SOURCE: “Dualism and the Hope of Reunion in The Winter's Tale,” in Soundings, Vol. LXIX, No. 3, Fall, 1986, pp. 294-309.

[In the following essay, Marshall argues that the statue scene in The Winter's Tale suggests a modification of orthodox Christian eschatology by denying the dualism of body and soul. Relating this scene to a sixteenth-century heresy known as mortalism—which held that both soul and body were dead until judgment day, when both would be resurrected—Marshall emphasizes the communal as well as the miraculous nature of Hermione's reanimation.]

In Shakespeare's England, the doctrine of bodily resurrection was avidly proclaimed and enthusiastically credited. John Donne, for instance, wrote in 1627 of how one's arm could be “lost in Europe,” his leg “lost in Afrique or Asia, scores of yeers between,” yet when God “beckens for the bodies of his Saints … that body that was scattered over all the elements, is sate down at the right hand of God, in a glorious resurrection.”¹ Advancing scientific knowledge and philosophical skepticism have gradually undermined belief in bodily resurrection; in our own century, the Anglican commission on Christian doctrine resolved: “we ought to reject quite frankly the literalistic belief in future resuscitation of the actual physical frame which is laid in the tomb.”² This radical shift in mainstream Christian notions about the body's ultimate fate has considerable relevance to the awakening of Hermione's statue at the end of The Winter's Tale. Calling the event a “resurrection,” as many critics do, effectively suggests a religious analogy for a miraculous event in the play. Yet because the theology of resurrection has become abstract, use of the term may well obfuscate what it originally revealed: an intense valuation of the human body.

In order to set the statue scene in meaningful historical context, more specific ways of probing Renaissance thought regarding inanimate bodies, and particularly regarding lifeless bodies coming back to life, are needed. Renaissance grave statuary provides one such way.³ Most prominent among the few available models for Renaissance notions of statuary were funeral effigies (painted figures placed on top of coffins) and tomb monuments. Both illustrate an intimate connection between death, dead bodies, and statuary; both bear significantly on the associations a Jacobean audience would have brought to The Winter's Tale.

In one compelling sense, all actors and actresses are moving statues, breathing art, animated in part by the playwright, or the script, and in part by the audience's sympathy, its imaginative consent. Living sculpture is, however, the particular crux of The Winter's Tale's conclusion, for Hermione's statue, once animated, becomes Hermione's living body, and conversely, the statue represents—or is—Hermione's inanimate, hence dead, body. Charles Frey writes of the “superior revelations of performance”⁴ as particularly important in the case of The Winter's Tale, and actors and audiences offer repeated testimony that something strange, something uncanny, is felt at the moment when Hermione's statue steps from its pedestal. This sort of response is no less typical for audiences of modern productions of the play than for those in earlier ages,⁵ when an intact model of bodily resurrection was available. In fact, the aesthetic and religious modes of interpreting The Winter's Tale meet, so to speak, in the churchyard, for memorials and representations of the dead relate directly to issues of individual and social identity, issues that lie at the heart of the dramatic experience, and particularly the dramatic experience of a lifeless form coming to life.

II

Obsequial rites are enacted like a drama, the deceased being the principal actor, while the bystanders play the subordinate roles.⁶

State funerals are today, as they were in Shakespeare's day, affairs of great pomp and pageantry, acknowledging the distinct threat to society when an important individual's death marks the closing of an era, yet asserting, through ceremony, the continuity of government and tradition. The body of the deceased serves as the main prop, or “the principal actor,” in this pageant of death. Not only the bodies laid out in a nation's capitol or paraded through ranks of mourners command this sort of dramatic interest. For at any funeral the dead body strikingly illustrates the text preached to the faithful each week, contemplated by the thoughtful every day, and lurking in the recesses of every conscious mind: dust to dust, ashes to ashes: this is one role we will all play. But while the compelling suggestive power of a corpse has remained fairly constant over the centuries, funeral customs producing the specific drama of death have undergone significant shifts. The funeral effigy, although an important actor in Elizabethan and Jacobean funerals, no longer appears. What precisely was its role?

