmare state at I. iii. 141 and a general nihilism at V. v. 28; and in Richard II is used seven times to define a nameless fear at II. ii. 1–40 and twice for a peaceful Nirvana-like dissolution at V. v. 38–41, the last example pointing on to ‘nothing brings me all things’ at Timon of Athens, V. i. 191–3: (Bergson’s equation of ‘the nought’ with ‘the all’ in L’Evolution Créatrice is analogous). It tends to occur at moments of crisis, or whenever what Nietzsche called the Dionysian element in tragedy is breaking into the rational and Apollonian: for the accompanying poetic implications see A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V. i. 16. A good apocalyptic use occurs later in The Winter’s Tale at III. i. 11. 4. For witchcraft see Richard III, III. iv. 66–71. Richard is, of course, continually compared to ill-omened creatures, and is visited by eleven ghosts before Bosworth. The presence of all these effects in Macbeth is obvious. See also 2 Henry VI, I. iv. 5. The word appears to be an amalgam of Delphi and the island Delos: it is considered an island. For ‘Delphos’ as the home of the oracle compare Paradise Regained, I. 458. 6. My own stage experience suggests that Leontes demands more nervous energy of the actor than Macbeth, Othello, Lear or Timon. This new realism depends partly on a new restriction in imagery. In the Histories persons use figurative language often glaringly ‘out of character’; in the Tragedies there remain serious discrepancies. The Final Plays show, normally, a satisfying coalescence. See also W. H. Clemen’s, The Development of Shakespeare’s Imagery. 7. In writing of Byron in The Burning Oracle. 8. The heavy emphasis in Love’s Labour’s Lost remains throughout imagistic, in the manner of the Sonnets. This early play does much to define both the positive end of Shakespeare’s work and the reasons for its postponement. See my remarks in The Shakespearian Tempest. 9. For a discussion of this ‘sagging action’ see ‘Hamlet Reconsidered’ in the enlarged (1949) edition of The Wheel of Fire. 10. This contrast has been well exposed by Professor J. Dover Wilson in The Fortunes of Falstaff. It is, however, there one strand only in a richer, satiric, design, with Falstaff becoming more forceful as he loses humour. 11. There is a deplorable stage tradition that Autolycus should again, in this late scene, start picking the purses of the Shepherd and Clown. The comedian will, of course, get his laughs; but for Shakespeare’s opinion of such ‘pitiful ambition’ see Hamlet’s address to the Players (III. ii. 50). 12. Compare the use of ‘eternity’ as the home of divinity in close association with power at Coriolanus, V. iv. 26. 13. It must, however, be noted that the birth here concerned seems to be one of an abnormal, semi-miraculous, sort; but the Pauline doctrine of resurrection holds strong fertility suggestion elsewhere, as in the great passage on immortality at 1 Corinthians, XV, where the dead body is compared to a grain of wheat buried in earth.

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14. A yet more relevant comparison with Yeats might adduce his drama Resurrection. Compare also the statue-interest of Ibsen’s last play. 15. Note that Shakespeare here purposely drives the miraculous to a limit not touched in Pericles. For a full discussion of the metaphysical implications of the immortality dramatized in The Winter’s Tale and other such works I must refer the reader to Chapter X of The Christian Renaissance. 16. We find a closely equivalent sense of the miraculous in the early scenes of All’s Well that Ends Well, where Helena’s mysterious art is clearly comparable with Cerimon, and the style of speech continually takes on a rhymed formality similar to that in Pericles. Lafeu’s excellent comment might be read as a text for The Winter’s Tale: They say miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar things supernatural and causeless. Hence is it that we make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear. (II. iii. 1.) Helena’s success is ‘the rarest argument of wonder that hath shot out in our latter times’; the ‘showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly actor’; ‘in a most weak and debile minister, great power, great transcendance’ (II. iii. 8, 28, 40). See also the many thoughts earlier on science, nature, death, ‘inspired merit’, ‘skill infinite’ and divine action at II. i. 102–89; with hint of a medicine ‘able to breathe life into a stone’ (II. i. 76). The relation of All’s Well that Ends Well to the Final Plays deserves more attention than can be accorded it here. See also As You Like It (with Rosalind as magician), V. ii. 65–9, 1964. My full-length study of All’s Well that Ends Well has now appeared in The Sovereign Power. 17. And, it would seem, Greek drama too, especially Sophocles’, wherein a tyrant is punished like Leontes by the sudden loss of his son (Antigone) and a child exposed like Perdita (Oedipus).

QQQ

1949—J.I.M. Stewart. From Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined Stewart was a varied writer whose work included critical engagements with writers as diverse as James Joyce and Thomas Love Peacock. Later, he wrote short stories and novels, including Our England Is a Garden and Other Stories (1979). Here, Stewart’s essay explores the “little-recognised impulses and conflicts within [our] own mind” that might help account for the notoriously unaccounted-for jealousy of Leontes. He brilliantly interprets Leontes’s behavior using Freud’s articulation of “delusional jealousy” and repressed homosexual desire.

It is, we find, necessary to recognise that the poetic drama, like myth, is partbased upon an awareness, largely intuitive, of the recesses of human passion and

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motive. And how vast, how dark, how variously haunted is this Avernus of the mind science begins, somewhat uncertainly, to describe to us. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus Orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae. Of just what Shakespeare brings from beyond this portal, and how, we often can achieve little conceptual grasp; and often therefore the logical and unkindled mind finds difficulties which it labels as faults and attributes to the depravity of Shakespeare’s audience or what it wills. But what the intellect finds arbitrary the imagination may accept and respond to, for when we read imaginatively or poetically we share the dramatist’s penetration for a while and deep is calling to deep. Leontes’s jealousy affords matter worth considering somewhat at large here. “It would seem . . .” Bridges writes, “that Shakespeare sometimes judged conduct to be dramatically more effective when not adequately motived. In the Winter’s Tale the jealousy of Leontes is senseless, whereas in the original story an adequate motive is developed.” And this is a further instance of Shakespeare’s willingness to please his audience by going outside nature for the sake of surprise. That Leontes’s jealousy, or the manner of it, is a fault rather than a beauty is a preponderant opinion. For Mr. Middleton Murry it is “extravagant” and illustrates the fact that in this play the machinery is unworthy of the theme. 31 And Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, comparing Shakespeare’s play with its source in Greene’s romance, writes: In Pandosto (we shall use Shakespeare’s names) Leontes’ jealousy is made slow and by increase plausible. Shakespeare weakens the plausibility of it as well by ennobling Hermione—after his way with good women—as by huddling up the jealousy in its motion so densely that it strikes us as merely frantic and—which is worse in drama—a piece of impossible improbability. This has always and rightly offended the critics, and we may be forgiven for a secret wish, in reading Act I, Scene 2, to discover some break or gap to which one might point and argue, for Shakespeare’s credit, “Here is evidence of a cut by the stage manager’s or some other hand, to shorten the business.” But the scene runs connectedly, with no abruptness save in Leontes’ behaviour.32 It appears to be Quiller-Couch’s explanation of Leontes’s abrupt frenzy that Shakespeare, conscious that he stood committed to traversing a space of some sixteen years, was necessarily in a hurry to get things going at the start. There have been other explanations: thus Horace Walpole conjectured that it all had something to do with the habits of Henry VIII. Over against these opinions we may set the pertinent comment of a Shakespearian actress, Lady Martin,

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who cautiously writes: “Such inexplicable outbreaks of jealousy, I have been told, do occasionally occur in real life.”33 Of course Lady Martin may be right and yet Shakespeare’s art be in no better case, since mental hospitals are full of patients whose bizarre behaviour is unfit for representation in drama. Leontes’s psychology even if real may be held too recondite to be other than that most hopeless of dramatic contrivances, an unconvincing possibility. It is conceivable, however, that this objection ignores a special condition of poetic creation—the fact of the poet’s mind being, in a recent critic’s words, flung open to the widest and deepest possible range of unconscious suggestion.”34 If the dramatist can manipulate, and his audience be moved by, feelings of the psychogenesis of which they are unaware, if this is an essential part of the experience of tragedy, then it is open to us to ask whether Shakespeare’s audience and properly attuned readers, in his lifetime or now, perhaps acknowledge in such a spectacle as Leontes’s jealousy not a theatrically effective trick or brilliant raid across the borders of psychological possibility, but rather a handling, according to the laws of drama, of little-recognised impulses and conflicts within their own minds. This would be but to maintain with classical Shakespeare criticism that his plays are grounded in our humanity; that he preferred men to monsters quite as much as Ben Jonson did, but had a deeper intuition than Jonson of the monster that can lurk in the man. The protasis of the Winter’s Tale may be stated as follows. Leontes, King of Sicilia, was in boyhood the close friend of Polixenes, King of Bohemia. Their “rooted affection” is beautifully described by the latter: We were (faire Queene) Two Lads, that thought there was no more behind, But such a day to morrow, as to day, And to be Boy eternall.   Hermione. Was not my Lord The veryer Wag o’ th’ two?   Polixenes. We were as twyn’d Lambs, that did frisk i’ th’ Sun, And bleat the one at th’ other: what we chang’d, Was Innocence, for Innocence: we knew not The Doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d That any did: Had we pursu’d that life, And our weake Spirits ne’re been higher rear’d With stronger blood, we should have answer’d Heaven Boldly, not guilty; the Imposition clear’d, Hereditarie ours.   Hermione. By this we gather You have tript since.   Polixenes. O my most sacred Lady

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Temptations have since then been borne to’s: for In those unfledg’d dayes, was my Wife a Girle; Your precious selfe had then not cross’d the eyes Of my young Play-fellow. Necessities of state had parted the friends in boyhood and, although there had been a regular correspondence between them, they had not met again until, shortly before the opening of the play, Polixenes came on a visit to Leontes’s court. Towards the close of this visit Leontes, upon the strength of what normal observers would regard merely as natural courtesies, falls into a violent suspicion of his friend Polixenes and his blameless wife, Hermione. Too hot, too hot: To mingle friendship farre, is mingling bloods. I have Tremor Cordis on me: my heart daunces, But not for joy; not joy. This Entertainment May a free face put on: derive a Libertie From Heartinesse, from Bountie, fertile Bosome, And well become the Agent: ’t may; I graunt: But to be padling Palmes, and pinching Fingers, As now they are, and making practis’d Smiles As in a Looking-Glasse; and then to sigh, as ’twere The Mort o’ th’ Deere: oh, that is entertainment My Bosome likes not, nor my Browes. And presently Leontes seeks the death of his best-loved friend—who, he believes, is now plotting against his life and crown. So much—and in both the passages quoted how matchless the verse!—so much for what Bridges finds “senseless”—and rightly so if interpretation be confined within the limits of a surface psychology. But with Shakespeare, I repeat, such an interpretation will often be inadequate. For in poetic drama (in the words of Mr. T. S. Eliot) characters must somehow disclose (not necessarily be aware of ) a deeper reality than that of the plane of most of our conscious living; and . . . show their real feelings and volitions, instead of just what, in actual life, they would normally profess or be conscious of. . . . It [poetic drama] must reveal, underneath the vacillating or infirm character, the indomitable unconscious will; and underneath the resolute purpose of the planning animal, the victim of circumstance and the doomed or sanctified being.35 It is because of this necessary concern of the poetic drama with unconscious volitions that I now venture to draw from Freud an interpretation of what is

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going on beneath the surface of Shakespeare’s Sicilia. I must ask the reader’s forbearance if he finds the vocabulary strange and the conclusion disconcerting; he will at least, I think, be convinced that what one man believes confined to a cheap theatre another man has been perfectly familiar with in a rather expensive sort of consulting-room. Here is Freud:36 The three layers or stages of jealousy may be described as (1) competitive or normal, (2) projected, and (3) delusional jealousy. . . . The jealousy of the second layer, the projected, is derived in both men and women either from their own actual unfaithfulness in real life or from impulses towards it which have succumbed to repression. It is a matter of everyday experience that fidelity, especially that degree of it required in marriage, is only maintained in the face of continual temptation. Anyone who denies this in himself will nevertheless be impelled so strongly in the direction of infidelity that he will be glad enough to make use of an unconscious mechanism as an alleviation. This relief—more, absolution by his conscience—he achieves when he projects his own impulses to infidelity on to the partner to whom he owes faith. This weighty motive can then make use of the material at hand (perception-material) by which the unconscious impulses of the partner are likewise betrayed, and the person can justify himself with the reflection that the other is probably not much better than he is himself.* . . . The jealousy of the third layer, the true delusional type, is worse. It also has its origin in repressed impulses towards unfaithfulness—the object, however, in these cases is of the same sex as the subject. Delusional jealousy represents an acidulated homosexuality, and rightly takes its position among the classical forms of paranoia. As an attempt at defence against an unduly strong homosexual impulse it may, in a man, be described in the formula: “Indeed I do not love him, she loves him!” In a delusional case one will be prepared to find the jealousy arising in all three layers, never in the third alone. Freud proceeds to the following illustration: The first case was that of a youngish man with a fully developed paranoia of jealousy, the object of which was his impeccably faithful wife. A stormy period in which the delusion had possessed him uninterruptedly already lay behind him. . . . The jealousy of the attack drew its material from his observation of the smallest possible indications, in which the utterly unconscious coquetry of the wife, unnoticeable to any other person, had betrayed itself to him. She had unintentionally touched the man sitting next her with her hand; she had turned too much towards

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him, or she had smiled more pleasantly than when alone with her husband. To all these manifestations of her unconscious feelings he paid extraordinary attention, and always knew how to interpret them correctly, so that he really was always in the right about it, and could justify his jealousy still more by analytic interpretation. His abnormality really reduced itself to this, that he watched his wife’s unconscious mind much more closely and then regarded it as far more important than anyone else would have thought of doing. . . . Our jealous husband perceives his wife’s unfaithfulness instead of his own; by becoming conscious of hers and magnifying it enormously he succeeds in keeping unconscious his own. If we accept his example as typical, we may infer that the enmity which the persecuted paranoiac sees in others is the reflection of his own hostile impulses against them. Since we know that with the paranoiac it is precisely the most loved person of his own sex that becomes his persecutor, the question arises where this reversal of affect takes its origin; the answer is not far to seek—the everpresent ambivalence of the feelings provides its source and the unfulfilment of his claim for love strengthens it. This ambivalence thus serves the same purpose for the persecuted paranoiac as jealousy serves for our patient—that of a defence against homosexuality. It will be seen, then, that Leontes’s behaviour may be interpreted as following a typical paranoiac pattern. His jealousy, where it begins to be abnormal, is derived from his “own actual unfaithfulness in real life.” This is the second or “projected” layer without which the third is never found, and it is interesting that the evidence for it has been provided by a recent editor37 unconcerned with depth psychology: Camillo, the text hints to us, has been Leontes’s assistant in covert immoralities. But it is from the third or “delusional” layer that the catastrophe issues. An early fixation of his affections upon his friend, long dormant, is reawakened in Leontes—though without being brought to conscious focus—by that friend’s actual presence for the first time since their “twyn’d” boyhood. An unconscious conflict ensues and the issue is behaviour having as its object the violent repudiation of the newly reactivated homosexual component in his character. In other words, Leontes projects upon his wife the desires he has to repudiate in himself. And in doing this he is taking advantage with typical paranoiac acuteness of something that does in a sense exist, for Hermione’s courtesy to Polixenes contains that element of flirtation which society wisely sanctions, since it is a sort of safety-valve and—in Freud’s words—“achieves the result on the whole that the desire awakened by the new love-object is gratified by a kind of turning-back to the object already possessed.” Only the pathologically jealous person does not recognise this convention of tolerance; “does not believe in any such thing as a halt or a turning-back once the path has been trod, nor

