[In the following essay, Wilcox confronts the myths commonly associated with the genre of tragicomedy, and maintains that Shakespeare's tragicomedies are "as much about femininity as masculinity. "]

In recent years, much has been spoken and written about Shakespeare's works in terms of the critical and cultural myths that have accrued around them.¹ Cultural materialist and feminist critics in particular have rightly drawn attention to the haze of previous interpretation and appropriation through which we always inevitably approach the plays. How might our reading of Shakespeare's tragicomedies be deepened by such a consciousness of the myths with which the critical reception of the plays has become riddled? By this generic term "tragicomedy" I mean the two problem comedies (All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure), and the late plays (often also referred to as the romances). What emerges initially from an examination of the ways in which these plays have been received and characterized is that the myths about them are particularly strongly gendered. They have been constructed by generations of critical readings as dramas of lone male figures; in the case of the late plays in particular, these have been identified autobiographically with the dramatist himself. We have been led to assume that the main focus of the plays is patriarchal: kings (Leontes, Pericles, Cymbeline, and the ailing king of France in All's Well That Ends Well), or controllers (Prospero and Duke Vincentio), fathers to their states and families. In almost every case, these are men in crisis over their role as ruler, father or husband, and they are joined in that state by a number of other males, including Angelo, Bertram and Post-humus. Such lists remind us forcibly of the pervading masculinity of these plays—or, perhaps, of the myths through which we have observed them for so long.

I should like to challenge these myths by suggesting that the plays are as much about femininity as masculinity. This is not proposed out of a spirit of perverseness on my part, but as a possible means of more fully understanding the tragic potential of the genre, by approaching it in terms of gender opposition. Does the feminine function in these plays as a means of restoring comic redemption after the devastation of masculine tragedy? My purpose here is not only to reclaim .. . an awareness of femininity in Shakespeare's tragicomedies, but also, more significantly perhaps, to ask questions about the inter-relation of gender and genre in Shakespeare's work.

When we begin to think of the feminine in Shakespeare's tragicomedies, we immediately encounter another critical myth—that the plays are all about chaste women. Again, we are the inheritors of assumptions about the "coldly" celibate Isabella in Measure for Measure, or the sensual but innocent young heroines of the romances.² It is true that in place of the swashbuckling energetic females of the comedies, the tragicomedies indeed present figures such as Isabella, Perdita and Marina; but we need to pursue the issue further and enquire into the significance of their chastity. In their purity lies a vulnerability to threat, and many are put to the test during the course of the plays: Isabella in the crisis of chastity versus charity, Imogen under Iachimo's scrutiny, Marina in the brothel. But to what end is this testing, if not ultimately to guarantee that the subsequent children of these women will be their husbands'? Chastity was, like most prescribed feminine virtues in the English Renaissance, a means to male peace of mind. The startling words of Antigonus in The Winter's Tale, astounded at the idea that the queen, Hermione, might be impure, vividly demonstrate this sense of chastity's necessity for patriarchy:

Be she honour-flaw'd—
I have three daughters: the eldest is eleven;
The second and the third, nine and some five;
If this prove true, they'll pay for't. By mine honour,
I'll geld 'em all; fourteen they shall not see
To bring false generations.³

In the view of this not untypical (and later nobly self-sacrificial) male, a daughter is better "gelded" than unchaste, because of the threat to the father inherent in "false generations", an eloquently ambiguous phrase linking fertility and illegitimacy. Chastity, then, may best be regarded as having been a prerequisite for acceptable motherhood, rather than a virtue which was an end in itself.