Not surprisingly, interpretations of the effigy's role are mixed. Before considering the various explanations, however, we should note that the image of a lifelike effigy on top of a coffin for the funeral procession was pervasive enough to be perpetuated in stone monuments. The double-decker monument generally featured a recumbent “transi,” or decomposed body, accompanied by a “vif,” or lifelike figure, in a recumbent, semi-reclining, or kneeling position. Philippe Ariés says this model “dominate[d] funeral iconography from the late Middle Ages to the beginning of modern times.”⁷ Although precursors of such tombs appeared in France in the thirteenth century, the “combination of transi and recumbent effigy was first employed in England,” during the fifteenth century, according to historian Henriette S'Jacob. S'Jacob calls the biform tombstone “an imitation” of the custom of funeral effigies.⁸ But whether effigies inspired the biform tombstone or developed simultaneously matters less than the familiarity of this iconography of death through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England. In the churchyard and in funeral processions, people in Shakespeare's day were accustomed to seeing death figured on two levels.

Those who assert the importance of the memento mori tradition connect the model with “a morbid preoccupation with death”: the upper figure supposedly represents human vanity, while below “the pomp of the effigy,” a cadaver indicates “man's inexorable and common fate.”⁹ In funeral iconography, however, the great age of the memento mori had concentrated on the transi alone—and gruesome decomposed corpses were sufficient to point “man's inexorable fate.” The addition of the upper figure, the vif, indicates a shift in conceptions of death, a growing emphasis on the separation of body from soul, that great theme of the metaphysical poets. Ariés suggests that the lower recumbent figure represents the body, and the upper figure the soul, often kneeling and frequently beatific as it anticipates the joy of heaven.¹⁰ This dualistic interpretation accords well with monuments in the Catholic countries that are Ariés' primary concern, where the vif was typically in a kneeling position, where perhaps salvation seemed fairly certain. When the upper figure was recumbent, however, as it typically was in English monuments, the body-soul division seems less clearly indicated; the two figures are parallel, not contrasted. Bergeron's explanation that the funeral effigy illustrated “the symbolism of the king's two bodies”¹¹ may be relevant here, despite its limitations. Obviously this symbolism fails to account for non-royal effigies and sepulchrals, but the notion of the king's two bodies was itself “crypto-theological,” as Ernst Kantorowicz puts it.¹² The image was derived from the doctrine of Christ's two natures, and thus this transference of terms points back to a duality in the Christian view of man.¹³ Curiously, there was, according to Kantorowicz, no continental parallel in terminology or conception to the English idea of the king's two bodies.¹⁴ This peculiarly English notion of royal duality and the early appearance in England of biform tombstones may suggest a different conception of mortality from that on the continent—not wildly different, but less settled, less assured, less disposed to catholicity, in both senses of that word. The concept of purgatory had served the Roman church well as a way of answering questions about the individual's fate immediately after his death. Protestantism, in abolishing purgatory, reopened the way for doubts about the transition to an afterlife. Orthodox Protestant mortality assigned the body to the grave until Judgment Day, when it would be resurrected to rejoin the soul, which entered heaven at the moment of death. The faithful knew they should heed the fate of the soul, and disregard the dross of earthly existence. Yet the concept of resurrection itself acknowledges a human love for the body. As seventeenth-century theologian Richard Baxter puts it:

[T]he soul separated from the body, is not a perfect man, so it doth not enjoy the Glory and happiness so fully and so perfectly as it shall do after the Resurrection, when they are again conjoined.¹⁵

This interval of separation of soul from body threatened loss of identity: confidence of one's existence without the physical form demands a rare degree of faith, of spiritual wherewithal. Long before the Reformation crystallized the issues, tensions regarding the afterlife were reflected in the double-decker monument.

S'Jacob distinguishes two conceptions of the afterlife which are expressed by sepulchral symbolism:

On the one hand the grave represented the dwelling place in which the defunct continues his existence still endowed with human feelings and needs, or where he lies in eternal rest. The second conception deals with the immortal soul, which bereft of its body embarked on its celestial journey. … According to the degree of worldly preoccupation, the sepulchre lays more or less stress on the memory of the deceased on earth.¹⁶

The biform iconography of death might be interpreted as an attempt to encompass both ideas of the afterlife: an attempt, that is, to lay the body to rest and to memorialize the departed soul. Successful acceptance of such doctrine renders a perfect balance, like that achieved in Ben Jonson's “On My First Daughter”:

Whose soule heavens Queene, (whose name shee beares)
In comfort of her mothers teares,
Hath plac'd amongst her virgin-traine:
Where, while that sever'd doth remaine,
This grave partakes the fleshly birth.
Which cover lightly, gentle earth.(17)

Jonson's elegy for his son, however, which betrays a stronger emotional attachment than the poem for his infant daughter, significantly fails to reach a satisfactory consolation.