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that a social ‘flirtation’ may be a safeguard against actual infidelity. In the treatment of a jealous person like this one must refrain from disputing with him the material on which he bases his suspicions.” This, assuredly, is what was experienced first by Camillo and then by the whole court! And the catastrophic suddenness as well as the obsessional force of Leontes’s jealousy, stunning alike to his court and to ourselves as we read, is also described by Freud as typical, as is the sufferer’s complete loss of all sense of evidence. Thus the old convention of “the traducer believed,” which realist critics, as we shall come to see, have regarded as an arbitrary and primitive device justified only by its usefulness in getting something going, turns out to follow a psychological pattern which is “real” enough, as when the testimony of a servant long known to be unreliable prompts to sudden and phrenetic suspicion of a blameless marriage partner. It is thus possible to believe that Shakespeare in stripping Greene’s story of its superficial realism in point of Leontes’s mania is doing something other than sacrificing nature to a cheap effect—which is Bridges’s contention. Rather he is penetrating to nature, and once more giving his fable something of the demonic quality of myth or folk-story, which is commonly nearer to the radical workings of the human mind than are later and rationalised versions of the same material. And here indeed may be the clue to a problem which frequently emerges upon any close scrutiny of the plays and their sources: the problem posed by Shakespeare’s habit of eliminating or flattening down obvious and superficially adequate motives for tragic action. It is because the audience are unconcerned with motivation, the realists say; and Shakespeare, for example, in making Macbeth do what in life such a man would not do is merely contriving a “steep tragic contrast” by arbitrary means. 38 But it may be that Shakespeare clears away obvious motives for much the same reason as the psychologist: to give us some awareness of motives lying deeper down. There is no great extravagance in supposing that what is here described is one of the mechanisms of poetic drama. “An imaginative author, steeped in his subject,” observes Mr. Granville-Barker, “will sometimes write more wisely than he knows.”39 Nevertheless the supposition raises the difficult question of how Shakespeare himself felt about it all. And just what—at the Mermaid, say, and after a performance of the play—he could have told an inquisitive friend about Leontes we cannot at all guess—just as we cannot guess what Blake could have told about such a lyric as “I saw a chapel all of gold.” But at least it seems probable that the dramatist in composition has access among other depths to that which such a psychology as Freud’s explores; and it is probable that the audience in some obscure way are brought to share his awareness, and so are not disconcerted by matters of which a conventional psychology and an unkindled reader will make little. Such objections as Bridges brings to the opening of the Winter’s Tale— the objections of a mind attuned only to discursive operation—do no more than scratch the surface of something drawing all its strength from its own innermost

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recesses. What can powerfully affect us in the theatre is, at least occasionally, the perception—coming to us, maybe, with something of the disguise and displacement characterising related disclosures in dreams—of types of conflict which consciousness normally declines to acknowledge. Odd as the conception is to our common thinking, we are obliged by the evidence to believe that the impact of such works of art as Shakespeare’s may be like that of the iceberg, most massive below the surface. And the sovereign sway exerted over generations of spectators by tragic heroes possessed of a seemingly uncanny power to baffle and schismatise rationalising commentary is perhaps the most striking intimation that this is so. “It seems indeed of the very essence of Shakespeare’s art”—Bridges is obliged to acknowledge despairingly—“to invent such characters as must give rise to difficulties.” Surely this is the confession of a bankrupt criticism. * Cf. Desdemona’s song:

Notes

I called my love false love; but what said he then? If I court moe women, you’ll couch with moe men. [Freud’s note.] 31. J. Middleton Murry, Shakespeare (1936), p. 393. 32. I quote from Quiller-Couch’s introduction to the play in the “New Shakespeare” (1931), p. xvi. 33. For Horace Walpole’s opinion see H. H. Furness, The Winter’s Tale (a New Variorum Shakespeare), pp. 310–11; and for Lady Martin see p. 366. 34. The description of the poet’s mind is from S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (1944), p. 115. 35. The quotation is from Eliot’s introduction to Bethell’s book. 36. The passages from Freud will be found in Collected Papers (1924), ii, 232 ff. 37. The recent editor is Dover Wilson. See his notes on I, II, 237 and II, I, 52 in the “New Shakespeare” edition. 38. That Shakespeare is chiefly concerned to achieve “steep tragic contrast” is the opinion of E. E. Stoll. I examine it in Chapter V. 39. H. Granville-Barker, Prefaces to Shakespeare, Fourth Series (1945), p. 157n.

QQQ

1987—Stanley Cavell. From Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare Cavell is a late-twentieth-century academic whose recent works include Cavell on Film (2005) and Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (2005). A philosopher by training, Cavell’s engagement with epistemological issues in Shakespeare’s drama has been widely read and proved influential in the field of Shakespeare studies.

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Apart from any more general indebtedness of the romantics to Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale is particularly apt in relation to their themes of reawakening or revival, as for example entering into the figure of the six-year-old boy of Wordsworth’s Intimations ode and the ode’s idea of the adult’s world as “remains,” as of corpses. I associate this figure, especially in view of his difficulties over remembering, with Freud’s report of a phobia in a five-year-old boy, partly simply to commemorate Freud’s acknowledgment that he was preceded in his perceptions by the poets, more specifically because of Freud’s consequent perception in this case of adult human life struggling toward happiness from within its own “debris.” Now here at the end of The Winter’s Tale a dead five- or six-year-old boy remains unaccounted for. Or is this prejudicial? Shall we say that the absent boy is meant to cast the shadow of finitude or doubt over the general air of reunion at the end of the play, to emblematize that no human reconciliation is uncompromised, not even one constructible by the powers of Shakespeare? Or shall we say that in acquiring a son-in-law the loss of the son is made up for? Would that be Hermione’s— the son’s mother’s—view of the matter? Or shall we take the boy’s death more simply symbolically, as standing for the inevitable loss of childhood? Then does Perdita’s being found mean that there is a way in which childhood can, after all, be recovered? But the sixteen years that Perdita was, as it were, lost are not recovered. Time may present itself as a good-humored old man, but what he speaks about in his appearance as Chorus in this play is his lapse, his being spent, as if behind our backs. Then is the moral that we all require forgiveness and that forgiveness is always a miracle, taking time but beyond time? Any of these things can be said, but how can we establish or deliver the weight or gravity of any such answer? Why did the boy die? The boy’s father, Leontes, says on one occasion that the boy is languishing from nobleness! Conceiving the dishonor of his mother, He straight declined, drooped, took it deeply, Fastened, and fixed the shame on’t in himself. (II, iii, 11–14)

But this sounds more like something Leontes himself has done, and so suggests an identification Leontes has projected between himself and his son. The lines at the same time project an identification with his wife, to the extent that one permits “conceiving” in that occurrence to carry on the play’s ideas of pregnancy, given the line’s emphasis on drooping, as under a weight. But I am getting ahead of my story. The servant who brings the report of Mamillius’s death attributes it to anxiety over his mother’s plight. But the

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timing of the play suggests something else. Mamillius disappears from our sight for good when he is ordered by his enraged father to be separated from his mother. “Bear the boy hence, he shall not come about her” (II, i, 59). And theatrically, or visually, the father’s rage had immediately entered, as if it was brought on, with Mamillius sitting on his mother’s lap and whispering in her ear. What the boy and his mother interpret themselves to be doing is telling and listening to a winter’s tale. What Leontes interprets them to be doing we must surmise from two facts: first, that both mother and son have got into this intimate position as a result of mutually seductive gestures, however well within the bounds, for all we know, of normal mental and sexual growth; second, that the idea of whispering has already twice been hit upon by Leontes’ mind as it dashes into madness, once when it imagines people are gossiping about his cuckoldry, again as it cites evidence for the cuckoldry to the courtier Camillo in the astounding speech that begins “Is whispering nothing?” (I, ii, 284). Naturally I shall not claim to know that Leontes imagines the son to be repeating such rumors to his mother, to the effect that he is not the son of, as it were, his own father. We are by now so accustomed to understanding insistence or protestation, perhaps in the form of rage, as modes of denial, that we will at least consider that the negation of this tale is the object of Leontes’ fear, namely the fear that he is the father. As if whatever the son says, the very power of his speaking, of what it is he bespeaks, is fearful; as if his very existence is what perplexes his father’s mind. Why would the father fear being the true father of his children? One reason might be some problem of his with the idea that he has impregnated the mother, I mean of course the son’s mother. Another might be that this would displace him in this mother’s affection, and moreover that he would himself have to nurture that displacement. Another might be that this would ratify the displacement of his and his friend Polixenes’ mutual love, his original separation from whom, which means the passing of youth and innocence, was marked, as Polixenes tells Hermione, by the appearance of the women they married. But for whatever reason, the idea of his fearing to be a father would make his jealousy of Polixenes suspicious—not merely because it makes the jealousy empirically baseless, but because it makes it psychologically derivative. This is worth saying because there are views that would take the jealousy between brothers as a rock-bottom level of human motivation. In taking it as derivative I do not have to deny that Leontes is jealous of Polixenes, only to leave open what this means, and how special a human relation it proposes, To further the thought that disowning his issue is more fundamental than, or causes, his jealousy of his friend and brother, rather than the other way around, let us ask how what is called Leontes’ “diseased opinion” (I, ii, 297) drops its disease.

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It vanishes exactly upon his learning that his son is dead. The sequence is this: Leontes refuses the truth of Apollo’s oracle; a servant enters, crying for the king. Leontes asks, “What’s the business?” and is told the prince is gone. Leontes questions the word and is told it means “is dead.” Leontes’ response at once is to relent: “Apollo’s angry, and the heavens themselves / Do strike at my injustice”; whereupon Hermione faints. Of course you can say that the consequences of Leontes’ folly have just built up too far for him to bear them any further and that he is shocked into the truth. This is in a general way undeniable, but it hardly suggests why it is here that he buckles, lets himself feel the shock. It is not psychologically forced to imagine that he first extend his assertion of Mamillius’s drooping from shame and accuse Hermione of Mamillius’s murder, or at least that Shakespeare follow his primary source, the tale of jealousy as told in Robert Greene’s romance Pandosto, and let Leontes immediately believe the oracle, but still too late; so that news of his son’s death and of Hermione’s death upon that news comes during his recantation, as double punishment for his refusal of belief. Or again, Shakespeare could have persisted in his idea that Leontes believes the oracle only after he sees that his disbelief has killed, and still have preserved the idea of the shock as the death of both his son and his wife. But the choice of The Winter’s Tale is, rather, to make the cure perfectly coincide with the death of the son alone. How do we understand Shakespeare’s reordering, or recounting? Think of the boy whispering in his mother’s ear, and think back to her having shown that her fantasy of having things told in her ear makes her feel full (I, ii, 91–2); that is, that her pregnancy itself is a cause of heightened erotic feeling in her (something that feeds her husband’s confusion and strategy). Then the scene of the boy’s telling a tale is explicitly one to cause jealousy (as accordingly was the earlier scene of telling between Hermione and Polixenes, which the present scene repeats, to Leontes’ mind); hence the son’s death reads like the satisfaction of the father’s wish. The further implication is that Apollo is angry not, or not merely, because Leontes does not believe his oracle, but because the god has been outsmarted by Leontes, or rather by his theater of jealousy, tricked into taking Leontes’ revenge for him, as if himself punished for believing that even a god could halt the progress of jealousy by a deliverance of reason. (Leontes’ intimacy with riddles and prophecies would then not be his ability to solve them, but to anticipate them.) Then look again at the “rest,” the relief from restlessness of his brain, that Leontes has achieved at this stage of death and fainting. He says, as he asks Paulina and the ladies in attendance to remove and care for the stricken Hermione, “I have too much believed mine own suspicion” (III, ii, 148)—a fully suspicious statement, I mean one said from within his suspicion, not from having put it aside. The statement merely expresses his regret that he believed his suspicion too much. How much would have been just enough? And

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what would prevent this excess of belief in the future? The situation remains unstable. How could it not, given what we know of the condition from which he requires recovery? He had described the condition in the following way, in the course of his speech upon discovering the mother and the son together: There may be in the cup A spider steeped, and one may drink, depart, And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge Is not infected; but if one present Th’abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider. (II, i, 39–45)

Of the fabulous significance in these lines, I note here just the skeptic’s sense, as for example voiced by David Hume, of being cursed, or sickened, in knowing more than his fellows about the fact of knowing itself, in having somehow peeked behind the scenes, or, say, conditions, of knowing. (Though what Shakespeare is revealing those conditions to be is something Hume, or Descartes, would doubtless have been astonished to learn.) And Leontes has manifested the collapse of the power of human knowing in the “Is whispering nothing?” speech, which ends: Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, If this be nothing. (I, ii, 293–6)

Chaos seems to have come again; and what chaos looks like is the inability to say what exists; to say whether, so to speak, language applies to anything. These experiences of Leontes go rather beyond anything I find I might mean by speaking of believing my suspicions too much. So far I am suggesting merely that this insufficiency of recovery is what you would expect in tracking Leontes’ progress by means of the map of skepticism. For here is where you discover the precipitousnness of the move from next to nothing (say from the merest surmise that one may be dreaming, a repeated surmise in Leontes’ case) into nothingness. Hume recovers from his knowledge of knowledge, or, let me say, learns to live with it, but what he calls its “malady” is never cured; and Descartes recovers only by depending (in a way I judge is no longer natural to the human spiritual repertory) on his detailed dependence on God. I assume it is unclear to what

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extent we have devised for ourselves late versions of these reparations. If The Winter’s Tale is understandable as a study of skepticism—that is, as a response to what skepticism is a response to—then its second half must be understandable as a study of its search for recovery (after Leontes, for example, and before him Othello, have done their worst). That skepticism demands—Cartesian skepticism, Humian skepticism, the thing Kant calls a scandal to philosophy— efforts at recovery is internal to it: It is inherently unstable; no one simply wants to be a (this kind of) skeptic. Skepticism’s own sense of what recovery would consist in dictates efforts to refute it; yet refutation can only extend it, as Othello notably found out. True recovery lies in reconceiving it, in finding skepticism’s source (its origin, say, if you can say it without supposing its origin is past). To orient ourselves in finding how The Winter’s Tale conceives of this search for recovery, let us question its title further. Several passages in the play are called tales or said to be like tales, but the only thing said to be a tale for winter is the tale begun by the boy Mamillius. I have heard it said, as if it is accepted wisdom, that the remainder of the play, after we no longer hear what Mamillius says, or would have said, is the play as it unfolds. Supposing so, what would the point be? According to what I have so far found to be true of that narration, what we are given are events motivated by seduction, told in a whisper, having the effect of drawing on the vengeance of a husband and father who, therefore, has interpreted the tale as revealing something about him, and specifically something to do with the fact that his wife has or has not been faithful to him, where her faithfulness would be at least as bad as her faithlessness would be. (This is the match of my way of looking at Othello.) Although I find these to be promising lines to follow out as characteristics of our play, they will any of them depend on some working sense of why a play is being called a tale. Is it simply that the play is about a tale, or the telling of a tale, as for instance the film The Philadelphia Story is, in a sense, about a magazine story, or the getting and the suppressing of a story? Does it matter that we do not know what the tale is that the play would on this account be about? Three times an assertion is said to sound like an old tale—that the king’s daughter is found, that Antigonous was torn to pieces by a bear, and that Hermione is living—and each time the purpose is to say that one will have trouble believing these things without seeing them, that the experience of them “lames report,” “undoes description,” and lies beyond the capacity of “ballad-makers . . . to express it” (V, ii, 61–2, 26–7). It is uncontroversial that Shakespeare’s late plays intensify his recurrent study of theater, so we may take it that he is here asserting the competition of poetic theater with nontheatrical romance as modes of narrative, and especially claiming the superiority of theater (over a work like his own “source” Pandosto) in securing full faith and credit in fiction. But what are the stakes in such a competition, if they go beyond the jealousies of one profession or craft toward another? Let us consider that Leontes’ interruption of Mamillius’s tale itself suggests a competition over the

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question whose tale the ensuing tale is, the son’s or the father’s, or somehow both, the one told in whispers and beckonings, under the voice, the other, at the same time, at the top of the voice, in commands and accusations. While evidently I expect considerable agreement that in Leontes’ intrusion we have an Oedipal conflict put before us, I am not assuming that we thereupon know how to work our way through the conflict. Freud, I guess like Sophocles, seems to look at the conflict as initiated by the son’s wish to remove or replace the father, whereas in The Winter’s Tale the conflict, on the contrary, seems primarily generated by the father’s wish to replace or remove the son. Perhaps this speaks of a difference between tragedy and romance—hence of their inner union—but in any case I do not wish to prejudge such a matter. Let us for the moment separate two of the play’s primary regions of ideas that intersect in Mamillius’s whispering of a tale of generation, namely ideas concerning telling or relating and ideas concerning breeding and issue. These are the ideas I shall follow out here to the extent I can, and from which I derive the point of calling the play a tale, something told. To grasp initially how vast these regions are, consider that telling in the play belongs to its theme not alone of relating or recounting, but to its theme of counting generally, hence to its preoccupation with computation and business and the exchange of money. And consider that the theme of breeding or branching or issue or generation belongs to the play’s themes of dividing or separation. The regions may be seen as the poles of opposite faces of a world of partings, of parting’s dual valence, as suggested in the paired ideas of participation and of parturition, or in other words of the play, ideas of being fellow to and of dissevering. The play punctuates its language with literal “part” words, as if words to the wise, words such as depart, parting, departure, apart, party to, partner, and, of course, bearing a part. That last phrase, saying that parts are being born, itself suggests the level at which theater (here in a phrase from music) is being investigated in this play; hence suggests why theater is for Shakespeare an endless subject of study; and we are notified that no formulation of the ideas of participation and parturition in this play will be complete that fails to account for their connection with theatrical parts; or, put otherwise, to say why tales of parting produce plays of revenge, sometimes of revenge overcome. Since the region of telling and counting (think of it as relating; I am naming it participation) is so ramified, and may yet remain incompletely realized, let me remind you of its range. Reading The Winter’s Tale to study it, to find out my interest in it, was the second time in my literary experience in which I have felt engulfed by economic terms; I mean felt a text engulfed by them. The first time was in studying Walden, another work insistently about pastoral matters and the vanishing of worlds. In The Winter’s Tale—beyond the terms tell and count themselves, and beyond account and loss and lost and gain and pay and owe and debt and repay—we have money, coin, treasure, purchase, cheat, custom,