This view is borne out by the conclusions of the tragicomedies; all the previously chaste women are partnered by the time we reach the conclusion of the plays. Virginity was hardly ever envisaged in this period as a permanent state; the virgin status of Elizabeth the First became a political embarrassment as soon as it was discerned as a continuing feature of her reign and not merely a prelude to a successful marriage guaranteeing the succession. In Measure for Measure, Isabella's chastity, a most deliberately chosen celibate state, is shown through fascinating parallels in the play between the convent and the jail to be an unnatural imprisonment, from which she is released by the Duke's match-making finale. The plays construct chastity as a temptation and yet a promise of "treasures" to men (Measure for Measure, 2.4.96), thus implicitly supporting Angelo's tortured response to Isabella, or Parolles's taunting of Helena, or Iachimo's voluptuous reading of Imogen. The plays uphold a male-oriented vision of female chastity as marketable and reassuring, and undermine any notion of virginity as an enduring virtue for the individual female. Rather than debate the morality of the bed-tricks in All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure, perhaps we should simply observe that the beds are never empty of a woman on those occasions.

Both these prevailing views of the tragicomedies, therefore—the maleness of their focus, and chastity as their dominant female ideology—need to be challenged. I intend to do so by means of a brief consideration of a feminine focus other than chastity found in the plays—that is; motherhood—as presented in the visual, verbal and generic structures of the tragicomedies. The idea of maternity is, of course, not so far removed from chastity; in addition to the obvious example of the virgin Mary, contemporary with Shakespeare was a virgin queen who, according to her own rhetoric, was married to the state and mother to her own people.⁴ Previous chastity is also integral to the ideal of pure motherhood within the tragicomedies, as Prospero's words to Miranda at the beginning of The Tempest demonstrate:

Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and
She said thou wast my daughter.

(1.1.56-57)

These lines, although still relying on chastity as a source of legitimacy for the father's offspring ("my daughter"), honour Prospero's wife, Miranda's mother. However, a notable feature of the comment is its past tense, for the mother is long dead; absent motherhood is a predominant feature of the tragicomedies. Like Miranda, Marina grew up not knowing her mother, being "Born in a tempest, when my mother died" (Pericles, 4.1.19). Just as Thaisa is secluded in a temple in Pericles, Hermione spends half of The Winter's Tale in hiding, apparently dead; she functions in the second half of the play as a potent memory, an icon in absence. Hermione appears as a figure in a vision; similarly, Posthumous's mother is only represented in Cymbeline as part of a dream, and Sycorax functions in The Ternpest as a symbol of Caliban's sense of injustice. We may have a strong impression, then, that motherhood lies at the margins of these plays—in the past, in the secrecy of death or hiding, or in the private space of memory or dream.⁵

Are Shakespeare's tragicomedies yet another group of texts in which motherhood, or the feminine, is marked by negativity and absence? Paradoxically, though motherhood may be marginalized in these plays, it would not be true to say that maternity is absent from them. On the contrary; maternal bodies are astonishingly present in the tragicomedies in the number of pregnancies visually or verbally represented within the plays. The decision to include mothers-to-be who "round" or "spread" (The Winter's Tale, 2.1.16 and 19) among the dramatis personae must have been a particularly conscious choice on Shakespeare's part, bearing in mind the problems for boy actors playing expectant mothers convincingly, but more pregnant women are involved in these plays than in any other genre of Shakespeare's output. In Measure for Measure, Juliet is shown on stage "very near her hour" (2.2.16) and attention is repeatedly drawn to her excess of fertility, in contrast to Isabella's chastity. By the end of All's Well That Ends Well, Helena is "quick" with child in order to fulfil the terms of Bertram's apparently impossible riddle; like the enigma of the riddle's solution, pregnancy can be concurrently hidden and obvious. In The Winter's Tale, Hermione's pregnancy is a sign falsely interpreted by her husband Leontes as evidence of an adulterous affair with Polixenes: "let her sport herself, cries the desperately jealous king, "With that she's big with" (2.1.60-61). When Hermione gives birth to Perdita in prison, it is observed that the child is set free from her "imprisonment" in the womb by the liberating force of "great Nature" (2.2.60). Most striking of all, perhaps, in the sense of visual impact, is the case of Thaisa who, before dramatically giving birth during a storm, is shown pregnant in a dumb show. Does the body, female and maternal, speak louder than words?

