William Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale.
Produced by the Michigan Shakespeare Festival. July 2011. Directed by Janice L. Blixt.
The Winter’s Tale is a play about kings first presented before the King’s Court in November 1611, after a run at the Globe Theater beginning earlier that year.
At the palace of Leontes, king of Sicilia, a Sicilian lord, Camillo, and a Bohemian lord, Archidamus, compare their countries. “If you chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia, on the like occasion whereon my services are now on foot”—namely, an extended visit to Sicilia by the Bohemian king, Polixines—”you shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia” (I.i.1-3), namely, that Bohemia is far less wealthy. At the planned reciprocal visit to Bohemia next summer by Leontes, you will never see such “magnificence” as we Bohemians have seen here (I.i.12). Archidamus playfully suggests that we will need to give all of you Sicilians “sleepy drinks, that your senses, unintelligent of our insufficience, may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse us” (I.i.13-14). Camillo assures him that a stronger bond than expense in hospitality binds the two kings. It is the natural bond of a friendship close to brotherhood. As boys, they shared the same education and planted a seed of “affection which cannot choose but branch now” (I.i.22), separated even as they have been by “their more mature dignities and royal necessities” (I.i.23). They are loving brothers, and Archidamus agrees that “there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter” their love (I.i.31-32).
This amity in their foreign policy matches the amity King Leontes enjoys at home. His young son, Prince Mamillius, “is a gentleman of the greatest promise that ever came into my note,” Archidamus says (I.i.33-34). And the king’s subjects love both father and son. Sicilia enjoys the blessing of a sound regime and the civil peace it fosters.
Elsewhere in the palace, the two kings discuss King Polixenes’ departure. Unlike King Leontes, faction may be arising in Bohemia. He fears “sneaping winds at home” (I.ii.13)—biting, rebuking criticism by his subjects for his nine-months’ absence. Nor does he wish “to tire your royalty” by prolonging his visit (I.ii.14). “My affairs / Do drag me homeward” (I.ii.23-24). When his liberal request to his friend to extend his stay still further fails, King Leontes turns to his queen, Hermione, to plead his case. Addressing her guest through her husband, she says to tell him that all in Bohemia is well, and that she grants Leontes permission to stay a month longer when he visits Bohemia. She good-humoredly threatens to take Polixenes prisoner.
He yields. Reminiscing to her of the childhood he shared with her husband, he tells her that each then supposed he were “to be boy eternal” (I.ii.64). “We knew not / The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream’d / That any did.” (I.ii.69-71). Had the “stronger blood” of sexual maturity not overtaken them, they could have stood before God in complete innocence (I.ii.72).
This friendly dialogue, slightly suggestive of possessiveness and eroticism, causes what could only have been a deep reserve of jealousy in King Leontes’ soul to erupt. “My heart dances,” he tells himself in an aside, “But not for joy, not joy” (I.ii.110-11). Considering his son, he reassures himself that Mamillius looks “like me” (I.ii.135). No adultery went into his making. But his wife is pregnant, nearing childbirth, which corresponds agonizingly with the nine months his brother has been in his palace. Does he linger in Sicilia only to witness the birth of a child who is really his own? Is that why Hermione wants him to stay a month longer?
Leontes casually asks Polixenes if he’s as fond of his own son as Leontes is of Mamillius. Indeed so: “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.” (I.ii.165-68). A true son. But Leontes has used his question only to set up his friend and his wife for surveillance; as he prepares to take his own son for a walk and leaving them alone, he confides to the audience, “I am angling now” (I.ii.180). He watches as they converse, taking ordinary gestures of two friends in conversation as proof of adultery, and even universalizing them: “It’s a bawdy planet” (I.ii.201). This inverts the Christian theme that God created the universe in the spirit of agapic love; in the eyes of jealousy, the world consists instead of erotic anarchy. When Camillo refuses to confirm his suspicions of the queen, even going so far as to defend her honor, Leontes puts him on the traitor list, too. To Leontes, slender evidence weighs heavily: “Is whispering nothing?” (I.ii.284). If their many gestures of affection are nothing, “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.292-95). The answer is that yes, all these tokens are not-nothings, literally, but nothing much when it comes to grounds for reasonable suspicion. Small ‘somethings’ may or may not add up to a bigger one. Only prudence and moderation will tell the difference. But that isn’t an answer Leontes would hear. In making something out of nothings, he apes God while throwing his regime into chaos. The king is a creative un-creator, about to unmake his family and hazard the unmaking of his family’s rule.
In Leontes’ mind, Camillo can redeem himself from the charge of treason by passing a kind of love test or loyalty test. He must agree to poison Polixenes—a lethal version of the sleeping potion with which Archidamus had playfully proposed to dope Camillo and the rest of next-year’s Sicilian visitors in Bohemia. This is the only way Leontes can eliminate his imagined rival while maintaining Hermione’s reputation, which he needs to keep inviolate so as not to call the royal succession into question.
As befits his name, which means ‘freeborn,’ or ‘noble,’ Camillo will have nothing to do with the murder. To obey such a master would be to obey “one who, in rebellion to himself, will have / All that are his so too” (I.ii.354-55). He hints of the plot to Polixenes, who appeals to him to disclose it fully: “I conjure thee, by all the parts of man; / Which honor does acknowledge, whereof the least / Is not this suit of mine, that thou declare / What incidency thou dost guess of harm / Is creeping toward me; how far off, how near; / Which way to be prevented, if to be; / If not, how best to bear it.” (I.ii.401-06). That is, your obligation to human nature overrides your obligation to your master. Camillo does yield to the higher obligation, asking only that when Polixenes embarks for Bohemia he take Camillo with him. Polixenes rightly believes the lord’s story, as he saw for himself a malignant glance his friend cast at him when last he saw him. “This jealousy / Is for a precious creature; as she’s rare / Must it be great; and, as his person’s mighty, / Must it be violent; and as he does conceive / He is dishonor’d by a man which ever / Profess’d to him, why, his revenges must / In that be made more bitter.” (I.ii.451-57). Love and honor rightly comport with one another, but here their combination has turned lethal.
The two men have been ‘brothers’ not in birth-nature but in the more refined natural relation of friendship. Yet they are also kings, and kings must concern themselves with conspiracies against their rule. They will hear rumors of such conspiracies, or even suspect conspiracies without hearing rumors but by observing the behavior of possible rivals. King Leontes invents a conspiracy against himself by ‘over-reading’ the behavior of his brother and his wife. When a trusted advisor disagrees with his misinterpretation, he not only rejects his testimony but commands him to murder the man he wrongly accuses. King Polixenes observes hostile behavior but only puzzles at it; when told of a possible conspiracy by a man subordinate to the conspirator, he carefully tests his testimony, confirming it by comparing it to his prior observation. The clinching evidence is Camillo’s willingness to exile himself, to join Polixenes in fleeing Sicilia. Living up to the meaning of his name, which means ‘hospitable,’ Polixenes tells the older man, “I will respect thee as a father, if / Thou bear’st my life off hence” (I.ii.461-62). Given Leontes’ jealousy-sparked, lethal madness, Polixenes is glad to ‘adopt’ a new father in place of his natural, deceased father. His brotherly friend has made himself unnatural by rebelling against his own nature and his own rule, causing faction in Sicilia where there had been unity both in the ruling household and among the elders, and sundering the alliance between Sicilia and Bohemia. Obsession with loyalty ruins the union the obsession demands.
