SOURCE: “‘Like an Old Tale Still’: Paulina, ‘Triple Hecate,’ and the Persephone Myth in The Winter's Tale,” in Images of Persephone: Feminist Readings in Western Literature, edited by Elizabeth T. Hayes, University Press of Florida, 1994, pp. 32-44.

[In the following essay, Wolf examines parallels between the leading female characters in Shakespeare's drama The Winter's Tale and the Greek goddesses Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate.]

It has long been recognized that the Persephone myth plays a role in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's story of redemption, rebirth, and reconciliation. The earliest and most complete development of the idea was made by W. F. C. Wigston in 1884. He noted that Hermione, with the loss of Perdita, falls like the earth in winter into her death-sleep. She is restored to life at the return of her daughter who, like Persephone, is a lost child and is connected with the spring through the text. G. W. Knight (1958, 106) and Northrop Frye (1986, 161) also touch on the idea. Carol Neely specifically connects the myth to the dominant role of women in the play (1987, 81).

All of these studies quite rightly focus on Hermione as the figure of grieving Demeter and Perdita (whose name means “lost”) as the lost Persephone. But there is another grieving woman in the play, Paulina, and Hermione is also lost and brought back from the dead, in one of the most moving and theatrically wonderful scenes that Shakespeare ever wrote. Thus, Paulina could equally well represent Demeter and Hermione could represent Persephone.

The blurring and overlapping of the roles of mother and daughter in the play reflect the blurring found in the Persephone myth and its rituals, for Demeter and her daughter “were a sacred duo, often nameless, each related to the other as past and future” (Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck 1978, 101) and “merely the older and younger form of the same person” (Harrison 1903, 274). There is, however, a third woman with an important role in the myth, and that is the ambiguous goddess Hecate. I suggest that Paulina represents Hecate, and that the shifting roles among the three women in the play parallel their roles in the myth. If, as Robert Graves maintains, the triad of Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate does indeed represent the three phases of the moon, the seasonal cycle (1957, 1:12, 92), and women at the three main stages of their life cycles (Graves 1957, 1:12; Wasson et al. 1978, 101-2), i.e., woman as maiden, nymph, and crone,¹ then Hermione, Perdita, and Paulina have a similar function in a play so centered around sexuality, thwarted maternity, and fertility, a play whose ending embodies life affirmation and continuity. Although Apollo's oracle certainly plays a role in the play, it is not, as Shakespeare scholars have suggested, the god Apollo who dominates The Winter's Tale (Tillyard 1963, 189; Martz 1987, 124) but rather the triple goddess Demeter-Persephone-Hecate.

Shakespeare mentions “triple Hecate”² in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and this line is usually glossed as referring to Hecate's function as moon goddess along with Artemis and Selene or Luna.³ The epithet has additional roots, however. According to Hesiod's Theogony, the Titan Hecate is honored by Zeus above all others and holds dominion over the three realms of land and sea and sky. In Hesiod's accont she can be a beneficent figure, endowed by Zeus with the power of bestowing on mortals any desired gift—success in battle, athletics, fishing, livestock breeding. She is a nurse; kourotrophos, “a fostering goddess for all youths,” “a nurturer of youths” (Hesiod 1983, lines 404-52). In later tradition, she is commonly referred to as a fertility goddess, sharing attributes with Demeter and with Artemis (all of them, for example, are depicted as carrying torches, a common attribute of goddesses of fertility). One of Hecate's epithets is phōsphoros, “bringer of light” (Euripides 1956, 569; Kerényi 1969, 110); another, euōnymon, “whom it is good to speak of,” she shares with Artemis (West 1966, 281). Like Artemis, Hecate presides over childbirth, and like Persephone, over death. Hesiod hints at the potential for a destructive Hecate when he adds to his account that she has the capability of withholding success from her votaries if she wishes. That power, along with her role as earth or fertility goddess, leads to her eventual connection with the world of the dead, and in later times she is more widely known in her sinister dimension as goddess of witches, “associated with uncanny things” (Hammond and Scullard 1970, s.v. “Hecate”) and invoked at crossroads, where three-bodied statues of her on triangular pedestals were set up. She is Medea's patroness, for example, and is invoked in Euripides' play and Apollonius's epic. Her companions are the Erinyes, and her appearances accompanied by them, scourges in hand, were terrifying.