In the tragicomedies, which marginalize actual motherhood but visualize actual maternity, the missing link between these two elements must surely be that the plays highlight how troubled the process of becoming a mother in full relationship with the child and the father can be. The course of pregnancy and mothering certainly does not run simply or comfortably through these plays. Though necessary to the future of a society, pregnancy is not always regarded with appreciation by those who observe it. Juliet is made to feel shame at her "plenteous womb" which expresses too readily the "husbandry" of her lover Claudio (Measure for Measure, 1.4.43-44). Hermione finds that her pregnant state indites her for a crime of which she is innocent, while Helena's impending maternity is a means to entrap Bertram and keep him within a marriage which he clearly resents. The women's fruitfulness, then, in these plays is for the most part a source of dismay or misinterpretation. Neither do things get any easier as the pregnancy progresses. In addition to the dangers of childbed shown through the experience of the mothers of Miranda and Marina, we are lugubriously reminded of the bizarre folklore surrounding pregnancy when we hear of Autolycus's ballad about a "usurer's wife" who conceived for "twenty money-bags at a burden" and, during pregnancy, longed to eat "adders' heads and toads carbonado'd" (The Winter's Tale, 4.4.257-60).

There is nothing straightforward or easy in maternity here, nor in the mothering which follows for those who live beyond childbed. Hermione, for example, is briefly shown in a playful relationship with her young son, Mamillius, before her own imprisonment, his sickness and death, her delivery of Perdita but separation from the baby, her own trial in a weak state too soon after childbirth, her fainting and apparent death. This bald summary of the sequence of events is a reminder of the dangers associated with motherhood in the tragicomedies. Mothers are also vulnerable to a more insidious kind of danger, that of mental rather than physical attack. Being a mother leads, it would seem, to censure and blame, as Posthumus reveals when he begins to mistrust Imogen; he immediately assumes that, if his wife is unfaithful, then his mother, who "seem'd / The Dian of that time", was also false (Cymbeline, 2.5.6-7; italics added). Interestingly, the strongest mother/child relationship established in the tragicomedies is one sought rather that given: Helena and her potential mother-in-law, the Countess. However, even here there is a hint of the inherent threat of mothering: the Countess's comment, "When I said 'a mother', / Methought you saw a serpent" (All's Well That Ends Well, 1.3.131-32), anticipates the sinister role played by step-mothers in Cymbeline and Pericles. The darker side of motherhood is also suggested by the plays' flirtations with the idea of incest. The closeness of daughters to their mothers in appearance and function is a significant element in The Tempest, Pericles and The Winter's Tale; Leontes, for example, has to be bullied by Paulina out of thoughts of taking his (unrecognized) daughter as his new wife because she resembles Hermione so strongly. The preoccupation of these dramas with the unscripted text of incest, which is also profoundly evident in the sibling-relationships in Cymbeline, surfaces as a part of the plays' concern with motherhood in the definition given in Pericles: the incestuous woman is termed in the Riddle "no viper, yet I feed / On mother's flesh which did me breed" (1.1.64-65).

In the structures and ideologies of these plays, therefore, motherhood is deeply ambivalent. It is absent and yet unusually present, threatened and threatening, but also talked about and sought out. One could argue that on this showing. Shakespeare was simply conscious of the complexity of maternal experiences, as also expressed in the texts of contemporary Englishwomen. Diaries and other autobiographical writings reveal the dangers of pregnancy, the fear of death and the sorrows of actual loss, and yet these records also assert the pride and authority associated with early modern mothering even in the homes of Protestant patriarchs.⁶ The ambivalence in women's attitudes no doubt stems from the basic fact that mothering was not a choice but an inevitable burden, for good or ill. Shakespeare's ironic awareness of this uninvited routine of constant motherhood emerges in The Winter's Tale when he portrays Hermione in disgruntled mood with her playful son as she herself enters the wearying late stages of her subsequent pregnancy. But does the playwright go any further in his tragicomedies than this subtle and sympathetic awareness of the lives of real and imagined mothers?