At the palace, Hermione temporarily hands off her son to the ladies in attendance: “He so troubles me, / ‘Tis past enduring” (II.i.1-2). Judging from the boy’s badinage with the lady, he is indeed something of an insolent little wiseacre, and a pregnant mother might well find him taxing. When Hermione returns, she tries to settle him down by asking him to tell her a tale. “A sad tale’s best for winter,” the boy replies, foreshadowing more than he knows; he proposes a story about “sprites and goblins” (II.i.26). Before he begins, Leontes enters the room, along with Lord Antigonus and several other courtiers. He will prove the greater goblin than any the boy might imagine.
Having heard the report that Polixenes and Camillo have fled, confirming to him that they must have been plotting against him, he continues to believe that Hermione was a co-conspirator and is now pregnant with his brother’s child. “She’s an adultress,” a “bed-swerver,” and a traitor (II.i.78,93)—a royal home-wrecker who, because royal, has betrayed her country, as well. He orders her imprisoned. Hermione takes his decree stoically: “There’s some ill planet reigns. / I must be patient till the heavens look / With aspect more favorable.” (II.105-07). She will not weep, adjuring the onlooking lords and ladies not to weep, either. Weep only if you “know your mistress / Has deserved prison” (II.i.119-20). As for Leontes, “Adieu, my lord. / I never wish’d you sorry; now / I trust I shall.” (II.i.123-24).
Lord Antigonus remonstrates, and Leontes rejects his criticisms as he had rejected those of Archidamus. “Why, what need we / Commune with you of this, but rather follow / Our forceful instigation? Our prerogative / Calls not your counsels; but our natural goodness / Imparts this….” (II.i.162-66). In the mind of the jealousy-addled tyrant, his will trumps his counselors’ reason because his will bespeaks the mind of a natural superior. “We need no more of your advice” because the whole matter “is all properly ours” (II.i.168-70). Jealousy registers love of one’s own; overweening jealousy registers a love of one’s own that spurns reason, including rational advice, for the solipsism of fury. He recognizes only one authority above himself. He’s sent to Apollo’s temple at Delphi for the word of the oracle, which he expects to confirm his charges not in his own mind but in the minds of his subjects.
Paulina, wife of Antigonus, attempts to visit Hermione in prison. She is allowed to see only the queen’s attendant, Emilia. Hermione has given birth to a daughter. Paulina would bring the infant to King Leontes in the hope of softening his heart at the sight of the child. When the jailor worries that he might be punished for letting the child out of jail, Paulina appeals to nature: “You need not fear it, sir. / This child was prisoner to the womb, and is / By law and process of great Nature thence / Freed and enfranchis’d—not a party to / The anger of the King, nor guilty of, / If any be, the trespass of the Queen.” (II.ii.48-53). What is more, “I will stand betwixt you and danger” (II.ii.66). That is, the child was imprisoned by natural necessity because her mother was, but now that she has been born she cannot justly be imprisoned any longer, being as innocent of wrongdoing as any human being can be. To this argument in principle, this rational argument from natural right, Paulina prudently adds a promise of political protection, inasmuch as arguments from principle can have no purchase in the world as it is without political security.
With his Polixenes the “harlot king” out of reach, King Leontes plans capital punishment for Hermione, the imagined accomplice and traitor. Meanwhile, sleepless and without appetite since hearing of his mother’s “dishonor” (II.iii.13), Mamillius has taken ill. Completing the derangement of nature within the royal household, the king too has been unable to sleep. But that hasn’t prevented him from strategizing. Calculating that King Polixenes’ throne is too secure and his alliances too strong for a successful attack on Bohemia, King Leontes reserves revenge on him for another time. This speech provides two important insights into the king’s mind: first, he isn’t so thoroughly insane as to have lost his ability to reason altogether; second, his jealousy isn’t a mere pretext for making war on Bohemia. His irrationality is limited to one dimension of his soul and his rule, albeit a dimension that threatens to ruin both his soul and his rule.
Paulina approaches the king’s court with Hermione’s baby in her arms. Delayed by one of the attending lords, she tells him not to fear the king’s “tyrannous passion” more than “the Queen’s life” (II.iii.27-28). Her “gracious, innocent soul” is “more free than he is jealous” (II.iii.28-29). When he persists, she tells him “I do come with words as medicinal as true, / Honest as either, to purge him of that humor / That presses him from sleep.” (II.iii.37-39). Hearing the disputants, the king comes forth to command his men to remove her. A woman of spirit, Paulina threatens to scratch their eyes out if they try, provoking the king to call her a masculine witch, to accuse his attendants of treason, and to charge “thou dotard” Antigonus with fearing his wife (II.iii.74). “This brat is none of mine” (II.iii.92). He commands that mother and daughter both be burned.
Knowing that the king can’t commit this act of judicial murder without accomplices, Paulina turns to the attendants. Look at the evidence: The infant’s features are miniature copies of the king’s. Appealing to “the good goddess Nature,” she suggests that not only the shape of the body but “the ordering of the mind, too,” is under Nature’s rule, and that yellow, the color of jealousy, has no rightful part in her natural order. This only enrages Leontes further, as he tells Antigonus he deserves to be hanged for failing to “stay her tongue”—to which the good lord coolly replies, “Hang all the husbands / That cannot do that feat, you’ll leave yourself / Hardly one subject” (II.iii.109-11). Threatened by the king with burning, Paulina professes to “care not,” since “it is an heretic that makes the fire, / Not she which burns in’t” (II.iii.113-15). You, king, in an attempt to defend your honor, and therefore the crown that depends upon its maintenance, make yourself instead “scandalous to the world” (II.iii.120). Your rule has become the derangement of the honor upon which your authority depends.
Paulina catches the king in another contradiction. Having called his passion tyrannical, she stops short of calling him one: “I’ll not call you tyrant,” only cruel and daft, a ruler whose acts that savor of tyranny which “will ignoble make you” (II.iii.115, 119). Leontes sputters at his courtiers, “Were I a tyrant, / Where were her life? She durst not call me so, / If she did not know me one” (II.iii.121-24). But she did in fact not call him so, and therefore, by the logic of his own charge, she must know him one. She hands the infant to her husband and issues a parting insult to all the king’s attendants: “You that are thus so tender” of the king’s “follies will never do him good, not one of you” (II.iii.127-28). Obedience is not enough, when dealing with the anti-natural, the tyrannical. She effectively calls for civil disobedience by the king’s men, and unknowingly prophecies the ruin of her own husband.