Increasing demands in the sixteenth century for actual portraits of the deceased on tombstones and effigies betray “more … stress on the memory of the deceased on earth.” S'Jacob writes of the ultimate difficulty of determining whether effigies were intended as symbolic representations of the soul or as portraits of the physical body of the deceased. Some sepulchral portraits may even have been inspired by “the desire of the soul to be re-incarnated into its former body.” In this case, “the effigy is no longer a symbol, but intended as a vehicle for the soul to inhabit,”¹⁸ and the notion of afterlife thus suggested more reminiscent of ancient Egyptian beliefs than of Western Christianity's. The eschatology expressed by the double-decker tombstone and its cousin the funeral effigy was probably no more precise than any other formulation; notions of afterlife are by their nature imprecise. Nevertheless, it seems clear that this biform iconography of death expressed keen valuation of the body, “the desire to preserve matter, the refusal to surrender it to the unknown great beyond.” Use of “a fictitious image” made it seem “as though the deceased were still living;”¹⁹ the effigy produced, in other words, a substitute immortality. A work of art, a shared fiction, a denial of death: The Winter's Tale addresses the same fantasy in similar terms.

III

Although the animation of Hermione's statue constitutes a denial of death, The Winter's Tale as a whole acknowledges human mortality. The visual evidence on stage of Hermione's death is confirmed by Paulina's impassioned report in III,ii. It is reiterated by Leontes' exiting to view “the dead bodies of my queen and son” (III,ii,235),²⁰ by Antigonus' dream of Hermione in III,iii (which he interprets for the audience as proof that she is dead), by Polixenes' words in IV,ii, and by the extensive discussion in V,i of Leontes' guilt, penitence, and possible remarriage. An absence of sixteen years—“that wide gap” (IV,i,7)—has approximately, or virtually, the finality of death. So reason, and the text of the play, indicate that Hermione dies. But reason falters when the memorial representation of the queen comes to life. Unlike the discovery of long-lost Perdita, Hermione's return can be assimilated to nothing in ordinary experience. Because this return leaps outside the bounds of experience, most critics resort to purely aesthetic terms in describing it; and clearly the statue scene is not realistic.

But while Hermione's animation contrasts with normal experience in the world, it nevertheless accords with a certain facet of imaginative experience that the religious climate of Jacobean England would have fostered and encouraged. The Winter's Tale is devoid of anything like doctrinal assurance, but the statue scene suggests what reunion in heaven would be like; it suggests, at the very least, heaven as Leontes would wish it to be. The statue's animation, dramatizing the change from death to life, fulfills the structure of hope offered by Christianity. Yet the actual change—in effect, the resurrection—remains a mystery, in accordance with Paul's terms in I Corinthians 15 regarding “how the dead shall be raised”: “behold, I shew you a mystery.” Hermione does not “make it manifest where she has liv'd, / Or how stol'n from the dead!” (V,iii,114-15), as Polixenes desires; she speaks only to acknowledge her bond with Perdita. In fact, the locus of dramatic concern falls less on Hermione herself than on the charged reactions of those around her. Their experience, which is also the theatrical experience of the audience, is one of death followed by miraculous reunion.

The emotional resonance of tragic death followed by recreation forms the basis of the bipartite structure of The Winter's Tale—three acts of destruction followed by two of restoration. The play is tragicomic in a Christian sense: suffering and death are ultimately contained by a benevolent order. Yet because the first three acts are so bleak, and because, in the midst of the reanimation scene, we are reminded that death is not an illusion (Mamillius and Antigonus remain dead), the play emphasizes the tragic part of the pattern more strongly than is customary in orthodox Christianity. Its pattern parallels the vision of human destiny associated with mortalism, a widespread heresy in post-Reformation England.²¹