The earlier, benevolent Hecate plays a role in the Homeric “Hymn to Demeter.” She hears but does not see the abduction of Persephone, and she approaches Demeter, torch in hand, to report what she has heard. The two goddesses go together to Helios to ask him what he knows, and when Persephone returns, Hecate is the first to greet her, after her mother. The author of the Homeric hymn reports that Hecate “showed much affection” for Persephone (Homer 1970, 130), and from that point on, she is Persephone's constant companion. In the Homeric hymn, Hermes brings Persephone back; but on a vase dating from the time of the Parthenon, Hecate is shown lighting Persephone's way out of Hades (Hammond and Scullard 1970, s.v. “Hecate”). Moreover, Hecate is often confused with Persephone and Demeter. The Erinyes, Hecate's companions, are sometimes said to be Demeter's daughters; and in Euripides' Ion, the chorus invokes Hecate herself as a daughter of Demeter (1958, line 1048). Like Demeter, she is a goddess of crops, a torch-bearing goddess, and a driver of a chariot drawn by dragons or serpents (triple Hecate's team in Midsummer Night's Dream). As a goddess of the underworld she is often confused with Persephone, invoked in Aeneid, book 4, at the death of Dido. In some localities Demeter took on a Hecate-like quality: she was known in Phigalia as “the Black One” (Pausanias 1935, bk. 8, sec. 42) and in Thelpusa as “Demeter Erinyes” (Pausanias 1935, bk. 8, secs. 25, 42). Hecate does not appear in the Homeric epics, but when Persephone is mentioned in the Iliad, it is with the epithet epainē, “awful” or “dreaded” (Homer 1938, bk. 9, line 457). The Homeric “Hymn to Demeter” blurs the roles of Hecate and Demeter, for Demeter, in her disguise as old woman and then nurse to the son of Keleos and Metaneira, takes on Hecate's role as nurse and crone, and, in her anger, the role of avenging fury.

Overlapping and confusion of the roles of the triad of Demeter, Persephone, and Hecate were widespread in the Renaissance. Shakespeare was familiar with the Erinyes dimension of Demeter's character, because he draws on it in The Tempest. When summoned by Iris to attend Juno at the wedding of Ferdinand and Miranda, Ceres (Demeter) angrily replies that she will come only if Venus and Cupid are not there, because she holds them responsible for Dis's abduction of her daughter and has “forsworn” (4.1.91) their company. In Heywood's The Silver Age, Hecate the moon goddess and Proserpine, daughter of Ceres, have become confused. Ceres grieves for the loss of her daughter the moon, and the compromise achieved between Ceres and Pluto results in the phases of the moon rather than in the change of seasons. Proserpine will shine twelve times a year in heaven and be with Pluto twelve times a year.

In The Winter's Tale, Perdita compares herself to Proserpina and is the lost daughter; it therefore makes perfectly good sense to regard her as the Persephone figure in the play and to regard Hermione as the Demeter figure. To this duo Shakespeare has added a third woman, Paulina, whose role is similar to that of Hecate in the myths. Although Paulina and Antigonus have young children ranging in age from five to eleven, they are slightly older than Hermione and Leontes: Antigonus has a “beard” that is “grey” and “little blood … left”⁴ and Paulina in good-natured but wistful self-disparagement refers to herself at the end of the play as “an old turtle” (5.3.132). Like Hecate in the Homeric hymn, she is a good friend to the two women—defending Hermione, protecting the infant Perdita, preserving Hermione, curing Leontes, and rejoicing at the reunion of husband, wife, and daughter.