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commodity, exchange, dole, wages, recompense, labor, affairs, traffic, tradesmen, borrow, save, credit, redeem, and—perhaps the most frequently repeated economic term in the play—business. But the sheer number of such terms will not convey the dense saturation of the language of this play—perhaps, it may seem, of language as such, or some perspective toward language, or projection of it—in this realm of terms; not even the occurrence within this realm of what one may take as the dominating thematic exchanges of the action, from suffering loss to being redeemed to paying back and getting even; the saturation seems more deeply expressed by the interweavings of the words and the scope of contexts—or, let us say, interests—over which they range. If one seeks an initial guess for this saturation or shadowing of language by the economic, or the computational, one might say that it has to do with the thought that the very purpose of language is to communicate, to inform, which is to say, to tell. And you always tell more and tell less than you know. Wittgenstein’s Investigations draws this most human predicament into philosophy, forever returning to philosophy’s ambivalence, let me call it, as between wanting to tell more than words can say and wanting to evade telling altogether—an ambivalence epitomized in the idea of wishing to speak “outside language games,” a wish for (language to do, the mind to be) everything and nothing. Here I think again of Emerson’s wonderful saying in which he detects the breath of virtue and vice that our character “emits” at every moment, words so to speak always before and beyond themselves, essentially and unpredictably recurrent, say rhythmic, fuller of meaning than can be exhausted. So that it may almost be said of every word and phrase in the language what William Empson has said of metaphors, that they are pregnant (or are they, or at the same time, seminal?). I was speaking of the thought that the very purpose of language, it may be said, is to tell. It is therefore hardly surprising, as it were, that an answer to the question “How do you know?” is provided by specifying how you can tell, and in two modes. Asked how you know there is a goldfinch in the garden you may, for example, note some feature of the goldfinch, such as its eye markings or the color of its head; or you may explain how you are in a position to know, what your credentials are, or whether someone told you. (I mean this example, I hope it is clear, in homage to J. L. Austin’s unendingly useful study “Other Minds.”) In the former case you begin a narrative of the object’s differences from other relevant objects; in the latter case a narrative of differences in your position from other positions. (From such trivial cases one may glimpse the following speculation arising: If a narrative is something told, and telling is an answer to a claim to knowledge, then perhaps any narrative, however elaborated, may be understood as an answer to some implied question of knowledge, perhaps in the form of some disclaiming of knowledge or avoidance of it.) But there is another route of answer to the question how you know (still confining our attention to what is called empirical knowledge), namely a claim

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to have experienced the thing, most particularly in the history of epistemology, to have seen it. This answer, as it occurs in classical investigations of human knowledge, is more fundamental than, or undercuts, the answers that consist of telling. What makes it more fundamental is suggested by two considerations. First, to claim to have seen is to claim, as it were, to have seen for oneself, to put one’s general capacity as a knower on the line; whereas one does not claim to tell by the eye markings for oneself, but for anyone interested in such information. Hence what is at stake here is just a more or less specialized piece of expertise, which may for obvious reasons be lacking or in obvious ways need improvement. Second, knowing by telling, as suggested, goes by differences, say by citing identifying marks or features of a thing: You can for instance tell a goldfinch from a goldcrest because of their differences in eye markings. Whereas knowing by seeing does not require, and cannot employ, differences. (Unless the issue is one of difference in the mode or nature of seeing itself, call this the aesthetics of seeing. Epistemology is obliged to keep aesthetics under control, as if to guard against the thought that there is something more [and better] seeing can be, or provide, than evidence for claims to know, especially claims that particular objects exist.) You cannot tell (under ordinary circumstances; a proviso to be determined)—it makes no clear sense to speak of telling—a goldfinch from a peacock, or either from a telephone, or any from a phone call. To know a hawk from a handsaw—or a table from a chair—you simply have, as it were, to be able to say what is before your eyes; it would be suggestive of a lack (not of expertise but) of mental competence (for example suggestive of madness) to confuse one with the other. As if the problem of knowledge is now solely how it is that you, or anyone, know at all of the sheer existence of the thing. This is why epistemologists such as Descartes, in assessing our claims to know, have had, out of what seems to them a commitment to intellectual purity and seriousness, to consider possibilities that in various moods may seem frivolous or far-fetched, such as that they may now be dreaming that they are awake—a possibility (unless it can be ruled out, explicitly) that at a stroke would put under a cloud any claim to know the world on the basis of our senses. (The difference between dreaming and reality is one of the great philosophical junctures, or jointures, that is not a function of differences; not to be settled by noting specific marks and features, say predicates. It is my claim for Wittgenstein’s thought that his criteria are meant not to settle the field of existence [in its disputes with dreams, imaginations, hallucinations, delusions] but to mark its bourn, say its conceptual space.) This is a long story, not to everyone’s taste to pursue at length, and not to anyone’s taste or profit to pursue at just any time (as Descartes is careful to say). What interests me here is to get at the intersection of the epistemologist’s question of existence, say of the existence of the external world, or of what analytical philosophy calls other minds, with Leontes’ perplexity about knowing whether his son is his.

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Leontes’ first question to his son is: “Art thou my boy?” And then he goes on to try to recognize the boy as his by their resemblance in certain marks and features, at first by comparing their noses. That speech, distracted, ends with a repetition of the earlier doubt: “Art thou my calf?” Already here we glimpse a Shakespearean pathos, a sense that one may feel mere sadness enough to fill an empty world. Upon the repetition Leontes compares their heads. These efforts are of course of no avail. Then he rules out the value of the testimony of anyone else, as if testifying that he must know for himself; and as he proceeds he insists that his doubts are reasonable, and he is led to consider his dreams. It is all virtually an exercise out of Descartes’s Meditations. But while Descartes suggests that his doubts may class him with madmen, he succeeds (for some of his readers) in neutralizing the accusation, that is, in sufficiently establishing the reasonableness of his doubts, at least provisionally. Whereas Leontes is, while in doubt, certainly a madman. What is their difference? What Leontes is suffering has a cure, namely to acknowledge his child as his, to own it, something every normal parent will do, or seems to do, something it is the first obligation of parents to do (though, come to think about it, most of us lack the knock-down evidence we may take ourselves to possess, in this case as in the case of owning that the world exists). Still it is enough, it is the essence of the matter, to know it for ourselves, say to acknowledge the child. The cure in Descartes’s case is not so readily describable; and perhaps it is not available. I mean, acknowledging that the world exists, that you know for yourself that it is yours, is not so clear a process. Descartes’s discovery of skepticism shows, you might say, what makes Leontes’ madness possible, or what makes his madness representative of the human need for acknowledgment. The depth of this madness, or of its possibility, is revealed by The Winter’s Tale to measure, in turn, the depth of drama, or of spectacle, or of showing itself, in its competition with telling or narrative, because, as suggested, even after believing the truth proclaimed by an oracle Leontes is not brought back to the world (supposing he ever is) except by the drama of revelation and resurrection at the end of this work for theater; by seeing something, beyond being told something. This is confirmed as a matter of this drama’s competition with narrative romance, by making the finding of a child who has been empirically lost, in fact rejected and abandoned, a matter swiftly dealt with by simple narration: The gentlemen who share the telling of the story of the daughter found say it is hard to believe, but in the event (especially given their use of the convention of increasing one’s credibility by saying that what one will say will sound incredible), nothing proves easier. The matter for drama, by contrast, is to investigate the finding of a wife not in empirical fact lost, but, let me say, transcendentally lost, lost just because one is blind to her—as it were conceptually unprepared for her—because that one is blind to himself, lost to himself. Here is what becomes, at some final

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stage, of the great Shakespearean problematic of legitimate succession: Always seen as a matter essential to the flourishing state, recognizing (legitimizing) one’s child now appears as a matter essential to individual sanity, a discovery begun perhaps in Hamlet, and developed in Lear. We are bound, it seems to me, at some point to feel that this theater is contesting the distinction between saying and showing. If the concluding scene of this theater is telling something, it is not something antecedently known; it is rather instituting knowledge, reconceiving, reconstituting knowledge, along with the world. Then there must be a use of the concept of telling more fundamental than, or explaining or grounding, its use to tell differences; a use of the concept of telling as fundamental as seeing for oneself. That there is such a use is a way of putting the results of my work on Wittgenstein’s idea of a criterion, because that idea—used to describe, in a sense to explain, how language relates (to) things—gives a sense of how things fall under our concepts, of how we individuate things and name, settle on nameables, of why we call things as we do, as questions of how we determine what counts as instances of our concepts, this thing as a table, that as a chair, this other as a human, that other as a god. To speak is to say what counts. This is not the time to try to interest anyone in why the concept of counting occurs in this intellectual space, I mean to convince one unconvinced that its occurrence is not arbitrary and that it is the same concept of counting that goes with the concept of telling. (Something counts because it fits or matters. I think of the concept in this criterial occurrence as its nonnumerical use—it is not here tallying how much or how many, but establishing membership or belonging. This is a matter both of establishing what Wittgenstein speaks of as a kind of object, and also attributing a certain value or interest to the object.) But before moving from this region of parting to the other—that is, from the region of telling and imparting or relating and partaking, which I am calling the region of participation, to the region of departing or separation, which I am calling the region of parturition—I want to note two ways for further considering the question. The first way is to ask whether it is chance that the concept of telling is used both to cover the progress of relating a story and to cover the progress of counting or numbering, as if counting numbers were our original for all further narration. Consider that counting by numbers contains within itself the difference between fiction and fact, since one learns both to count the numbers, that is to recite them, intransitively, and to count things, that is to relate, or coordinate, numerals and items, transitively; and counting by numbers contains the ideas that recitations have orders and weights and paces, that is, significant times and sizes of items and significant distances between them. In counting by numbers, intransitively or transitively, matters like order and size and pace of events are fixed ahead of time, whereas in telling tales it is their pleasure to work

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these things out as part of the telling, or as part of a mode or genre of telling—it is why what the teller of a story does is to recount, count again—so you needn’t be making a mistake if you let lapse a space of sixteen years in your account of certain kinds of things. The second way I note for considering the connection of counting by criteria with counting as telling (or tallying) concerns what I suppose is the major claim I make in The Claim of Reason about Wittgenstein’s idea of a criterion, namely that while criteria provide conditions of (shared) speech they do not provide an answer to skeptical doubt. I express this by saying that criteria are disappointing, taking them to express, even to begin to account for, the human disappointment with human knowledge. Now when Leontes cannot convince himself that Mamillius is his son on the basis of criteria such as their having similar noses and heads, and instead of recognizing criteria as insufficient for this knowledge, concludes that he may disown his child, not count him as his own, Leontes’ punishment is that he loses the ability to count, to speak (consecutively), to account for the order and size and pace of his experiences, to tell anything. This is my initial approach to the “Is whispering nothing?” speech. Without now trying to penetrate to the meaning of that Shakespearean “nothing,” trying rather to keep my head up under this onslaught of significance, I take the surface of the speech as asking whether anything counts: Does whispering count, does it matter, is it a criterion for what the world is, is anything? And in that state no one can answer him, because it is exactly the state in which you have repudiated that attunement with others in our criteria on which language depends. So I take us here to be given a portrait of the skeptic at the moment of the world’s withdrawal from his grasp, to match the portrait of Othello babbling and fainting, in comparison with which the philosopher’s portrait of the skeptic as not knowing something, in the sense of being uncertain of something, shows as an intellectualization of some prior intimation. And Shakespeare’s portrait indicates what the intimation is of, of which the philosopher’s is the intellectualization, one in which, as I keep coming back to putting it, the failure of knowledge is a failure of acknowledgment, which means, whatever else it means, that the result of the failure is not an ignorance but an ignoring, not an opposable doubt but an unappeasable denial, a willful uncertainty that constitutes an annihilation. These formulations suggest that The Winter’s Tale may be taken as painting the portrait of the skeptic as a fanatic. The inner connection between skepticism and fanaticism is a further discovery of the Critique of Pure Reason, which takes both skepticism and fanaticism as products of dialectical illusion (the one despairing over the absence of the unconditioned, the other claiming its presence), divided by perfect enmity with one another, united in their reciprocal enmities with human reason. The Shakespearean portrait lets us see that the skeptic wants the annihilation that he is punished by, that it is his way of asserting the humanness of knowledge,

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since skepticism’s negation of the human, its denial of satisfaction in the human (here in human conditions of knowing), is an essential feature of the human, as it were its birthright. It is the feature (call it the Christian feature) that Nietzsche wished to overcome by his affirmations of the human, which would, given our state, appear to us as the overcoming or surpassing of the human. I said that Leontes loses the ability to count, to tell, to recount his experiences, and now I am taking that as his point, his strategy—to turn this punishment into his victory. Before he is recovered, he wants not to count, not to own what is happening to him as his, wants for there to be no counting, which is to say, nothing. Why? This takes us to that other region of parting, that of departure, separating, dividing, branching, grafting, flowering, shearing, issuing, delivering, breeding: parturition. Without partings in this region there is nothing, if nothing comes from nothing, and if something comes only from the seeds of the earth. Leontes is quite logical in wanting there to be nothing, to want there to be no separation. The action of the play is built on a pair of literal departures, in the first half (after a short introductory scene) a departure from Sicilia, and in the second (after the introductory scene of Time’s soliloquy) a departure back from Bohemia. And the Prologue, so to speak, of the play, the opening scene of Act 1, is, among some other things, a recounting of the separation of Leontes and Polixenes. Against which, how are we to understand the range of Leontes’, and the play’s, final words? Good Paulina Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely Each one demand and answer to his part Performed in this wide gap of time since first We were dissevered. Hastily lead away. When were we first dissevered? Who is we? Perhaps we think first of Leontes and Hermione; but Hermione thinks first of Perdita (she does not speak to Leontes in her only speech upon reviving, but says that she “preserved / [Herself] to see the issue” [V, iii, 127–8]); and if Leontes is thinking of Polixenes when he says “first-dissevered,” does he mean sixteen years ago or at the time of their childhoods? and if he is thinking of Perdita he must mean when he had her carried off, but we shall, perhaps, think of her delivery from her mother in prison; and perhaps we shall think of Paulina’s awakening Hermione by saying “come away,” speaking of life’s redemption of her, and of “bequeathing to death [her] numbness,” as her leaving death, departing from it, as a being born (again). As if all disseverings are invoked in each; as if to say that life no less than death is a condition and process of dissevering; as if to see that each of us “demanding and answering to our part” means seeing ourselves as apart from everything of