Mortalists denied the existence of the human soul from the moment of death to the Last Judgment. Unlike orthodox Christian eschatology, which attempted to placate fears by assigning only the body to the grave, this heresy in effect extended the grasp, and hence the terror, of death. Mortalists accordingly placed supreme emphasis on resurrection as the act of new creation that would redeem both body and soul from death. Adherents of the heresy in Renaissance England believed that mortalism best acknowledged the respective limits of reason and faith. Orthodoxy granted the soul ongoing life supposedly in order to loosen the human grip on earthly existence: death of the body should not matter if the soul lives on. But to mortalists, the notion of an immortal soul subverted rational experience: one sees death, knows it; one can only believe in immortality, for there is no objective proof for it. According to mortalism, it is more logical to assert that both body and soul die and that both body and soul will be resurrected. Instead of positing one component of human existence (the soul) which is virtually immune to death, mortalists applied Christianity's tragicomic pattern (death followed by resurrection) to each individual in both aspects, body and soul. This acknowledgement of death's power to obliterate the individual accords with the emotional reality of loss, as well as with logic and observable fact. Only a miracle could re-create a person lost in death's oblivion. Mortalists believed that such a miracle would occur at the end of time; theirs was then an extreme form of Christian faith in the resurrection.

Sir Thomas Browne, a self-confessed mortalist in his youth, indicates this disjunction between matters of reason and belief when he expounds on the General Resurrection as an act of new creation:

How shall the dead arise, is no question of my faith; to beleeve onely possibilities, is not faith, but meere Philosophy; many things are true in Divinity, which are neither inducible by reason, nor confirmable by sense, and many things in Philosophy confirmable by sense, yet not inducible by reason. … I beleeve that our estranged and divided ashes shall unite againe, that our separated dust after so many pilgrimages and transformations into the parts of mineralls, Plants, Animals, Elements, shall at the voyce of God returne into their primitive shapes; and joyne againe to make up their primary and predestinate formes.²²

Such balancing of rational experience and miracle bears a curious thematic appropriateness to The Winter's Tale, with its structural rhythm of loss and recovery. The similarity of mood and of dictated response are not coincidental, for mortalism is apposite to the statue scene in subtle but powerfully suggestive ways. The play insists that Hermione is dead, then restores her to life by theatrical miracle. And because this miracle is acted, not spoken of or merely imagined, attention centers on Hermione's body. On stage, death implicates body and soul, for here no character can be separated from her body, the moving statue which portrays her. Drama assumes a kind of mortalism, because it weighs the “body” and the “soul” of its characters equally.

The Winter's Tale shares with Hamlet a deep concern with mourning. But where the tragedy resolves the impulse to mourn through action and the consolation of memory, the romance resorts to something outside ordinary experience, and heals Leontes' grief, still raw after sixteen years, through miracle. The fantasy is pleasing because of the inadequacy of Christian consolation: Christian doctrine, strictly applied, has never accorded comfortably with the human impulse to mourn. Ostentatious displays of grief, elaborate funeral rituals, sepulchral monuments were condemned by the Church fathers,²³ and might not exist at all if the Church's message were completely accepted. The faithful were instructed to be comforted—to rejoice—that the defunct had entered his or her inheritance in the beyond. But this consolation has failed, historically, to circumvent an emotional sense of loss. The stronger one's emotional attachments, the more devastating is the Biblical description of heaven:

[T]hey which shalbe counted worthie to enjoye that worlde, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marie wives, nether are maried. … For they … are equal unto the Angels.

(Luke 20. 35-36)²⁴

This doctrine proclaims what is perhaps most fearful about death—not only loss of husbands, wives, children, friends, but loss of what we think of as our selves. For if denied the other in heaven, how can one imagine one's own existence? Since human identity derives to such a large extent from relationships with other people, a heaven without marriage offers little comfort, for it seems to exclude the possibility of reunion, of restored intimacy with those who make life meaningful.

Severing soul from body, in heaven or in the interval between death and judgment day, has two disturbing implications—loss of personal identity, and loss of the other. Hence comes the drive, manifested in The Winter's Tale, to revise the church's vision of heaven to allow assurance of individual identity and to restore losses of human attachment. Such restoration in a sense only completes the implications of the doctrine of bodily resurrection, Christianity's acknowledgement of the sacredness of both flesh and spirit. Like many heresies, mortalism does not so much counter orthodoxy as develop an idea implicit in church doctrine.

Mortalism's relationship to the drive to solidify heaven is a paradoxical one. The heresy's basic tenet concerns the soul, not the body. Yet, as William Kerrigan points out in discussing Milton's heresies, mortalists denied the soul by way of saving the individual.²⁵ Placing the soul alongside the body in the grave abolished—though at considerable cost, to be sure—the specter of a disembodied soul; it eliminated what Calvin called “that violent separation, which nature shunneth.”²⁶ Against orthodoxy's proffered consolation—immortality of the soul—Milton asserted the strength of his inviolable person. While most seventeenth-century mortalists lacked Milton's compelling personal and theological reasons for embracing the heresy, I think the relationship between mortalism's popularity and a swelling sense of the integrity of the individual is clear and inescapable.