Moreover, Paulina is regarded by Leontes as a Hecate in her sinister dimension, the “railing Hecate,” as Shakespeare refers to her in I Henry VI (3.2.64). Leontes calls Paulina “a mankind witch” (2.3.67), “crone” (2.3.76), and “hag” (2.3.107) and threatens to burn her at the stake. Paulina becomes a fury in act 3, scene 2, chastising Leontes for his crimes against his wife, his children, his friends and counselors, and his guest. Several critics have seen Paulina as Leontes' conscience (Knight 1958, 26; Martz 1987, 137). The crimes that Leontes has committed, against a guest, against a mother (not his own mother, admittedly, but a pregnant woman who is the mother of his children), were exactly the crimes for which Hecate's companions the Erinyes, who personified the pangs of conscience, hounded transgressors (see Oedipus at Colonus, Oresteia). Then, like the Erinyes in Oedipus at Colonus, Paulina becomes a benign figure to the repentant Leontes, curing him of his “lunes” (2.2.30). She in fact becomes a kind of nurse to the reborn Leontes; her “medicinal” words had failed to “purge” (2.3.37-38) Leontes earlier in the play but now succeed. “O grave and good Paulina, the great comfort that I have had of thee” (5.3.1), he says to her toward the end of the play.

And Paulina in the last scene of the play becomes something of a sorceress-magician, in the tradition of the Hecate who is the patroness of witches, although both she and Shakespeare deny it. Leontes speaks of the “magic” in the statue that “conjures” (5.3.39) again a recollection of his crimes and drains the life from Perdita, who looks like stone herself when she sees the statue. Paulina creates a miracle and brings Hermione back from the grave while insisting that she is not “assisted by wicked powers” (5.3.90) or engaging in “unlawful business” (5.3.96) and that her “spell is lawful” (5.3.105). “Be stone no more … I'll fill your grave up” (5.3.99, 102) she tells the statue. Paulina is Heracles bringing Alcestis back from the dead, or Medea renewing old Eason, yet she is none of those things but is instead a loving, comforting, nurturing friend whose rectitude and patient faith have repaired Leontes and Hermione's shattered family. She has nursed Hermione back to health and sustained her for sixteen years, cured Leontes, and kept both hopeful that the oracle would be fulfilled. Like Hecate with her torches, she is “the bringer of light” to The Winter's Tale. And like the Hecate of the Theogony, she has indulged Leontes' dearest wish.

The Winter's Tale, like the Persephone myth, contains three women at the three major stages of a woman's life cycle, each dominating a different section of the play. Hermione is the nymph or matron, the mother, dominating the first section of the play; Perdita is the Kore, the maiden, dominating the second; and Paulina is the crone, presiding over the end of the play. But Shakespeare provides, as does the Persephone myth, a great deal of overlapping among the roles of the three women.

Paulina, for example, briefly replaces Hermione as a nurse to Perdita in act 2, scenes 2 and 3. She replaces Hermione as companion to Leontes for sixteen years. She gets to greet Perdita before her own mother does, and then greets her as if Perdita were her own lost child, as Hecate does in the Homeric hymn. In the statue scene, Paulina watches overjoyed as Hermione embraces Leontes, then bids Hermione turn to acknowledge her daughter: “turn, good lady, / Our Perdita is found” (5.3.121, my italics). Leontes at various points in act 3 threatens to burn all three women at the stake. As Paulina was by Leontes, so Perdita is later accused of witchcraft by Polixenes, who breaks up his son's betrothal ceremony and then turns on the bride with: “fresh piece of excellent witchcraft” (4.4.426-27) and “you, enchantment” (4.4.438).

There are, naturally, many similarities between mother and daughter, some shared by Paulina. Both Perdita and Hermione share Paulina's feistiness, and Perdita shares her mother's charm, beauty, hospitality, and sexual frankness. Her happy world of love and warmth, both familial and sexual, is violated by a tyrannical male figure, just as her mother's was. She resembles her mother physically, as Leontes can see when he first sees her as a sixteen-year-old. (Similarities between mother and daughter have led several directors to have one actress play both roles.)