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which we are part, always already dissevered, which above all here means—and hence the idea of theater in this theater above all means—that each is part, only part, that no one is everything, that apart from this part that one has, there is never nothing, but always others. How could one fail to know this? I say that such thoughts are invoked in Leontes’ concluding words, but to what extent in saying “Hastily lead away” is he, do we imagine, anxious to depart from them as well? Let us go back to my claim that Leontes’ wish for there to be nothing— the skeptic as nihilist—goes with his effort, at the cost of madness, not to count. The general idea of the connection is that counting implies multiplicity, differentiation. Then we could say that what he wants is for there to be nothing separate, hence nothing but plenitude. But he could also not just want this either, because plenitude, like nothingness, would mean the end of his (individual) existence. It may be that each of these fantasies comes to the wish never to have been born. Beyond suggesting a wish not to be natal, hence not mortal, the wish says on its face that suicide is no solution to the problem it sees. If philosophers are right who have taken the idea of never having been born as dissipating the fear of death, the idea does not dissipate the fear of dying, say annihilation. Leontes’ nothingness was, as it were, to make room within plenitude for his sole existence, but it makes too much room, it lets the others in and out at the same time. So Leontes, I am taking it, wants neither to exist nor not to exist, neither for there to be a Leontes separate from Polixenes and Hermione and Mamillius nor for there not to be, neither for Polixenes to depart nor for him not to. It is out of this dilemma that I understand Leontes to have come upon a more specific matter not to count. What specifically he does not want to count is the other face of what he does not want to own, the time of breeding, the fact of life that time is a father, that it has issue, even, as Time, the Chorus, says in this play, that it “brings forth” its issue, which suggests that time may also be, like nature, a mother. Of all the reasons there may be not to wish to count time, what is Leontes’ reason? The last word of the Prologue is the word “one” (in that context a pronoun for “son”); and the opening word of the play proper, as it were, is “nine.” It is the term of Hermione’s pregnancy, which, as I suppose is by now predictable, I am taking as the dominating fact of the play. Let us have that opening speech of Polixenes’ before us. Nine changes of the wat’ry star hath been The shepherd’s note since we have left our throne Without a burden: time as long again Would be filled up, my brother, with our thanks, And yet we should for perpetuity Go hence in debt. And therefore, like a cipher,

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Yet standing in rich place, I multiply With one “We thank you,” many thousands more That go before it. (I, ii, 1–9)

(For fun I note that it is a speech of nine lines, the last not (yet) complete, and that of Polixenes’ seven speeches before he accedes to the command to stay, all but one are either nine lines or one line long.) Polixenes’ opening speech speaks Leontes’ mind, it contains everything Leontes’ mind needs (which now means to me, since a working mind, a mind still in command of language, a mind that cannot simply not count), everything it needs to miscount, or discount, to misattribute, the thing it finds to be unbearable to count: The speech has the figure nine as the term at once of pregnancy and of Polixenes’ sojourn in Sicilia; it has the contrast between being absent or empty (his throne without a burden) and being present and filled up (“standing in rich place,” and especially time as tilled up, about to issue in something); and it has the idea of nothing as breeding, that is, of a cipher multiplying, being fruitful, the Shakespearean nothing—as noting, as cipher, as naughtiness, as origin—from which everything comes (as Lear, for example, to his confusion, learned). I observe in passing that the clause “like a cipher / Yet standing in rich place, I multiply” is a latent picture of sexual intercourse, by which I mean that it need not become explicit but lies in wait for a mind in a certain frame, as Leontes’ is, the frame of mind in which the earth is seen as, or under the dominance of, in Leontes’ phrase, a “bawdy planet.” He uses the phrase later in the scene when he concludes “No barricado for a belly. Know’t / It will let in and out the enemy, / With bag and baggage” (I, ii, 204–6), another latent fantasy of intercourse and ejaculation. The vision of our planet as bawdy is shared by Hamlet and Lear as a function of their disgust with it, and it is an instance of the way in which the world, in a phrase of Emerson’s, is asked to wear our color: Leontes’ vision of the world sexualized is a possibility realized in Antony and Cleopatra, confronting in that play the vision of the world politicized, where those worlds intersect or become one another; in The Winter’s Tale the intersection of sexualization is with the world, I would say, economicized. In Polixenes’ opening speech, economicization is expressed in the idea of his multiplying, which in that context means both that he is breeding and that numbers and words in general, like great nature and time, are breeding out of control; and it is expressed in that phrase he uses about filling up another nine months, making time pregnant with thanks, namely that he would still “for perpetuity / Go hence in debt.” The ensuing computation by multiplication (adding an inseminating cipher) is meant not to overcome but to note the debt. What the unpayable debt is is sketched in the opening scene, the Prologue. In this civilized, humorous exchange between courtiers representing each of the

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two kings, each expresses his own king’s wish to pay back something owed the other. The debt is discussed as a visiting and a receiving, but in the central speech of the scene Camillo describes the issue between the kings as one in which an affection rooted between them in their childhoods has branched, that is continued but divided. “Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities made separation of their society, their encounters though not personal, have been royally attorneyed with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies; that they have seemed to be together, though absent; shook hands as over a vast.” In the ensuing play the vast opens, and the debt seems to be for the fact of separation itself, for having one’s own life, one’s own hands, for there being or there having to be substitutes for the personal, for the fact that visits are necessary, or possible; a debt owed, one might say, for the condition of indebtedness, relatedness, as such, payment of which could only increase it, have further issue. So we already have sketched for us here an answer to the question why a play about the overcoming of revenge is a play of computation and economic exchange: The literal, that is economic, ideas of paying back and of getting even allow us to see and formulate what revenge Leontes requires and why the revenge he imagines necessary for his rest only increases the necessity for it; and it suggests the transformations required if revenge is to be replaced by justice. Leontes wishes an evenness, or annihilation of debt, of owing, which would take place in a world without counting, apart from any evaluation of things, or commensuration of them, for example, any measuring of visits, of gifts, of exchanges, as of money for things, or punishments for offenses, or sisters or daughters for wives. Payment in such a case would do the reverse of what he wants, it would increase what he wishes to cease; it would imply the concept of indebtedness, hence of otherness. And this sense of the unpayable, the unforgivability of one’s owing, as it were for being the one one is, for so to speak the gift of life, produces a wish to revenge oneself upon existence, on the fact, or facts, of life as such. Nietzsche spotted us as taking revenge on Time, Time and its “it was,” as if we are locked in a death struggle with nostalgia. Leontes seems rather to want revenge on Time and its “it will be,” not because of its threat of mutability, bringing change to present happiness, but for something like the reverse reason, that its change perpetuates the nightmare of the present, its changes, its issuing, the very fact of more time. This may mean that Leontes’ case is hopeless, whereas Nietzsche is led to a proposal for reconceiving time; but then this also meant reconceiving human existence. Nietzsche’s formulations will have helped produce some of mine; but a more interesting matter would be to understand what helped produce some of his—doubtless his work on tragedy went into it. This leaves open the question of the relation of telling and retaliation, the question whether narration as such is being proposed as the offspring of revenge, that it is out of revenge for the fact of issuing and unpayable indebtedness that words breed

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into tales in which evenness is sought, in which recounting, counting again, is imperative, either as retribution or as the overcoming of retribution we know as forgiveness and love. The opening scene proper of The Winter’s Tale raises the question why Polixenes, after a visit of nine months, chooses now to leave; it alerts us to consider that Polixenes gives no good answer to this question. He expresses a fear of what, in his absence, may “breed” (I, ii, 12); and when Hermione says that if he’ll “tell he longs to see his son” she’ll not only let him go but “thwack him hence with distaffs”—that is, to attend to his brood is a reason any woman will respect—but he does not claim this. Furthermore, the victory of her argument comes with saying that, since he offers no reason, as if leaving something unsaid, she’ll be forced to keep him “as prisoner, / Not like a guest.” When in the next act she is reported, in prison, to receive comfort from her babe, what she is reported saying is “My poor prisoner, / I am innocent as you” (II, ii, 27–8). And Polixenes gives in to her with the words “Your guest, then, madam: / To be your prisoner should import offending” (I, ii, 54–5). Take this as something Leontes hears, or knows for himself, almost says for himself in his identification with Polixenes. The offense for him in being her prisoner, her child, would be a matter of horror, if she were having his child. His logic again, in denying this consequence, is therefore impeccable. (This is not the only time, in noting Leontes’ identification with Polixenes, that I allude to the psychic complexities this poses for Leontes. For a further example, if Polixenes is his brother, hence Hermione Polixenes’ sister, then imagining that they are adulterous is imagining them incestuous as well. If you take Leontes either as horrified or as jealous of that, hence either as denying or craving it, then the implication is that he feels himself on that ground to be the illegitimate and incestuous brother. This idea would be helped, perhaps signaled, by the emphatic lack of mention in the present situation of Polixenes’ own wife.) I am still asking why Polixenes has decided to part now. To the evidence I have been marshaling from his opening speech concerning breeding and time’s being filled up and his multiplying and later his not being a prisoner, I add the repeated explanation with which he ends each of his succeeding two substantial speeches: “Besides, I have stayed / To tire your royalty” (I, ii, 14–5) and “My stay [is] . . . a charge and trouble” (I, ii, 25–6). Taken as pro forma, civilized excuses these must receive pro forma, civilized denials from his hosts; and for a long time it seemed to me that he was saying just the thing that would prompt them to urge him civilly to stay. Then the urging gets out of hand, and the leaving becomes no less suspicious than the urging. My better suggestion is by now clear enough, and is contained in Polixenes’ word “nine.” He is departing because Hermione’s filling up and approaching term seems to him to leave no more room and time for him in Sicilia. It is this, the implication of the fact of her pregnancy, that Polixenes’ speech leaves unsaid; and it is this that Leontes in turn undertakes to deny, for, it seems to me, all kinds of reasons.

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First, out of his love for Polixenes, to reassure him; again, because he feels the same way, that his room and time are being used up by Hermione’s plenitude; again, with the very intensifying of his identification with Polixenes, the wish or push to exit, to depart, feels to him like abandonment, as does the imminent issuing, or exiting, or dissevering, of Hermione. I regard it as a recommendation of this way of looking at the opening of the play that it does not choose between Leontes’ love and loss of status as between Polixenes and Hermione, and that it does not deny the sexual implication of the number nine that Shakespeare’s telling carefully sets up in coordinating the beginning of Polixenes’ visit with Hermione’s conceiving. However fantastic it seems of Leontes to imagine that the first thing that happened upon Polixenes’ arrival on his shores is that he impregnated his wife, it is not fantastic for him to relate that arrival to an access of his own desire. Another recommendation of this way of taking things is that it does not require a choice between locating the onset of Leontes’ jealousy as occurring only with the aside “Too hot, too hot” at the 108th line of the scene and as having been brought on the stage with him. This is now a matter of a given performance, of determining how you wish to conceive of Leontes’ arrival at the conjunction of the events in Polixenes’ opening speech: He wouldn’t have to hear them from Polixenes, for what Polixenes knows is not news for him. What matters is the conjunction itself, the precipitousness of it. Taking the jealousy as derivative of the sense of revenge upon life, upon its issuing, or separating, or replication, I am taking it as, so to speak, the solution of a problem in computation or economy, one that at a stroke solves a chain of equations, in which sons and brothers are lovers, and lovers are fathers and sons, and wives and mothers become one another. Precipitousness I have also taken as an essential feature of the onset of skeptical doubt, which is a principal cause in my taking Othello’s treatment of Desdemona as an allegory of the skeptic’s view and treatment of the world. It is a place within which to investigate psychic violence, or torture, as a function both of skepticism’s annihilation of the world and of the wounded intellect’s efforts to annihilate skepticism. Still at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play, it is nearing time to call a halt. I must reach its closing scene, since that will present this play’s vision of a path of recovery, the quest for which is, as I claimed earlier, imposed by the nature of skepticism itself. To prepare what I have to say about this vision of recovery, and as if in earnest of the intention one day to get further into the second part of the play, the Bohemian part, that which after all makes a romance out of a tragedy, I shall pick out two elements of that part that I shall need for a description of the final events—the elements of Autolycus and of the fabulous bear. In the figure of Autolycus the play’s preoccupations with deviousness (both in money and in words—his father or grandfather was Hermes) and lawlessness and economy and sexuality and fertility and art are shown to live together with jollity, not fatality. They are together in his early line, “My traffic is sheets” (IV,

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iii, 23), meaning that his business is stealing and bawdry; that he sells ballads and broadsheets; that he sells ballads about, let us say, birds that steal sheets; that he steals the ballads from which he makes a living; and that these exchanges have something to do with the providing of sexual satisfaction—all of which it seems reasonable to suppose that Shakespeare would be glad to say of his own art. I emphasize Autolycus as an artist figure, in balance with the solemnity of the Giulio Romano artistry at the play’s close, as one of the contributions Bohemia makes to Sicilia, its recounting of existence. It is in Autolycus that, in this play of the play between art and nature, between artifice and issue, we see that the sheepshearing festival is also a business enterprise; it is not in itself, as one might have thought the recovery from skepticism, or civilization; it celebrates the progress of nature no more than the exchange of money and custom, like the play to which it lends its great image. Then Clown enters to Autolycus (it is our first view of him after his going off to perform the “good deed” of burying the remains of the bear’s dinner of Antigonous) as follows: Let me see, every ’leven wether tods, every tod yields pound and odd shilling; fifteen hundred shorn, what comes the wool to? . . . I cannot do’t without counters. Let me see, what am I to buy for our sheepshearing feast? (IV, ii, 32–7)

The Clown’s painful calculation reminds us that all the arithmetical operations—not alone multiplying, but dividing, adding, and subtracting—are figures for breeding, or for its reciprocal, dying. If Thoreau had asked the question, What comes the wool to? I am sure he would at the same time have been asking, What does wool mean? what does it matter? what does it count for?—as if to declare that this piece of nature’s issue is itself money and that the process of determining meaning is a process of counting; as if the fullness of language shown in figuration has as sound a basis as the issuing of language demonstrated in figuring. (I mention as a curiosity that the idea of shearing or pruning, as well as that of summing up or reckoning, is contained in the idea of computing.) One of Autolycus’s ballads he claims to have gotten from a midwife named Mistress Taleporter, evidently a carrier of tales, about “how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden” (IV, iv, 263–5). It is agreed that Autolycus is mocking contemporary ballads about monstrous births, and I hope it will equally be agreed that this, while filling the play up with ideas of money as breeding, hence of art and nature as creating one another, is mocking Leontes’ idea that birth is as such monstrous; it seeks perspective on the idea. Further perspective is sought in the following scene, of the sheepshearing itself, in the notorious debate between Perdita and Polixenes concerning bastards,

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which expresses the halves of Leontes’ mind: Perdita, like her conventional natural father, who called her a bastard and shunned her, wants to shun bastards; Polixenes, in denying a flat distinction between nature and nature’s mending art, benignly concludes that all graftings are legitimate, as legitimate as nature; typically, he has thus shown a possibility from which Leontes draws a malignant conclusion, here that no birth is legitimate, that the world is of bastards, to be shunned and cast adrift. This brings me to the bear, in whom nature seems to be reabsorbing a guilty civilization. His dining on the roaring gentleman, mocking him, is carefully coordinated in the Clown’s report with the raging, mocking storm, which is seen as having “swallowed” or “flapdragoned” the roaring souls on the ship. But if the bear is nature’s initial response to Leontes’ denials of it, is there a suggestion that the denial of nature is also nature’s work? I take it the play concludes (explicitly, at any rate) not, or not always, that in its citing of “an art / Which does mend Nature, change it rather; but / The art itself is Nature” (IV, iv, 95–6), the implication is that there is also an art that does not mend nature, but that instead changes it into something else, unnatural, or, say, lawful, or rather social, an art not born of nature but, hence, of the human or of something beyond. This is one of the arguments of which the final scene is a function, summarized in Leontes’ cry: Oh, she’s warm! If this be Magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating. (V, iii, 109–11)

In proposing that there is a lawful as well as an unlawful magic, which perhaps comes to the idea that religion is lawful magic (thus reversing an older idea), Leontes’ words suggest that there is an unlawful as well as a lawful eating. A play like Coriolanus a few years earlier was in part built from the idea there is an unlawful, or prelawful, eating, a cannibalism, that Shakespeare names elsewhere as well as the relation of parents to children. (Coriolanus, on my view, goes so far as to suggest that there is even a lawful cannibalism, one necessary, at any rate, to the formation of the lawful, that is, to the social.) I note again that The Winter’s Tale similarly presents lawful and unlawful versions of its ramifying idea of “paying back,” with which the first two scenes of Act I and the first and last scenes of Act V open, revenge being the unlawful version of which justice would be the lawful. I propose taking the final scene as, among other things, a marriage ceremony. This means taking Paulina’s warning to her audience that hers may seem unlawful business and her invitation to them to leave, as a statement that she is ratifying a marriage that can seem unlawful, where the

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only unlawfulness in question there would seem to be some forbidden degree of consanguinity. In Polixenes’ statement to Perdita, You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of nobler race. (IV, iv, 92–5)