The sixteenth-century desire for actual portraits of the dead on monuments suggested the direction in which sepulchral symbolism would proceed. Dual model monuments fell out of favor; the lower figure, the transi, ceased to appear. In the words of Ariés, it was

as if despite the pressure of more elevated theologies and spiritualities, a stubborn belief in the integrity of the individual had triumphed, as if there could not be two different representations of the same person on the same tomb.²⁷

Mortalism's popularity attests to this implicit rejection of the vestiges of dualism that had girded medieval mystical notions of the afterlife. Proffered rewards in the next world were less and less able to outweigh earthly attachments. At one extreme, rejection of body-soul dualism implicitly entailed rejection as well of a heaven that failed to restore human relationships.

IV

At the close of King Lear, when the king comes on stage cradling Cordelia's dead body,²⁸ the audience may for a moment be uncertain whether she is dead or not. The feather fails to stir and we realize “she's dead as earth” (V,iii,262). But Lear's dying certainty that this was the faithful daughter, the one who refused to dissemble, works as a kind of reanimation, because Cordelia lives in those moments, for Lear at least, to a degree she never could before. Although dead, Cordelia is enriched with the meaning Lear invests in her.

A similar but more prolonged uncertainty occurs at the close of The Winter's Tale when, at the first glimpse of Hermione's statue, the audience is unsure whether the live actress represents a thing of stone or a woman pretending to be stone. They quickly recognize, of course, that this is an actress standing still, not a cunning replica; but the uncertainty as to whether she represents, theatrically, a statue or a real person renders an acute consciousness of the merging parameters of life, death, and illusion. The audience is thus buffeted within the theatrical experience at the same time as they are struck by an awareness of the experience as theater. The confusion increases through the long passage during which Hermione remains on the pedestal. Even when she steps down and embraces her husband, even when he gasps, “O, she's warm!” (V,iii,109), the audience may wonder how this can be Hermione herself. The characters in the play demand that she speak before they accept her as living, and many in the audience will leave the theater still questioning Hermione's return. Paulina's enigmatic “it appears she lives” may only enhance a suspicion that here appearance, as so frequently in Shakespeare, belies reality. Yet because Leontes, Perdita, and the others on stage respond as though Hermione is alive, most viewers will concur that this is the living queen, although opinions vary as to how she got there and where she might have been.

In the final moments of both King Lear and The Winter's Tale, the audience confronts a body of indeterminate status and, reminded of the actual experience of confronting a dead body, must realize the inexact correspondence between person and corpse. It is not simply a matter of identity residing in the soul and the body being extraneous, as medieval theologians would have maintained. The relationship between dead body and living soul is a fluid one on Shakespeare's stage. Only in the theater can “playing dead” equal “being dead;” only here can the submerged fiction of the funeral effigy be enacted; only here can the religious structure of hope be fulfilled. Cordelia wins immortality through art, the art of the drama, for she is resurrected each time the play is produced. But this immortality is possible only because of the compelling wish the audience shares with Lear that she not be dead, that her effigy be enlivened. So in spite of her death Cordelia lives for Lear, and because of her death she lives for the audience. Hermione's live body, on the other hand, seems at first glance more stone than flesh, and only gradually, reluctantly, do the court party—and the audience—grant her life. The scene at the end of The Winter's Tale reverses that in King Lear in the simple sense that Hermione is alive and Cordelia dead. But in a more complex analogy, each character achieves a living identity, is granted a sort of spiritual existence, by the responses of those around her: life inheres in communal bonds and emotional ties. Cordelia can achieve a new depth of identity after she is physically dead through Lear's belated recognition of her essence.²⁹ Leontes regains Hermione herself—not a mere memory or the ghost Antigonus saw—by means of her body. Hermione's living body, that is, must be given back to Leontes before he can realize her forgiveness, and only then can he free himself from life-constricting guilt.