After accusing Antigonus of setting his wife to this action, King Leontes initially commands that he burn the child, or he will dash out her “bastard brains” with “these my proper hands” (II.iii.136-37). When his fellow lords attest to Antigonus’ innocence, Leontes cries, “You’re liars all” (II.iii.145). In his insane jealousy he has constructed an entirely fictional world around himself, all founded upon the initial fiction that his wife and brother have committed adultery against him.
King or rather Tyrant Leontes hasn’t lost every vestige of sanity, however. Evidently seeing that he faces a palace revolt, he tells Antigonus that he will pardon his wife in exchange for his vow to carry the child out of Sicilia and leave her exposed, “Where chance may nurse or end it” (II.iii.182). Thus the end of Act II echoes the beginning of Act I, when the Bohemian Lord Archidamus told his Sicilian counterpart, Camillo, that he would see the “great difference” between Bohemia and Sicilia if chance were to bring him to Bohemia. Chance has brought Camillo to Bohemia, fleeing in the company of the Bohemian king; the important difference between the two countries has turned out not to be an ‘economic’ difference, the difference in wealth, but the political difference between kingship and tyranny, between a just and reasonable natural ruler and an unjust, irrational, unnatural one.
Leontes now learns that Cleomenes and Dion, his messengers to the Delphic oracle will arrive in an hour. Having failed to hear the voices of natural reason, even when Nature is described as a goddess, what will the voice of the god tell him? And how will he respond to its ruling?
On the road to the Sicilian capital, the messengers discuss the beauties of Delphi—its delicate climate, its sweet air, its fertile soil, and its impressive temple. In describing the oracle, Cleomenes moves from the beautiful to the sublime: “The ear-deaf’ning voice o’ th’ oracle, / Kin to Jove’s thunder, so surprised my sense / That I was nothing.” (III.i.9-11). Dion affirms that when the sealed contents of the oracle’s answer are revealed, “something rare even then will rush to knowledge” (III.i.20-21). In precise contrast to Leontes’ attempt to make something out of nothings, something significant out of human-all-too-human trifles, the Delphic oracle’s teachings make human beings feel insignificant in comparison to the wisdom and power of Jove’s son, Apollo. What Leontes has deranged the oracle would set right, substituting divine knowledge for the king’s baseless surmise.
Meanwhile, the tyrant Leontes wants to be “clear’d of being tyrannous” in Sicilia’s law court (III.ii.4-5). Submitting to the rule of law gives the appearance of constitutionalism to his rule. Hermione stands charged with treason on three counts: as queen, she has committed adultery; she has conspired to murder the king; she has aided the flight of her co-conspirators. The murder charge is a new invention, derived from the first invention; it was of course King Leontes, and only King Leontes, who conspired to have a king murdered.
Hermione points out the lawless character of the king’s appeal to the law. “Mine integrity / Being counted falseness,” she is being considered guilty until proven innocent (III.ii.24-25). She nonetheless makes her defense, appealing to three authorities: the “pow’rs divine” (III.ii.26); “my past life” (III.ii.31); and the king’s own conscience. With respect to her past life, she says she loved Polixenes “as in honor he requir’d” as a visiting king and as “yourself,” Leontes, “commanded” (62, 65). In her central answer, the evidence of her good character, she cites her chaste and true previous conduct, her status as a royal wife, herself the daughter of “a great king,” the emperor of Russia, and mother of a prince, and, finally, her integrity, the evidence for which she brings out by saying she prizes her honor, not her life (III.ii.31-43). “My life stands in the level”—the gunsight—”of your dreams, / Which I’ll lay down” (III.ii.78-79). Now deprived of her husband’s favor and of both her children, she is unafraid to die, but will continue to defend her honor. As for the king’s conscience, he has replaced proofs with “surmises,” exhibiting “rigor, and not law” (III.ii.110,112).
The only appeal among these that might sway the king is the appeal to powers divine. Accordingly, Hermione asks for the oracle of Apollo, which she expects will vindicate her honor. Leontes agrees to her request, sure of his own charges. When the messengers appear and are duly sworn, the court officer breaks the seal and reads a message from Delphi that not only exonerates Hermione but calls the king “a jealous tyrant” and prophesies that “he shall live without an heir” (III.ii.131-33). To this, Leontes proves his tyranny by denying the authority of the god: “This is mere falsehood”; let the trial continue (III.ii.139). He would make the oracle from Delphi a nothing.
But the god is not to be mocked. One of Leontes’ servants reports that Mamillius has died of sickness brought on by worrying over his mother’s peril. Leontes immediately understands this to be evidence of Apollo’s anger at “my injustice” (III.ii.143). His line of succession has been destroyed. He was quite willing to deny the words of the god, but he cannot deny the action of the god. He confesses, “I have too much believ’d mine own suspicion” (III.ii.149). He speaks one of the very rare prayers in all of Shakespeare’s writings, asking Apollo to pardon “my great profaneness ‘gainst thy oracle” (III.ii.151) and promising to atone by reconciling himself with Polixenes, “new woo my queen,” and recall “the good Camillo,” a “man of truth, of mercy” (III.ii.151-53). He confesses that his several jealousies led him “to bloody thoughts and to revenge” (III.ii.156) against persons who unfailingly acted with humanity, honor, self-sacrifice, and piety.
But Apollo has not done acting. The queen has collapsed, and Paulina pronounces her dead. She condemns Leontes, telling him that the gods will not forgive him, however contrite he may be, or seem to be. “Therefore betake thee / To nothing but despair” (III.ii.206-07). This would be the final “nothing” for him; nothing came of nothing.
But the king shows that he really is contrite. “Go on, go on,” he tells her; “thou canst not speak too much,” as “I have deserved / All tongues to talk their bitt’rest” (III.ii.212-14). When Paulina herself repents and asks his forgiveness, he replies with humility, “Thou didst speak but well / When most the truth; which I receive much better / Than to be pitied of thee” (III.ii.229-31). After burying his queen and his son in one grave, he will continue to rule Sicilia “in shame perpetual” “so long as nature” will let him live, visiting the chapel where the grave will be (III.ii.235,237). Nature, the true ‘something,’ which he had spurned and deformed with his passion and the acts deriving from that passion, will have the last word.
