You Speak a Language That I Understand Not: The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter's Tale | III. "BE STONE NO MORE"
III. "BE STONE NO MORE"
The literary figure to whom Shakespeare turns to explore such a vexed relation to the world is Ovid's Pygmalion.46 For both skepticism and projection join hands to fashion Leontes's misery (e.g., "Your actions are my dreams"). On David Ward's persuasive argument for retaining the punctuation of the First Folio and for remembering the contemporary meaning of "coactive" as "coercive" or "compulsory" (and not merely "acting in concert"), Leontes's speech about "affection" is stressing "the coercive nature of affection," its "action upon the 'nothing' it generates in the imagination" (as Ward parses it, "Affection . . . Thou . . . Communicat'st with dreams . . . With what's unreal: thou co-active art, / And fellow'st nothing" [1.2.138-42]).47 In addition, it is through Ovid's Orpheus-Pygmalion sequence—particularly as given the influential contours of Petrarchan linguistic self-consciousness—that...
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