(which names the convention of grafting as what marriage is, marriage of different stocks and buds), marriage is located as the art, the human invention, which changes nature, which gives birth to legitimacy, lawfulness. No wonder Shakespeare’s investigation of marriage has no end. Since I am not dealing very consecutively with the Shakespearean problematic of incestuousness, which haunts this play, and since I propose no theory of incest—wanting rather to keep the events of the play at the level of data for which any such theory would wish to account—let me register my sense here that we can hardly these days avoid the thought that a play in which the line between nature and law is blurred and questioned is a play preoccupied with incestuousness, taking the incest taboo, with Freud and Lévi-Strauss, as that event which creates the social out of natural bondings. A reason for me not to hurry into this area is that this role attributed to the incest taboo is, in traditional philosophy, attributed, if ambiguously, to the social contract, which may help to explain why the existence of this contract and the new bonds it is said to have created have been the subject of confusion and joking in the history of political theory. It suggests itself that the tyranny of kings, from which the contract was to free us, was itself an expression or projection of something beyond divine right, namely that we require divorce from a contract already in effect, a kind of marriage bond; divorce from the tyranny of the parental or, say, the romance of the familial, a subjugation not by force but by love. Leontes was mad, but the problem he had fallen prey to is real, and remains without a perfect solution. I said that the bear dining on the gentleman is the play’s image of lawful eating, for as the Clown observes, “They [viz., bears] are never curst [i.e., badtempered (Arden ed.) or vicious (Signet ed.)] but when they are hungry” (III, iii, 129–30), so that, unlike mankind, things of nature are not insatiable. This is why this dinner can carry comically, why its expression of nature’s violence seems the beginning of redemption, or rescue, from the shipwreck of human violence, with its unpayable debts. Near the end of the chapter entitled “Spring,” just before the concluding chapter of Walden, Thoreau paints the violence of nature in sentences like the following:

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We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander. We are cheered when we observe the vulture feeding on the carrion which disgusts and disheartens us and deriving health and strength from the repast. . . . I love to see that Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed, suffered to prey on one another. . . . The impression made on a wise man is that of universal innocence. In having already described the final scene as a study of theater and proposed it as a wedding ceremony, I am, it will be clear, not satisfied to think of it—as was once more familiar—as a translated moment of religious resurrection, with Paulina a figure for St. Paul, a figure justified by the appearance in the scene of the words “grace,” “graces,” “faith,” and “redeems.” It is, however, equally clear to me that an understanding of the scene will have to find its place for this translation. I look for it in a sense of this theater as in competition with religion, as if declaring itself religion’s successor. It may be that I am too influenced here by some things I have said about Coriolanus, but it strikes me that the reason a reader like Santayana claimed to find everything in Shakespeare but religion was that religion is Shakespeare’s pervasive, hence invisible, business. The resurrection of the woman is, theatrically, a claim that the composer of this play is in command of an art that brings words to life, or vice versa, and since the condition of this life is that her spectators awake their faith, we, as well as Leontes, awake, as it were, with her. A transformation is being asked of our conception of the audience of a play, perhaps a claim that we are no longer spectators, but something else, more, say participants. But participants in what? Who is this woman, and on what terms is she brought to life? She says she preserved herself “to see the issue” (V, iii, 128), meaning the issue of the oracle that gave hope Perdita was in being, and meaning Perdita as her issue, her daughter, to whom alone, as said, she speaks (except for the gods) as she returns to life. Does this mean that she does not forgive Leontes? Perdita is equally his issue, and does the odd naming of her as “the issue” accept or reject this? Perdita found is equally the issue of this play, called The Winter’s Tale, as is Hermione awakened. Beyond this, in a general scene of issuing, of delivery, I find myself feeling in Hermione’s awakening that the play itself is being brought forth, as from itself, that she is the play, something I first felt about Cleopatra and her play, in which her final nested acts of theater are also the staging of a wedding ceremony. Who knows what marriage is, or what a wedding ceremony should look like, after Luther and Henry the Eighth have done their work? And if we are created with Hermione, then we are equally, as an audience, her, and the play’s, issue. Paulina (with her echoing of St. Paul, the expounder both of marriage and of salvation by faith alone) I take as the muse of this ceremony, or stage director;

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she knows the facts; it is Leontes’ faith that is at stake. And the ceremony takes place at his bidding and under his authority:   paulina. Those that think it is unlawful business I am about, let them depart.   leontes. Proceed. No foot shall stir. (V, iii, 96–8)

So we, the eventual audience, are here under his authority as well. What happens from now on is also his issue; it is his production. To see what happens to this scene conceived as his creation, and the culmination of his creatings, I put this together with two other authorial moments of his in the early scenes in Sicilia. First with his aside upon sending off Hermione and Polixenes to dispose themselves according to their own bents: I am angling now, Though you perceive not how I give line. (I, ii, 180–1)

Taken as an author’s revelation to his audience, he is cautioning us that what we do not perceive in his lines will work to betray ourselves. And I put his authority—compromised as authority is shown to be—together also with my seeing him as interrupting his son’s tale of generation, another authorial self-identification. Leontes has found the voice in which to complete it, as it were a son’s voice, as if he is accepting in himself the voices of father and son, commanding and whispering, hence multiplicity, accepting himself as having, and being, issue. What is the issue? I have said that not alone the play is the issue of the tale of romance, as from a source, but Hermione as the play. Can Hermione be understood as Leontes’ issue? But this is the sense—is it not?—of the passage from Genesis in which theology has taken marriage to be legitimized, in which the origin of marriage is presented as the creation of the woman from the man. It is how they are one flesh. Then let us emphasize that this ceremony of union takes the forth of a ceremony of separation, thus declaring that the question of two becoming one is just half the problem; the other half is how one becomes two. It is separation that Leontes’ participation in parturition grants—that Hermione has, that there is, a life beyond his, and that she can create a life beyond his and hers, and beyond plenitude and nothingness. The final scene of The Winter’s Tale interprets this creation as their creation by one another. Each awakens, each was stone, it remains unknown who stirs first, who makes the first move back. The first

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move of revenge it seems easy to determine; the first move to set aside revenge, impossible. Some good readers of this play who would like to believe in it further than they find they can, declare themselves unconvinced that this final scene “works” (as it is typically put). But I take some mode of uncertainty just here to be in the logic of the scene, as essential to its metaphysics as to the working of its theater. Its working is no more the cause of our conviction, or participation, than it is their result; and our capacity for participation is precisely a way of characterizing the method no less than the subject of this piece of theater. Does the closing scene constitute forgiveness, Hermione’s forgiveness of Leontes? At the beginning of Act V Leontes was advised by one of his faithful lords that he has “redeemed,” “paid” more penitence than done trespass, and that he should “Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; / With them, forgive youself.” This mysterious advice implies that to be forgiven you must allow yourself to be forgiven, accept forgiveness. Has Leontes accomplished this? It seems to be the form in which the revenge against life (as Nietzsche almost said), the weddedness to nothingness, is forgone, forgotten. The romantics saw this revenge, as for example in The Ancient Mariner, as our carrying the death of the world in us, in our constructions of it.1 The final scene of issuing in The Winter’s Tale shows what it may be to find in oneself the life of the world. * * *

Is the life of the world, supposing the world survives, a big responsibility? Its burden is not its size but its specificness. It is no bigger a burden than the responsibility for what Emerson and Thoreau might call the life of our words. We might think of the burden as holding, as it were, the mirror up to nature. Why assume just that Hamlet’s picture urges us players to imitate, that is, copy or reproduce, (human) nature? His concern over those who “imitated humanity so abominably” is not alone that we not imitate human beings badly, but that we not become imitation members of the human species, abominations; as if to imitate, or represent—that is, to participate in—the species well is a condition of being human. Such is Shakespearean theater’s stake in the acting, or playing, of humans. Then Hamlet’s picture of the mirror held up to nature asks us to see if the mirror as it were clouds, to determine whether nature is breathing (still, again)—asks us to be things affected by the question. Note

1. This idea, in conjunction with Coleridge and others, is the topic of my essay “In Quest of the Ordinary,” in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. M. Eaves and M. Fischer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986).

QQQ

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1998—Richard McCabe. “Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale” McCabe is an actor with extensive experience in Shakespearean theater. His essay on playing the role of Autolycus (taken from Players of Shakespeare 4, edited by Robert Smallwood, Cambridge University Press) shows an actor fleshing out a difficult and ambiguous role, finally arriving at a useful sense of the character’s “purpose” within the overall structure of the play.

If the casting of Autolycus depended on a pure singing voice I would never have been asked to play the part. An essential element of his character is an ability to express himself in song. Having always been embarrassed by my singing voice, the playing of Autolycus struck me as a potentially disastrous venture. However, it was not a challenge I could easily turn down although I knew it would be a painful process. I figured from past experience that if I met and overcame the challenge of the part I would feel a strong sense of achievement and exorcise some personal demons at the same time. If I failed I resolved to fail spectacularly; I believe there is a thin line between brilliantly good and thrillingly awful. There is a honeymoon period between agreeing to play a part and the first day of rehearsal, and I often find this the most exciting time. Initial instincts are usually the best ones, and these I take into rehearsal to act as a foundation on which to build my character. It is not advisable to have too fixed an idea of a character though, as you invariably learn most about it by interaction with other actors in the process of rehearsals. Theatre is about compromise and once the director has given you her or his vision of the piece and the designer has shown you the model of the set and outlines for costume, there may be very few of your initial ideas that fit into this particular view of the world of the play. My initial question when approaching a part is to ask what my character’s function is in the play overall. This proved a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Autolycus doesn’t appear until the fourth act. He has little to do with the plot. He is not a character who experiences an emotional journey, who is transformed, by the events of the play, into some one better or worse than before; he does not experience a Damascan moment of self-revelation. He appears and remains a self-contained entity, sure of his beliefs, unshakeable in his pursuit of them. On the surface he seems a light-hearted, likeable rogue, always ready with a song. On closer examination of the text he reveals himself as arrogant, selfish, self-centred and mean. Added to this that he is a thief, a liar, a pickpocket and all-round cheat, there was a danger he could in the playing come across as highly unpleasant. How could the audience possibly warm to this character (who disadvantages others at every turn), a man who ‘beloved of no-one, cares for noone’? I knew he should be charming and provoke laughter, but how?

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I looked to his ancestry. In many ways he seemed unique. He was in the line of the all-licensed, prose-speaking fool but bore no resemblance that I could see (save for an ever-ready singing voice) to the Robert Armin line of fools that replaced the knockabout physical clown of Will Kemp. The advent of Armin heralded a darker, more intellectually complex character, with Touchstone probably the first of the Armin fools. This pedigree continues with Feste, Lavache, right through to the Fool in King Lear, whose wit is almost devoid of humour, a picture of grim desolation. Into this array of figures it is very difficult to place Autolycus, although he does share certain characteristics with his cousins; he talks directly to the audience, offers an alternative view to the action of the play, and is almost completely in prose. The speaking of prose in Shakespeare can itself present problems. Verse gives actors a structure to work from. It is a support that usually gives us the rhythm of a speech. With prose there is no such obvious structure. One has to define one’s own meter. I am constantly surprised that the RSC, who rightly place much emphasis on verse-speaking, do not lavish the same attention on prose, which is in many ways harder to speak. Uncertain, then, of his function, his ancestry and even his essential sympathy as a character, I approached rehearsals with a feeling of excitement and dread. Autolycus does not appear in the first half of the play. The audience, through Leontes, is treated to a display of the worst aspects of human nature. His obstinacy, and unwillingness to listen to reason, culminate in the death of his wife and child, and the rejection of a baby he believes, wrongly, to have been fathered by someone else. It is almost a complete three-act tragedy. With the fourth act time advances sixteen years and the action shifts from the ice-cold world of Sicilia to the warm shores of Bohemia. After so much guilt and remorse it is very daring of Shakespeare to introduce a character with no conscience or sense of morality, but Autolycus’s entrance signals the beginning of spring and the regeneration of life. Certain previous productions have made a stylistic connection between Sicilia and Bohemia to make the play a unified whole. Our director, Adrian Noble, felt very strongly that they should be as different as possible, as if moving from darkness into light. To this end, it was decided early in rehearsals to give Autolycus a fantastical, unnaturalistic entrance. I descended from above on a sort of tree whose multi-coloured branches sprouted balloons. It was a bold gesture that told the audience we were now entering a different world, and not to be influenced by what had gone before. I remember that when the screen lifted to reveal a sky-blue cyclorama and brightly coloured balloon tree, the feeling of release in the audience was almost palpable. I flew down singing ‘When daffodils begin to peer’. Shaun Davey wrote another version of the song which I felt did not possess the minor to major

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shift that the play here takes. Happily the second version was a triumph, and by selling the song in an Archie Rice end-of-the-pier manner it was not as traumatic as I had envisaged. After the song Autolycus gives us a summary of his character. He tells us that he has served Florizel in some capacity, worn fine clothes but is now out of a job. It was important to decide what sort of job he had and why he is no longer employed. I had recently seen a television programme on insider trading in the City of London, and how the so-called Thatcher boom years had created a type of high-flying, working-class financial dealer. It seemed possible that Autolycus may have been a minor court official attached to the privy purse, who succumbed to personal greed. Discovery of financial mismanagement would be good reason for ejection from the court. During rehearsals a photographic session was arranged in which we shot an image depicting two court henchman restraining a short-haired, Armani-suited Autolycus from striking a photographer. This photograph was enlarged above the legend ‘servant guilty’, and both put on the cover of a large-print mockedup newspaper named The Bohemian Gazette. By producing the newspaper on the line ‘but now I am out of service’ (IV.iii.14), I was able to give the audience a past history and a reason for my present situation. Autolycus clearly enjoys his life. As a vagabond he is his own master and free to travel wherever his fancy takes him. All roads are the right road. ‘And when I wander here and there [with a sexual implication] I then do most go right’ (IV. iii.17). He tells us that his father named him Autolycus, betraying his classical ancestry. He was ‘littered under Mercury’ who was the god of all dishonest persons and noted for his cunning. There is a comparison with Florizel’s character whose disguise as a swain associates him with Apollo. Shakespeare’s source for this, as with so much else, was Ovid. I was particularly struck by the admission that ‘beating and hanging are terrors to me’ (line 29). In such a declamatory opening speech, brimming with selfconfidence, the uncertain tone of this one line gives us—albeit momentarily— a glimpse of vulnerability in his otherwise impervious, jocund outer shell. In performance I had my neck made up in an ugly, purple bruise which I revealed on the line, suggesting Autolycus had once narrowly escaped a lynching, the memory and scar of which will always haunt him. However, displaying great equanimity he delivers his personal doctrine and, I think, a key line to his character: ‘For the life to come I sleep out the thought of it’ (line 29). The robbing of the Young Shepherd is the first opportunity we get to see Autolycus in action. Disguise and the ability to transform himself are chief constituents of Autolycus’s character and I made a decision early on in rehearsals that accents should play a key role in this. This was not a decision I took lightly— accents being my other bête noir, occupying a twin peak of unattainability along with singing. However, I knew it had to be done to do full justice to the character so, along with my extracurricular lessons to improve the tone and quality of my

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singing voice, I now added phonetic pronunciation lessons covering the three chief accents I intended to pursue. I say extracurricular: the truth is that the whole job is extracurricular, and once switched on to a part it is very difficult to turn off. It invades all your waking and sleeping hours like a bad conscience and is only stilled by finding solutions that are acceptable to both your character’s inner life and one’s own sense of personal truth. I had Autolycus choose to adopt the Young Shepherd’s accent having overheard him in his monologue prior to our scene. This proved to be somewhere between Warwickshire and Lancashire and gave ample opportunity for highlighting words with rogue sounds. It led the Young Shepherd to believe that I was truly a local man and to offer to help me. The scene as a whole benefits greatly, as do all Autolycus’s appearances, from stage business. This has become something of a pejorative term though I fail to understand why. I think gratuitous ‘gagging’ unsupported by or unrelated to the text can be a bad thing, but audiences can generally tell the difference between an actor massaging his own ego, and a piece of well-executed, character-led stage business which requires skill, invention and precision. All this may serve as an apology for our playing of the scene which was full to overflowing with ‘biz’. Graham Turner and I thought to maximize the comic effect of the scene by having me fleece him completely. Like so many others, the stage direction ‘picks his pocket’ is editorial and not to be found in the first Folio. This gave us the freedom to punctuate the dialogue throughout with thefts beginning with Autolycus pocketing a handkerchief, and culminating in him riding off on the Young Shepherd’s bicycle. Autolycus can’t resist the opportunity for selfpublicity and spends nearly half the scene talking about himself, delighting in the Young Shepherd’s acknowledgement of his fame. At the conclusion of the scene, buoyed with the Young Shepherd’s coffers, Autolycus sings his way off to the sheep-shearing with, I think, another key character line: A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile-a. (IV.iii.103–4)