On the seacoast of Bohemia, Antigonus, with the king’s infant daughter in his arms, hears the mariner who has escorted him say that the area is “famous” for its “creatures of prey” (III.iii.12-13). Antigonus fears rather the spirit of Hermione, who appeared to him in his sleep last night;”ne’er was dream / So much like waking” (III.iii.18-19). “Good Antigonus,” the spirit told him, “Since fate against thy better disposition, / Hath made thy person for the thrower-out / Of my poor babe, according to thine oath,” call her Perdita, meaning ‘lost.’ (III.iii.27-30). As punishment, you will never see your wife Paulina again. Antigonus obeys the spirit, whom he takes as having been sent by Apollo. He places the infant on the ground, “either for life or death” on the ground ruled by the one he mistakenly supposes to be her father, King Polixenes (III.iii.45). He puts a bundle down beside her; if she is found, its contents will pay for her support. “Most accurs’d am I / To be by oath enjoin’d to this” (III.iii.52-53). He is indeed: As a storm blows up, one of the local creatures of prey, a bear, attacks him. “I am gone for ever” (III.iii.57), a victim of nature at its most violent, driven into it by a tyrant whose name means ‘lion.’
Not so, Perdita. A shepherd finds her and, believing some “waiting-gentlewoman in the scape” abandoned her, determines to “take it up for pity” (III.iii.72-75). His son arrives to report that the ship which had carried Antigonus has capsized in the storm and Antigonus has been mortally wounded by the bear. Their mood brightens considerably when they discover that the infant comes equipped with a sack of gold and jewels. The shepherd is suddenly rich.
Suddenness is a recurring motif in the play. Leontes veers from apparent contentment to raging jealousy to just and humble penitence. Paulina too goes from severe judge to pleader for forgiveness. Suddenness is a form of the interaction of thought, speech, and/or action with time, and Act IV opens with Time himself speaking to the audience in the role of a chorus. I “please some, try all”; I bring “joy and terror,” “good and bad”; perhaps above all, Time “makes and unfolds error” (IV.i.1-2) (as Viola sees in Twelfth Night). Therefore, Time continues, it is no crime in me if I violate the laws of the classical ‘unities,’ which decree that all actions in a play occur within a twenty-four-hour span. After all, “it is in my pow’r / To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour / To plant and o’erwhelm custom” (IV.i.7-9). And so I shall now “slide o’er sixteen years” (IV.i.6) and return you to Bohemia, where King Polixenes still lives with his son, Florizel, and Perdita has “now grown in grace / Equal with wond’ring” (IV.i.24-25).
At the palace, plots are being formed. Camillo laments the loss of his country, which he hasn’t seen since he fled with the King. A faithful lover of his own, he wants to be buried there, and now it is safe for him to return, as in the intervening time King Leontes has shown himself as penitent in action as he had been in speech. In contrast, King Polixenes still doubts the sincerity of his friend’s longstanding shows of remorse, having seen how quickly the man’s mood can turn. He has another task for his trusted courtier; he wants him to accompany him to the house of the wealthy shepherd, whose daughter Florizel has been courting, according to reports the king has received from his spies. Even in childhood Florizel was changeable, Polixenes had told Leontes, back in Sicilia. So he has longstanding reasons to keep his eyes on him. The ing and Camillo will disguise themselves and investigate, as Polixenes remains a cautious man when it comes to his own suspicions. This mission is far more urgent than Camillo’s natural but private longing, as the prince’s alleged action implicates the royal succession in Bohemia.
Bohemia, land of predators, features at least one human specimen of the breed. A rogue named Autolycus (literally, ‘wolf-self’) ambles along a road near the shepherd’s house singing of spring, when “the red blood reigns in the winter’s pale” (IV.iii.4). The sixteen years’ shift in chronology accompanies a one-season shift in the natural season, from winter in Sicilia to spring in Bohemia. Red blood hints at both love and predation; while the prince walks in the spirit of the first, Wolf-Self walks in the spirit of the second. He was once a servant of Florizel, but has been let go, from the Bohemian court to the Bohemian wilds, where a self-made wolf belongs.
He finds his next prey in the shepherd’s son, who’s been sent to purchase food, spices, and flowers for a feast Perdita is planning. Pretending to have been beaten and robbed, Autolycus picks the youth’s pocket, relieving him of money the youth would have given him, in pity. Enjoying his sport, Autolycus blames a man named ‘Autolycus’ for the beating. He is a true lord of misrule, but unfit for Twelfth Night celebrations, fit only for the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ avant la lettre—shammer, liar, law-breaker.
At the shepherd’s cottage, Florizel and Perdita also play with role reversal, but for love, not profit; he’s dressed as a shepherd swain, she as a queen. Perdita worries that the king, “by some accident,” might discover them and object to their play (IV.iv.19), but Florizel tells her that it’s only done in “jollity,” that the gods themselves condescend to take the forms of beasts, for love (IV.iv.19,25). Apollo himself transformed himself into “a poor humble swain, / As I seem now” (IV.iv.30-31). Such an allusion to Ovid’s tales, which suggest a rather bawdy planet indeed, might well unsettle a virtuous shepherdess, but Florizel assures her that unlike the gods, “my desires / Run not before mine honor, nor my lusts / Burn hotter than my faith” (IV.iv.33-35).
Yes, but what of the real difference in rank between the prince and the shepherdess? She remarks that “Your resolution cannot hold, when ’tis / Oppos’d, as it must be, by the pow’r of the King” (IV.iv.36-37). One of us must change, for real. Florizel brushes her worries aside; “prithee, darken not / The mirth of the feast” (IV.iv.41-42). If forced to choose, “I’ll be thine” and “not my father’s” because “I cannot be / Mine own, not anything to any, if / I be not thine” (IV.iv.42-45). He will be constant in this purpose, even if “destiny say no” (IV.iv.46). Think of today’s feast as the precursor to the celebration of that nuptial which “We two have sworn shall come” (IV.iv.50-51). Perdita can only hope that Lady Fortune will “stand you auspicious” (IV.iv.52). Very well, he says, the guests approach, so “let’s be red with mirth” (IV.iv.54), with the rising blood of the Bohemian springtime.
To whom does the prince belong? His father considers him his own, by nature. As ruler, and as future ruler, both belong to Bohemia, and it to them. The prince considers himself more fundamentally his own, by an even more elemental nature; having vowed to marry his beloved, he anticipates becoming ‘one flesh’ with his bride, and has made this a matter of honor. Marriage is the natural foundation of the political community, but this marriage seems to challenge the natural foundation of the ruling family, the regime of that community. Perdita sees the tension, even contradiction, between the ruling intentions of father and son, king and prince. The prince, ardent for her, prefers not to think about it.