If we turn our attention to the conclusions and overall dramatic structures of the plays, we find a profoundly maternal working of the tragicomic narrative process. It is significant, for instance, that a restored mother/child relationship, and particularly mother/daughter, is frequently the crowning glory of the comic ending. For too long, this fact has been obscured by the conventional critical focus on father/daughter reunions, modelled on the tradition of King Lear. But these tragicomic conclusions are vitally different from the tragic model, as their generic name of course implies, and yet we have been unwilling to allow for this difference in terms of gender. As the tragicomedies find a way to end happily, it is often by means of replacing the false step-mother or foolish father (or both) by the mother. At the conclusion of All's Well That Ends Well, a play whose title invites us to be conscious of its ending, Helena's final words signal a joyous reunion with the Countess. The last scene of Pericles movingly depicts the first meeting, outside the childbed, of the now mature Thaisa and her daughter Marina; Pericles requests Cerimon, in maternally loaded language, to "deliver / How this dead queen re-lives" (5.3.64-65). The play's climax is birth itself. The Winter's Tale famously concludes with the statue of Hermione coming to life before her daughter's eyes; the arrival of Perdita, it must be remembered, is the catalyst for this event, and not any action on Leontes's part. The focus of this dramatic closing is predominantly female. Paulina is utterly in charge, and the visual centre is a woman's body, the figure of Hermione in image and then in reality (or, at least, in enacted reality). When Hermione steps down from the pedestal, she embraces Leontes but saves her first public words after sixteen years' silence for Perdita:

You gods, look down,
And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon my daughter's head! Tell me, mine own,
Where hast thou been preserv'd?

(5.3.121-24)

While the paternal line has been shown to be barren and fruitless, destroying, as Leontes did, everything around him including his only male heir, the female line is epitomized in these words of Hermione as holy, preservative, life-giving.⁷ The myth of the masculinity of the tragicomedies must surely be called into question here.

Even where there is no mother present in the closing moments of a play, Shakespeare returns to the discourse of motherhood in his tragicomic conclusions. The Tempest celebrates in its masque the fundamental principle of the "Earth's increase" (4.1.110), and when Cymbeline rediscovers his daughter Imogen and her two long-lost brothers, the king cries out:

O, what am I?
A mother to the birth of three? Ne'er mother
Rejoic'd deliverance more.

(5.5.368-70)

Indeed, perhaps the most profound representation of motherhood in these plays is not in material mothering but in the language, modes and structures of the genre itself. We might describe Shakespearean tragicomedy as labouring in near tragedy but eventually and with difficulty giving birth to a life-affirming conclusion. Several of the plays require strong midwife figures—the Duke in Measure for Measure, for example, or Paulina in The Winter's Tale—and the conclusion is, as we have seen, envisaged as a new birth, often linking the grace of femininity (as in Hermione's blessing of Perdita) with rebirth or resurrection into spiritual grace. Like childbirth, the endings of the tragicomedies can only come about at the appointed time. These are plays obsessed by time, so much so that the enigmatic phenomenon is given physical embodiment in the chorus of The Winter's Tale, spoken of by the Gower chorus in Pericles, and referred to repeatedly and anxiously by Prospero. The wish expressed for the pregnant Hermione—"Good time encounter her!" (The Winter's Tale, 2.1.20)—might well serve as an epigraph for the functioning of the plays as a whole. In addition to awaiting their auspicious concluding moment or "good" time, the plays also construct their achievement of finality in feminine and maternal ways. The Tempest and Pericles are finally subject to the movements of the sea, that fluid of destruction and renewal so fundamentally construed as feminine; the conclusions are life-giving and fruit-bearing, again a maternal vocabulary echoed by Posthumus when he joyfully exclaims on embracing the rediscovered Imogen, "Hang there like fruit, my soul" (Cymbeline, 5.5.263). Such maternal fruitfulness is perhaps the conceptual background for the defiant comment of Helena in All's Well That Ends Well, that "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie" (1.1.202). Though the statement smacks of a general self-sufficiency, it may, as the end of the play suggests, refer more specifically to the female power of reproduction, bearing "in ourselves" the life of the future.