If Perdita is the Persephone figure, then strictly she is the Queen of Hades, queen of the dead; but it is the two older women in The Winter's Tale who are more closely allied to the underworld. Hermione appears as a ghost to Antigonus “in pure white robes” (3.3.21) in a scene with connotations of the Hecate triads. She bows to him “thrice” (3.3.23) (cf. “with Hecate's ban thrice blasted” in Hamlet [3.2.258]) and waits until her “fury [is] spent” (3.3.25) before she speaks to him. She is both the grieving mother and a ghostly, scary, vengeful figure:

                                                                                                    ‘For this ungentle business,
Put on thee by my lord, thou ne'er shalt see
Thy wife Paulina more.’ And so, with shrieks,
She melted into air.

(3.3.16-17)

In a later scene, Paulina imagines herself as the ghost of Hermione, a vengeful fury pursuing Leontes should he marry another woman:

Were I the ghost that walked, I'd bid you mark
Her eye, and tell me for what dull part in't
You chose her: then I'd shriek, that even your ears
Should rift to hear me; and the words that follow'd
Should be ‘Remember mine.’

(5.1.62-67)

Eventually, of course, Perdita the maiden will become a nymph and then a crone. The joy at the end of the play is tempered somewhat by the knowledge that Hermione, Leontes, and Paulina are reunited with Perdita just as she is about to leave them again; she is betrothed to Florizel and is about to move into her mother's role as matron, as wife and mother. A comparable situation occurs with Polixenes seeing his son reach sexual maturity. Polixenes feels threatened by the change, however, and refuses to accept his son's independence, whereas the women, as Neely has noted, are more tolerant of natural change and growth (1987, 79).

These are the broadest parallels between the Persephone myth and The Winter's Tale, with both myth and play enacting the lives of three women, essentially kindred, at three stages of life, through experiences of loss and restoration. But there are many other evocations of myth in The Winter's Tale, some closely related to the triad of Persephone, Demeter, and Hecate, some less so. Their cumulative force is to suggest that women dominate the play not only as dramatic characters, which is evident from the plot, but also as presiding deities.

Demeter, Persephone, and Hecate are fertility goddesses, but Hecate is part of another triad controlling fertility, the triple moon goddess Luna-Artemis-Hecate. Among their other functions, both Artemis and Hecate are concerned with childbirth, children, and families. Hecate shares the cult epithet kourotrophos, “nurturer of children,” with Artemis. In ancient times the moon, not the sun, was thought of as influencing fertility, partly because dew is heaviest on moonlit nights, and dew is an important substitute for rain in warm climates; and partly because of the similar duration of the menstrual and lunar cycles (cf. the “moist star” of Hamlet [1.1.118], and “governess of floods” in Midsummer Night's Dream [2.1.103]).

The sheepshearing festival combines native English and ancient classical fertility festivals. Martz thinks that the scenes may be indebted to festivals for Apollo (1987, 124). But why should there not be resemblances to the most famous ancient fertility ritual of all, the Eleusinian Mysteries? One characteristic of the Eleusinian Mysteries was their celebration of humanity. In the classical era, women played a much more important role in the ceremonies than they did in Athenian society, and men and slaves were admitted to what began as a women's ritual. The sheepshearing festival is inclusive and communal, welcoming rich strangers like Polixenes and Camillo, male and female, young and old, and even, albeit unknowingly, thieves like Autolycus. It's probably more important, however, that the rituals for Demeter involved a celebration not just of fertility but of human sexuality. Demeter, it must be remembered, was a fertility goddess who never married, and who enraged Zeus when she bore her son Iacchus (or Pluton) after she and the Titan Iasius sneaked away from a wedding to make love in a thrice-ploughed field (Homer 1965, bk. 5, 125-28; Hesiod 1983, 971).