The shepherd wants to prepare his adopted daughter for rule, in his own more limited domain. You, Perdita, are “hostess of the meeting” (IV.iv.64). The guests include shepherds and shepherdesses, but also King Polixenes and Camillo, in disguise. Welcome these “unknown friends” to the feast; in the absence of your mother, whom Perdita assumes to be the shepherd’s late wife, put away your girlish blushes “and present yourself / That which you are, Mistress o’ th’ Feast” (IV.iv.65-68). And she does so, greeting king and courtier with gifts of rosemary and rue, dried flowers that keep “all the winter long,” representing “grace and remembrance” (IV.iv.75-76).
The king wants to know her better. Complimenting her beauty, he graciously remarks her gifts of “the flowers of winter” fits the old age of his uninvited but welcomed guests (IV.iv.78). She tells him that the springtime flowers, carnations and gillyvors, are hybrids, “nature’s bastards,” and she will not grow them in “our rustic garden” (IV.iv.83-84). They are products of art, not nature. The king corrects her, however, arguing that “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.” (IV.iv.89-92). Marrying “the gentlest scion to the wildest stock” “does mend nature—change it rather; but / The art itself is nature” (IV.iv.93-97). Given her own vows, she cannot but agree. The king seems to bless the union: “Make your garden rich in gillyvors, / And do not call them bastards” (IV.iv.98-99). Bastardy had been exactly the issue respecting her own birth, unbeknownst to her; unbeknownst to him, he is teaching the girl he was falsely accused of siring. Both understand nature; neither knows the other.
She distributes more flowers, always in accordance with the nature of the flowers and the age of her guests, matching nature with time. She flirts with Florizel, whose name means ‘flower.’ In turn he calls her royal by nature. Polixenes stands amazed at “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.iv.156-59). Camillo can only agree: “She is / The queen of curds and cream,” queen of the natural (IV.iv.160-61). The lovers dance.
Autolycus prowls in, now disguised as a piper, avoiding recognition by any of the three men who know him from the king’s court. Ever ready to separate others from their money, he sings of the trinkets he would like to sell. The lovers have other goods in mind. Florizel professes his love for Perdita in front of his disguised father, saying he loves her more than any other of his gifts: beauty, force, or knowledge. The shepherd happily gives his daughter to the man he takes for another shepherd.
The king, however, has a few questions for his unsuspecting son. “Soft swain,” he begins, “Have you a father?” (IV.iv.383). Yes, “but what of him?” (IV.iv.384). Not an auspicious beginning. Does he know of your plans to wed? “He neither does nor shall” (IV.iv.385). Ahem. “Methinks” (Polixenes opines) “a father / Is at the nuptial of his son a guest / That best becomes the table. Pray you, once more, / Is not your father grown incapable / Of reasonable affairs?” (IV.iv.386-90). Not at all, he is quite healthy. But then surely there is something “wrong” and “unfilial” about your conduct; a man should use reason to choose his wife, “but as good reason / The father—all whose joy is nothing else / But fair posterity—should hold some counsel / In such a business.” (IV.iv.398-402). Florizel agrees, but insists that “for some other reasons… I do not acquaint / My father of this business” (IV.iv.403-04). He means that he has already pledged himself to Perdita, although he may also be thinking of Perdita’s warning about his father’s likely objections to their difference in rank.
It is indeed both understandable yet astonishing that Florizel and Perdita have formed no plan, conceived of no plot, beyond marriage. What exactly do they intend to do after the ceremony and the wedding night? This is understandable in view of their ardor, but astonishing in view of the remarkable circumstance which they both see so clearly, the incongruity of a prince marrying a shepherdess—however rich the bride’s father may be. Father Time, whom we met at the beginning of Act IV, cannot be on their side. In this, the dilemma of springtime in Bohemia, the season of red blood in the land of natural riches and civil-social poverty, parallels the dilemma of winter in Sicilia, land of civil-social riches of natural poverty. In Sicilia, the king’s love of his own ruins itself with marital jealousy; in Bohemia, the king’s love of his own threatens to ruin itself with filial and patriotic jealousy.
The enraged king rips off his disguise, excoriating first his son, “whom son I dare not call,” as “too base to acknowledge”; then the shepherd, an “old traitor,” whose hanging, unfortunately, would only shorten his life for a week; and finally Perdita, “thou fresh piece / Of excellent witchcraft” who has taken advantage of his fool of an unworthy son (IV.iv.410-15). Polixenes behaves exactly as his brother had done in his succession crisis, although in this case he has command of the facts. Disowning his son, barring him from succeeding to the throne, he threatens Perdita with death if she ever contrives to see his son again. With that, he stalks out, leaving not only the lovers but Camillo behind. In his rage he has forgotten his own teaching on nature, which he had delivered to Perdita—that purity of breeding is no more, and perhaps somewhat less natural than intermixing of breeds by the art that is itself natural, including the natural arts of family formation and even politics, the founding and maintenance of cities.
“Even here undone!” Perdita says (IV.iv.433)—here in the countryside, far from the court. She remains a woman of spiritedness, saying she would have liked to tell the king that the same sun which shines on his court shines on this cottage. And she doesn’t forget to remind her beloved that “I told you what would come of this” (IV.iv.439). For his part, the shepherd blames both Florizel and Perdita for bringing ruin upon him.
The prince remains happy to relinquish his future throne for her: “I am heir to my affection” (IV.iv.473), heir to his truest nature, the nature that aims at reasonable and artful ‘hybridization.’ Camillo objects: “This is desperate, sir” (IV.iv.477). You may call it so, Florizel replies, “but it does fulfill my vow,” uphold my honor (IV.iv.478). “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 seas hides / In unknown fathoms, will I break my oath / To this my fair belov’d.” (IV.iv.480-85). He intends to put to sea with her; he does not say whereto, because he doesn’t know. He announces that he and his future bride will be “slaves to chance” (IV.iv.532). And so he must be, having failed to respect old father Time any more than he respected his father the king, conveiving no erious plan for the future, for the day after the wedding.
And that’s the problem. Florizel is full of noble sentiments, but unlike his betrothed, and (fortunately, as it happens) the prudent Camillo, he never thinks more than one moment ahead. Old Father Time knows him, but he doesn’t know Old Father Time; he lives entirely in the present and the immediate future. Camillo sees how his own intention, to return to Sicilia, and Florizel’s intention, to escape Bohemia with Perdita, may unite for the benefit of all. Citing his loyal services to his father, he suggests that he can be equally devoted to his son, the one “nearest to him” (IV.iv.514). If you will but “embrace my direction,” I can contrive a better plot than whatever Fortune likely will impose. “You know / Prosperity’s the very bond of love, / Whose fresh complexion and whose heart together / Affliction alters.” (IV.iv.564-65). Perdita objects, saying that “affliction may subdue the cheek / But not take in the mind” (IV.iv.568-69)—another worthy sentiment, to which Camillo gives due praise, but not a thought that addresses the problem at hand.
