SOURCE: Lindenbaum, Peter. “Shakespeare's Golden Worlds.” In Changing Landscapes: Anti-Pastoral Sentiment in the English Renaissance, pp. 91-135. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986.

[In the following essay, Lindenbaum traces the development of Shakespeare's anti-pastoral sentiment in his works. Beginning with The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the critic notes that the forest in this early play is sentimentalized, a place of idleness (otium) where none of society's rules apply or must be obeyed. By contrast, he argues, the pastoral realms of his later plays, including As You Like It, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, are not that different from the ordinary world in that they all endorse the idea that one must accept personal responsibility and actively engage in life.]

The Two Gentlemen of Verona provides good evidence that anti-pastoralists are made and not born, that an anti-pastoral stance arises from continued thinking on the literary use and meaning of a sojourn in a pastoral landscape. The Two Gentlemen is the earliest and least successful of Shakespeare's plays to utilize a structure that Northrop Frye has labeled the “drama of the green world,” comedies whose action “begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world.”¹ This structure, which Frye derives from popular medieval romance and folklore, is also the basic structure of pastoral romance we have seen suggested in Sannazaro's Arcadia and then subjected to Sidney's anti-pastoral purposes in the Old Arcadia. Walter R. Davis's several studies on explicitly pastoral romances—that is, works that insist upon their connection with the earlier pastoral tradition, as differentiated from Frye's more popular sources—have elaborated upon Frye's scheme and emphasized its psychological dimension. The pastoral sojourner retreats from the pain and turmoil of the actual world, experiences love and undergoes calm self-analysis in Arcadia, and then returns to the outer world in harmony with himself.² Shakespeare was to turn to this scheme, either in this psychological or in Frye's more general form, which encompasses a play's whole society, some eight times in his career,³ and it is in the use of this particular comic structure as opposed to that of a history play or a tragedy that we might best determine the degree of the playwright's pastoralism or anti-pastoralism. For when Henry VI in the midst of battle expresses a desire “To be no better than a homely swain” (3 Henry VI, II.v.22), he is turning his back upon his responsibilities in the public, heroic world; such a wish is more likely to be expressing Shakespeare's judgment upon Henry than upon the pastoral ideal. But in the drama of the green world Shakespeare had at hand a structure in which characters might legitimately seek refuge in a pastoral landscape in order to escape fortune's blows or regain emotional balance, with no opprobrium being cast on their act of retreat; it is when and if Shakespeare shows himself unwilling to accept the full implications of that structure that we can with some assurance talk of his being anti-pastoralist in the way I have been using that term.

The full implications of the pastoral romance structure might best be understood as those assumed by Charles the Wrestler of As You Like It when he says that Duke Senior and his band “fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world”; they are a reflection of the merging of Arcadia with the Golden Age or prelapsarian Eden discussed in my opening chapter and are implications that Frye, with his interest not simply in literary structures but in the archetypal patterns or myths lying beneath those structures, might be expected to seize upon. And in the scheme Frye (and Davis after him) postulates, the green or pastoral world is a realm where special conditions are in effect, a realm of wish-fulfillment closer than the normal world to the ideal life of the Golden Age or Eden:

The forest or green world, then, is a symbol of natural society, the word natural here referring to the original human society which is the proper home of man, not the physical world he now lives in but the “golden world” he is trying to regain. This natural society is associated with things which in the context of the ordinary world seem unnatural, but which are in fact attributes of nature as a miraculous and irresistible reviving power.⁴

Frye's green world is thus qualitatively different from normal life outside its bounds, in effect morally purer since it is a more direct reflection of Eden. Contact with that purer realm must, as if of necessity, prove morally or psychically therapeutic, an assumption which might well account for the apparently miraculous events that tend to occur in Shakespeare's green worlds (for instance, the immediate conversion of villains as soon as they enter a forest).

One of the troublesome characteristics of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, yet one which makes the play instructive in a consideration of Shakespeare's attitude toward pastoral, is that in its green-world scenes it adheres unequivocally to the form and concomitant implications that Frye has sketched for us. It is, in fact, the only Shakespearian green-world play to do so, and it thereby becomes vulnerable to the charge of escapism. It does not impose the limits upon the pastoral impulse toward retirement that Shakespeare's later pastoral plays do, and unlike those later plays it does not insist upon a realistic vision of, or fallen quality in, the forest in which the characters take refuge.

The particular appeal of the forest of this early play is suggested by Valentine in the soliloquy which opens the final scene:

How use doth breed a habit in a man!
This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,
I better brook than flourishing peopled towns:
Here can I sit alone, unseen of any,
And to the nightingale's complaining notes
Tune my distresses, and record my woes.
O thou that dost inhabit in my breast,
Leave not the mansion so long tenantless,
Lest growing ruinous, the building fall,
And leave no memory of what it was.
Repair me, with thy presence, Silvia:
Thou gentle nymph, cherish thy forlorn swain.

[V.iv.1-12]⁵

The first six lines especially do little but present a very conventional statement of the country's superiority to the court, the only doubt of this superiority being expressed in the initial line's suggestion that Valentine has had to learn to enjoy the country, that he at first held a courtier's prejudice against it. The country, here, holds much the same appeal for Valentine as it did for Sannazaro's Sincero. This green world is a place where a “forlorn swain” can indulge himself in grief and not worry overmuch about most of life's responsibilities; the country is being viewed, to use Panofsky's phrase again, “through the soft, colored haze of sentiment,” and that view is symptomatic of the handling of the forest scenes throughout the final two acts of the play.

We are otherwise told relatively little about the forest of The Two Gentlemen. Silvia in the final scene wishes that she had been seized by a hungry lion rather than saved by the false Proteus (V.iv.33-35); but there are no hungry lions in this particular forest. In lieu of other evidence we are forced to accept the outlaw existence of the exiles who inhabit the forest as representative of life there generally. And if life at court in the play proves to be characterized by petty squabbles, below-stairs plotting, and flamboyant and unrealistic speechifying, the Robin Hood life that the forest scenes present hardly serves as a more viable alternative. Upon one brief meeting, the outlaws consider Valentine “a man of such perfection” (IV.i.57) that they elect him their leader, simply on the basis of his “goodly shape,” his own claim that he knows languages, and his announcement that he has killed a man. The whole sequence of events in the forest scenes—from the moment when the exiled Valentine in effect applies for membership in the outlaw band by inventing an offense far more serious than the intended elopement of which he was guilty (IV.i.26-29) to his final request that the Duke pardon those companions “full of good, / And fit for great employment” (V.iv.154-55)—is merely wish-fulfilling fantasy. The humor with which Shakespeare handles his pasteboard outlaws, who equate an outright murder with an attempt to elope with a Duke's daughter, calling both “petty” crimes (IV.i.47-52), reveals that the playwright himself is looking upon the green world of this play as a realm where society's everyday rules do not apply and do not need to.

What is perhaps most startling about this treatment of life in the forest is that the forest scenes come at the end of a play that has in every other respect been moving its characters to a realistic perception of themselves and the world around them. The play as a whole is structured around the education of the two gentlemen of the title, an education which Proteus's guardians see as designed to make a young man “perfect,” by which is meant early in the play simply “tried and tutor'd in the world”; the young gentlemen are to become courtiers, adept in the social arts (I.iii.17-23). Their full education takes them, though, both to the court at Milan and to those “unfrequented woods” where both young men are brought to understand that true human perfection would involve unfallen virtue and hence that there is slight possibility of actually achieving that state. It is Proteus himself who ultimately corrects Valentine's and Julia's earlier descriptions of him as possessing “angel-like” and “divine” perfection (II.iv.61; II.vii.13), when he admits fully to what has been his own very imperfect conduct:

                                                                                                                        O heaven, were man
But constant, he were perfect. That one error
Fills him with faults; makes him run through all th' sins;
Inconstancy falls off, ere it begins.
What is in Silvia's face but I may spy
More fresh in Julia's, with a constant eye?

[V.iv.109-14]

Just as Shakespeare has Proteus speak here in terms of a generalized man, not simply of personal offenses, a proper view of any man in the world of this play has to take into account the ways in which man is not perfect but rather quite flawed and fallen.

If we can speak of accepting full responsibility for one's own bad actions in a tarnished world as part of an anti-escapist ethic, The Two Gentlemen of Verona presents an unusual instance of an author proposing such an ethic before realizing that an attitude toward a pastoral retreat might in some way be related to it. The play reveals a disharmony between the realistic vision toward which the action as a whole moves its characters and the quite unrealistically portrayed green world in which that vision is finally achieved. There is little reason why Proteus's final recognition of himself and all men as imperfect and fallen should take place in this particular forest. While using the Renaissance pastoral romance's sojourn in the green or pastoral world in order to resolve complications arising at court, Shakespeare fails to take full advantage of a natural setting which might better have served to mirror more explicitly the fallen state of the men going into it; the setting might thereby have enhanced the education in man's own nature which was the main concern of the play.⁶ The woods of The Two Gentlemen can be said to have been unfrequented, then, not only by figures in the play's normal court world, but by the playwright himself: Shakespeare simply did not bring the force of his whole imagination to bear on the forest he was using, and the result was an unthinking or automatic acceptance of a pastoral romance structural scheme he adopted from pastoral writers before him, most likely from Montemayor, whose Diana was one of the sources of the play.

The Two Gentlemen's forest scenes represent what we can consider a missed opportunity for Shakespeare, but one he would not miss again. In his later green-world comedies, and particularly his two most overtly pastoral plays, As You Like It and The Winter's Tale, the playwright does focus fully upon the assumptions embodied in the pastoral romance form, and the outcome of this new concentration is an attitude toward a pastoral sojourn similar to, if less assertive than, Sidney's. Life in Sidney's Arcadia proved to be virtually indistinguishable from life outside its boundaries, and his Arcadia provided no escape from the normal cares and responsibilities of the outside heroic world. Sidney was able to call upon pastoral's traditional function of examining man as man—as an individual as opposed to a prince or public figure—and yet still nursed in both versions of his Arcadia an objection to the requirement of placing such an examination in a pastoral setting. The pastoral worlds of As You Like It and The Winter's Tale are, similarly, only simplified reflections of the normal world outside their bounds, not qualitatively different from it; they provide only limited relief from the concerns of everyday life. Shakespeare is, to be sure, less grudging than Sidney in granting his characters a sojourn in Arcadia, but the force of his pastoral plays' arguments is either to insist upon the need to leave Arcadia again or at least to cure characters of wrong ways of thinking about Arcadia and the idea of retreat generally. While Shakespeare uses the pastoral sojourn to educate his characters, those characters emerge from Arcadia and their education, much like Pyrocles and Musidorus before them, not closer to man's unfallen state but more fully aware of the ways in which they themselves and the world around them are time-bound, fallen, and limited. The pastoral plays, like all of Shakespeare's comedies, are directed not toward any past or even future more perfect life but toward full participation in life in the present.

THE FOREST OF ARDEN

As You Like It is the most self-consciously literary of Shakespeare's pastorals and among the most literary of all his plays. Like Sidney's Old Arcadia, it takes its start from an argument with conventional literary pastoralism, in this case as that mode is represented by the play's main source, Lodge's Rosalynde. While relying heavily upon Lodge for his characters and action, Shakespeare uses his inherited material in such a way as to undermine many of the basic assumptions of Lodge and other pastoral writers like Sannazaro and Montemayor, particularly the belief in Arcadia as a special land of ease and escape from worldly responsibilities.⁷ If Shakespeare paid too little attention to the pastoral setting of his first green-world play, in this one he may well have paid it too much; for the play is, as critical studies have frequently pointed out, particularly lean in dramatic action. In place of any dramatic complication or plot, we have in the middle acts especially a series of apparently casual encounters or debates between various characters in which they discuss their views primarily on two closely related subjects, romantic love and pastoral life.⁸ But no matter what the appearances, those encounters in the forest are not so casual after all. Shakespeare uses them to mold, burnish, and refine his version of an ideal human sensibility, the sensibility embodied in the play by the central, controlling figure of Rosalind. It is a sensibility that can, among other things, take full advantage of the freedom a pastoral sojourn might offer without succumbing to the belief that life in Arcadia is significantly different from life elsewhere.

The Forest of Arden is no Eden.⁹ While apparently miraculous conversions of evil men to good do occur in the Forest of Arden, those conversions warrant close examination to determine how miraculous they actually are. That they are in the play at all is an indication that the connection between Arcadia and Eden or the Golden Age was a part of Shakespeare's consciousness in writing a pastoral work; yet the thrust even of those conversions, and particularly Oliver's, which is described in most detail, is to remind us of the difference between present Arcadia or Arden and past Eden. Oliver is rendered a true brother again and fully confesses to his former “unnatural” behavior in seeking to kill Orlando (IV.iii.123-37).¹⁰ Such wording might appear to mark a return toward man's original condition when his actions and desires would have been totally in accord with God's design for him, before man's true nature was obscured by the fall. But Oliver's conversion did not just occur as if by magic in the forest: it was the result of considered, human action on Orlando's part, and action that involved ridding Oliver of the threat of a serpent and a lioness. This is plainly not a realm in which lions lie down peacefully next to lambs, or men; and serpents also have already become dangerous. If Oliver has entered into a “better world” (LeBeau's phrase of I.ii.274) in the forest, it is an entrance made with full recognition both of human sinfulness and of animal savagery.