The sheep-shearing is a monstrously difficult scene to pull off. Its jollity can feel forced, its sweetness cloying, its denouement savage. By the time Autolycus enters (again with a song) the party is in full swing. ‘Lawn as white as driven snow’ (IV.iv.220) is a wonderful sales device. It plays heavily on the ladies’ vanity (every item in the song is for a woman) as well as the mens’ generosity to their loved ones, and with a chant that speaks over four centuries to our own consumer-conscious society, advises all to ‘Come buy’. It also allows the actor a lot of freedom to display his selling technique which is still to be found at any street market in the country. The audacity and complete confidence in his ability

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to deceive all is again evident. With a wonderful sense of self-irony, Autolycus’s first line to the Young Shepherd is to be wary of cozeners. A potential problem with the scene that follows was in taking Autolycus’s sales pitch too literally. Talking of a usurer’s wife giving birth to twenty money bags or a ballad-singing fish appears to stretch the villagers’ credulity to the limit. But it is not necessary for their collective IQ to drop by seventy-five per cent whenever Autolycus appears. Street sellers in our own time use such techniques frequently. With tongue firmly in cheek any outlandish tale is permissible. Indeed the stranger the tale, the more delighted the audience, a harmless conspiracy at which the younger members of the community will gawp in wonder while the elders laugh and enjoy the tales; as innocent and commonplace as the selling of Santa Claus. The shepherds are no fools. Their world may not be as sophisticated as the court, but it is in every way as worldly. Autolycus’s later dismissal of them is more a testament to his abilities as a trickster than to any overt naivety on their part. Indeed, Autolycus is taken by surprise at his own ability to dupe them. During rehearsals Adrian had the inspired idea of setting up a full afternoon’s improvisation in which the whole scene could be enacted in real time, in our own words. This took place in his Stratford house’s back garden which looked onto fields and meadows: an ideal setting. The weather on the day was glorious. Food was prepared, drinks brought and people arranged into family groups. Florizel and Perdita billed and cooed, Mopsa and Dorcas fought for the attentions of the Young Shepherd, while Polixenes and Camillo, heavily disguised, skulked around convincingly. The great advantage of group improvisations is that it stops actors from being self-serving. It forces everybody truly to listen to each other and leave themselves open to the developing dramatic situation. Ideally, this should prevent people using the circumstances for their own ends. However, having said that, this is precisely what I went on to do. Autolycus’s nature obliges him to exist in a vacuum and to manipulate situations. A difficulty with Autolycus, as with other breakers of the fourth wall, is to define their boundaries. If one is given the licence to talk directly to the audience it puts your character in a privileged position. Knowing how far to take this ‘special relationship’ is the work of many years. Realizing the need to gain everybody’s attention I placed myself some distance away and approached the assembly slowly, playing an accordion. This had the desired effect and I was able to launch into selling the assortment of impotency cures and antiwrinkle creams I had prepared earlier. A large part of that afternoon’s work was transferred straight into the production, although we all regretted the loss of the truly climactic rendition of the satyrs’ dance which proved too wet to recreate on the Stratford stage. In performance I used simple conjuring tricks to ingratiate myself with the villagers and, replete with a suitcase full of merchandise and a fresh costume, I was ready for business. To mislead the Young Shepherd I employed another

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accent. In selling the song ‘Two maids wooing a man’ Autolycus informs his audience ‘there’s scarce a maid westward but she sings it’ (IV.iv.288) and earlier talks of a fish appearing on the coast. I used this to suggest that the pedlar was fresh from the West Country. Geographically, it is to be remembered that the sheep-shearing is no more set in Bohemia than is the wood where the mechanicals meet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Athens. It is not something that has ever bothered audiences—nor should it. ‘Two maids wooing a man’ is a three-part song of sexual rivalry which corresponds with the dramatic situation between Mopsa, Dorcas and the Young Shepherd and allows Autolycus free rein within the convention of the entertainment to act out the Young Shepherd’s role, in our case in a particularly lascivious way. ‘Will you buy?’ was an opportunity to show a more tender side to Autolycus, however contrived. In performance the start of the song was played to Perdita— something of a lost cause. On realizing this I shifted my focus to a stray lamb of a girl, saucer-eyed and highly impressionable. I reeled her in on the end of a silk stocking. The effect was to remind the audience of the amorality and danger of a character like Autolycus, whose name means ‘All-wolf ’. Had she not been rescued by an alerted mother, Autolycus might, to adapt Caliban ‘Have peopled else this isle with Autolyci’. This is the last of the songs. There are six songs in the play, five of which are sung by Autolycus solo, the sixth a trio which he leads. All are confined to Act Four, Scene Three and the first 324 lines of Act Four, Scene Four. The singing voice is a fundamental constituent in the natural vitality and freshness that the fourth act brings to the play. Had I been fully aware of this from the beginning I would probably have turned the part down! We next see Autolycus having sold all his trumpery, mocking integrity and praising the rogue life. Shakespeare must have taken great delight in creating Autolycus. Being free from the shackles of convention he is allowed to undermine our belief in principles of virtue, honour, fidelity, and honesty, and despite the fact that he suffers no moral retribution, he paradoxically continues to appeal to us. It is hard not to have a sneaking admiration for people like him, outsiders who dare to challenge our comfortable certainties. Their unique quality can ostracize these true individuals from our society but their uncomfortable probing is as necessary as it is painful. The exchange of clothes with Florizel puts more money in his purse. He resolves to conceal Florizel’s escape with Perdita from Polixenes not out of any desire to help but just to be true to his dishonest nature. This is perfectly balanced by Camillo, the lovers’ confederate, whose admission to the audience that he will tell Polixenes all, is born out of a complete desire to help the young lovers. A similar deceit, although for different reasons, is practised by Autolycus on the Old Shepherd and his son. Autolycus leads them to believe he will plead their case to Polixenes when in reality he is going to bring them ‘aboard’ Florizel for

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his own selfish ends. The effect of the imagined punishments Autolycus describes is comical in performance but read off the page is startlingly brutal and violent. This section, along with many other such passages, provides an interesting angle on our perceived image of Shakespeare, the man. An imagination that could conceive of such savage, sadistic deaths must have belonged to a more complex personality than the mild-mannered man of tradition. In performance I combed my hair through, drew on a pencil moustache with a child’s crayon that had been left lying about, and used a bubble blower as an improvised monocle. This, coupled with a heavy Teutonic accent and newly acquired clothes changed my appearance sufficiently for the Old Shepherd and his son to accept me as a new character. At the end of the scene Autolycus seems to be at the height of his powers. He has made money from everyone he has come into contact with and more importantly, he has found a means of currying favour with Florizel. And yet why should he want to do this but to gain re-entry to the court? And why should he want that when he protests to be happy on the open road? He is not a fish out of water as Touchstone is in the Forest of Arden. This is an area that never made sense to me although it never seemed to trouble the audience. It is interesting that after such domination of the fourth act, Autolycus becomes merely a cipher in the fifth. He is curiously mute in the scene with the three gentlemen (V.ii), indicating possibly that he is as moved as everyone else by Paulina’s steward’s story. This is followed immediately by a speech in which Autolycus almost appears sorry for himself, bemoaning the fact that he didn’t get any credit for the royal reunion. But characteristically he corrects himself, confessing that this good action would not have sat easily amongst his misdeeds. At this point the newly-elevated Shepherd and son enter and Autolycus is forced into a false repentance, a parody of Leontes, in a bid to get the Shepherd pleading his case with Florizel. In performance I would steal the Young Shepherd’s watch on the line ‘Thou wilt amend thy life’ (V.ii.150) and only at the very end of the scene take a decision to return it and follow them, indicating that Autolycus is dependent on their innate goodness for preferment, the same goodness ironically that allowed him to dupe them in the first place. Towards the end of the rehearsal period I was asking myself why we forgive Autolycus his crimes. Could it be because ultimately his crimes are venial, or maybe because he is such an entertaining thief, breaking through convention and conformity, and bringing to the play a fresh, natural vitality. Happily my attention was drawn to a Louis McNiece poem on this subject which concludes that we forgive Autolycus because we all recognize a bit of him in ourselves. I now fully understood Autolycus’s function in the play. By excusing his sins we are more able to pardon the repentant Leontes, and accept the enchantment of the final scene. He acts as a bridge. Without Autolycus there could be no ‘happy’ ending. He allows us to forgive and move on and, as such, is central to the heart of the play.

The Winter’s Tale in the Twenty-first Century q The first decade of the twenty-first century, especially toward its close, witnessed a steady amount of critical interest in the play. Many of the approaches to the play continue the kind of work seen in the last few decades of the previous century. Interest in the material body as a subject for critical discourse, for example, continues, though a particular focus for twenty-first-century materialist critics of The Winter’s Tale has been the woman’s maternal body. Over the last several years, Janet Adelman, Michelle Ephraim, Simon Reynolds, and Donna Woodford have reflected on gynecological concerns dramatized in the play (full citations for these and all articles referenced in this period’s introduction are contained in the bibliography). Of late, this approach has been employed effectively by critics addressing a number of Shakespeare plays. Other clusters of critical interest have accumulated around issues of storytelling and The Winter’s Tale (Marion Wells and, included in this volume, Mary Ellen Lamb), religion (Karen Marsalek Sawyer, James Ellison, Grace Hall, Phebe Jensen, and, excerpted here, Frances Dolan), and wonder and magic (Kirby Farrell, Amy Tigner, and, in several essays of interest, Huston Diehl). Engagement with the play’s religious backdrop has become part of a broader critical trend, with an increased focus particularly on Catholic aspects of Shakespeare’s drama. Collectively they speak to the strength and enduring relevance of The Winter’s Tale, a work that ambiguously blends sobering elements of reality with escapist flights of fancy and idealized portrayals of reconciliation and atonement.

2009—Mary Ellen Lamb. From “Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors: The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Old Wives’ Tales” Lamb teaches at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and has published widely on a variety of early modern English authors. Her recent work includes Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts (Ashgate, 2008) and The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson 157

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(Routledge, 2008). The following is an excerpt from an essay appearing in Staging Early Modern Romance, edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne (Routledge, 2009). In her essay excerpted here, Lamb explores the relationship between Shakespeare’s play and its source text, Robert Greene’s prose romance Pandosto. Lamb’s primary concern, however, is the pleasure of the “old tales” evoked by The Winter’s Tale and the influence early modern class assumptions about such texts may have had on the play’s reception.

With its conspicuous use of Robert Greene’s Pandosto, The Winter’s Tale rode the crest of the wide-spread public consumption of printed prose romances (Newcomb, Reading 81–82, 262; Mentz, Romance 5). It is not only modern scholars who recognize the play’s appropriation of plot elements from Greene’s romance; this was fully accessible to the reading members of Shakespeare’s audience as well. The enthusiastic readership that probably increased the play’s box office receipts also posed a risk to the play’s cultural capital. The cultural forces were already in effect that only four years later would present Pandosto as reading matter most suitable for humble chambermaids (Newcomb, Reading 89). The Winter’s Tale addresses this difficulty in contradictory ways. It appeals to a populuxe audience in its opening exchange of exaggerated compliments between courtiers, in the naming of the Italian sculptor Julio Romano, in the restoration of Hermione in a private chapel (Yachnin 204–6). The play also confronts this problem head on, by implicating the debased virtual audiences of women and the lower sorts in its reflections on its own art. The country clowns who enjoy (and buy) Autolycus’s ludicrous ballads impersonate the virtual low readership imagined for Greene’s Pandosto, and their gullibility exposes the commercialism tainting prose romances (and plays) censured for improbable plots. Foregrounded from the first appearance of a very pregnant Hermione, the play’s emphasis on maternity dignifies the highly gendered concerns of the virtual woman reader of prose romance. In its self-defense against both of these charges—its indiscriminate commercial appeal even to low audiences and its supposedly trivial narrative pleasures enjoyed by women—The Winter’s Tale addresses the larger concern not only of its own status as a literary work, but also of the codes for determining cultural distinction itself. The play’s primary intervention in this cultural system appears most prominently in its title, The Winter’s Tale, which refers to a genre of narrative even more debased than prose romance, and for similar reasons: its cross-classed and cross-gendered appeal, as well as its apparent lack of any purpose beyond giving pleasure.8 Linked with old wives’ tales in its earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the term winter’s tale summoned up a homely scene of narration, usually by an old woman, before a fireplace during long winter evenings (Hackett 151). Early modern renderings of this scene were commonly denigrating, from Boccaccio’s deprecation of “a maundering old woman, sitting with others late of a winter’s

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night at the home fireside, making up tales of Hell, the fates, Ghosts and the like” (54) to Shakespeare’s own Lady Macbeth, who castigates her husband for his “flaws and starts” more appropriate to “a woman’s story at a winter’s fire / Authorized by her grandam.”9 Both scenes allude to the frequent cross-class sharing of stories with their elite charges by servants and nurses, often represented as old crones, although old tales were told by other equally debased female narrators, such as the impressively flatulent alewife Mother Bunches or the distractible blacksmith’s wife Madge Clunch of George Peele’s Old Wives Tale (1595).10 Old, fat, and ugly, these often grotesque representations measure the extent to which they too, were virtual, performing the ideological work of demeaning this oral tradition. Paying tribute to this low and female domain in its title, The Winter’s Tale brings to visibility the centrality of these low oral narratives to its own production. At the same time, the title of The Winter’s Tale simultaneously evokes another, quite different scene of narration, explicit in the assertion by the young prince Mamillius that “a sad tale’s best for winter.”11 The young boy’s tale of “sprites and goblins” whispered in his mother’s ear, as the pair are surrounded by her waiting gentlewomen, identifies Shakespeare’s play with the widespread circulation of tales among women and children. The play does what it can to ease anxieties elicited by this scene of narration: the narrator is a boy instead of an old female nurse; he speaks to his mother rather than to a mixed group of low servants and family; the scene is set in the daylight in a royal court rather than at night by a winter’s fire. Yet his opening line (“There was a man . . . Dwelt by a churchyard” 2.1.28, 30) elicits the creepy-crawly feeling anticipating the later “flaws and starts” typical, according to Lady Macbeth, for young boys. The appeal of a ghost story of “sprites and goblins,” and the agreeable fright it inspires, crosses the social boundaries of gender and class (Fox 192). John Aubrey expresses great nostalgia for just such “fabulous stories . . . of Sprights and walking of Ghosts” told by “old women and mayds” in his pre–civil war childhood (xxix). The differences between these two forms of “winter’s tale” make visible the threat of this close relationship with women to the elitist and sexist ideologies of early modern England. The cultural significance of Mamillius’s tale lies not in its content but in the intimacy of his interaction with his mother, who asks for his story (“Pray you sit by us, / And tell ’s a tale” 2.1.22–23), who praises his former efforts (“do your best / To fright me with your sprites. You’re powerful at it” 2.1.27–28), and who invites him to sit close to her so he can whisper it (“Come on then, and give ’t me in mine ear” 2.1.32). While Leontes does not knowingly interrupt Mamillius’s tale, the fear which causes the boy’s violent removal from his mother’s presence (“Give me the boy . . . you / Have too much blood in him” 2.1.56, 57–58) gives expression to a similar cultural fear of female influence evoked by oral tales enjoyed in childhood. Erasmus would also remove young boys from the influence of the “stupid and vulgar ballad, or the old wives’ fairy rubbish such