We know we are in a different world from that of Leontes' possessive jealousy when the old shepherd comes in complaining good naturedly about teenagers who will get wenches with child and assuming, with no trace of condemnation whatsoever, that Perdita is the product of “trunk work, behind-stair work” (3.3.74). Yet the happy influence of Bohemia will be carried back to Sicily, where evidence of Leontes' “recreation” (3.2.238) is his willingness to stick up for the young lovers. The whole Bohemian episode includes a comfortable acceptance of young love and celebration of sexuality, culminating in Perdita's lament for virgins who die unmarried and her subsequent sexual joking with Florizel about burying him under flowers, not dead, but “quick, and in my arms” (4.4.132) and about pretending that he is a bank to make love on. The spirit of tolerance in the Bohemian community exists even among the puritans in their midst. The entertainment, Perdita's foster brother tells us, includes one puritan, but he sings anyway. In another account of the Persephone story, an Orphic hymn, the grieving Demeter is cheered up by a peasant wife (another version of the crone) named Baubo, who makes ribald gestures and causes Demeter to laugh for the first time since Persephone's disappearance. The Eleusinian Mysteries included a ritual copulation and a lot of coarse games and tales (Kerényi 1967, 40). Autolycus provides those in The Winter's Tale with his ballads “so without bawdry” and such “delicate burdens” as “jump her and thump her” (4.4.195-97). In classical myth the tie between Demeter and herders was very close because in the Orphic hymn, a swineherd, shepherd, and cowherd witness the rape and bring Demeter news of Persephone's whereabouts (Kerényi 1967, 171). In gratitude, she rewards one of them by giving him the gift of knowledge of agriculture, which he spreads to all lands by traveling in a chariot drawn by serpents, much like Hecate's team (Graves 1957, 1:92). Singing shepherds played a prominent role in Eleusinian processions. In the Orphic hymn, the name of the shepherd who helps Demeter find Persephone is Eumolpos, “the sweet singer” (Harrison 1903, 555-56). It is entirely appropriate, then, that Perdita's saviors in The Winter's Tale should be genial, festive shepherds.

The idea that women in various stages of their life cycle dominate the play as presiding deities is supported by references in the play to fertility of human life and to seasonal changes. The second scene opens with the line “Nine changes of the watery moon” (1.2.1), making explicit the connection between the moon, water, and human pregnancy. The first two and a half acts take place in winter, as Mamillius tells us when he begins his “sad tale” (2.1.25). There is some confusion over the season of the Bohemian episodes, but they certainly take place in spring or summer. Act 4, scene 3 begins with Autolycus's joyous song of praise to spring, to the daffodils, the first flowers of spring, to spring fever in humans and birds, and to spring housecleaning and the opportunities it affords for him to ply his trade. And sheepshearing should take place in spring. Florizel's description of Perdita's dress compares her to Flora “peering in April's front” (4.4.3), again giving the impression that we are in the early spring of the year. But Perdita, in her Proserpine speech, laments that she has no spring flowers and gives Camillo and Polixenes flowers of midsummer (Martz 1987, 135). Leontes tells Perdita, whom he knows only as Florizel's fiancee at this point, that she is as welcome to Sicily “as is the spring to th' earth” (5.1.151), but this remark is symbolic and metaphorical. The mood in the closing act, with Leontes' remarks about his wife's wrinkles and Paulina's about her age, is “autumnal” (Pafford 1976, lxx), but of course it is in this scene that Hermione is reborn and Perdita is found.

Knowing the season of the sheepshearing scene is not critical; with the entrance of the shepherd in act 3, scene 3, we move from the tragic winter world of Leontes' court and Sicily to the spring-summer world of Perdita and Bohemia. All seasons of the year are represented in the play, and Hermione's pregnancy is a visible reminder of her role as earth mother or corn goddess. There are various accounts of where the rape of Persephone took place—in the Homeric hymn, it is near Mt. Nysa. But according to Ovid, it occurred in Sicily, and the explanation given for this location is that Sicily was renowned for the fertility of its soil. Wigston also suggested that Shakespeare changed the name of his heroine from Bellaria in Pandosto to Hermione because Hermione is the name of a city where Demeter had a famous temple.