Shakespearean tragicomedy, therefore, not only presents a remarkable array of characters and concerns which are close to the matter of mothering, but also finds its patterns of action, language, metaphor and resolution in motherhood, drawing on ideas of maternity in nature, society, royal images and ordinary female experience. The genre itself, then, may be characterized as a maternal form; the play might usefully be seen as the ultimate maternal body. As we have seen, motherhood in early modern England consisted of many paradoxes, relating to chastity and fertility, absence and presence, life-threatening and life-giving qualities. Thus it is entirely apt that maternity should epitomize the paradoxical complexity of the tragic/comic mix in these plays, and exemplify a genre which brings both death and new life into its cycle of action.

The implications of this reading of the tragicomedies are considerable, since if genres can be gendered in this way, the idea may be more widely applied. If tragicomedy is characterized as productively feminine, would it be useful to consider tragedy as destructively driven by a compulsive masculine concept of heroism? Perhaps it would be more challenging and critically responsible to avoid falling into the old binary trap, and instead to suggest that tragedy in Shakespeare's hands is allied with unnatural sexuality and false parenting. We have only to think of Lady Macbeth's "unsex me here"(Macbeth, 1.5.38) and Iago's metaphor for his cruel plan as a "monstrous birth" (Othello, 1.3.398), or the relationship of tragedy to forced or inauspicious time, to realize that this linking of genre and gender, or dramatic form with sexuality, may be worthy of further investigation. Are the comedies an exploration of the place of androgyny in a patriarchal world? How closely is historical or political success, as portrayed by Shakespeare, linked to denial of sexuality? There is no room to follow up these subsequent questions here, simply the opportunity to hint at some further areas for fruitful consideration which the exploration of gender and genre in the tragicomedies has raised. We always find ourselves, of course, in the business of making new myths through which to re-read the works of Shakespeare; but as we shift our gaze from the filter of one myth to another, some fresh insights may, I hope, be glimpsed.

Notes

¹ See, for example, The Shakespeare Myth, ed. Graham Holderness, Manchester, 1988; Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis, London, 1985; Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, eds Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Manchester, 1985; The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds Carolyn Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Nealy, Chicago, 1980; Terence Hawkes, That Shakespeherian Rag, London, 1986.

² For a discussion of reinterpretations of Shakespeare's female characters by contemporary actresses, see Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare's Women Today, London, 1988.

³The Winter's Tale, 2.1.143-48. All Shakespeare quotations are taken from the one-volume text, The Complete Works, edited by Peter Alexander, London, 1951.

⁴ See Frances Teague, "Queen Elizabeth in Her Speeches", in Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, eds S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, London, 1992, 63-78.

⁵ For further reading on repressed maternal subtexts in the works of Shakespeare, see Coppella Kahn, "The Absent Mother in King Lear", in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, eds Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers, Chicago, 1986, 33-49; see also Janet Adelman's psychoanalytic study, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, "Hamlet" to "The Tempest", London, 1992.

⁶ For women's varied and in some cases detailed accounts of pregnancy, childbirth and the upbringing of children, see Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, eds Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, London, 1989; for women's elegies on their lost children, see Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women's Verse, eds Germaine Greer, Jeslyn Medoff, Melinda Sansone and Susan Hastings, London, 1988.

⁷ For a fuller interpretation of this scene, see my "Shakespeare's Winter's Tale: Drama and Sexual Difference", forthcoming in Lectures de la difference sexuelle from Editions des Femmes, Paris, 1994.