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as most children are steeped in nowadays by nurses and serving women” (214). In early modern gender ideology, the tender bond with women threatens a boy’s eventual attainment of a full masculinity best inculcated by the study of Latin writings in a humanist schoolroom (Ong, Fletcher 303–5).12 By staging the bond between Mamillius and Hermione in its full heart-rending closeness, The Winter’s Tale suggests the hollowness of the stereotype denigrating winter’s tales, and the distortion of their debased virtual narrator—the old crone, the “maundering old woman,” the “grandam.” The actual winter’s tale—the tale Mamillius whispers to his mother—makes visible an intimate and generative female sphere lying outside—beyond and anterior to—narratives shaped either by a struggle for distinction or for economic profit. While a tale of “sprites and goblins” has little evident cultural or even literary value, the narrative pleasures shared between Mamillius and Hermione are far from trivial. Through its three references to its own events as unlikely as an “old tale,” The Winter’s Tale foregrounds a continued adult identification with this early narrative tradition. Paulina describes Hermione’s apparent coming-to-life as so unlikely that “were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (5.3.116–17). Leontes’ recovery of his daughter Perdita is “so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion” (5.2.25); and the bear’s killing of Antigonus is “like an old tale still, which will have matter to rehearse though credit be asleep and not an ear open” (5.2.53–54). In the process of comparing its own events to those of absurd old tales, the play also defends them. When the living Hermione embraces Leontes, no onlooker mocks or ridicules her unexpected transformation. In their sympathetic joy, Camillo and Polixenes provide a prompt to the audience to respond instead with pleasurable acceptance. These references set up the same double sense of “old tale” as the play’s title does with “winter’s tale.” The very improbability of the “old tale” of Hermione’s transformation only increases its power to move an audience who remains open to its power. The enjoyment of this event requires a surrender of logic not possible for those whom Alfred Hitchcock called, in a different context, “the plausibles” (Denby 148). “Plausibles” might ask a series of questions about Hermione’s preservation: did no one notice her presence in the chapel for a period of sixteen years? Didn’t anyone wonder about the food Paulina must have taken there? How could she remain alone, except for visits from Paulina, for that time without losing her mind? Those who willingly surrender this desire for answers open themselves to a nonanalytical experience of pleasure shared indiscriminately with anyone: with children, with chambermaids, with country clowns as well as with kings and queens. There are many forms of narrative pleasure, many analytic and some hyperrational. Pleasures often indicate and, according to Pierre Bourdieu (Distinction), function to reify hierarchies of class (Sebek). Some narrative pleasures are inextricably tied to political understandings (Jameson; McLuskie; Zizek). These pleasures are quite different from the naive or perhaps even mindless

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delight, from the “flaws and starts” that reveal a child’s total absorption in old wives’ tales. Also experienced by adult early moderns, this child-like pleasure is perhaps best expressed in Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry. Describing the intense delight imparted by “a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner,” Sir Philip Sidney asserts the childishness of the pleasures experienced even by grown men: “So is it in men (most of which are childish in the best things, till they be cradled in their graves): glad they will be to hear the tales of Hercules, Achilles, Cyrus, Aeneas” (358). Rather than a sentimental reflection about childhood, this sense of imaginative pleasure as experienced most directly by children has been recently advanced by Michael Witmore as at the core of an evolving early modern concept of fiction. Early moderns tended to distrust the imagination, but they also were aware of its potential uses. As Witmore explains, children’s cognitive incompleteness rendered them an ideal test case or laboratory for exploring the ontology of fiction as, he argues in different terms, occurs in A Winter’s Tale.13 Paulina’s role as midwife suggests this acceptance of inner childishness and even of a domination by women like that experienced in early childhood. As various critics have observed, Paulina acts as “a sort of midwife of events” (Hackett 158, also Wells 255–56, Wilson, “Observations” 138); and in her homely and direct garrulity, she resembles the “old wife” narrator of tales. As she attests to the baby’s paternity, Leontes insults her as a “midwife” as well as a “mankind witch” and “a caller / Of boundless tongue” (2.3.67, 90–91, 159). Leontes later comes to understand that her words are “as medicinal as true, / Honest as either” (2.3.37– 38). Her role as midwife merges with her role as playwright in her sixteen-year long fiction that Hermione is dead and that, as she brutally affirms, Leontes killed her (5.1.15). Paulina’s role as midwife and sage wisewoman suggests the healing energy possible to old tales for adults who, like Leontes, become receptive to their power. From a tyrant, Leontes becomes a penitent. His neurotic need to dominate yields to a submissive obedience to a woman beneath his rank. As Leontes follows Paulina’s instructions to him, to the onlookers, and to the audience, that “it is required / You do awake your faith” (5.3.94–95), he models an openness to narrative that eludes rational analysis.14 This choice offered the audience to marvel rather than to disdain (or to hoot) at the play’s implausible events dignifies simultaneously play, old tale, and finally prose romance. As Newcomb observes, antimimeticism formed a “bedrock of the attack on romance” as a genre; in Plato’s writings, contempt for foolish stories designed to dupe the ignorant masses “cloaks the arbitrariness of social differentiation as an absolute aesthetic or moral law” (Reading 119–20). In its differences from Pandosto and especially in its miraculous revival of Hermione, The Winter’s Tale defends prose romance by placing even more pressure on an audience member’s willingness to defy this aesthetic of plausibility. Following a similar strategy, The Winter’s Tale defends the supposed feminine orientation of prose romance by

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including even more “of the feminine and maternal” (Hackett 158) in for example, the considerable narrative authority wielded by Paulina, a character not present in the Pandosto plot. In supporting the maternal condition as a legitimate topic and in valuing the recovery of a daughter, the play validates the concerns of a female readership of prose romance.15 For elite readers as for Leontes, this valuing of women’s matters and “feminine” prose narratives represents another recovery of “that which is lost” (3.2.132–33). With the addition of Autolycus to the Pandosto source, The Winter’s Tale legitimates prose romance by presenting another worst-case scenario for a commonly described failing. In perhaps the “first public staging of the book market” (Newcomb, Reading 124), The Winter’s Tale addresses the crass commercialism alleged both for the book market and the theater as they arguably exploit the credulity of an audience of the ignorant lower sorts. Autolycus’s invitation to the Bohemian peasants to buy his ballads, along with other trivial items such as gloves, ribbons, bracelets, pins, perfumes (4.4.212–24), is presented less like marketing than thievery, as one of a series of other congames, some taken directly from Greene’s cony-catching pamphlets (Mentz, “Wearing Greene”; Mowat, “Rogues”). Ingenuously exclaiming “Why should I carry lies abroad?” (4.4.259), Autolycus palms off outrageously ridiculous ballads as factually true. He pretends that the signature of one undoubtedly fictional midwife, “one Mistress Taleporter, and five or six honest wives that were present” (4.4.257–58), authenticates a ballad of a usurer’s wife, while the signatures of five justices attest to the truth of a magnificently absurd ballad of the singing fish. Their printed form only enhances the deception. As Mopsa exclaims, “I love a ballad in print alife, for then we are sure they are true” (4.4.249–50). The play implicates both itself and Pandosto in the commercialism of this market for ballads. In his account of Leontes’ recovery of Perdita, the second gentleman exclaims that “such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that balladmakers cannot be able to express it” (5.2.20–23). Autolycus’s fictional midwife Mistress Taleporter gestures back to Paulina in her function as Hermione’s midwife (Wells 248). For both Paulina and Mistress Taleporter (literally a taleporter), the role of midwife is inextricably connected with the telling of fictions. This ballad-selling scene also implicates Pandosto for, like Autolycus’s ballads, the prose romance is in print. The sordid commercialism of the transactions, however, does not taint the pleasure represented as experienced by the country folk. In competition with each other for the affection of the shepherd’s son, Dorcas and Mopsa immediately relate their own situation to the ballad “Two Maids Wooing a Man,” which they sing in such pleasant harmony that their common suitor buys for them both (Newcomb, Reading 127). Their pleasure, and the pleasure usually afforded theater audiences in their performance, demonstrates the irrelevance of factual truth to the value of the ballad. In their receptivity to the truth of the ballad to their own lives, instead of to some outside factual reality, Dorcas and

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Mopsa model an openness to the positive effects of a text, whether a ballad, a prose romance, or a play.16 The Winter’s Tale does not idealize country folk. The blatant sexual allegations exchanged between Dorcas and Mopsa move the shepherd’s son to exclaim, “Will they wear their plackets where they should bear their faces?” (4.4.233–34). Their crudeness contrasts with the graceful eloquence that naturalizes Perdita’s superior social status; and the play cannot end happily until Perdita assumes her rightful place as a princess. The play does not romanticize oral tales as somehow more authentic or existing in a purified realm removed from print. As shown by Mistress Taleporter’s forged signature, oral tales are not separate from written culture. The absurdity of Autolycus’s ballad of the singing fish, transformed from a maiden because she “would not exchange flesh with one that loved her” (4.4.267–68), even suggests the equivalent absurdity of the numerous transformations of chaste maidens in classical works, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Classical texts mix promiscuously with vernacular, as the thefts perpetrated by Autolycus, described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the thieving son of Mercury, derive from Robert Greene’s low cony-catching pamphlets. Yet while printed ballads, romances, and even classical myths may be corrupted by market forces, the pleasure elicited by their improbable narratives is not, ideally, distinct from the intense pleasure elicited by old tales told to children. The Winter’s Tale locates the agency especially of improbable narratives—whether oral or printed, whether vernacular or classical— in the forms of pleasure they elicit. This episode of the play set in Bohemia presents nonrational pleasure in narratives, perhaps like the more healthy forms of laughter, as a social leveler.17 The choice to marvel rather than to disdain dissolves the elitist hierarchy of distinction responsible for creating virtual audiences of the lower sorts and women. One might say that in the authentic experience even of a highly developed work of art, it is necessary that the most sophisticated consumers awake their faith, to become at least temporarily open to narrative, absorbed in the moment like country clowns, themselves not unlike children listening to old tales, listening in fact to The Winter’s Tale. If this perception seems sentimental, there is another way to frame it. In this experience of narrative pleasure and, more to the point, in the commodification of this experience, perhaps lies the closest connection between Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale and Greene’s Pandosto. I claim that for early moderns, both the pleasure and the embarrassment at that pleasure in reading implausible prose fictions replicated an earlier narrative experience generating intense pleasure but later a sense of awkwardness or even shame, as the marker of a childhood subjection to women. The pleasurable aspect of that experience itself becomes commodified and is offered for sale—by Autolycus, by Greene, by Shakespeare himself—without, it is inferred, changing the nature of that pleasure for the audience or reader. Or is this connection—this shared childish delight in implausible fictions—between Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale itself only a clever marketing ploy? That is, the commercial

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ploy is this: come buy this prose romance—come see this play—and you will again feel the delight you felt as a child in listening to improbable narratives. Or, to push this point further, are clever marketing ploys successful precisely because they address, with uncanny accuracy, unspoken, and unspeakable consumer desires— in this case, a desire to return to a form of narrative delight once experienced in the company of lower class women not unlike Dorcas and Mopsa—now perceived as “low” and even, for adults, ridiculous? Notes

8. An exception is Scot’s description of women’s tales as a mode of control (7.15.139). 9. Macbeth 3.4.63, 65–6 in Bevington’s edition of Complete Works. 10. For discussion of the use of these debased women narrators, see Hackett (15–16), Pamela Brown (77), Fox (173–212), Lamb (“Old Wives Tales,” Popular Culture 48–50). 11. The Winter’s Tale, 2.1.25 ed. by Snyder and Curren-Aquino; all further citations to this play will be taken from this edition. 12. In “Old Wives’ Tales,” I argue that the excellence of early modern literature may lie not only in the influx of classical literature, but in the inventive, unpredictable, and often partial resolutions to the conflict between the cultures of women caretakers and the Latinate schoolroom confronting schoolboys; see also Lamb (Popular Culture 45–62). Many explications of the play mention this pattern. See Wells, Hackett (150–58), Newcomb (Reading 118), Lamb (“Engendering”), Snyder and Curren-Aquino (5). 13. Witmore devotes a chapter to Mamillius as demonstrating the impetus of a fiction able to continue after its youthful originator has ceased to exist (137–70). After his discussion of the “naïve and corny nature” of the plot of The Winter’s Tale, Northrop Frye provides a modern version of a similar claim: “Perhaps literature as a whole, like so many works of literature, ends in much the same place that it begins. The profoundest kind of literary experience, the kind that we return to after we have, so to speak, seen everything, may be very close to the experience of a child listening to a story, too spellbound to question the narrative logic” (51). 14. The Catholicism implicit in this command, uttered before a statue of a woman in a chapel, has been discussed ably by, for example, Lupton (210–18), who describes it as contained as one of the “afterlives of the saints” (title), and by Richard Wilson, Secret (263–65), but like Wilson, I do not see the implicit Catholicism as contained. Interesting for the argument of this paper, Catholicism was itself sometimes denigrated as composed of “old wives tales” (Fox 175). Following out these associations is beyond the scope of this argument. 15. This is not to argue that the play follows a feminist agenda. For its antifeminism, see Wilson, “Observations” (144), Traub, Orgel (The Winter’s Tale 272). 16. In this, the play follows the focus in early modern defenses of fiction on the effect of a work on the reader. See Sidney, Vickers (7–22). 17. See for example Bakhtin (474), Patterson (70).

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Ephraim, Michelle. “Hermione’s Suspicious Body: Adultery and Superfetation in The Winter’s Tale.” Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Eds., Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007: 45–58. Farrell, Kirby. “Witchcraft and Wonder in The Winter’s Tale.” Renaissance Historicisms: Essays in Honor of Arthur F. Kinney. Eds., James Dutcher and Anne Lake Prescott. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008: 159–172. Foakes, R.A. Shakespeare: The Dark Comedies to the Last Plays—From Satire to Celebration. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1971. Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965. Hall, Grace. “Alienation, Separation, Redemption, Reconciliation, and Resurrection in The Winter’s Tale.” Reconciliation in Selected Shakespearean Dramas. Ed., Beatrice Batson. Newcastle, England: Cambridge Scholars, 2008: 190-207. Hunt, Maurice, ed. The Winter’s Tale: Critical Essays. New York: Garland Publishing, 1995. Jensen, Phebe. “Singing Psalms to Horn-Pipes: Festivity, Iconoclasm, and Catholicism in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 279–306. Knight, G. Wilson. The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1947. Lamb, Mary Ellen. “Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors: The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Old Wives’ Tales.” Staging Early Modern Romance. Eds., Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne. New York: Routledge, 2009: 122–139. Mowat, Barbara A. The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976. Neely, Carol Thomas. Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare’s Plays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur. Shakespeare’s Workmanship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931. Reynolds, Simon. “Pregnancy and Imagination in The Winter’s Tale and Heliodorus’ Aithiopika.” English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature, 84, no. 5 (October 2003): 433–447. Sawyer Marsalek, Karen. “Awake Your Faith: English Resurrection Drama and The Winter’s Tale.” Bring Furth the Pagants: Essays in Early English Drama Presented to Alexandra F. Johnston. Eds. David Lausner and Karen Sawyer Marsalek. Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 271–291.

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Smallwood, Robert. Players of Shakespeare 4: Further Essays in Shakespearean Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Snyder, Susan. “Mamillius and Gender Polarization in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Quarterly, 50, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 1–8. Stewart, J.I.M. Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined. London: Longman, 1949. Tigner, Amy. “The Winter’s Tale: Gardens and the Marvels of Transformation.” English Literary Renaissance, 36, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 114–134. Yachnin, Paul and Myrna Wyatt Selkirk. “Metatheater and the Performance of Character in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare and Character: Theory, History, Performance, and Theatrical Persons. Eds., Paul Yachnin and Jessica Slights. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan, 2009: 139–157. Wells, Marion. “Mistress Taleporter and the Triumph of Time: Slander and Old Wives’ Tales in The Winter’s Tale.” Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, 58 (2005): 247–259. Woodford, Donna. “Nursing and Influence in Pandosto and The Winter’s Tale.” Performing Maternity in Early Modern England. Eds., Kathryn Moncrief and Kathryn McPherson. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2007: 183-195. Young, David. The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

Acknowledgments q

The Winter’s Tale in the Twentieth Century

Arthur Quiller-Couch, “The Winter’s Tale.” From Shakespeare’s Workmanship. Copyright © 1918. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. G. Wilson Knight, “‘Great Creating Nature’: An Essay on The Winter’s Tale.” From The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays. Oxford University Press, 1947; reprinted by Barnes & Noble, 1966. J.I.M. Stewart, excerpt from “Falstaff on Boars Hill.” From Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949. Stanley Cavell, “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses (A Reading of The Winter’s Tale).” From Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare. Copyright © 1987. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Richard McCabe, “Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale.” From Players of Shakespeare 4: Further Essays in Shakespearian Performance by Players with the Royal Shakespeare Company, edited by Robert Smallwood. Copyright © 1998. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

The Winter’s Tale in the Twenty-first Century

Mary Ellen Lamb, excerpt from “Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors: The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Old Wives’ Tales.” From Staging Early Modern Romance: Prose Fiction, Dramatic Romance, and Shakespeare, edited by Mary Ellen Lamb and Valerie Wayne. Copyright © 2009 by Routledge/Taylor & Francis.