That Arden is a fallen landscape we learn initially from Duke Senior, who at his first appearance defines both himself and his immediate surroundings for us:

Now my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say
“This is no flattery. These are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.”
Sweet are the uses of adversity.

[II.i.1-12]

The Duke is saying, not that he escapes from the effects of the fall in Arden, but that he is fully conscious of those effects and yet they do not bother him (hence there is no need for Theobald's famous emendation of line 5's “not” to “but”). But if the Duke is apparently clear-sighted in his observation of Arden as fallen and demonstrates some familiarity with his natural surroundings, he is nonetheless an unreliable witness; for there is much in his opening speech to suggest that he has never left the court and been in a state of nature after all.¹¹ Like Valentine's forest, the Duke's Arden is perceived very much after the manner of earlier Renaissance pastoral poetry and romance. He expresses the view that country life is superior to life at court, and in finding his present life “more sweet / Than that of painted pomp” and the woods “More free from peril than the envious court,” he thinks he sees a definite difference between court and country. He is assuming the view of the country as a place of relief from worldly cares, a view common in pastoral poetry written at court but not nearly so common among actual country people.

The play's most explicit connection between the Duke's point of view and literary pastoralism is to be found in Amiens's lovely and extremely conventional pastoral song of II.v; the courtier is an extension of the Duke himself, and his song is essentially a restatement of the Duke's opening speech:

Under the greenwood tree,
          Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
          Unto the sweet bird's throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
          Here shall he see
          No enemy,
But winter and rough weather.
Who doth ambition shun,
          And loves to live i' th' sun,
Seeking the food he eats,
          And pleas'd with what he gets,
Come hither, come hither, come hither.
          Here shall he see
          No enemy,
But winter and rough weather.

[II.v.1-8, 35-42]

The tradition has been Anglicized in the song's reference to the greenwood tree of English ballads rather than to the more specific beech of Virgil, but the posture of a man lying beneath a tree and gaily singing or piping to the birds overhead is one that looks back ultimately to Virgil's First Eclogue and, beyond that, to Theocritus's Idylls. With the important qualification which admits once again that there is a winter season in Arden and hence that the forest is not actually part of an Edenic or “golden world,” this song's evocation of traditional pastoral otium bears out at least the substance of Charles's remark about Duke Senior's life in the forest: while the Duke, Amiens, and the rest of the gentlemen-foresters there sing, hunt, talk, and feast, they do “fleet the time carelessly.”

The Duke and Amiens come by their conception of country life most directly from Lodge's Rosalynde. But there, the view of the country as a place essentially free from care is ascribed to a country figure rather than an exiled courtier, and this difference accounts in large part for the considerable differences in tone and attitude between the play and its source. Lodge fully endorses the attitudes expressed by the Duke and by Amiens's song; since a shepherd ought to be able to speak authoritatively about the country in which he has spent all his life, there is little reason to question the picture of country life Coridon provides:

and for a shepheards life (oh Mistresse) did you but live a while in their content, you would saye the Court were rather a place of sorrowe, than of solace. Here (Mistresse) shall not Fortune thwart you, but in meane misfortunes, as the losse of a few sheepe, which, as it breedes no beggerie, so it can bee no extreame prejudice: the next yeare may mend al with a fresh increase. Envie stirres not us, wee covet not to climbe, our desires mount not above our degrees, nor our thoughts above our fortunes. Care cannot harbour in our cottages, nor doo our homely couches know broken slumbers: as we exceede not in diet, so we have inough to satisfie: and Mistres I have so much Latin, Satis est quod sufficit.¹²

Lodge is assuming for the purposes of his fiction that the literary conception of pastoral otium presents an accurate view of country life, and his Rosalynde is throughout marked by just such a strict, unquestioning adherence to the assumptions of the pastoral convention.¹³ Lodge's Arden is an artificial, idealized realm of special conditions, one in which courtiers and shepherds can converse with one another on equal terms, in fact, in exactly the same terms; all the lovers in the work, regardless of class, speak the same elegant, Petrarchan language. The sheep that most need tending here are thoughts or passions, and few of the normal concerns of everyday country life enter within its borders.

Shakespeare's distance from the assumptions of his source is shown most directly in his character Corin, the figure in the play who corresponds in his actions, but not in many of his opinions, to Lodge's Coridon. Corin presents a much more down-to-earth picture of life in the country, and his overall function in the play is to act as a corrective to the Duke's and Amiens's view of pastoral life. He later is to announce that he (like Coridon) envies no man and is satisfied with little (III.ii.71-75), but his first words to a court figure attest that a shepherd's life is by no means necessarily an easy or happy one, that very real misery exists in Arden:

CORIN.
Who calls?
TOUCH.
Your betters sir.
CORIN.
Else are they very wretched.

[II.iv.64-66]

And he goes on to provide evidence that, quite contrary to the implications in the Duke's thinking, people in the country can be just as selfish and greedy as those at court: Corin can provide little aid for the travel-weary Aliena because he is not master of his own sheep but is subject to the rule of a churlish country master who “little recks to find the way to heaven / By doing deeds of hospitality” (II.iv.78-80). An actual shepherd does not simply lie beneath a greenwood tree and play upon his pipe as Amiens's song might have us believe, but rather has to make a living, even in Arden. Like the Duke, Corin recognizes a difference between court and country, but in contrast with the Duke's assumption that court people are envious and malicious while country people are not, the distinction he points to is a real one. The difference between court and country people is merely a difference in manners and customs, rather than one in man's nature:

Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behaviour of the country is most mockable at the court. You told me you salute not at the court, but you kiss your hands: that courtesy would be uncleanly if courtiers were shepherds.

[III.ii.44-49]

It is Corin's direct knowledge of the greasy quality of a sheep's fleece which prompts him to make such an observation. And his direct knowledge of country life enables him to point out for us the discrepancy between country life as it really is and idealized country life as it is envisioned by Duke Senior, Amiens, and Thomas Lodge.

Shakespeare's treatment of the other shepherds in his play shows a similar movement away from Lodge's pastoralism. Silvius, like Montanus, his counterpart in Lodge, is through much of the play pursuing the proud and pitiless Phebe, claiming in Petrarchan manner that he bears invisible wounds from love's keen arrows (III.v.30-31). Phebe has a more critical sensibility than does Lodge's shepherdess of that name—she points to the exaggeration in Silvius's complaints—but she also has considerably less beauty. Instead of a figure who in Lodge was the fairest shepherdess in all Arden, we have in As You Like It one who needs to be told by Rosalind that she should sell when she can (III.v.60). Such a figure can have little claim to occupy the idealized realm of conventional Renaissance pastoralism she aspires to in her Petrarchan disdain. Even less appropriate in such a realm would be the two rustics Shakespeare added to his source, William and Audrey. Lodge's Montanus was bilingual (one of his songs was in French); Shakespeare's William has barely mastered English. The longest single word he speaks is his own name. He and Audrey are caricatures of country figures, Shakespeare's equivalent to Sidney's Dametas and his family, and (it is to be hoped) as far removed from actual shepherds as are Silvius and Phebe. Shakespeare has given us in Corin a country figure with a good measure of dignity and intelligence; in the literal-minded William and Audrey he shows that living close to nature does not necessarily provide even a modicum of good sense, much less refinement.

Corin, Silvius and Phebe, William and Audrey, all provide what we can call unconscious criticism of Duke Senior's and Lodge's pastoralism. They help Shakespeare establish a realistic picture of pastoral life and love, but in doing so are unaware that they serve such a function. Corin, for example, does not intentionally correct the Duke; he simply speaks of his life as he lives and sees it. To all these unwitting critics, Shakespeare added two others not to be found in Lodge, both of whom consciously set themselves up as critics of Duke Senior's attitude. Touchstone and Jaques are directly familiar with both court and country, and both hold to the belief that country life is no better than life at court; in fact, in several respects it is decidedly worse. Both see that the country is by no means necessarily a place of ease and relief. Touchstone bemoans the lack of simple creature comforts there, and Jaques, in effect agreeing with Corin's realistic picture of country life, counters Amiens's song praising the country with his own verse asserting that only an ass or stubborn-willed fool (like the courtiers circled around him as he speaks) would leave the court's “wealth and ease” to take up life in the forest (II.v.47-54); if otium is to be found anywhere, it is only in the aristocratic life at court where there are servants and courtiers of lower rank to do one's bidding.

It is Jaques's claim that there is a close affinity between himself and Touchstone, so close that he wishes to assume a suit of motley and set himself up as a professional fool. But whereas the two do have a good deal in common, both having been added by Shakespeare to his source material to puncture the illusions of their fellow characters and to help in the criticism of more conventional literary pastoralism, the two actually serve very different purposes in the play. As professional fool, Touchstone acts very much as his name suggests. Through parody and mimicry he tests the assumptions of the play's other characters in order to expose their illusions, but without necessarily suggesting what should be substituted in their stead. His comments do reveal a rather conservative estimate of what is real, as he customarily disregards whatever he does not break his shins against. But beyond that, there is not much consistency to his opinions: he simply assumes one perspective and then another—for instance, when in conversation with Corin he tries at the same time both to mock the affected snobbery of a courtier and yet to bring Corin to admit that the country is inferior to the court (III.ii.31-83). He holds to what Richard Lanham has called the rhetorical view of life.¹⁴ Merely a rhetorical being, he has, finally, no substantive existence in the play's world, and although we should be very sorry to see him go, Touchstone is thus not strictly necessary to the play's central argument. Jaques, on the other hand, is necessary to that argument and represents a much more significant addition to Shakespeare's source than all the others combined. Accordingly, it is necessary to examine Jaques and his position in the play in detail.

Jaques, quite unlike Touchstone, speaks and acts from a fixed point of view, one that is consistently negativistic and pessimistic. A generation ago James Smith accused him of posing as a skeptic, an adherent to what is in fact an inconsistent doctrine, a belief that denies the possibility of belief and of meaningful human action.¹⁵ We need not necessarily posit a whole philosophic system to Jaques or label it, but we should note that his point of view is pronounced enough to put him at odds with virtually every other character in the play. And because of his negativism Jaques cannot be included in the celebration at the play's end: as all the other characters proceed to the marriage feast presided over by Hymen, who “peoples every town” (V.iv.143), as they thus take active steps toward ensuring the continuance of the race and building a society that is to endure into future generations, Jaques is forced not only by his own desires but by the play's comic logic as well to retire to a more remote part of the forest and to absent himself from the new society taking shape at the play's conclusion.

At the point Jaques announces his desire to become a professional fool, he receives the strongest of several rebukes he has to endure in the play:

Most mischievous foul sin, in chiding sin.
For thou thyself hast been a libertine,
As sensual as the brutish sting itself,
And all th' embossed sores and headed evils
That thou with license of free foot hast caught
Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world.

[II.vii.64-69]

This speech is somewhat out of character for the basically good-natured Duke, who has earlier confessed that he actually enjoys coping with Jaques in the latter's sullen fits (II.i.67). And we are by no means obligated to accept its charges as fully true; there is little direct evidence within the play that Jaques was once a libertine. But the lines do indicate that the period of Jaques's activity—if it ever did exist, and whether it was good or bad—is in the past. The position he now holds is that of someone tired of action and of life. The melancholy man, Thomas Overbury tells us, “thinkes businesse, but never does any: he is all contemplation, no action.”¹⁶ And the melancholy Jaques is merely an observer, one who goes around gaining knowledge and experience and doing nothing with them. When he looks back at the society he detaches himself from, he expresses distaste for everything he sees: both court and country life, love, lovers, even the name of Rosalind. Everything human is alien to him. He urges Orlando to sit down with him and “rail against our mistress the world and all our misery” (III.ii.272-74), an invitation Orlando refuses to accept, since he finds no cause to chide anything in the world besides himself. The celebrated speech on the seven ages of man, with its focus only on woeful pageants (II.vii.139-66), of course presents a very one-sided picture of human life. The speech conveys not only Jaques's essential dislike of human life but his detachment from it: the metaphor of the world as stage suggests that any given human being is only playing at a part and thus is not a figure one need sympathize with fully in his joys and sorrows.