The statue scene suggests that hopes of reunion depend upon resurrection of the body because, living in a world of physical forms, we recognize others, even those we know most intimately (and, we suppose, spiritually) by their bodies. It may be as difficult to imagine a heaven without bodies as a drama without actors. The statue scene also suggests a related notion, that resurrection of the individual alone is unimaginable. Because we identify ourselves largely through those we love and value life because of others, the hope of resurrection is a communal hope: “we do not hope for the resurrection of the body, but of our world: hence the idea of paradise.”³⁰ Hermione's statue thus becomes Hermione only through interaction with Leontes and Perdita; recovery of a statue kept “[lonely], apart” (V,iii,18), no matter how lifelike its wrinkles and stance, could only mock the woman who was Hermione.

The Winter's Tale, and Shakespeare's romances as a whole, offer a revision of orthodox eschatology. Against the scriptural assertion that there will be no marriage in heaven, they develop the image of the earthly family reconstituted. The statue scene in particular appeals to the emotional longing that produced mortalism, to a reluctance to assent to separation of soul from body. The prospect of such separation threatens not only the individual ego but every bond, every shared hope, everything human experience can teach of love. A powerful expression of this sentiment occurs in the Paradiso when the souls around Dante

plainly showed their desire for their dead bodies,—not perhaps for themselves alone, but for their mothers, for their fathers, and for the others who were dear before they became eternal flames.³¹

And similarly, the seventeenth-century poet Henry King suggests, in his Exequy for his wife, that the hope of resurrection cannot be a merely personal hope; King longs for Doomsday because

                                                                                                    Never shall I
Be so much blest, as to descry
A glympse of thee, till that Day come
Which shall the Earth to cinders doome,
And a fierce Feaver must calcine
The Body of this World, like Thine,
(My Little World!) That fitt of Fire
Once off, our Bodyes shall aspire
To our Soules' blisse: Then wee shall rise,
And view our selves with cleerer eyes
In that calme Region, where no Night
Can hide us from each other's sight.(32)

For King, the Last Day does not loom as the ominous occasion of judgment but promises resurrection of “Bodyes” that will allow reunion of “selves.” The poetic imagination transforms the orthodox position that bodily resurrection is necessary for complete bliss: in King's Exequy as in The Winter's Tale, future happiness can only follow reunion, which requires resurrection, communal resurrection. This hope of being given back our bodies, and hence each other, forms a central element of Shakespeare's eschatological imagination.

How available can the physical dynamic of The Winter's Tale be for a contemporary audience? Without general belief in resurrection, must Hermione's vivification speak solely (though compellingly) of art's power to surprise and restore us? Certainly more generally expressive of the modern sense of corpses would be a scene like that of Father Zosima's funeral in The Brothers Karamavoz, where the body's decay betrays the religious community's expectations of a religious miracle. The revealed experience is one of corruptibility, not preservation or vivification. Nevertheless, the novel eventually is able to affirm Christianity by concentrating on religion's consolation for the inevitability of loss, including that of the physical self.

Drama, in our own day as in Shakespeare's, stands unique among literary forms in the degree to which it depends upon an awareness of bodies. Film, while in many ways drama's modern counterpart, can never capture the physical pulse that beats in the theater, although film can acquaint an audience with the visceral shock produced by the return of someone believed to be dead. When, in the theater, we experience the felt difference between Hermione's statue and Hermione herself, we approach the sense of fruition associated with resurrection in Shakespeare's England. The Winter's Tale's theatrical model of revivification has largely transcended its original religious analogues, yet it retains the capacity to touch a deep and in many cases inarticulable desire for reunion after death. The statue scene powerfully illustrates how that desire depends upon the hope of reconstituted bodies.

Notes

1. John Donne, Sermons, ed. George E. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953-1962) 8: 98.

2. Doctrine in the Church of England (London, 1938) 208, cited in C. A. Patrides, “Renaissance and Modern Thought in the Last Things: A Study in Changing Conceptions,” Harvard Theological Review 51 (1958): 178.

3. Glynne Wickham (Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage [London: Routledge, 1969] 264) was, to my knowledge, the first to note a resemblance between Hermione's statue and grave effigies. Several recent articles discuss The Winter's Tale in the context of statuary. Leonard Barkan (“‘Living Sculptures’: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter's Tale,” ELH 48 [1981]: 639-67) connects the play with Ovidian metamorphosis and Michelangelo's theories of sculpture. David Bergeron (“The Restoration of Hermione in The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare's Romances Reconsidered, ed. Carol McGinnis Kay and Henry E. Jacobs [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978] 124-33) mentions the relevance of funeral effigies as an associative model, but does not probe the conceptual meanings of lifelike tomb figures. Bruce Smith (“Sermons in Stones: Shakespeare and Renaissance Sculpture,” Shakespeare Studies 17 [1985]: 1-24) focuses on dramaturgical aspects of what he calls “Hermione's effigy”: “More than a mockery of life, more than an object of veneration, Hermione's statue is finally the iconic focus of the tragicomedy” (19). Smith's emphasis comes closest to my own, but my argument is more concerned with religious and philosophical currents.