169

Index q accents, role of Autolycus and, 152– 153, 154–155, 156 act 1, The Winter’s Tale, 5–6, 11–12 act 2, The Winter’s Tale, 6–7 act 3, The Winter’s Tale, 7–8, 12–14 act 4, The Winter’s Tale, 8–9, 14–16, 92–104 act 5, The Winter’s Tale, 9–10, 16–18, 104–117 acting, 1, 35, 150–156 anachronisms, 69, 117 Antigonus (The Winter’s Tale), 8, 20 justice and, 50 natural world and, 90–91 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism and, 26, 28 twentieth-century criticism and, 66–67 Antony and Cleopatra, 83, 111, 161 art, 108, 112–113, 116–117, 144 audiences, 125–126, 154, 158–159 author’s purpose, literary criticism and, 64–65 authorship, doubts about, 27, 33–34, 63 “Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale” (McCabe), 150–156 Autolycus (The Winter’s Tale), 8, 9, 20, 68 acting the role of, 150–156 Charles Cowden Clarke and, 53–55

comedy and, 92–94, 102–103 commercialism and, 162 sheepshearing scene and, 100– 101 Stanley Cavell and, 143–145 ballads, 144, 162 bear, the, 28, 51–52, 67–68, 91, 145, 146 biographical information, William Shakespeare and, 1–3 business and money, 132, 132–133, 140–141, 144, 152, 156, 162 Camillo (The Winter’s Tale), 6, 8, 8–9, 19 cannibalism, 145 Cavell, Stanley, 126–149 Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined (Stewart), 119–126 character development Autolycus and, 150 Eliot, T. S. and, 122 Hermione and, 43–44 length of The Winter’s Tale and, 65–66 Leontes and, 41–42, 89–90 Mamillius and, 44–45 Paulina and, 49–50 Shakespeare’s workmanship and, 66–69

171

172

The Winter’s Tale

Characters of Shakepear’s Plays (Hazlitt), 33–39 characters, The Winter’s Tale, 19–21, 35 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 48–49 children and childhood Christian imagery and, 83–84, 84–85 fatherhood and, 48–49 friendship of Leontes and Polixenes and, 121–122 generational reconciliation, 62, 63, 64, 132 mothers and motherhood, 159–160 natural world and, 90–91, 106–107 old wives’ tales and, 159, 160 twentieth-century criticism and, 72–74 See also Mamillius (The Winter’s Tale) chorus, Time (The Winter’s Tale) as, 15, 92 Christian imagery, 81, 82, 147 act 5, The Winter’s Tale, 104 Autolycus (The Winter’s Tale) and, 93 childhood and, 84–85 natural world and, 83–84, 90, 117 nobility and, 100 Paulina and, 82 resurrection scene and, 109, 114–115 Clown (The Winter’s Tale), 8, 12–13, 20, 51, 93–94, 144, 153 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 61–62 comedy, 2, 12–14, 17, 63, 92–94, 102–104, 143–145 See also tragedy commercialism, 153–154, 162, 163– 164 Cordelia (King Lear), 113, 114 Coriolanus, 145, 147

counting and numbering, 136–138, 139–141, 141–142, 144 Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature (Schlegel), 39–41 court satire, Autolycus (The Winter’s Tale) and, 102–103 criteria, 137 The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Final Plays (Knight), 71–119 Cymbeline, 65, 69, 108 death, 114 See also ghosts; resurrection debt, 140–141 Defence of Poetry (Sidney), 161 “Defence of the Epilogue” (Dryden), 26 delusional jealousy, 123–124 Descartes, René, 130, 131, 134, 135 Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cavell), 126–149 Dryden, John, 25, 26 eighteenth-century criticism. See seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury criticism eternity, 109, 111, 116 evil, development of, 77, 78, 79 faith, resurrection scene and, 114–115 falling action, plot and, 102, 104 family resemblances, 106–107 fatherhood, 48–49, 128 See also children and childhood female characters minor characters and, 52–53 Paulina (The Winter’s Tale) and, 49–50 See also specific characters fertility, 95, 98, 100–101 First Folio, 3

Index

Florizel and Perdita (Garrick), 29–31 Florizel (The Winter’s Tale), 8, 20 Autolycus and, 155 family resemblances and, 107 narrative failures and, 66 Perdita and, 99 William Hazlitt and, 35–39 flowers, 96–97, 97–98 Fools, role of Autolycus and, 151 forgiveness, 149, 156 See also penitence foreshadowing, resurrection scene and, 109–110 Freud, Sigmund, 123–124, 127 Freudian psychology, Leontes (The Winter’s Tale) and, 119–126 friendship, 49–50, 121–122, 124–125 Garrick, David, 8, 15, 25, 29–31 generational reconciliation, 62, 63, 64, 132 Greek gods, 85, 87, 95, 98, 152 See also Oracle, the Greene, Robert, 27, 59 Hamlet, 149 Hazlitt, William, 33–39 Hermione (The Winter’s Tale), 5, 6, 7, 9, 16–18, 19 Mamillius (The Winter’s Tale) and, 127–128, 129 nineteenth-century criticism and, 35, 42–43, 43–44 resurrection scene and, 111–116 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism and, 26 twentieth-century criticism and, 70, 85–86, 142, 147, 148 homosexuality, 58, 124–125 improvisation, role of Autolycus and, 154

173

incest, 142, 146 innocence, 5, 43–44 Investigations (Wittgenstein), 133 issue and breeding, 132, 138–143, 140, 142–143, 144–145, 148 See also children and childhood jealousy, of Leontes evil and, 79 issue and breeding, 143 Mamillius and, 127–129 nineteenth-century criticism and, 34, 40 plot contrivances and, 64 psychoanalytical approaches and, 119–126 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism and, 27–28 theme of, 5, 6, 11–12, 129 twentieth-century criticism and, 65–66 youth and age, 74, 75 justice, 50, 54, 87, 88 Keats, John, 33, 94, 101 key passages, in The Winter’s Tale, 11–18 Knight, George Wilson, 57, 71–119 knowledge, telling and relating, 133–134, 137 Lamb, Mary Ellen, 157–164 language, Shakespearean Hermione and, 86–87 issue and breeding, 138–143 Leontes and, 34, 75–80, 87–88 love and, 84–85 natural world and, 82–83 prose and, 151 psychology, of Leontes and, 77–79 resurrection scene and, 108–109 telling and relating, 132–138

174

The Winter’s Tale

lawfulness, 145–146 legitimate succession, the, 136, 144–145 length, of The Winter’s Tale, 65–66 Lennox, Charlotte, 26, 27–29, 61 Leontes (The Winter’s Tale), 5–6, 6–7, 9, 11–12, 16–18, 19 acknowledging Mamillius and, 134–135 Arthur Quiller-Couch on, 65–66 character development and, 41– 42, 89–90 counting and numbering, 137, 138, 139 fatherhood and, 48 Florizel and Perdita (Garrick) and, 29–30 Freudian psychology and, 119– 126 issue and breeding, 142–143 lawfulness and, 148 parting and, 138–139 penitence and, 88–89, 104–106, 116–117, 149 Polixenes (The Winter’s Tale) and, 141 psychoanalytical approaches and, 58 resurrection scene and, 112, 113 tyranny and, 79–80, 80–81, 89, 116 use of language and, 75–80, 87–88 William Hazlitt and, 34 See also jealousy, of Leontes literary theory, twentieth-century, 57–58 loss. See parting love, 74–75, 84–85, 101–102 Macbeth children and childhood, 85 Leontes and, 77, 78, 89

realism and, 125 time and, 111 tyranny and, 104 “winter’s tales” and, 158–159 madness, 134, 135, 136 magic and witchcraft, 81–82, 154 See also romance and fantasy Mamillius (The Winter’s Tale), 6, 7, 19 children and childhood, 44–45, 85 family resemblances and, 106–107 Leontes and, 127–129, 134–135 tales and, 131, 159 use of language and, 83, 84 youth and age, 72–73, 74, 75, 76, 77 Marina (Pericles), 99, 113, 117 marriage, 1, 145–146, 147 Masefield, John, 58–60 materialist criticism, 157 McCabe, Richard, 58, 150–156 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 12 midwives, 161, 162 minor characters, 52–55 Mopsa (The Winter’s Tale), 52–53, 162 moral lessons, 59, 90, 94 mothers and motherhood, 158, 161–162 See also children and childhood; issue and breeding motivations, jealousy and. See jealousy, of Leontes music, 114–115, 150, 151–152, 155 naming, 136 narrative forms, 9, 65–69, 69–71, 131, 159–161, 163–164 natural world art and, 108, 109 the bear and, 51–52, 146 blending of comedy and tragedy in, 63

Index

Henry David Thoreau and, 146–147 key passages, 13 nineteenth-century criticism and, 42, 47, 50–52 storms, 50–51, 90, 91 theater and, 149 twentieth-century criticism and, 77–78, 83–84, 90–91, 92–99, 109–110, 117 use of language and, 82–83 neoclassical drama, 25, 29, 57, 61 New Shreds of the Old Snare (Gee), 163 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 141–142 nineteenth-century criticism A. W. Schlegel and, 39–41 Charles Cowden Clarke and, 41–55 romantic period and, 57 William Hazlitt and, 33–39 nobility and royalty, 40, 42–43, 46–48, 98–100, 109–110 numbering. See counting and numbering Oedipal conflict, 127–129, 132 off-scene action, 68, 107–108 Old Shepherd (The Winter’s Tale), 8, 12–13, 20, 50–51, 91, 155–156 old wives’ tales, 157–164 Oracle, the, 64, 66, 80, 129 Othello, 41, 51, 65, 89, 114, 131, 143 paganism, 82, 117 Pandosto (Greene), 27, 129 parting finding what is lost, 135–136 issue and breeding, 148–149 Polixenes (The Winter’s Tale) and, 142–143 Stanley Cavell and, 132, 138–139

175

pastoralism, 70–71, 72, 94–99 See also natural world Paulina (The Winter’s Tale), 6–7, 9–10, 16–18, 20 friendship and, 49–50 as Leontes conscience and, 104–105 marriage and, 147–148 old wives’ tales and, 161 penitence and, 88–89, 116, 117 resurrection scene and, 111, 112, 113, 114 twentieth-century criticism and, 70 tyranny and, 81–82 penitence, 60, 88–89, 104–106, 116–117, 129–130, 149 Perdita (The Winter’s Tale), 7–8, 19 Autolycus and, 55 family resemblances and, 106– 107 Hermione and, 110–111 issue and breeding, 147 the natural world and, 96–97, 97–98 nineteenth-century criticism and, 35–39, 40, 45–46 nobility and, 46–48, 98–100 Polixenes (The Winter’s Tale) and, 96–97 twentieth-century criticism and, 70–71, 135, 138 performance study approach, 58 Pericles, 48, 61–62, 63, 72, 91, 92, 99 Persephone, 98, 117 “plausibility,” resurrection scene and, 184 plot Autolycus and, 68, 150 contrivance of, 27–29, 39–40, 55, 64, 121

176

The Winter’s Tale

falling action and, 102, 104 nineteenth-century criticism and, 40, 41, 55 separation of tragedy and comedy in, 62–65 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism and, 26, 27–28 summary of, 5–10, 59 poetry, of William Shakespeare, 2, 3 Polixenes (The Winter’s Tale), 5, 8, 20 counting and numbering, 139–140 Leontes and, 141 parting and, 142–143 Perdita and, 96–97 resurrection scene and, 112–113 tyranny and, 102 youth and age, 73, 74 Pope, Alexander, 26–27, 33–34 projected jealousy, 123, 124–125 prose romances, 158, 161–162 psychoanalytical approaches, 58, 119–126 psychology, of Leontes, 42, 65, 77– 79, 119–126 public opinion, 25, 29, 33, 158 Quiller-Couch, Arthur, 61–71, 120

recognition scenes, 68–69, 107–108 recovery, search for, 131, 143 religious imagery. See Christian imagery resurrection, 105, 107–108, 109–110, 135, 147, 160 revenge, 149 revised versions, of The Winter’s Tale, 8, 15, 25, 29–31, 29–31 revival, theme of, 127 romance and fantasy key passages, 14 nineteenth-century criticism and, 33, 35–39, 39–41 realism and, 14, 17–18 remorse and, 60 role of Autolycus and, 151–152 royalty and, 109–110 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism and, 25 sheepshearing scene and, 45–46 time and place and, 69 tragedy and comedy, 91–92 romantic love, 74–75, 95, 101–102, 107 romantic period, 33, 57, 127 royalty. See nobility and royalty

realism jealousy of Leontes and, 120– 121, 125 the natural world and, 97 resurrection scene and, 112–113, 115–116 role of Autolycus and, 151–152 romance and fantasy and, 14, 17–18 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism and, 27–28 twentieth-century criticism and, 71 reality, telling and relating, 134

Schlegel, A. W., 39–41, 42 seasons, the, 83, 92–99 seeing, telling and relating, 133–134 seventeenth- and eighteenth-century criticism, 25–26 Alexander Pope and, 26–27 Charlotte Lennox and, 27–29 David Garrick and, 29–31 John Dryden and, 26 neoclassical drama and, 57 nineteenth-century criticism of, 55 sexuality, 140, 142, 144, 146, 155, 163

Index

Shakespeare Illustrated (Lennox), 27–29 Shakespeare, William, biography of, 1–3 Shakespeare-Characters, Chiefly Those Subordinate (Clarke), 41–55 Shakespeare’s Workmanship (QuillerCouch), 61–71 sheepshearing scene business and money, 144 Charles Cowden Clarke and, 45–46 Florizel and Perdita (Garrick) and, 29, 30–31 George Wilson Knight and, 94–104 plot summary and, 8 role of Autolycus and, 153–156 Shield of Our Safetie (Anderson), 165 Sidney, Philip, 161 skepticism, 131, 135, 137–138, 143 social class, 160, 161–162, 163 social conventions, 124–125, 146, 155 sonnets, 3 sources, for The Winter’s Tale , 27, 59 Hermione and, 171–172 jealousy of Leontes and, 120, 125, 129 Mary Ellen Lamb and, 157 prose romances and, 158, 163– 164 springtime, 92–94, 151 stage business, 153 stage directions, 67–68 Stewart, J.I.M., 58, 119–126 storms, 50–51, 90, 91 summary, of The Winter’s Tale, 5–10 summertime, 95–98 sun imagery, 95, 97, 100, 102 superstition, 80–81, 114 suspicion, penitence and, 129–130

177

tales, 131–132, 144–145, 157–164 telling and relating, Stanley Cavell and, 132–138 The Tempest, 51 textual errors, 66 theater, study of, 131, 132, 147, 149 Thoreau, Henry David, 146–147 time character of Time (The Winter’s Tale), 8, 9, 13, 14–16, 21, 92 childhood and, 127 counting and numbering, 139, 141–142 resurrection scene and, 111 telling and relating, 136–137 time and place Arthur Quiller-Couch and, 61, 62 eternity and, 116 neoclassical drama and, 25, 29 nineteenth-century criticism and, 40 romance and fantasy, 17, 69 Time (The Winter’s Tale), 15 twentieth-century criticism and, 61, 64–65 Time, Real and Imaginary (Coleridge), 61–62 title, of The Winter’s Tale, 39, 60, 158, 160 Touchstone (As You Like It), 92, 103 tragedy, 2 acts 1 to 3 of The Winter’s Tale and, 62–63, 72, 89 comedy and, 62–65, 91–92, 169 romantic love and, 95 tragicomedies, 2, 61 Troilus and Cressida , 111 twentieth-century criticism, 57–58 Arthur Quiller-Couch, 61–71 George Wilson Knight, 71–119 J.I.M. Stewart, 119–126 John Masefield, 58–60

178

The Winter’s Tale

Richard McCabe, 150–156 Stanley Cavell, 126–149 twenty-first-century criticism Mary Ellen Lamb and, 181–188 tyranny, 79–81, 87, 88, 89, 116, 102, 146 “Virtual Audiences and Virtual Authors: The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest and Old Wives’ Tales” (Lamb), 157–164 whispering, 128, 137 William Shakespeare (Masefield), 58–60 winter, 88, 101

witchcraft. See magic and witchcraft Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 133, 134, 136, 137 women female characters and, 49–50, 52–53 influence on children and, 159– 160 narrative forms and, 161–162 workmanship, of The Winter’s Tale, 66–69, 69–71 The Works of Shakespeare (Pope), 26–27 youth and age, 72–74, 91, 92–93, 96–97