Donning a suit of motley would enable Jaques to express his dislike of the world around him at will: he says he wishes to “Cleanse the foul body of th' infected world” (II.vii.60), but he is willing to do so only under the condition that no one consider him wise, and hence serious (II.vii.44-47). The statement of this rather contradictory desire is of interest on several counts. One is that it reflects a basic misunderstanding of the role of professional fool in a society. A fool has a special status, occupying a position both inside and outside society at the same time. He is permitted to mock, to parody, to criticize in ways that others are not, but he does so as part of an established social function: he allows for the release through laughter of emotions that would under normal circumstances be repressed by society. He is, then, ultimately a source of social cohesion and remains, like Touchstone at the end of As You Like It, a part of the society he criticizes. Jaques, from an alienated vantage point that can see only an “infected world” around him, wants the fool's freedom but fails to recognize the fool's concomitant responsibility of playing an active (if indirect) part in the construction of an enduring, cohesive social group.¹⁷ More important yet is the fact that Jaques's desire to take up motley betrays a wish to avoid moral as well as social responsibility. In desiring the fool's traditional immunity from prosecution (or, alternately, freedom of the press for satirists), Jaques would also gain unlimited opportunity to vent his spleen without ever being called to account for his words. This indulgence, if granted, would place him not simply in the social no-man's land he already occupies in his detachment but in a moral no-man's land as well. And the desire to avoid full moral accountability for what one says or does betrays what we can label as escapist tendencies.

As we might expect, any escapist desires Jaques might have are revealed most fully in his attitude toward pastoral life. One of Duke Senior's lords remarks that Jaques, in ruminating on the fate of an injured deer, pours forth invectives not only against the country, city, and court but even against the particular type of pastoral existence the Duke and his followers are experiencing in the forest:

Thus most invectively he pierceth through
The body of country, city, court,
Yea, and of this our life, swearing that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants, and what's worse,
To fright the animals and to kill them up
In their assign'd and native dwelling-place.

[II.i.58-63]

Peter G. Phialas has observed that Jaques here is holding to an extreme form of pastoralism,¹⁸ the most extreme voiced in the play. Jaques is totally opposed to man's occupancy of the natural world. By implication he is looking back for his ideal to a benign period before man was forced to hunt and kill animals, even before there was such a thing as human society at all. He yearns, then, for the distant past and for impossible conditions, and with such an attitude he can only observe and attack the world he sees in motion around him. He must be totally outside life that moves in time—precisely the position in which he chooses to remain at the play's conclusion when he decides to stay on in the forest. His claim is that he will observe and learn from the habits of the new monk, Duke Frederick: “Out of these convertites, / There is much matter to be heard and learn'd” (V.iv.183-84). But by this point in the play, it is clear that Jaques will only be gaining more experience and, as Rosalind has suggested earlier, doing nothing with it but make himself sad (IV.i.20-27). Remaining in the forest will enable him to make permanent both his stance as an observer outside society and his refusal to take up meaningful action of any sort.

In fairness to Jaques, we should observe that while alienated and melancholic, he is not at all a malicious figure. There is a considerable measure of goodwill and humor in the blessings he doles out to the other characters as he takes his leave:

[TO Duke Sen.]
You to your former honour I bequeath,
Your patience and your virtue well deserve it.
[TO Orl.]
You to a love that your true faith doth merit:
[TO Oli.]
You to your land and love and great allies:
[TO Sil.]
You to a long and well-deserved bed:
[TO Touch.]
And you to wrangling, for thy loving voyage
Is but for two months victuall'd. So to your pleasures.
I am for other than for dancing measures.

[V.iv.185-92]

But while not in fact a villain, Jaques assumes the role of villain in the thoroughly comic world of the forest, a world in which true villains are converted to goodness as soon as they enter. For Jaques puts forward the point of view that must be cast out before the life-affirming philosophy of Rosalind and Orlando can reign supreme. By his very existence in the play's world, Jaques helps to define the positive ideals which the play embodies. He favors solitude, detachment, and inaction; he looks back longingly toward the distant past and thus wishes to stop time and to escape from a world governed by it. His whole world view thereby stands diametrically opposed to that held initially by Rosalind alone and finally by Rosalind and Orlando together, an opposition Shakespeare objectifies nicely by his staging when he has Jaques exit right before each of the two great wooing scenes in the forest (at III.ii.289 and IV.i.36).

What precisely Jaques is opposed to in the play can be seen from examining Rosalind's (and ultimately Orlando's) very different response to time.¹⁹ Once Rosalind establishes that Orlando is listening to her, the first question she asks of him in the forest is “I pray you, what is't o'clock?” (III.ii.294). The question proves significant, since it is asked by someone very aware of time's passing and of a figure for whom time is not yet consistently important. Orlando earlier expressed considerable dismay over the enforced idleness resulting from his brother's neglect of him (I.i.32-34), and he showed a distaste for wasting time when he first encountered Duke Senior in the forest and observed that the Duke and his followers “Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time” (II.vii.112). But here in III.ii, Orlando answers Rosalind's query with the assertion that “there's no clock in the forest” (295-96). Rosalind's response in turn is that if Orlando were the kind of lover his poems claim he is, he himself would be the forest's clock: “Then there is no true lover in the forest, else sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the lazy foot of Time, as well as a clock” (297-99). Were Orlando to become the kind of lover she suggests, he would of course become even more like the ridiculous Silvius than he already is. But Rosalind's humor covers serious concern: despite his claim to be “love-shaked,” Orlando does not yet seem to have a committed lover's consciousness of time, or of anything else. He misses his next appointment with his mock-Rosalind, rather casually excusing himself by saying that he has come within an hour of his promise (IV.i.40-41).

Rosalind meanwhile has been very conscious of the time passing when Orlando is away, and while her high spirits consistently temper her concern with a note of mock sentimentality, she reveals a true lover's distress and dedication when she asks Celia, “But why did he swear he would come this morning and comes not?” (III.iv.17-18) or announces, “I'll tell thee Aliena, I cannot be out of the sight of Orlando” (IV.i.205-6). It is largely because she is aware of the true identity of the man she has been speaking to that time trots hard for Rosalind when Orlando is absent. And he is, no doubt, to be excused for his lack of punctuality and for his ability to part for two hours calmly because he does not realize that Ganymede is his real Rosalind. But one of the ways that Shakespeare has of showing that Orlando is worthy of the love of the generally more witty Rosalind is to bring him to her consciousness of time. On the second occasion that he misses an appointment with Ganymede, Orlando has a valid excuse, his fight with the lion which threatened his brother. And despite his wound, he remembers this time to send a messenger to his mock-Rosalind to explain his absence. It is when Orlando finally expresses impatience with the masquerade with Ganymede, when a mock-Rosalind will no longer serve his turn for the real one, that she acknowledges that Orlando has passed his test and is ready to receive her. Rosalind has used a game as a way of showing Orlando that his earlier claim to be a lover was also only a type of game or pose, merely borrowed Petrarchanism. When Orlando now announces that he can “live no longer by thinking” (V.ii.50), Rosalind responds with, “I will weary you then no longer with idle talking,” a line which in itself ought to promise fair for Orlando, given his own earlier stated concern over idleness. Mere game playing is now a thing of the past.

Rosalind has been asserting consistently that time is, or should be, important to a lover. But even in the two wooing scenes in the forest when she has been discussing this importance, all movement has in effect stopped while their love is allowed to blossom. It is in these scenes that Shakespeare allows his characters (and us) to relax, to enjoy their pastoral existence more than Sidney's heroes ever could. Orlando may have his obligations to the Duke and he has his fight with the lion, but these are offstage; when onstage the two lovers return over and again to the question whether Orlando is truly in love. Although Rosalind is actually using these encounters to educate Orlando and is not herself idle in them, the two scenes convey a general impression of timelessness, an impression we may in fact not be fully or immediately conscious of as the scenes themselves progress; what points it out forcefully is the abruptness with which the concern for events offstage is reasserted toward the end of IV.i. With no preparation whatsoever, following a speech in which Rosalind discusses the use women make of their wit, Orlando announces: “For these two hours Rosalind, I will leave thee” (168). Orlando's outburst of impatience in V.ii dispels that impression of timelessness and has the effect of bringing their pastoral sojourn to an end. By his impatience Orlando is expressing a desire that time move on so that he might devote himself to action, action in this context being defined as genuine loving as opposed to a life of pretense or mere thinking about love. Rosalind's own interest in a life of such action is to be seen in the complex yet very direct speech which continues from her statement that she will weary Orlando no longer with idle talking:

Know of me then—for now I speak to some purpose—that I know you are a gentleman of good conceit. I speak not this that you should bear a good opinion of my knowledge, insomuch I say I know you are; neither do I labour for a greater esteem than may in some little measure draw a belief from you to do yourself good, and not to grace me. Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things. I have since I was three year old conversed with a magician, most profound in his art and yet not damnable. If you do love Rosalind so near the heart as your gesture cries it out, when your brother marries Aliena, shall you marry her.

[V.ii.52-64]

Even though Rosalind is still in disguise as she says this, she shows a desire to get beyond ulterior motives in conversation, to communicate precisely and completely what she means. Language here is stripped bare of any possible ambiguities of expression. In a work with so much play upon and criticism of style, and particularly style in courting, this speech is a breakthrough. In its unambiguous directness it acts out a commitment to action, in this case, to love as opposed to a desire to talk about love as a substitute for the thing itself; such expression stands utterly at odds with both the self-conscious poses of a conventional Petrarchan and pastoral lover like Silvius or the early Orlando and the equally self-conscious detached observations of a Jaques.

Once Orlando and Rosalind have determined that the masquerade should cease, the play's main action is, in effect, completed. Before all the plot complications are resolved and the play's various lovers are paired off in appropriate manner, though, Shakespeare presents us with a picture of yet another pair of pastoral lovers, in a song which itself serves as a reprise for the wooing scenes in the forest. The song helps to enforce a final realistic vision of life in a pastoral world; for it tells of a country lover and his lass who live in a world in which time passes, and in its final two stanzas especially, it insists upon the consequent necessity of seizing the opportunity to love when one can:

This carol they began that hour,
          With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,
How that a life was but a flower,
          In spring-time, the only pretty ring-time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding,
Sweet lovers love the spring.
And therefore take the present time,
          With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino,
For love is crowned with the prime,
          In spring-time, the only pretty ring-time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding,
Sweet lovers love the spring.

[V.iii.26-37]²⁰

Unlike Marvell's appeal to a coy mistress, this song is an uncompromisingly happy one. In that happiness, it reiterates much of the spirit of life in Arden as experienced by Rosalind and Orlando. Like Rosalind herself, the song recognizes time's passing and yet accepts that movement with joy and confidence. Touchstone claims that there is “no great matter in the ditty” and considers that it is “but time lost to hear such a foolish song” (V.iii.38-39, 43-44). The fool either misses the song's whole point or is merely guilty of indulging in his characteristic contentiousness. In either case, his response serves to remind us that mere criticism, which has been the mode of both Touchstone and Jaques, has not been Shakespeare's full or only purpose in the play. Shakespeare has sought to undermine romanticizing pastoralism, and Touchstone and Jaques have helped in that goal, but he has wished to build a fuller vision of life in its place. There has been more going on in As You Like It than those who set themselves up as critics within the play's world would have us believe.

All the brief minor debates in As You Like It give way finally to a single major debate, one whose opposing sides are expressed in their fullest form in the whole approach toward life of Rosalind and Jaques, respectively. When Jaques decides to stay on in the forest at the end of the play and join the convertite Duke Frederick, he is repeating the act of a former suitor that Ganymede claimed to have “cured” of love: Ganymede drove that lover “from his mad humour of love to a living humour of madness, which was, to forswear the full stream of the world and live in a nook merely monastic” (III.ii.406-9). Rosalind, for her part, in seeking love and marriage is submitting herself completely to the full stream of the world. The central conflict the two characters embody is at bottom one between an active life and a life of retreat, between a life of love in a world ruled by time and a life of escapist detachment from the world and from other human beings. It is in the particular terms of this conflict that we can perceive Shakespeare's unfairness to the pastoralist position. For that conflict is not the legitimate Renaissance debate between the claims for the active and contemplative life that a work in the pastoral mode might well have prompted, and Shakespeare is no more open to the arguments on behalf of the contemplative life than was Sidney before him. Shakespeare could conceivably have made his extreme pastoralist in the play a Platonic poet or a visionary—after the manner, let us say, of Spenser's Colin Clout of Book VI of The Faerie Queene. But in choosing instead to have Jaques betray escapist desires to be free of time's onward movement and of the social world's normal responsibilities, rather than be a true contemplative, the playwright banks his argument so that the pastoralist position is denied full intellectual and moral respectability.