4. Charles Frey, “Interpreting The Winter's Tale,” SEL 18 (1978): 310.

5. Dennis Bartholome (The Winter's Tale in Performance in England and America, 1611-1976 [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982] 173-75, 192, 224-25) describes several particularly memorable contemporary performances: Diana Wynyard's Hermione at the Phoenix Theatre in 1951, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production in 1975, and the 1976 production at Stratford-upon-Avon by John Barton and Trevor Nunn.

6. Henriette S'Jacob, Idealism and Realism: A Study of Sepulchral Symbolism (Leiden: Brill, 1954) 69.

7. Philippe Ariés, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Random-Vintage, 1982) 253.

8. S'Jacob 58, 236.

9. Frederick Burgess, English Churchyard Memorials (London: SPCK, 1979) 100-01.

10. Ariés 248-56.

11. Bergeron 132.

12. The King's Two Bodies: A Study of Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957; rpt. 1981) 16.

13. According to Jeffrey Burton Russell in Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965) 189: Christianity, while

    not purely, or even primarily, dualistic … received the imprint of dualism from two distinct dies. First, Jesus and the primitive Christian community were influenced by the teachings of the Essenes, who in turn had come under the influence of Persian dualism. Second, as Christianity became progressively hellenized, Greek philosophical dualism made a deep and durable mark upon it.

14. Kantorowicz 20.

15. The Saints Everlasting Rest: or, a Treatise of the Blessed State of the Saints in their enjoyment of God in Glory (1650) 255, as quoted in Bryan W. Ball, A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism to 1660, Studies in the History of Christian Thought Vol. XII (Leiden: Brill, 1975) 243.

16. S'Jacob 3.

17. The Complete Poetry of Ben Jonson, ed. William B. Hunter, Jr. (New York: Norton, 1963) 12. Jonson was Roman Catholic: the notions of afterlife under discussion here were tendencies in Renaissance thought rather than precise formulations of doctrine.

18. S'Jacob 238, 156.

19. S'Jacob 58.

20. In quoting Shakespeare I have used The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. B. Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton, 1974).

21. The Fifth Lateran Council had in 1513 denounced anyone who raised philosophical doubts regarding the soul's immortality (Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972] 11). Burns reiterates that the heresy in England was by no means limited to speculative theologians but in fact had its widest following among common people. The Anglican Church condemned the notion that souls die or “sleep idlie” in the fortieth of the 1553 Articles of Religion.

22. Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964) i, 48.

23. In the Anglican Church of Shakespeare's day, the passage from Luke was read each year at Morning Prayer on November 4, only a few days after All Saints' Day, with its lesson of imminent judgment and its superstitious regard for the dead. Matthew 22: 30 is a parallel text. I use the Geneva Bible when quoting scripture.

24. According to St. Ambrose, for instance: “Our soul is not buried with our body in the tomb. … It is pure waste when men build sumptuous tombs as though they were receptacles [receptacula] of the soul and not merely of the body … the dwelling place of the soul is on high.” “Animarum autem superiera esse habitucula,” De bono mortis 19: 44, as quoted in Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) 32-33.

25. “The Heretical Milton: From Assumption to Mortalism,” English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 143.

26. As quoted by Kerrigan 132.

27. Ariés 256.

28. Recurrence of the term “pieta” in descriptions of this scene suggest its innate iconic resemblance to statuary.

29. Stanley Cavell (Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays [New York: Scribner's, 1969] 293) indicates a related sense of spiritual presence withstanding Cordelia's absence when he comments that “half of Cordelia remains” when she goes out to France—“in Lear's mind, Kent's service, the Fool's love.” I suspect the long-standing temptation to feature one actor as both Cordelia and Fool stems from a similar perception of her (and his) lingering presence.

30. J. C. Nohrnberg in private correspondence.

31. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford, 1939), Paradiso III, xiv, 61-66.

32. The Poems of Henry King, ed. Margaret Crum (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965) 70.