Camillo proposes that they embark for Sicilia, where King Leontes will treat you as a son, having lost his own son as one consequence of his jealous rage, sixteen years ago. Once again, the couple will disguise themselves. Florizel will wear the clothes of Autolycus, which he obtains in exchange for his fine court-garments. For his part, Camillo will return to King Polixenes, report the escape, then accompany the king in his chase after them, to Sicilia—effectively hitching a free ride on the royal train.
As for Autolycus, he never lacks a scheme of his own, never lacks a way to exploit time. He has just returned from picking the pockets of a crowd gathered to hear the shepherd’s son sing to his two favorite shepherdesses, which is “the time that the unjust man doth thrive” (IV.iv.662). He doesn’t so much plan ahead as he seizes immediate opportunities, “smell[ing] out work for th’ other senses” (IV.iv.664). Just as Leontes defined the world in terms of bawdry, Autolycus defines it in terms of theft. The young prince is stealing himself from his father. The gods themselves are thieves, and Mercury, the god-thief, is Autolycus’ model. Although he could disclose Camillo’s plot to the king, he won’t. “I hold it the more knavery to conceal it; and therein am I constant to my profession” (IV.iv.672). A person whose wit is all in his senses, his knowledge is the cunning of the ‘con’ artist, his morality the honor among thieves.
The times provide him with another ripe opportunity for gain. The shepherd’s son advises his father to tell King Polixenes that Perdita isn’t his daughter but a foundling. He can prove this by showing the king the “secret things” he found in the bag next to the infant (IV.iv.684). Now dressed in the finery he acquired from the prince, Autolycus overawes the rubes, frightens them into giving him some of their gold as protection money, then accompanies them on their mission to catch up with the king before he leaves for Sicilia. Autolycus pauses to praise himself: Fortune is courting him now “with a double occasion and a means to do the prince my master good, which who knows how that may turn back to my advancement?” (IV.iv.816-18).
By far the longest scene in the play, Scene iv of Act IV takes more time because in it Shakespeare portrays the intricate patterns human beings can weave into time, and have been woven into by it, and by the nature that weaves its own patterns, in time. Human beings can improve nature by their art, especially by prudent ‘breeding’ of flowers and of themselves, through marriage. Good marriages can perpetuate a good regime, through time. Human beings can also corrupt nature by their art, by thinking of nature and the gods as their partners in crime. Human beings, and especially rulers, can corrupt nature by letting their natural passions, especially their love of their own, override their natural reason. What King Leontes did to himself, to his family, and to Sicilia in letting his love for his own wife run beyond any reasonable limits King Polixenes has begun to do in his love for his own son, and his son has begun to do in his love for his own beloved. Camillo, who also loves his own, his own native country and king, is the only one who has the prudence to plot a good end to the badly plotted plans of the others.
At the palace in Sicilia, Cleomenes would persuade King Leontes that he has done his penitence, performing it with “saint-like sorrow” for many years, more than repaying his trespass (V.i.2). “Do as the heavens have done: forget your evil; / With them forgive yourself” (V.i.5-6). Cleomenes speaks rather like a twenty-first-century therapist or New-Age ‘Christian’ pastor. The King will not forgive himself for making his kingdom “heirless” and for causing the death of his wife, “the sweet’st companion that e’er man / Bred his hopes out of” (V.i.10-12).
Concurring with the king, not the counselor, Paulina speaks like her namesake, the Apostle Paul, one who never overlooked human guilt. You killed your wife, she reminds him—a woman superior to the amalgamation of all the virtues of all the other women in the world. Leontes can only ask Paulina for mercy, if in the kingly manner of commanding: “Say so but seldom” (V.i.19).
Cleomenes persists. You, Paulina “might have spoken a thousand things that would / Have done the time more benefit, and grac’d / Your kindness better” (V.i.21-23). Here, time means circumstances, the conditions prevailing at this time—more specifically, the political circumstances, which Cleomenes would have Paulina consider in accordance with nature (kindness) and grace, which might be a human enhancement of nature or a gift of God. Dion unfolds the political consideration more fully, saying that the king should marry again. In refusing to consider such an act, Paulina shows no pity “for the state” of Sicilia, and no “remembrance” of the king’s “sovereign name” (V.i.25-26). You “consider little / What dangers, by his Highness’ fail of issue, / May drop upon his kingdom and devour / Incertain lookers-on” (V.i.27-29). Given this time, what could be more holy than a new marriage for the king, a new heir to his throne for his kingdom?
Paulina has a ready answer to this politic consideration: God disagrees. Apollo’s oracle has decreed that Leontes shall not have an heir until his lost child has been found. This, she adds, is as unlikely as the chance that her husband Antigonus, long missing and rightly presumed dead, will rise from the grave. And she reminds the king that even Alexander the Great left his crown not to an heir (his wife was pregnant with his only son) but to “th’ worthiest” man in his empire, “so his successor / Was like to be the best” (V.i.98-99); she refers to one version of Alexander’s last words, “I bequeath my kingdom tôi kratikôi“—to the strongest. Stopping short of imitating Alexander, whom Paulina has turned into a man who thinks of honor and goodness, the king agrees that there are “no more such wives” as Hermione, and “therefore no wife” for him (V.i.56). If I were to take another wife, Hermione’s spirit, he says, would arise to rebuke him, and he swears never to marry without Paulina’s permission, which she tells him she will not grant unless another “as like Hermione as is her picture” appears (V.i.74), or rather “when your first queen’s again in breath” (V.i.83).
As in so much here, such a one will appear suddenly, accompanying the son of his childhood friend. Leontes himself so remarks: Florizel’s arrival is “out of circumstance”—untimely—and “sudden,” which suggests to the experienced king that “‘Tis not a visitation framed, but forced / By need and accident,” especially in view of the few attendants accompanying the couple (V.i.91-92). For her part, Paulina is skeptical in another way. To the servant who announces their approach, praising Perdita as “the most peerless piece of earth, I think, / That e’er the sun shone bright on,” she laments, “O Hermione / As every present time doth boast itself / Above a better gone, so must thy grave / Give way to what’s seen now” (V.i.93-98). True enough, but the servant insists, that this woman—well, “Women will love her that she is a woman / More worth than any man; men that she is / The rarest of all women” (V.i.110-11). When the couple does arrive, Leontes sides with the servant, calling Perdita a goddess, while expressing his regret, misery and remorse for “mine own folly” in ruining his family and his friendship with his childhood friend, Florizel’s father (V.i.136).
Florizel has prepared his covering lies. His father commanded him to come to Sicilia with the message that he remains Leontes’ friend, that only infirmity prevents him from making the trip himself, and that Florizel’s ‘wife’ is from Libya. Their retinue is modest because he has ordered several of his attendants to return home to assure King Polixenes of his son’s safe arrival. Again suddenly, news arrives that the supposedly home-ridden king has arrived with Camillo, whom Florizel assumes has betrayed him.