In a debate with terms or sides such as we do have in As You Like It, there can be little doubt that Shakespeare's own sympathies lie with Rosalind rather than with the Jaques whose views romantic critics were apt to identify as some version of Shakespeare's own. If we wished, we could easily place not only Shakespeare but all of the play's various characters along a scale between Rosalind's and Jaques's positions. Corin, Celia, and the educated and reformed Orlando, for instance, would in their different ways stand close to Rosalind; Silvius seeks love, but seeks it in a timeless poetic realm and hence would be placed near Jaques. The Duke's position both early and late in the play, though, proves especially important in revealing the play's full stand on conventional pastoralism of, let us say, Lodge's sort. For the Duke (along with his alter ego, Amiens) is, as we have seen, the character most fully identified with Lodge's fictive assumptions; and in a debate with the terms as just defined, a character who indulges in dreams of an Arcadian land free from the usual worldly cares and difficulties would necessarily find himself in Jaques's camp. There are in fact a number of minor details in the play that connect the Duke and Jaques. The metaphor of the world as a stage which Jaques elaborates upon so that it becomes an expression of his own alienation was suggested to him by the Duke (II.vii.137-39); and the Duke confesses early on that it irks him that he and his courtiers are forced to hunt the “native burghers of this desert city” for food (II.i.22-23), a sentiment which the melancholy Jaques elsewhere in the forest carries to his characteristic extreme when he invectively pierces not only the usurping courtiers but even the natural “fat and greasy citizens” of the forest, who in his view have adopted some of mankind's more unattractive qualities (II.i.45-63). Given these metaphoric connections, Jaques takes on the appearance of being, like Amiens, an extension of the Duke himself, and he thereby points up for us the deeper implications of, and dangers in, the Duke's own thinking.

It is to the Duke's credit that he moves at the play's conclusion from Jaques's camp to that of Rosalind. His pastoral dream proves by the end to have been that of a basically good man on vacation. He was, after all, as Amiens has told us, making the best of bad fortune, his enforced banishment (II.i.18-20), and his essential moral health is affirmed at the play's end by his unhesitating willingness to return to court and take up responsible active life in the political world again. This final act of the Duke's is in turn a direct reflection of the whole play's anti-pastoral argument. For the Duke and the play both, the forest is initially a place of possible ease, idleness, and escape from normal cares and responsibilities, but that initial view provides the stimulus for Shakespeare's eventual insistence upon a more active stance. As Shakespeare proceeds to show that the forest is a realm in which time passes, in which man must make a living, and in which nature can be red in tooth and claw, it becomes increasingly clear that the proper response to this pastoral world is to view it for what it is and assume that life within it is not essentially different from life anywhere else. To a character with the sensibility Shakespeare wishes to endorse, a sensibility like Rosalind's, Arden becomes simply a place like any other where one can commit oneself to a life of responsible action and sympathetic involvement with others in a world constantly in motion.

EDEN AND BOHEMIA

Time in The Winter's Tale is not something merely talked or sung about but actually appears on stage—to announce a gap of sixteen years in the play's action. This Time is, to all appearances, a thoroughly benevolent and polite chap, anxious to please and careful not to offend: he wishes that the audience may never spend its time less agreeably than it does while watching the play. He speaks in slightly archaic rhymed verse and himself admits to being old-fashioned; but even in the course of this admission, he warns that he is not one to be snickered at or ignored. His admission comes in lines which show that he sees himself not merely as a chorus—the role assigned to him by the Folio's stage direction—but as the author of the play in which he appears:

                                                                                Let me pass
The same I am, ere ancient'st order was,
Or what is now receiv'd. I witness to
The times that brought them in; so shall I do
To th' freshest things now reigning, and make stale
The glistering of this present, as my tale
Now seems to it.

[IV.i.9-15]²¹

He is Shakespeare's agent in calling attention to the deliberate departure from realistic technique in the play, to the ways in which the play is like an old tale or romance. But at the same time he also asserts the play's ultimate realistic bias. For he notes the similarity between the world of his play and the world outside the play; he claims not only that he controls the lives of his characters but that his power extends over the audience as well; he can and will make just as stale and old-fashioned as this play the “glistering present” in which the audience finds itself. Benevolent and good-natured as he might appear to be, then, he reminds the audience of his very real power, of his ability to please some but try all, to make and unfold error, and to “o'erthrow law, and in one self-born hour / To plant and o'erwhelm custom” (IV.i.8-9).

Most modern critics of The Winter's Tale have been unwilling to grant Time the amount of power in the play's world that he claims for himself. The “triumph of time”—to borrow the subtitle from Shakespeare's source for the play—is usually seen as one which amounts to a triumph over time. The play is most often read as a dramatic embodiment of a myth of renewal, perceived either in Christian terms of a fall and a redemption or in those of pagan fertility myths' cycle of death and rebirth.²² There are indeed resonances both of vegetation myths and of the Christian drama of redemption in the play, and I am not about to deny their presence. A lost child is found again and is reconciled to her father in a scene which onlookers witness as if they were hearing of “a world ransomed, or one destroyed” (V.ii.15). The play begins in winter and ends in late spring or early summer; Perdita refers to Proserpina when she is handing out flowers; and she and Florizel are as welcome in Sicily “As is the spring to th' earth” (V.i.151). Leontes early in the play sins against Hermione by doubting her chastity and fidelity and commits blasphemy against heaven by denying that there is any truth in Apollo's oracle, acts for which he is evidently punished by the loss of his son and the apparent loss of his daughter and wife; he goes through a period of “saint-like sorrow” under the confessional guidance of a figure named Paulina; and when he wakens his faith (V.iii.95), he is rewarded with the miraculous return of his “gracious” wife, Hermione.

Yet Shakespeare points out that the Hermione who is redeemed is sixteen years older than the woman Leontes accused of infidelity. And no matter how much of a miracle Hermione's resurrection appears to be when it is played on stage, Shakespeare is careful to present us with a more prosaic explanation of how and why she has survived all these years: a gentleman of the court notes that Paulina has visited her removed house two or three times a day since Hermione's apparent death (V.ii.104-7), and Hermione herself tells us that she has remained alive so as to see the daughter whom the Oracle gave her reason to believe had survived (V.ii.125-28). The recognition by Leontes himself that Hermione has more wrinkles now than she did sixteen years earlier brings us to the realization that Time has not been routed after all. In his speech of IV.i, Time notes that he is the same as he was “ere ancient'st order was”; he is, then, beyond the control of his own ravaging power. But he is the only figure in the play who is. The final scene, despite its emphasis on the marvelous and the miraculous, does not bring its characters back to the point at which they began, and a full reading of The Winter's Tale must take into account the contradictory conceptions within the play of time being triumphed over and of time still triumphing and having its inevitable eroding effect on human life.

It is Shakespeare's particular use of a pastoral landscape and of the pastoral romance form in The Winter's Tale that brings that latter perception of time, as a destroyer, to our attention most forcefully. The play is less self-consciously grounded in the literary pastoral tradition than is As You Like It and contains relatively little direct criticism of the pastoral convention merely for being a convention and departing from normal perceived reality. But the play has an anti-pastoral dimension nonetheless, since it takes issue with what Shakespeare evidently saw as lying behind the use of the pastoral convention and pastoral romance form in the Renaissance period. The Winter's Tale drives the anti-pastoral argument of As You Like It harder and a step further toward a mythic or archetypal conclusion: it gives evidence of Shakespeare taking renewed notice of the merging of pastoral Arcadia with the Golden Age and prelapsarian Eden and objecting strongly to the nostalgic sentimentalism that follows upon the union of those originally quite separate landscapes. The play's action includes a sojourn in a pastoral setting that proves psychologically educative and therapeutic for its court characters, and in this respect, at least, The Winter's Tale adheres in relatively orthodox manner to pastoral romance form. But Shakespeare complicates that structure by introducing not the usual one, but two pastoral landscapes: the picture of Polixenes' and Leontes' youth evoked in pastoral terms by Polixenes in I.ii and the Bohemia of Acts III and IV, epitomized in the sheepshearing scene of IV.iv. The two versions of pastoral are significantly different, and in their difference lies much that the play has to tell its major characters and us. For while the first of the pictures of pastoral life is conceived in idealized, Edenic terms and is remembered with fondness by Polixenes (and presumably by Leontes as well), the details of his particular description and the play's subsequent action bring us to see that there is something basically wrong, even diseased, with Polixenes' picture of his youth, with his present nostalgic attitude toward that period in his life, and, by extension, with his whole attitude toward life and the world of time around him. Pastoral Bohemia is then used not simply to provide contrast with the court but to correct the version of pastoral that the court projects out of its tensions: a trip to the real countryside for a view of the country's actual conditions becomes a crucial step in the education or cure of Polixenes, Leontes, and, to the extent that he resembles his elders, Florizel. Through the use of these two versions of pastoral the play opposes, more strongly than As You Like It before it, any attempt to return to Edenic conditions in the present world: the yearning for prelapsarian conditions which is part of the discredited pastoral stand in As You Like It, but which appears only fleetingly in Jaques's look back to a time before there was strife between man and animal, is here the starting point for the play's central dramatic action.

When in the second scene of the play Polixenes is asked by Hermione to describe his and Leontes' youth together, he draws upon imagery from the pastoral world to convey the particularly innocent quality of their experience:

We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun,
And bleat the one at th' other: what we chang'd
Was innocence for innocence.

[I.ii.67-69]

It is not just any pastoral scene he is evoking but a specifically Edenic one; for the picture he presents denies the effects of time and the fall on the two young princes. The denial of time occurs in lines describing how he and Leontes felt when they were still young:

                                                                                We were, fair queen,
Two lads that thought there was no more behind,
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal.

[62-65]

Such an attitude is typical of youth, perhaps, and is by no means objectionable. More troublesome, though, is the way Polixenes now looks upon that past experience. For as he continues his description he betrays a wish to be a child again and to live in what he considers to have been an unfallen state:

                                                                                          we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did. Had we pursu'd that life,
And our weak spirits ne'er been higher rear'd
With stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven
Boldly “not guilty,” the imposition clear'd
Hereditary ours.

[69-75]

These lines take us to the heart of Polixenes' version of pastoral and establish the initial grounds for a debate similar to that underlying As You Like It. In his rather futile and wishful “Had we pursu'd that life, / And our weak spirits ne'er been higher rear'd / With stronger blood,” Polixenes is giving vent to escapist sentiments, which he expresses in dreams of a misconstrued Eden. He is to find immediate opposition to those sentiments from Hermione, who wittily tries to argue him out of such nostalgia and toward a more realistic and healthy view of his and Leontes' past (and present) state; in this play's court world, one under the control of a mentally disturbed and tyrannical Leontes, her words on this subject, as on virtually all others, are not heeded by the men to whom they are directed.

One of the ways Shakespeare has of distancing us from Polixenes and the sentiments he expresses in this conversation is to have him wander into theological error. The “hereditary imposition” Polixenes refers to is original sin, and he is suggesting that had he and Leontes remained in their childhood state, they would have escaped that taint.²³ With the reference to “stronger blood,” he is implying further that it was sexual passion which brought about their fall from grace, an implication Hermione is quick to seize upon. She humorously challenges Polixenes with “By this we gather / You have tripp'd since” (75-76), thus inviting him to be more explicit; and he complies:

                                                                                                              O my most sacred lady,
Temptations have since then been born to's: for
In those unfledg'd days was my wife a girl;
Your precious self had then not cross'd the eyes
Of my young play-fellow

[76-80]

But Polixenes is being slightly careless with his words and is still not completely aware of the theological implications of his own statements. In effect, he is accusing Hermione of being the cause of Leontes' fall from grace, while at the same time he uses courtly formulas and refers to her as “my most sacred lady.” Hermione, for her part, shows that she is more aware of those implications, and she takes Polixenes to task for them. Her initial outburst to this explanation of Polixenes is the cryptic “Grace to boot,” the spirit of which might best be expressed by a paraphrase like “Some thanks we get.” A more literal translation would read “Grace in addition to the bargain,” and by the remark Hermione could well be pointing to the discrepancy in being addressed as “sacred” while being called a Satanic or Eve-like temptress. But she does not stop here; apparently accepting for the moment Polixenes' definition of sexual love as sin, she announces that she is perfectly willing to assume responsibility for the “fall” Polixenes describes:

Of this make no conclusion, lest you say
Your queen and I are devils. Yet go on;
Th' offences we have made you do, we'll answer,
If you first sinn'd with us, and that with us
You did continue fault, and that you slipp'd not
With any but with us.

[81-86]

Throughout this gay and lighthearted interchange, Polixenes has been unconsciously betraying a disapproval or even a fear of sexual love. It is a fear that Hermione plainly does not share. For in telling Polixenes to go on, she even welcomes the charge of being a devil or temptress, if it is only her participation in sexual love which makes her an offender. With such a definition of sin as that of Polixenes being applied by a prosecutor, she is confident of her ability to account for her actions before her judge. Her own implication here then is that she does not consider sexual love between marriage partners as itself a sin. Just as a moment earlier she questioned Polixenes when he suggested that he and Leontes might have escaped the taint of original sin, so here she has a surer hold on Christian doctrine than he does.

Hermione's manner since she began talking with Polixenes has been that of one who is confidently and wittily, yet warmly, cutting through the veneer of complex and courtly expression to the real meaning to be found beneath. Her remark “By this we gather / You have tripp'd since,” for instance, reduces to a concise, explicit statement Polixenes' implication about his and Leontes' present moral state. At the end of the dialogue with Polixenes, she applies to her husband's words that same ability to examine speech closely. When she tells Leontes that Polixenes will stay on and is complimented with “Thou never spok'st / To better purpose” (88-89), she queries the remark, implying that it is overstated; she will not rest until she hears the full and explicit truth come from Leontes' mouth:

LEON.
Hermione, my dearest, thou never spok'st
To better purpose.
HER.
                                                                                Never?
LEON.
                                                                                Never but once.
HER.
What! have I twice said well? when was't before?
I prithee tell me: cram 's with praise, and make 's
As fat as tame things: one good deed, dying tongueless,
Slaughters a thousand, waiting upon that.
Our praises are our wages. You may ride 's
With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere
With spur we heat an acre.