The Persephone story is about a rape, and no one gets raped in The Winter's Tale. But of course the story of the rape of Persephone is about death as well as about sexual violation and forced marriage. Leontes causes the death of his son and one trusted counselor, and tries to cause the death of his wife, his daughter, his best friend, and another trusted counselor. He has destroyed his family, and in his barbaric treatment of his pregnant wife and his children, he has attacked life itself. Before he begins to repent, he seems bent on becoming an agent of death. His turning against a previously welcome guest violates codes of hospitality; Hades himself is called sometimes “the receiver of many guests” but also “the Inhospitable One” (Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck 1978, 110). The Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival's 1986 production of the play presented the scene of Hermione's arrest as a kind of rape. Hermione and her women were dressed in night clothes, Hermione was sleepily putting her son to bed, and into this warm, intimate, and protected atmosphere burst Leontes and six men. According to Colm Feore, who played Leontes, David William, the director, “staged it as a vicious, absolutely vicious infiltration of her chamber … her women, her pregnancy and her children. … He violates her chamber as he feels she has violated him” (quoted in Gaines 1987, 206).

The Winter's Tale contains many references to tales and stories, beginning with the title. There are Mamillius's tale; Hermione's misery, “which is more than history can pattern” (3.2.35); the stories that the young shepherd can tell his children when “he's dead and rotten” (3.3.81), as the old shepherd puts it in a happy malapropism; Autolycus's “true” ballads (4.4.282); and the marveling of the courtiers over the revelations of the last act. Their astonishment over the unfolding of miraculous incredible events, so “like an old tale” (5.2.62), forestalls any possible audience objection to the denouement. Paulina's announcement that the statue is indeed alive, “That she is living / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale: But it appears she lives” (5.3.115) has a similar function. Shakespeare, as scholars have noted (Goddard 1951, 272), also draws in this play on some old tales of good women who have been tested and proven. The Griselda story is one, the Alcestis myth another.⁵ But the oldest tale he draws on is the myth of the grieving mother, the lost child, and the supportive older woman of the Demeter-Persephone story.

Louis Martz has made a good case for Greek influences on The Winter's Tale. It should be noted that Hecate does not appear in Ovid's account of the Persephone story, so that if the parallels I have adduced are valid, Shakespeare has chosen Greek rather than Roman versions of the story. Martz makes a case for the scope of a play that begins in a Grecian context and ends in a Christian context, the three sections being a summary of all human history. But the analogues to the Persephone story do more than universalize the experience of the play or pay tribute to Shakespeare's Greek predecessors. The triad of Demeter, Persephone, and Hecate underpins and enriches the portraits of three of Shakespeare's strongest, most attractive, and most triumphantly successful women.

Notes

1. A nymph is a married woman, a matron; a crone is a woman past the years of childbearing.

2. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, in The Riverside Shakespeare, act 5, scene 1, line 384. Subsequent act, scene, and line numbers in parentheses in discussions of all plays by Shakespeare except The Winter's Tale refer to this edition.

3. See, for example, Kittredge's gloss on the line: “The moon goddess has three names—Diana on earth, Phoebe in heaven, and Hecate in Hades. In the character of Hecate she is the goddess of nocturnal spells and the patroness of witches” (1971, 246, note to 5.1.367). Dr. Johnson wrote that “thrice-crowned queen of night” (3.2.2) in As You Like It “allud[es] to the triple character of Proserpine (or Hecate), Cynthia, and Diana, given by some mythologists to the same goddess” (1968, 251).

4. Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, act 2, scene 3, lines 161, 165. Subsequent act, scene, and line numbers in parentheses in discussions of The Winter's Tale refer to the Arden edition.

5. The Alcestis story has some connections with Persephone; in Apollodorus's version, Persephone refuses Alcestis's sacrifice and sends her home.

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