Having caught the young man in his lies, King Leontes at first gravely admonishes him: “I am sorry / Most sorry, you have broken from his liking / Where you were tied in duty; and as sorry / Your choice is not so rich in worth as beauty, / That you may enjoy her” (V.i.210-214). Florizel can only plead faithful love as his defense. Fortune may have proved an enemy, bringing the king of Bohemia so soon behind his own arrival, but Fortune has the power “to change our loves” (V.i.218). This being so, King Leontes, remember when “you ow’d no more to time / Than I do now,” when you were young, with few years behind you (V.i.219-20). Be “mine advocate” with my father; he will listen to his old friend (V.i.221). Leontes quite reasonably doubts that he will do so, and (the very Pauline) Paulina chimes in to chide the king for looking too intently at the beauteous Perdita, and to tell him to remember something else, namely that Hermione “was more worth such gazes / Than what you look on now” (V.i.226-27). After excusing himself to his own accuser by remarking the astonishing resemblance of Perdita to his wife, he tells Florizel that, in light of her beauty, he will defend him to his father on the grounds that “Your honor [was] not o’erthrown by your desires” in choosing her (V.i.230).
Shakespeare does not present the discovery of Perdita’s true identity. He the description of the scene to observers. In front of the palace Autolycus, who very much wants to know what has happened, asks a gentleman who witnessed the scene from a distance, having been ordered out of the room along with all who were not principals in the matter. When shown the contents of the bag the shepherd found with the infant, the gentleman reports, Leontes and Camillo “look’d as they had heard of a world ransom’d, 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 th’ importance were joy or sorrow—but in the extremity of the one it must needs be” (V.ii.14-18). The wisest beholder cannot know the human things only by seeing; he must hear human speech, as Socrates taught by going to the marketplace instead of gazing at the stars (then supposed to be the rulers of human destinies) as Plato taught in the dialogues he wrote after following his teacher to the marketplace, listening silently to his conversations with the persons he meets there. So Shakespeare teaches in every play.
A second gentleman arrives; he has heard them speak. “The oracle is fulfill’d: the king’s daughter is found” (.ii.23-24). This satisfies their wonder at what’s been seen; the first gentleman saw joyful not sorrowful men. But who is the king’s daughter? A third gentleman, the king’s steward, emerges to tell them that it is Perdita, and that the royal families have reconciled, and that Paulina’s sorrow at hearing the suspected death of her husband, many years earlier, has found a countervailing joy in the fulfillment of the oracle, the return of Hermione’s daughter.
The third gentleman concludes his report by saying that Perdita and her newfound families have gone to see a statue of her mother “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”—as God had, and as God did—would “beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly is he her ape.” (V.ii.90-94). A pupil of Raphael, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s grandparents, Romano was an extraordinarily versatile artist—painter, architect, sculptor, and, perhaps dearest to the playwright’s heart, a costume and scenery designer for comedies. And like his master, Romano combined Christian and classical motifs in his works, furthering the same dialogue between the ‘ancients’ and the (Christian) ‘moderns’ Shakespeare himself engaged in.
The gentlemen leave to witness the viewing, leaving Autolycus, the shepherd and the shepherd’s son (newly ennobled by the prince for their services to himself and the royal families) to perform their own parody of a reconciliation, which depends not on true speech but empty words, when the son promises to pronounce Autolycus “as honest a true fellow as any in Bohemia” when presented to the royals (V.ii.150-51). After all, if shepherds can become nobles by being pronounced to be such by a prince, surely a rogue may be pronounced honorable by the newly ennobled. Wiser beholders of the scene will consider that while words are indispensable supplements to sights, when it comes to insight, their mere incantation has no power at all (independent of consent, obedience) unless pronounced by a supremely powerful god whose words themselves constitute the power of action. Both kings learned this. Leontes learned that thinking and calling his wife an adulteress didn’t make her one; Polixenes learned that commanding his son to obey didn’t make him obedient.
At the chapel on Paulina’s property, the two kings, their children, Camillo and Paulina wonder at the statue of Hermione. Before the unveiling, Leontes and Paulina exchange graceful blessings; Paulina especially, knowing the harshness with which she has treated the king for so long, welcomes his coming here: “It is a surplus of your grace, which never / My life may last to answer (V.iii.7-8).
When she unveils the statue, all wonder at its lifelikeness, its likeness to nature, even to the detail of new wrinkles on her skin, wrinkles Romano is said to have added, revising her face in accordance with time—in Paulina’s words, “mak[ing] her as she liv’d now” (V.iii.31). Leontes marvels at the statue’s appearance of “warm life,” shamed once more “for being more stone than it” (V.iii.35,38). The statue is “royal,” magical in its “majesty,” because it has “my evils conjured to remembrance” and caused Hermione’s living daughter to stand still, like a statue, transfixed (V.iii.38-42). Her father’s words reawaken Perdita’s power of speech and action. “Do not say ’tis superstition that I kneel” before this statue (V.iii.43); it is so lifelike, I do not commit idolatry. She addresses the statue as if were her mother, asking, “Give me that hand of yours to kiss” (V.iii.46).
Paulina interrupts to warn that the statue is newly-painted, not yet dry; do not touch it. She would like to re-veil it, lest Leontes think it really moves, and indeed Leontes does so think, saying its eyes seem to move, its veins pulse blood. When he moves forward to kiss the statue, Paulina again warns against staining oneself “with oily painting” (V.iii.83). Obeying the command not to touch, Leontes and Perdita nonetheless refuse to leave off gazing. This forces Paulina to make a crucial choice.
“If you can behold it”—if you are strong enough to bear it—I’ll “make the statue move indeed, descend, / And take you by the hand” (V.iii.88-90). But then you will think not that I am an idolater but a witch—the accusation Polixenes had leveled against Perdita, perhaps unbeknownst to Paulina. To do so, therefore, I require you to “awake your faith” or, if you refuse, to leave (V.iii.95). No one leaves; each passes the test set by Pauline Paulina.
“Music, awake her,” she commands (V.iii.98). Music, which had enlivened and given harmony to the dancing shepherds in Bohemia—music, the sound which keeps time, and to which human beings keep time—accompanies Paulina’s command to the statue. “‘Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach; / Strike all that look upon with marvel…. Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him / Dear life redeems you.” (V.iii.99-103). It is time: words and actions now fit the circumstance not only of the king’s contrition but of the daughter’s return, the redemption of the mother’s hope. And to the living witnesses: “Start not; her actions shall be holy as / You hear my spell is lawful” (V.iii.104-05). Hermione is no less good than she was when falsely accused, but from ‘standing accused’ she now moves, living, among the living. “O, she’s warm!” Leontes exclaims (V.iii.110)—alive as she had seemed to him when looking but disallowed from touching. “If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (V.iii.111-12). He had obeyed Paulina’s command not to touch the ‘statue’ as a king respecting the property of a citizen. He now issues a royal command to legalize good magic.