[89-96]

Such a speech as this last gives evidence not only of Hermione's wit but also of her essential health. She is apparently belittling women, and when she says “cram 's with praise, and make 's / As fat as tame things,” the primary level of her metaphor equates women with pets that one feeds. But she is eight months pregnant and plainly pleased with herself as she speaks these words, and the exuberance, bordering on harshness or even grossness, of the word “cram” here expresses the opposite of squeamishness. Unlike Polixenes, she is fully willing to accept the flesh and all that might, by some, be considered the gross part of human nature. Her demand to be made fat and her later suggestion of being ridden by a man are a far cry from the repressed mode of sexual innuendo: they are openly and enthusiastically sexual.

The fear of sexual love that Polixenes, on the other hand, reveals in this scene amounts to an inadvertent confession that he and Leontes simply could not deal with sexual passion without disastrous results. That confession is given immediate verification in the sudden outbreak of Leontes' perverted sexual passion, his jealousy. While there is no direct evidence from the text that Leontes overhears the interchange between Hermione and Polixenes, that interchange is in several ways closely connected with Leontes' sudden seizure. Leontes later objects to private conversations between Hermione and Polixenes, conversations which he claims involve paddling of palms, pinching of fingers, and practised smiles (I.ii.115-16), and this interchange between the two is the only one we see. And it is only after, and right after, this conversation between Hermione and Polixenes that we come upon the first definite sign of Leontes' jealousy—his aside of “Too hot, too hot!” (I.ii.108).²⁴ It seems reasonable to conclude that it is the conversation between Hermione and Polixenes about the princes' Edenic youth, whether Leontes overhears it or not, which provides the immediate stimulus for the outburst of his sexual jealousy, and especially reasonable when we note that the attitude toward sexual love that Polixenes expresses in that conversation is a more distant but deeper cause of that outburst and of Leontes' disease. With the definitions of innocence, sin, and the fall which Polixenes gives in that interchange, it is not surprising—in fact, it is almost inevitable—that one or the other of the princes should be subject to an uncontrollable outburst of misplaced sexual feeling. The sufferer in this case happens to be Leontes, though it was Polixenes who expressed the distrust of sexual experience; but the two princes are in many ways similar, and there is every reason to believe that Polixenes' feelings about his youth and loss of innocence represent those of Leontes as well.

In the opening scene of the play, we are told that the two princes were “trained together in their childhoods, and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose but branch now” (I.i.22-24). Derek Traversi has pointed to the double and contradictory use of “branch” in this sentence, conveying the meaning both of “the unity of living growth” and “a spreading division within that growth.”²⁵ But “affection” also has multiple meanings in this context, and throughout the play. Its principal use here is to indicate the strong emotional attachment the princes have for one another. Yet it can suggest also that the two princes have the same emotional makeup. A stronger suggestion of this similarity, and of their similar attitude toward their youth, is to be found later in I.ii, when Leontes himself brings up the subject of his childhood:

                                                                                Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd,
In my green velvet coat; my dagger muzzl'd
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,
As ornaments oft do, too dangerous.

[153-58]

Leontes, like Polixenes, quite understandably looks back to his youth as a time of joy and safety, and he is quite consciously expressing a wish to be back in that happier period; he too wishes he could stop time's movement. But the lines betray something else as well. The reference to his muzzled dagger has sexual suggestions, and if we follow them out, we find the idea expressed that the male sexual organ was originally only an ornament, not designed to be used, but potentially very dangerous to its possessor. Leontes is no doubt largely or totally unaware of this meaning in his lines; he is, he thinks, talking about his dagger, although that in itself is evidence that at some level of his consciousness he is unwilling to confront the fact of his own sexuality. While he may not himself intend any comment on his early sexual experience or fear of it here, the lines, with their buried sexual meaning, do associate Leontes with the distrust of sexual love Polixenes voiced a moment earlier in his conversation with Hermione.

In addition, there is a general parallel in the actions of Polixenes and Leontes in the two halves of this sharply divided play. After a sixteen-year gap, Polixenes participates in much the same sequence of actions as Leontes did earlier. Polixenes' threat to scratch Perdita's beauty with briars (IV.iv.426) is, as Traversi has noted, the exact complement to Leontes' earlier violence against Hermione and Perdita. Outbursts of rage in both figures follow immediately upon the presentation of a picture of life in a pastoral setting, and the result of each outburst is that Perdita is put at the mercy of the sea.²⁶ The effect of such structural parallelism and of the similarity in the actions, sentiments, and temperaments of Polixenes and Leontes is to make the two characters virtually interchangeable. It is this similarity between the two princes that makes it safe to assume that Polixenes speaks for Leontes as well when he yearns for an existence unaffected by time's movement and provides that definition of primal innocence which implies that sexual love could be no part of man's experience in his unfallen condition. And the emphasized similarity makes it possible to say also that Polixenes is Leontes' stand-in on a trip to a pastoral landscape that is designed to cure them both of those misguided attitudes. The interchangeability of the two characters thus accommodates another of Shakespeare's variations upon pastoral romance form in The Winter's Tale: it allows for the pastoral education and regeneration of a character, Leontes, who himself never leaves the court.

The actual countryside in The Winter's Tale bears little resemblance to the idealized, innocent pastoral realm Polixenes yearns for and thinks he remembers. Bohemia, in fact, with its storm-ridden seacoast and its man-eating bears, provides one of Shakespeare's harsher pastoral landscapes. And Shakespeare is careful to show in this play also that living close to nature does not automatically or necessarily make a person intelligent, sensitive, attractive, or chaste. Autolycus at his first entrance sings of tumbling in the hay with country beggar women (IV.iii.12); and though Perdita says that her friends “wear upon your virgin branches yet / Your maidenheads growing” (IV.iv.115-16), her foster brother has evidently tripped with several and still has not retired from the field (IV.iv.239ff.). The rustic shepherds are like sheep themselves, unthinking easy prey for that wolf Autolycus, who enjoys his own kind of sheep-shearing feast. After Perdita, the country figure who possesses the most dignity is the Old Shepherd, her reputed father. He is differentiated from the rest by being given poetry rather than prose to speak (in the sheep-shearing scene, at least), and that poetry shows him to be hospitable, warm, and genial, with a firm love of the land and of tradition. Unaware of the true identity of either Perdita or Florizel, he at first warmly approves of their match. But at the moment Polixenes unmasks, the old man is selfishly concerned only for his own neck. And after his meteoric rise in social status, he becomes just as comic a butt for laughter as his mindless son. Perhaps more damaging yet is the fact that he is used to caricature Polixenes' response to the onset of sexual passion in youth. His solution of how to deal with that passion has simplicity to recommend it, but that is about all to be said on its behalf; he would merely eliminate the years between ten and twenty-three from young people's lives:

I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.

[III.iii.59-63]

With rustics such as these, Shakespeare is plainly not offering up the country merely as an escape from, or a blissful alternative to, life at court.

It is however not the rustics but a figure born at court, Perdita, who is most responsible in the play for demonstrating what country people and country life are like. Probably because of her royal birth she is idealized (a reflection of Shakespeare's adherence to social decorum), while the other shepherds are not; but she is nonetheless the one who speaks on behalf of nature in the debate with Polixenes on nature and art and who fully articulates the conditions under which country people live. In doing so, she also reasserts the vision that Hermione put forward in the play's opening acts. Whereas Hermione's views were in effect stifled and ignored at court, they flourish in the play's country scenes, and it is from Perdita, as representative of the country, that we and the play's court figures encounter an insistence upon time's movement and an endorsement of sexual love that provide definitive repudiation of Polixenes' conceptions of innocence, sin, the fall, and hence of the ideal human existence—those conceptions which were so closely connected with, and even the ultimate cause of, Leontes' diseased outburst of sexual jealousy.

Just as Leontes has his complement in Polixenes, so then does Hermione have a complement in the second half of the play, in her daughter Perdita. The word “grace,” with its many meanings, appears frequently in the play, most often to denote a quality in Hermione; when Time reintroduces Perdita, sixteen years older than the newborn child we have just seen left on the coast of Bohemia, he uses the same term to describe the daughter: Perdita is “now grown in grace” (IV.i.24). Perdita has been raised in the country and is by no means as sophisticated as her mother: unlike Hermione, for instance, she is made uncomfortable by praise. But she shares her mother's distrust of courtly rhetoric and extravagant statement and possesses Hermione's ability to examine such expression critically. When Camillo very lamely flatters her with “I should leave grazing, were I of your flock / And only live by gazing” (IV.iv.109-10), she, after the manner of her mother, scolds him for his words by reducing them to their literal meaning, instead of accepting them merely as a vague compliment:

                                                                                                    Out, alas!
You'd be so lean that blasts of January
Would blow you through and through.

[IV.iv.110-12]

And when in the same scene Polixenes attempts to defend art (and gillyvors) by arguing that grafting is an art “Which doth mend nature—change it rather” (IV.iv.96), Perdita is clever enough to see why he has made his last-second change in wording and wittily calls him to account for his near error. In her response she posits a hypothetical case in which she suggests that the young man standing next to her (Florizel) might desire to breed by her only because she were painted and he not so (IV.iv.101-3). Had Polixenes stayed with “mend,” he would have been arguing that grafting is not simply a natural process but also an improvement upon what nature might produce on its own. Such logic, Perdita sees, would justify human couples' breeding merely because they happen to differ, a conclusion the class-conscious Polixenes would find distasteful on general principles—even if he had not come to this sheepshearing specifically to prevent a grafting or marriage between his son and what he assumes is a girl of low estate. Perdita has among other things, then, rather nicely reduced Polixenes' unstated belief in class distinctions to a mere matter of being painted or not, and far from being limited by a “peasant” mind she thus exercises her mother's critical sensibility even in the nature-and-art debate she is so often assumed to lose to the superior reasoning of Polixenes.²⁷

The most important similarity between Perdita and Hermione, though, is in their attitude toward sexual love. Hermione's willingness to acknowledge being a devil in the definition of the fall that Polixenes provides in I.ii implies that she accepts sexual love as good and natural for man; Perdita brings back to the earth not only spring for Leontes but that attitude toward sexual love as well. While thoroughly chaste and modest, she is particularly frank and open about her sexual desires. And they are desires which exist not in a timeless world but in a time-governed one. It is the insistence on time passing and on the full acceptance of sexual love which most differentiates Perdita's pastoral vision from Polixenes' vision of his “Eden” earlier in the play. Whereas Polixenes sought to stop time and be free of sexual passion, Perdita fully accepts the first and rejoices in the second.

Her consciousness of time is shown to us initially in her words and actions as she distributes flowers to the various guests at the sheepshearing feast. She found herself engaged in the debate with Polixenes on nature and art as a result of her desire to find flowers appropriate to each recipient. She first gave Polixenes and Camillo the winter flowers of rosemary and rue, which were chosen, Polixenes assumes, as a gift suitable for aged men (IV.iv.78-79). Concluding from Polixenes' remark that he was insulted by this initial offering, Perdita goes on to explain why she gave them flowers betokening old age:

                                                                                Sir, the year growing ancient,
Not yet on summer's death nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers o' th' season
Are our carnations and streak'd gillyvors,
Which some call nature's bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not
To get slips of them.

[79-85]

These lines are frequently misread as a reference to the present time of the scene as being not yet on summer's death nor on the birth of winter.²⁸ But the time of this scene is most likely late June, when sheepshearing feasts traditionally take place; and these lines instead are simply an explanation of why Perdita could not give Polixenes and Camillo the late summer flowers that would have been more appropriate for them: because the fairest late summer flowers suggest to her unchastity and work by an artist's hand, she does not have any of them in her garden. After the debate with Polixenes she proceeds to give Polixenes and Camillo midsummer flowers instead—hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, and marigolds—and in handing them over is consciously flattering her guests for a moment:

                                                                                these are flowers
Of middle summer, and I think they are given
To men of middle age. Y'are very welcome.

[106-8]²⁹

Then she turns to Florizel and her younger friends and expresses a desire to give them flowers of spring. In her choice of and reference to flowers, Perdita has been moving gradually backward in time—from winter to late summer to middle summer to spring. In this backward movement, she is reenacting or recapitulating in small the redemptive scheme of the play as a whole. But at the very moment that time is symbolically redeemed by Perdita's actions and words, Perdita herself reasserts the concept of time as constantly moving forward. For she has to admit that she does not have those spring flowers she would like to hand out, and she points to a way, then, in which she is unlike Proserpina:

                                                  Now, my fair'st friend, [To Florizel]
I would I had some flowers o' th' spring, that might
Become your time of day; and yours, and yours,
                                                  [To Mopsa and the other girls]
That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina
For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let'st fall
From Dis's waggon!

[112-18]

There is a strong note of melancholy here and of regret that she cannot really bring spring back to the earth. In handing out her flowers, Perdita is very conscious of the limitations placed on human life by time's movement.

Perdita would appear, for the moment, to be like Polixenes in seeking a life in which one would not be limited by time's inevitable movement onward. But while Polixenes moved from a vision of a timeless world to a desire to retreat and avoid sexual involvement, Perdita quickly recovers from her melancholic mood and moves instead to a triumphant assertion of her dedication to active, living, sexual love:

PER.
                                                            O, these I lack,
To make you garlands of; and my sweet friend,
To strew him o'er and o'er!
FLO.
                                                                                                    What, like a corpse?
PER.
No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on:
Not like a corpse; or if—not to be buried,
But quick, and in mine arms.

[127-32]

She pauses on “or if” most likely because she has in her mind struck upon the root meaning of “corpse”; she would very plainly, then, be thinking about love which makes full use of the body.

There is, no doubt, a smile on Florizel's face as he teases Perdita with his question “What, like a corpse?” But the question points to a way in which Florizel has not yet reached Perdita's level of appreciation of the type of love she advocates. He is generally, next to her, a rather unsure figure. Like his father, when he wants to give the highest possible praise to something, he places it beyond time's control; in expressing his love for Perdita, he in his own way tries to deny time and make her action eternal:

                                                                                What you do,
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,
I'd have you do it ever: when you sing,
I'd have you buy and sell so, so give alms,
Pray so, and, for the ord'ring your affairs,
To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that, move still, still so,
And own no other function. Each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing, in the present deeds,
That all your acts are queens.

[135-46]

G. Wilson Knight has commended this speech as a praiseworthy “striving after eternity,” and F. David Hoeniger has called it “one of the most moving passages in the whole of Shakespeare.”³⁰ But if Shakespeare had wanted us to accept these sentiments without qualification, he probably would not have had Perdita object to them. Perdita has earlier had to chide Florizel for his “extremes” in dressing her up as the goddess Flora for the feast (IV.iv.1-14), and here she finds his words too extravagant. His praise gives evidence of a verbal art which she distrusts and which disguises what she takes to be his true nature:

                                                                                O Doricles,
Your praises are too large: but that your youth,
And the true blood which peeps fairly through't,
Do plainly give you out an unstain'd shepherd,
With wisdom I might fear, my Doricles,
You woo'd me the false way.

[146-51]

Even in her mild rebuke, she retains her wit. For she knows very well that Doricles is a prince and not simply an unstained shepherd. But prince and representative of the court and its art that he may be, Florizel eventually justifies Perdita's confidence and trust in him. At the moment when he must choose between his succession and his love, he stands by Perdita; and in doing so he allies himself with all of nature as well:

                                                                                It cannot fail, but by
The violation of my faith; and then
Let nature crush the sides o' th' earth together,
And mar the seeds within! Lift up thy looks:
From my succession wipe me, father; I
Am heir to my affection.

[477-82]

It was Leontes' diseased “affection” (I.ii.138-46) which blinded him to the truth and caused him to commit the unnatural act of seeking the death of his own seed, Perdita. It is a mark of Florizel's health here that he can rely upon and dedicate himself fully to just those emotions which Polixenes and Leontes found so dangerous and disruptive. For Florizel not to follow the dictates of his “affection” would, in his view, be as bad as marring all the seeds germinating in the earth. He is speaking in overly exalted terms perhaps, but there is good reason to take his exclamation seriously. Perdita has by this time—as a result of her stand in favor of unadulterated nature in the nature-and-art debate, her distribution of flowers, and her identification with Flora—been fully associated with nature and natural life. On this level of association, Florizel in standing by her is helping to ensure nature's continuance from generation to generation. And in allying himself with nature and the country as opposed to the court, Florizel is assuming for his own the vision of human life in which time has a definite effect and in which sexual love plays a good and vital role.

The court's inhabitants can, and indeed do, learn from their country sojourn, then. One need not perhaps go to the country to find and develop a vision like that of Perdita; Hermione possessed that vision without ever having left the court. And the trip to the country is only one of two possible ways the play presents as a means of moving from the disease of Acts I-III to the health and happiness of the conclusion—the other way being the path of penance Leontes follows at court under the moral guidance of Paulina. But the action of the final scenes at court is thoroughly imbued with the specific lessons taught by the country and its representative, Perdita. The recognition that Hermione's statue has wrinkles which Hermione herself did not have sixteen years earlier reasserts the vision of time presented by Perdita when she confesses to her inability to bring back spring and to distribute spring flowers out of season. And the play ends with a rather stark insistence on time passing. When the statue first moves, Polixenes raises the question what exactly Hermione has been doing for these past sixteen years (V.iii.114-15). As Hermione begins to answer it and explain to her daughter why she kept herself alive, she is interrupted by Paulina with:

                                                                                There's time enough for that;
Lest they desire (upon this push) to trouble
Your joys with like relation.

[V.iii.128-30]

Had the question been pursued further, it might have proved embarrassing for both Paulina and Shakespeare. But in having Paulina interrupt here, Shakespeare is not I think merely trying to hurry over a potential weakness in his play's construction. Rather, the effect of raising Polixenes' question and then cutting off its answer before a full explanation has been provided is to enforce upon our consciousness just how wide a gap of time sixteen years can be.

Finally, the concluding scene offers yet another of the instances in the play in which a character expresses a wish to halt time's and life's movement, only to be corrected or rebuked for that wish. Leontes and Perdita both, when they see Hermione's statue, desire simply to stand there and gaze at it for twenty years (V.iii.84-85). Polixenes proved to be misguided in desiring to return to a realm in which he could be “boy eternal,” and Florizel was gently chided for desiring a Perdita constantly repeating the same action, like a wave of the sea. Here, time moving onward brings Leontes and Perdita greater joy than the single moment made eternal. For in the place of a statue, a work of art set in a timeless dimension, Leontes and Perdita are presented with a Hermione warm with life. Polixenes, in his description of his youth, expressed a distrust of his own “blood,” by which he meant his passions and particularly sexual passion. In the sheepshearing scene, Perdita used the word “blood” to refer to a quality in Florizel that she could rely upon to express his true feelings when she could not trust his extravagant words (IV.iv.148); Florizel's “true blood,” then, was cause for confidence and trust. For Leontes in this final scene, the fact that Hermione's statue appears to have veins which bear blood (V.iii.65) becomes cause first for wonder and then, when verified, for rejoicing. “Blood” at this point of course means not simply the passions but one's lifeblood, that which makes one a living being. The use of that particular word here helps to point out that Polixenes, in his distrust of his own blood and in his wistful look back toward the past and childhood, was denying life. The final scene of the play is a celebration of life. It is, in fact, life itself which Paulina calls Hermione's redeemer when she bids the apparent statue descend from its pedestal:

                                                                                                    Come!
I'll fill your grave up: stir, nay, come away:
Bequeath to death your numbness; for from him
Dear life redeems you.

[V.iii.100-103]

“Life” in this final scene clearly means life as it exists in a moving world, a world governed by time. It is Shakespeare's considerable achievement in this play, no less than in As You Like It, that he can bring us to accept the view of time as constantly moving forward and hence eroding and destructive, and to accept it not merely with resignation but with equanimity and even enthusiasm. And it has been his picture of life in a realistically perceived pastoral setting, and the meeting with a pastoral figure whose approach toward life is the very opposite of the nostalgic, which has made us willing to grant that acceptance.

RETURNING HOME

As You Like It and The Winter's Tale in their different ways share the pastoral romance's three-step pattern of an expulsion or retreat, sojourn in a pastoral setting, and return to the normal world. What is perhaps most notable in Shakespeare's use of that structure in these plays is the relative emphasis he gives to the third of those steps. That which provides the generative impulse for the pastoral romance form and which we therefore might expect to be its most distinctive element—the sojourn in a pastoral setting—seems to have held comparatively little appeal for him in itself. He did keep returning to the form and its setting, and, admittedly, some greater health and freedom are to be found in the plays' green worlds: lovers get together in the Forest of Arden and Bohemia, and Perdita brings proper attitudes toward time and sexual love to the older generation of her play. But in one sense, the pastoral sojourn was not strictly necessary for the characters, since the love of Rosalind and Orlando was well under way even at the troubled court, Rosalind possessed the essentials of her philosophy before fleeing that court, and Perdita's views were also held by Hermione, a court figure. In any case, the main thrust of the pastoral sojourn in both plays is not back toward some ideal existence in the past, or even toward what one can do in Arcadia that one cannot do elsewhere, but rather toward the vision that one must have or develop in order to return to and live properly in the normal world. In this respect, the earlier pastoral plays aspire to the condition of The Tempest, the last of Shakespeare's plays to use the structure of pastoral romance. It is a play that is entirely a return.

The island upon which the action of The Tempest takes place is this time a realm of special conditions, where a human being can fulfill many of his fondest dreams and, through magic, assume a godlike control over both the natural elements and his fellowmen. But the action of the whole play is nonetheless one in which the main character seeks to earn his passage home so that he can immerse himself once again in the full stream of the world. And Shakespeare's distrust of idealized pastoral realms finds its most absolute expression in this play, since this time it is not simply thoughts of a misconstrued Eden (as was the case with Polixenes) but a true one that must be abandoned. What The Tempest adds to the earlier pastoral plays' mere assertions that man ought not to indulge in escapist dreams of ideal landscapes is insight into why he cannot afford such indulgence. That insight is provided, with a dramatic efficiency that is typical of the play as a whole, in a single critical incident in the play's action, the point at which Prospero interrupts the revels celebrating the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda. We can look at that crucial incident alone for a vivid and succinct summary statement of the dangers involved in giving oneself over to any kind of pastoral dream of better times and better places.

The interruption of the masque is an act that draws particular attention to itself in the play, for, as has been noted frequently, Prospero's anger when he bids his performing spirits vanish is out of all proportion to the cause of his interruption, Caliban's conspiracy.³¹ Ferdinand observes that Prospero is “in some passion / That works him strongly” (IV.i.143-44), and Miranda remarks that she has never seen her father so distempered (144-45). The stage direction at the point Prospero begins speaking during the masque calls for a strange, hollow, and confused noise, which would, like Lear's storm on the heath, appear to be a representation of the protagonist's inner turmoil. Yet once Prospero directs his thoughts to Caliban's conspiracy again, he disposes of it with consummate ease. Given this disparity between Prospero's anger and the ostensible cause for it, what Frank Kermode has (I believe incorrectly) called the inadequate motivation for Prospero's anger, the scene in effect demands that we ask why Prospero is so angry.

The masque itself provides part of the answer. The masque is Prospero's gift to Ferdinand and Miranda and consists in part of various pagan deities in their turn blessing the lovers with the gifts at their disposal. Those blessings construct for the lovers a vision of an ideal pastoral realm even more rarefied than the island of the play's action. The lovers are presented with a foison or abundance similar to that which Gonzalo earlier claimed for the inhabitants of his Golden Age utopia (II.i.158-60); the only difference is that here it is Ceres, the goddess of agriculture, an art that would not have been necessary in Gonzalo's ideal realm, who bestows the blessings of

Earth's increase, foison plenty,
Barns and garners never empty;
Vines with clust'ring branches growing;
Plants with goodly burthen bowing.

[IV.i.110-13]

As part of her gift, Ceres would have the lovers flourish in a realm in which there is no winter:

Spring come to you at the farthest
In the very end of harvest.

[114-15]

And such blessings are bestowed only after Ceres has been assured that Venus and Cupid, responsible with Pluto for the rape of Proserpina, are to be excluded from the celebration (IV.i.86-91). Venus and Cupid, in fact, having been unsuccessful in imposing some “wanton charm” on Ferdinand and Miranda, are already on their way back to Paphos, and the god of love has broken his arrows (91-101). The conditions of the visionary realm that Prospero's Juno and Ceres conjure up are, then, those of Spenser's Garden of Adonis, itself a source of fecundity and an ideal realm devoted to love, but love without the pain that ordinarily accompanies it in the rest of Book III of The Faerie Queene and in our world; in that garden, as here in Prospero's masque, Cupid has been deprived of his arrows and hence of his power both to raise unruly passions and to hurt.

The conditions of abundance, love, and innocence presented in the masque quite understandably make an onlooker think of Paradise, and Ferdinand, like Polixenes before him (and just as mistakenly), expresses the wish that such conditions might be made permanent:

                                                                                Let me live here ever;
So rare and wonder'd father and a wise
Makes this place Paradise.

[122-24]

It is not completely clear whether in voicing the desire to “live here ever” Ferdinand refers to the visionary realm of the masque or to the island from which he views the masque and which is only a partial reflection of the masque's paradisal realm. The masque world, in any case, is plainly one that man cannot remain in forever: Prospero has been insisting all along on the tenuousness of his pageant and hence of the vision it projects. He refers to the masque initially as a “vanity” of his art (IV.i.41) and then as the enactment of his “present fancies” (121-22); here, at the point of Ferdinand's comment, he asks for silence, “or else our spell is marr'd” (127). Prospero's disturbed and violent interruption of the masque shortly afterward merely makes definite and final those assertions of the pageant's insubstantiality.