If it is magic. The king may well doubt it. The funeral of wife and son which he attended but Shakespeare did not describe; the claim that an Italian artist had painted wrinkles on a statue to make the figure appear to have aged; his own perception of life and movement in the figure as he stood beholding it; Paulina’s prudent caution in speaking truth (I am not a witch) even as she maintains a pious lie: all this points to the truth, that Hermione has been living in seclusion at her friend’s house, all along. And Hermione’s words confirm this. To her daughter she says, “Thou shalt hear that I, / Knowing by Paulina that the oracle / Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserv’d / Myself to see the issue.” (V.iii.125-28). If she had been a statue, she could have known nothing, heard nothing; if she had been a statue, she did not preserve herself. Statues don’t make themselves, although some of Shakespeare’s Romans might be said to aspire to make themselves into statues. [1]
“There’s time enough for that” hearing of the story, Paulina interrupts—again discreetly, knowing that the elaborate ruse she and Hermione have now completed ought to be disclosed opportunely, at the right time (V.iii.128). But first she laments, all of you are “precious winners” in this plot, but “I, an old turtle[dove] / Will wing me to some wither’d bough,” with no living mate (V.iii.131-33). Good-humored King Leontes puts an immediate stop to her understandable self-pity. “O peace, Paulina! / Thou shouldst a husband take by my consent / As I by thine a wife” (V.iii.135-37). Camillo shall be your “honorable husband” (V.iii.143). The honor of every member of the royal party has been vindicated.
Calling Polixenes again his brother, asking his pardon, and Hermione’s, “that e’er I put between your holy looks / My ill suspicion” (V.iii.148-49), King Leontes concludes, “Good Paulina, / Lead us from hence where we may leisurely / Each one demand and answer to his part / Perform’d in this wide gap of time since first / We were dissever’d. Hastily lead away.” (V.iii.152-55). The king has learned to use time well: slowness for discussion, haste for executive action. Seeing is the knowledge reason brings, insight; hearing is the knowledge faith brings by taking someone at his word; touch is the knowledge action brings, the only knowledge that affects both knower and known at the same time. Leonine Leontes has learned how to rule rightly by coordinating all these senses, and all the ways of knowing they represent.
The royal succession of both regimes has been secured, along with the alliance of Sicilia and Bohemia, founded upon the renewed brotherly friendship of the kings. Paulina’s rapid action in leading the royal party—in her leading, her Pauline character is acknowledged by the king—will lead to leisured discussion, the prerequisite of learning. They each will learn of the parts performed by the others. By fusing the fiction of the characters’ many plots with the reality of actors playing roles on a stage, Shakespeare returns his audience to reality, having invited them better to understand nature and convention, truth-telling and lies, seeing, hearing, and touching—the portals of understanding—better than they had before.
Love, especially the love of one’s own, and honor stand at the core of the play. Each can be perverted into jealous passion that dismisses any evidence contrary to the suspicions of the lover. The remedy for restoring the lover to reason, to bringing the honor-lover back from the dishonor incurred by his passion cannot be philosophy if the lover is no philosopher, and has no prospect of becoming one. The remedy must be another form of love. This is where the Christian themes of humility and agapic love come in. Paulina’s love for King Leontes is Pauline—harsh and exacting on the sinner but for his own good, and open to mercy and forgiveness when true repentance has been demonstrated. This partly explains her patience, another distinctively Christian virtue, seen in the long endurance of her plot to conceal the queen’s survival. In keeping with the theme of time, and timing, throughout, Paulina understands that ‘only time will tell.’
Paulina’s plot also bespeaks her patient faith in the oracle of Apollo. The mixture of classical-pagan and Christian themes in the play has led to disputes over when the action occurs. Clearly, given the specific reference to Giulio Romano, it must be set in Christian-modern times, at the height of the Renaissance. Renaissance Italy extended the familiar practice of typology—of seeing Old-Testament figures as ‘types’ or precursors of Christ—to figures in classical antiquity. Apollo was often represented as one such; Michelangelo gives the Christ in his painting “The Last Judgment” the face of the Apollo Belvedere. In this play, Apollo is described as the son of Jove, and in English the pun on ‘son’ and ‘sun’ can be deployed in allusion to the pagan god’s association with the sun, carried daily in a chariot across the sky. In Italian Renaissance literature, in Dante and Ficino, this association was well-established; more, Apollo was understood to be the enemy of Aphrodite, a god of reason not of passion. Jesus, who commands his followers to be as prudent as serpents and harmless as doves, who firmly opposes eroticism in favor of agape, can thus be considered as having been foreshadowed by the pagan god, now considered as entirely mythical. Both natural sun and the Son of God do indeed shine on courts and cottages alike, as Perdita once remarked.
Christianity also enters into Shakespeare’s treatment of time. In the New Testament, time does not always march steadily, as old Chronos does. Time is not only chronos but kairos. It can overthrow laws and either plant or overwhelm customs, not only by wearing them down over the years but suddenly, in an hour as it were, in the moment of God’s creation or in the resurrection of Christ. The suddenness of so many events in the play registers this dimension of time. Hence also the importance of memory, necessary in a world in which time brings changes, slow or instantaneous; without remembrance, timeless nature and timeless divinity cannot be respected.
It is the Christian aspect of the play that confuses playgoers and readers accustomed to Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies. In his comedies, Shakespeare often presents an incipiently tragic circumstance, happily resolved. In his tragedies, Shakespeare always brings in fools, clowns, and loveable rogues, often showing the tragic folly of his heroes. Nonetheless, the genres are clear-cut. The Winter’s Tale points to Christ, Christian love—to the tragic death of the Man of Sorrow which nonetheless has a supremely happy ending in His Resurrection, and looks ahead, with patience, to the final happy ending prophesied in the Book of Revelation. In this play, Shakespeare first separates tragic Sicilia from comic Bohemia, then marries them. In this he is quite Christian.
It is also true that to represent Apollo as a ‘type’ of Christ can go in the other direction. Many atheists conclude that Apollo isn’t the type of Christ but the prototype, that Christianity merely takes up Jewish and pagan motifs. Such ambiguity may be seen in the play. Is Hermione first a woman, then a statue magically or miraculously transformed into a woman again? Or is she rather the natural Hermione, all along? In the first case, the wonder of the royal party is religious; in the second, it is philosophic or, more precisely, proto-philosophic.
When Shakespeare leaves his stage, he always leaves such wonder behind. He sees his characters and he sees his audience, hears them and speaks to them, and acts out of knowing them and loving what is best for them. He is the wisest beholder.
Notes
- This is a point made by Michael Platt in his fine study, Rome and Romans According to Shakespeare, reviewed elsewhere on this website.
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