But the main reason why one cannot remain in the realm of the masque or even indulge in thoughts of such a realm very long is, of course, Caliban. In determining why Caliban should be so upsetting to Prospero, we should not lose sight of that savage and deformed slave's essential humanity. He is not a subhuman monster, half man, half fish: Trinculo and the drunken Stephano are hardly to be accepted as authorities on such a matter. And while Caliban's may be a nature upon which “Nurture can never stick” (IV.i.189), he is by no means simply a representation of that nature itself. The temptation to consider him an allegorical representation of man's flesh, untouched by spirit, arises no doubt from the inclusion of an “airy spirit” among the play's characters. But the figure in the play with whom Caliban stands in most direct contrast is not so much the spirit Ariel as another human being, Miranda. Miranda and Caliban have both grown up on the island and been subject to much the same education at Prospero's hand, with Miranda evidently on occasion called upon to act as teacher's aid for her slower fellow student.³² Unfortunately, Caliban has not responded well to his lessons: with the language he has been taught, his profit is to know how to curse (I.ii.365-66), and Prospero's (and Miranda's) pains, humanely taken, have been in general “all, all lost, quite lost” on him (IV.i.190). Although Caliban is perhaps not as hopeless a case as Prospero would have us believe—he possesses several of the play's more beautiful lines, likes music, and can appreciate the island's beauty (see, for instance, III.ii.133-41)—he does epitomize all that is intractable and ineducable in human nature, and it is for those qualities that he serves in the play as a constant reminder of man's fallen state and is a threat to the particular vision that Prospero's masque presents.

In having Prospero break off the masque because of Caliban, then, Shakespeare is pointing to the incompatibility between the ideal Edenic world of the masque vision and the fact of man's fallen nature, as evidenced in Caliban. And Prospero's anger can be said to be in part attributable to his annoyance that man generally cannot be rid of the Caliban in himself, that human life refuses to correspond to man's dreams and aspirations, as projected in man's art and in this particular case by the masque and its vision of a paradisal realm. But we should note further how much Prospero, at the conclusion of his speech ending the revels, looks upon his mental disturbance as a personal weakness of his own rather than, let us say, a justified response to a sorry fact about the human condition generally:

                                                                                                    Sir, I am vex'd;
Bear with my weakness; my old brain is troubled:
Be not disturb'd with my infirmity.

[IV.i.158-60]

This concentration on his own infirmity suggests that Prospero's distemper is directed as much toward himself as toward the recalcitrant and quite fallen slave who has been mounting a conspiracy against him.

This is a suggestion that gathers some force if we glance back at another instance of Prospero's vexation in the play—those repeated admonitions to Miranda in I.ii that she be more attentive to his account of past events. As with Prospero's anger when interrupting the masque, here too there appears to be little correlation between the immediate dramatic action before us and Prospero's response to it: there is no evidence that Miranda's attention is wavering and therefore that she needs to be reminded five times to listen more carefully to what Prospero says; on the contrary, Miranda herself observes that Prospero's account would cure deafness (I.ii.106). But there is good cause for Prospero's anger in the subject of his account, if not in its auditor. At the point in his narrative when he is most upset and when he bursts forth with the flurry of reminders to mark his words, Prospero is describing the treachery of his usurping brother:

My brother, and thy uncle, call'd Antonio,—
I pray thee, mark me, that a brother should
Be so perfidious!—he whom next thyself
Of all the world I lov'd, and to him put
The manage of my state …

[I.ii.66-70]

The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies. Thy false uncle—
Dost thou attend me?

[75-78]

Although Prospero is willing to assume responsibility for having awakened the evil nature in his false brother (89-93), that willingness does not help him get past this particular point in his narrative any the quicker. Not only does he keep interrupting his account (ostensibly to make sure Miranda is listening), he is also given to repeating himself, to mulling over and again his own mistakes and the extent of his brother's falseness. Prospero's obvious distress here gives evidence of his still being unable to accept or comprehend his brother's action—“that a brother should / Be so perfidious!”; “Mark his condition, and th'event; then tell me / If this might be a brother”—and the admonitions he directs at Miranda would thus appear to be a means to focus himself as much as Miranda upon the full import of what he is saying. Since Prospero is delivering the whole account of past events as a preface to the acts he is to perform on the afternoon of the play's action, his reminders and repetition look very much like the efforts of someone forcing himself to concentrate upon his mistakes of twelve years back, lest he make the same mistake again.

And that is precisely what has happened during the betrothal masque of IV.i. Prospero's error in the past was to neglect worldly ends and dedicate himself solely to the liberal arts and to the bettering of his mind—in effect, to the contemplative life—at the expense of satisfying his assigned tasks in the political world (I.ii.89-93). Retired in his study, he lost cognizance of the true nature of the world around him and of the men in it (particularly of Antonio) and of the fact that men need to be ruled. Prospero designs the events of the present in The Tempest to rectify that mistake, to put himself back in the seat of power he held before he made only his library his dukedom. To achieve this end, he insists throughout the day's maneuvers upon the precision with which his instructions are to be followed by Ariel, how “exactly” and “to point” his orders are to be carried out (I.ii.194, 502; III.iii.83-86); and he has been showing, until the betrothal masque, a firm awareness of time passing and of the necessity of grasping “the very minute” to accomplish his goals (I.ii.37, 181-84, 240-41). The masque, as the creation of his art, with its picture of a life of pastoral bliss in a timeless Edenic setting, places the appeal of a retired, contemplative life before Prospero once again. It is an appeal to which he seems to have succumbed, despite his prior recognition of his pageant's insubstantiality; for in viewing the masque, Prospero momentarily loses his consciousness of the importance of each passing moment and forgets Caliban's conspiracy, the “minute” of which plot (IV.i.141) comes upon him unawares. And in losing that firm control over his own actions and the day's sequence of events, Prospero betrays that, as much as he might wish the contrary, he cannot after all separate himself from the Caliban he has so consistently berated in the course of the play. The ineducable Caliban is indeed, as Prospero is soon to acknowledge and only partly in a different sense, a thing of Prospero's own (V.i.275-76); Prospero himself reveals a failure to learn, an inability to profit from past mistakes.

It is this consciousness of having repeated a past error that can best account for the extent of Prospero's disturbance at the point when he interrupts the masque. His old fondness for a life of retirement and dedication to the liberal arts, of indulgence in timeless realms set off from life in the everyday political world, has once again made him vulnerable to men less controlled and worthy than himself. And the reason why one cannot afford to give one's imagination over to pastoral dreams of any sort of idealized realm is that so many such men, so much evidence of the fall, must be confronted and dealt with at all times. Prospero has of course been using his books during his twelve-year stay on the island; but as Leo Marx points out, he has not simply been living a life of retired contemplation there. He has brought the island from a savage state in which an Ariel is imprisoned and a Caliban allowed to run free to one in which the good spirit carries out an enlightened (if frequently angry) ruler's commands and a Caliban is controlled and put to work.³³ He has, then, been ruling the island in that twelve-year period, just as he has on the day of The Tempest's action been carefully planning each event—until he is distracted by the betrothal masque and its offer of an ideal pastoral existence. Using his books and art for a social purpose, he has served his apprenticeship, in the limited sphere that a pastoral kingdom might provide, for the much more complex type of rule he will exercise in Milan.

And it is back toward Milan that the play's action takes us with increasing urgency, once the betrothal masque has been interrupted. One can no more stay forever on the island than in the Edenic realm of the masque. The disruption of the masque is merely one in a sequence of steps taking Prospero and everyone else in the play away from realms in which special conditions of any sort apply and back to life in the normal world as we all know it. Once the vision of an Edenic realm dissolves, Prospero announces his intention to abjure the rough magic that gave him control over the physical elements and to drown his book, thus relinquishing all his special magical powers over others. When his magic has brought all his enemies to the point at which they lie at his mercy, he decides not to exercise his avenging power, choosing instead a forgiveness based upon a recognition of his kinship with his enemies as fellow human beings (V.i.20-32). Miranda earlier referred to any figure able to control a storm such as the one opening The Tempest as a “god of power” (I.ii.10); later, the Folio's stage direction had Prospero during the performance of another of his theatrical shows, that of the vanishing banquet, assume a position “on the top (invisible)” (S.D., III.iii.17), and the figures fulfilling Prospero's wishes in that pageant claimed to be “ministers of Fate” (60-61). For Prospero, the movement in the last two acts is plainly one away from a status that gives him godlike attributes to one in which he fully embraces his humanity, acknowledging Caliban as his own and giving extended thought to his own death (V.i.311).

Such a move is not made without a struggle on Prospero's part and perhaps even on Shakespeare's. Prospero, like any artist, in the midst of his manipulating clearly enjoys the almost godlike power over others that his magic and art have given him; it is with a note of exultation that, immediately after the banquet vanishes, he can exclaim:

                                                                                                    My high charms work,
And these mine enemies are all knit up
In their distractions: they are now in my power.

(III.iii.88-90)

And it is perhaps a reflection of the playwright's own pride in artistic achievement that the betrothal masque, that high point of Prospero's artistry, should be interrupted only in its second half, during the dance of the Nymphs and Reapers; the part of the masque most directly presenting the picture of a visionary realm of abundance and innocence, a paradise without winter or pain, is granted full expression and is played out intact.

But the movement back toward Milan and life in the everyday world is, nonetheless, reasserted strongly with Prospero's harsh interruption of his “insubstantial pageant.” And the very harshness of that interruption, accompanied and underscored by that “strange, hollow, and confused noise” (S.D., IV.i.139), is of some significance in itself. When the revels are abruptly terminated, a sojourn in a pastoral landscape, this time in the extreme form of a fully idealized paradisal realm, has once again served Shakespeare as an occasion for asserting a commitment to the active over the contemplative life. The strength of Prospero's passion when he interrupts the masque creates a severe break in the play's action; it is a break which places Shakespeare at odds with those Renaissance contemporaries (like Castiglione and his Ottaviano Fregoso) who viewed the active and contemplative lives as complementary and who could envision a smooth transition from a contemplative life of study to active life in the political world.³⁴ For Shakespeare, the Renaissance debate between the active and contemplative lives remained exactly that, a debate, and his stand in it does not seem to have changed appreciably from the position implied in As You Like It when he rather unfairly chose to make a melancholy man the chief proponent of the contemplative life. The masque of The Tempest has Prospero moving off in a direction which the rest of the play denies, and the playwright's commitment to the active life is here revealed to be both a strong and a rather uncompromising one.

Given that commitment, made at the expense of not simply the pastoral setting of the island but the Edenic setting of the masque, it is only fitting that Shakespeare should turn next to a history play, Henry VIII—and that probably his last sole effort—and a history play presenting one of the playwright's harshest and most confusing political worlds. For it is toward just such a world of harsh, complex, day-to-day political fact that Shakespeare's anti-pastoral argument, extending through his most apparently carefree and unpolitical plays and culminating in The Tempest, had been propelling him all along.

Notes

1. Northrop Frye, “The Argument of Comedy,” in English Institute Essays: 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson, Jr. (New York, 1949), pp. 67-68.

2. Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton, 1969), p. 60; see also Davis's more extended discussion on the development of the pastoral romance form in Chap. 1 of A Map of Arcadia: Sidney's Romance in Its Tradition (New Haven, 1965), pp. 7-44.

3. Shakespeare's use of this green-world comic structure extends from Two Gentlemen, perhaps his earliest comedy, to The Tempest, his last, and is to be found also in varying degrees of articulation in A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale. It is reflected as well in King Lear's movement from the court to the heath and back to court.

4. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective (New York, 1965), pp. 142-43. Pp. 132-59 of this later book present an extended elaboration upon Frye's brief comments on the green-world structure in “The Argument of Comedy,” and particularly upon the connection he sees between the green world and the Golden Age or Eden. Davis asserts the connection even more categorically: “The inner pastoral circle inherited from classical pastoral represented concretely a realization of more than the usual possibilities in life, or a life of conscious artifice. It always suggests the paradisiacal, whether explicitly—as when it is called ‘a second Elisium’ or ‘Nature's Eden’—or implicitly, when it is described, like the godhead, by negatives asserting a peculiar state of stasis without cold or heat, without either direct sunlight or complete shade, a place of eternal becoming. It is always presented as the place where the natural and the supernatural join, where heaven meets earth (often, concretely, as a place habitually visited by the pagan gods)” (Idea and Act, p. 57).

5. Quotations from The Two Gentlemen of Verona are from the Arden edition, ed. Clifford Leech (London, 1969).

6. For a fuller discussion of this education and a consideration of the play's virtues (and there are some), see my “Education in The Two Gentlemen of Verona,” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900], 15 (1975), 229-44.

7. R. P. Draper (“Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy,” Études Anglaises, 11 [1958], 1-17) and David P. Young (in his chapter on the play in The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare's Pastoral Plays [New Haven, 1972]) have written most extensively on the ways in which As You Like It is “a consideration … of pastoral itself” (Young, p. 70). Draper notes that Shakespeare used pastoral as “a means of exploring instead of escaping from life” (p. 17), and Young sees Shakespeare as writing As You Like It “out of a sympathetic interest in pastoral, which he undertook to explore more fully than Lodge had done,” and definitely not as “bent on demolishing or ridiculing his source” (p. 39). My own view is closer to that of Albert R. Cirillo, in “As You Like It: Pastoralism Gone Awry,” ELH, 38 (1971), 19-39: “by consistently undercutting the pastoral convention as a convention, he [Shakespeare] also suggests that the ideal of the pastoral is not an end in itself” (p. 39).

8. See Harold Jenkins, “As You Like It,” in Shakespeare Survey 8, ed. Allardyce Nicoll (Cambridge, 1955), 40-51; Helen Gardner, “As You Like It,” in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (London, 1959), pp. 17-32; and Anne Barton, “As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending,” in Shakespearian Comedy, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14 (London, 1972), pp. 160-80. This dramaturgical casualness by no means in itself denotes faulty craftmanship. But there is evidence of inattention to matters of basic dramatic technique, such as the handling of characters' exits and entrances. Characters enter, say their pieces, and then are often inelegantly hustled off stage again; see, for instance, the exits of Touchstone and Corin in III.ii and that of Silvius in IV.iii. What such evidence points to is that the mere unfolding of plot was not Shakespeare's primary concern in constructing the play; its main thrust or organizing principle is what we would probably call thematic.

9. It is not necessary to assert this observation as forcefully as it might have been in the past, thanks to Cirillo's article “As You Like It: Pastoralism Gone Awry” and to Francis Berry, “No Exit from Arden,” MLR [Modern Language Review], 66 (1971), 11-20, later incorporated into his Shakespeare's Comedies (Princeton, 1972). In their opposition to the older view of Arden as an idealized Golden Age or Edenic landscape, both Berry and Jan Kott before him (“Shakespeare's Bitter Arcadia,” in Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski [Garden City, N. Y., 1966], pp. 314-42) overstress the amount of bitterness and struggle within the play's forest world and hence upset the play's balance in a new direction.

   Several more recent studies of As You Like It have also darkened the play, by emphasizing the conservative, patriarchal social structure that underlies its action and both inhibits the play's spirit of festivity and limits our sense of Rosalind's dominance of its world. See especially Peter Erickson's chapter “Sexual Politics and Social Structure in As You Like It,” in his Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley, 1985), pp. 15-38. Erickson offers a modification upon C. L. Barber's seminal study of the play in the latter's Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959). While Erickson's approach is helpful in pointing out how socially conservative Shakespeare may have been, he betrays a measure of anger at the playwright for not being as liberated as he himself is. Louis Adrian Montrose, in “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 32 (1981) 28-54, strikes a slightly better balance with the statement that “if As You Like It is a vehicle for Rosalind's exuberance, it is also a structure for her containment” (p. 52). At risk of being accused (by Montrose) as being among those generations of critics who are quite infatuated with Rosalind, I still find the issue of patriarchal authority only an undercurrent in what is, after all, one of Shakespeare's most festive plays, the guiding central intelligence or sensibility of which is Rosalind's.

10. Quotations from As You Like It are from the Arden edition, ed. Agnes Latham (London, 1975).

11. See Draper, “Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy,” p. 9: “Although the Duke has been banished to the Forest of Arden, he brings with him his old cultivated, polite, chivalric life and makes that a part of his environment.”

12. Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde, in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. II, The Comedies, 1597-1603, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (London, 1958), pp. 188-89.

13. Lodge does occasionally betray a city or court inhabitant's condescension toward country people: the Coridon who has been accepted earlier as an eloquent and intelligent proponent of country life appears at the marriage of Alinda and Saladyne overdressed in a holiday suit which is an incongruous mixture of elegant and extremely rustic articles of clothing and which makes its wearer look slightly ridiculous (Rosalynde, p. 247; for comment on the suit, see Roy Lamson and Hallett Smith, eds., The Golden Hind [New York, 1942], pp. 665-66n). Similarly, a moment later Coridon offers a mazer of cider to the exiled Duke Gerismond “with such a clownish salute, that he began to smile” (p. 248). But such instances of recognition of the gap between court and country, occurring primarily near the end of the work, stand primarily as lapses in tone and inconsistencies in the fictive assumptions of the work as a whole; there is little in the rest of the action to point to a realistic view of either court or country figures.

14. See Lanham's comments on “homo rhetoricus” and the rhetorical view of life, in the first chapter of his The Motives of Eloquence (New Haven, 1976), pp. 1-35.

15. James Smith, “As You Like It,” Scrutiny, 9 (1940), 13-16.

16. The Miscellaneous Works of Sir Thomas Overbury, ed. Edward F. Rimbault (London, 1890), p. 74; cited by Agnes Latham, p. xlvii, in her Introduction to the Arden As You Like It.

17. See Alice Lotvin Birney, Satiric Catharsis in Shakespeare (Berkeley, 1973), pp. 87, 97; Enid Welsford, The Fool (1935; rpt. London, 1968), pp. 141, 218-19; and Robert Hillis Goldsmith, Wise Fools in Shakespeare (East Lansing, Mich., 1955), pp. 68-93.

18. Peter G. Phialas, Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1966), p. 235. Rosalie L. Colie (Shakespeare's Living Art [Princeton, 1974], p. 256) similarly refers to Jaques as “the superpastoralist of the play.”

19. For a similar but brief treatment of Rosalind's and Orlando's attitude toward time, see Jay L. Halio, “‘No Clock in the Forest’: Time in As You Like It,” SEL, 2 (1962), 203-7.

20. These stanzas as rendered here and in modern editions of the play follow the stanzaic arrangement of the song as it appeared in Thomas Morley's First Book of Ayres (1600), rather than what is most likely the garbled version of the First Folio. In the Folio, the song's first stanza is followed immediately (and without a stanzaic break) by the final (fourth) stanza, with the second and third stanzas following thereafter. If one accepts the Folio's stanzaic order, the “therefore” of “Therefore take the present time” is deprived of its meaning, since that line would not follow upon “How that a life was but a flower,” and the song might thus well merit Touchstone's judgment upon it as foolish and a waste of time to hear. See Latham's note to V.iii. 15.

21. Quotations are from the Arden edition of The Winter's Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London, 1963).

22. For view of the play as reenacting the Christian drama of redemption, see S. L. Bethell, “The Winter's Tale”: A Study (London, 1947), pp. 71-104 et passim; J. A. Bryant, Jr., Hippolyta's View: Some Christian Aspects of Shakespeare's Plays (Lexington, Ky., 1961), pp. 207-25; and S. R. Maveety, “What Shakespeare Did with Pandosto: An Interpretation of The Winter's Tale,” in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene, Oreg., 1966), pp. 263-79. And for emphasis on parallels between the play and fertility myths, see F. C. Tinkler, “The Winter's Tale,” Scrutiny, 5 (1937), 344-64, especially 357-59; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Last Plays (1938; rpt. London, 1958), p. 46; F. David Hoeniger, “The Meaning of The Winter's Tale,” UTQ [University of Toronto Quarterly], 20 (1950), 11-26; and E. A. J. Honigmann, “Secondary Sources of The Winter's Tale,” PQ [Philological Quarterly], 34 (1955), 27-38. G. Wilson Knight (The Crown of Life [1947; rpt. London, 1965], pp. 76-128) seems to combine the Christian and fertility myth readings. He states that “Nature rules our play” (p. 88) and while himself viewing it as “scarcely orthodox,” sees the play as expressing a “pantheism of such majesty that orthodox apologists may well be tempted to call it Christian” (p. 97).

23. Pafford understands the phrase “the imposition clear'd / Hereditary ours” to mean that the boys would be able to plead themselves guiltless of all personally committed sin, that is, of all sin except original sin (note to I.ii.74-75). He thus takes “clear'd” to mean “excepted.” This does not seem to be the easiest or most reasonable reading of “clear'd” or of the phrase as a whole. It is much more likely that “clear'd” takes on its more common meaning of “removed,” a meaning the word has in legal contests (“to be cleared of the charges against one”); such a meaning is more consonant with the word's context here, which has Polixenes referring to filing a plea of “not guilty” before a judge, albeit an eternal one. Admittedly, my interpretation, which has the boys pleading “not guilty” to original sin, makes less immediate sense than Pafford's (since it is impossible to make such a plea), but it is, I believe, precisely because of the theological error in Polixenes' remark that Shakespeare has Hermione catch him up and query him further.

24. Despite the attempts of J. Dover Wilson (in his notes to the New Cambridge edition of the play) and Nevill Coghill (“Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter's Tale,” in Shakespeare Survey 11, ed. Allardyce Nicoll [Cambridge, 1958], pp. 31-33) to explain away what critics before them saw as a flaw in the play's dramaturgy—the lack of psychological preparation for Leontes' initial outburst of sexual jealousy—it is difficult to find concrete evidence of Leontes' jealousy before the exchange between Hermione and Polixenes. Leontes has been rather unexpansive since his initial entrance, but the first possible indication of anything troubling him comes in his answer to Hermione's desire to be made as fat as a tame thing and be told when she first spoke to the purpose. In this speech Leontes, using his first notable or striking metaphor in the play, describes his own courtship of Hermione as taking “three crabbed months” which “sour'd themselves to death” (I.ii.102). And this rather discordant metaphor may only be his unsuccessful attempt to express a lover's impatience with waiting. Indeed, there may be an advantage in having Leontes' jealous outburst come upon us with dramatic suddenness at the “Too hot, too hot” of line 108, since the very suddenness of that outburst would help to emphasize and convey the violence and force of the insanity that has seized his mind.

25. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: The Last Phase (New York, 1955), p. 108.

26. Ibid., p. 145. For further comment on the parallels between the two halves of the play, see Ernest Schanzer, “The Structural Pattern of The Winter's Tale,” REL [Review of English Literature], 5, no. 2 (1964), 72-82. Tayler (Nature and Art, p. 133) notes that the two pastoral moments in the play balance each other structurally, the first preceding disruption and the second preceding integration.

27. For the view of Perdita as unable to keep up with Polixenes' reasoning, see Pafford, p. lxxviii of the Arden ed., and his note to IV.iv.88-97.

28. See, for instance, Pafford in his note to IV.iii.37. My own interpretation of these lines is in agreement with and indebted to the reading of William O. Scott, “Seasons and Flowers in The Winter's Tale,” SQ, 14 (1963), 412-13.

29. The Folio does not give any stage direction for lines 103-8. Pafford, in his note to line 103, assumes that the men of middle age are not Polixenes and Camillo, but rather some other guests. But since Camillo has the next speech and since no other guests speak up at this point, it is most reasonable to assume that Perdita has given the flowers of midsummer to Camillo and Polixenes.

30. Knight, The Crown of Life, p. 120; Hoeniger, “The Meaning of The Winter's Tale,” p. 12. It ought perhaps be noted that Florizel's lines here are apparently indebted to a slightly mocking passage in the Arcadia in which Sidney cites Pyrocles' passion for Philoclea as evidence of the strange ways in which love enchains the lover's judgment; the passage is to be found in OA, 230, and in Feuillerat's edition of the 1593 text, II. 53-54.

31. See, for instance, Frank Kermode's comments on Prospero's “apparently unnecessary perturbation” in the Introduction to the Arden edition of The Tempest, 6th ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), pp. lxxii-lxxv, and his note to the stage direction at IV.i.138. Quotations from The Tempest will be from this edition.

32. Given any textual warrant, I would prefer to follow Dryden and Theobald and assign Miranda's speech of I.ii.353-64, which tells of pains taken to teach Caliban to speak, to Prospero rather than to his daughter. The harsh tone of the speech is much more clearly in accord with Prospero's other lines in the play and quite out of character for Miranda. In any case, Caliban in the next, answering speech uses the plural form of “you” in cursing those who have taught him (I.ii.365-67). Despite the Folio's assignment of I.ii.353-64 to Miranda, then, Prospero clearly has had a role in educating Caliban, and undoubtedly (as Prospero's speech of IV.i.188-93 suggests) the major role.

    For the observation that the true foil to Caliban in the play is Miranda rather than Ariel, see Stephen Kitay Orgel, “New Uses of Adversity: Tragic Experience in The Tempest,” in In Defense of Reading, ed. Reuben A. Brower and Richard Poirier (New York, 1962), pp. 121-22. I am greatly indebted as well to Orgel's comments on the betrothal masque.

33. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), pp. 52-57.

34. I disagree, then, with Kermode, who views Prospero's stay on the island as contemplative preparation for a return to the active life and who thus considers the active and contemplative lives to be thoroughly complementary in the play; see his Arden edition Introduction, p. li.