What light, if any, does this dimension of multiculturalism shed on Perdita in terms of her development towards womanhood? Physically, she is the image of her mother, as is remarked by the Third Gentleman (V.ii.36-37) as well as by Leontes, who almost falls in love with her (V.i.226-27). Thus we are in a sense seeing Hermione all over again, except that Perdita's behavior is just the opposite of her mother's. Whereas Hermione, a Russian princess, was free and familiar with her guest Polixenes, Perdita, half-Russian and half-Sicilian, is "retired" when her guests, including Polixenes, arrive and is reprimanded for this by her putative father, the Old Shepherd (IV.iv.62). "Sir, welcome./ It is my father's will I should take on me/ The hostess-ship o' th' day. You're welcome, sir" (IV.iv.70-72). In the restrained conduct of Perdita, "now grown in grace" (IV.i.24), we witness a reenactment of the Polixenes-Hermione relationship, but this time with a new and transformed Hermione as hostess. It is a flashback, so to speak, but with a difference, a marvelous piece of dramatic legerdemain.

One final observation: it must have been evident to Shakespeare's audience that, following the death of Mamillius, the prophecy of the Oracle—"the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found" (III.ii. 134-36)—had been fulfilled with the discovery of Perdita, whose marriage to Florizel would result in heirs both for Sicilia and Bohemia, thus reconciling the two countries that had been estranged. With Mamillius' death, the crown would ultimately pass on to his nephew, or niece, Perdita's offspring; similarly, with Queen Elizabeth's death, the English crown had passed on to her nephew, James VI, son of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots.

In The Winter's Tale the prospect of heirs being born is projected in the image of the "branch" and in the possibility of the King having "no son" (I.i.24, 45), a curious innuendo made in the play's opening scene in the face of the fact that the King does have a son. But looked at in the light of the contemporary political scene, this and the play's ending would, of course, have reminded the members of Shakespeare's audience of what they had themselves not long before experienced: the anxiety of seeing their recent monarch Queen Elizabeth dying without an heir and also the relief they felt at the throne being then painlessly filled by James VI of Scotland, coming to England as James I, thus effecting reconciliation between two long-standing antagonists, England and Scotland, and uniting them under a single crown. For that audience, politics and history had become drama.²⁰

Notes

¹ References to The Winter's Tale are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

² Sukanta Chaudhuri, ed., Renaissance Essays for Kitty Datta (Calcutta: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), pp. 26-27.

³Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, ed. Edward A. Bond (London: Hakluyt Society, 1856), p. 162.

⁴The First Forty Years of Intercourse Between England and Russia, 1553-1593, ed. George Tolstoy (St. Petersburg, 1875), p. 30, as quoted in Jesse D. Clarkson, A History of Russia (New York: Random House, 1961), pp. 113-14.

⁵ Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation (London: J. M. Dent, 1907), II, 73. For a fascinating account of the company's financial success in England during the reign of Ivan the Terrible, see Richard Wilson, "Visible Bullets: Tamburlaine the Great and Ivan the Terrible," English Literary History, 62 (1995), 47-49, 60-62.

⁶ Julian S. Huxley and A. C. Haddon, We Europeans: A Survey of 'Racial' Problems (New York: Harper, 1936), p. 179.

⁷ Ibid., p. 140.

⁸ Mario Pia di Bella, "Name, Blood and Miracles: The Claim to Renown in Traditional Sicily," in Honor and Grace in Anthropology, ed. J. G. Peristiany and Julian Pitt-Rivers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), p. 151.

⁹ Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, introd. Holbrook Jackson (London: Dent, 1932), III, 265 (Pt. 3, Sec. 4, Mem. 1, Subs. 3).

¹⁰ Anthony Gerard Barthlemy, Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1987), p. 155n.

¹¹ Allesandro Serpieri, "Reading the Signs: Towards a Semiotics of Shakespearean Drama," in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 122.

¹² David Abulafia, Commerce and Conquest in the Mediterranean, 7700-7500 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1993), p. 21.

¹³ C. Marsden, Palmyra of the North: The First Days of St. Petersburg (London: Faber and Faber, 1942), p. 27.

¹⁴ Richard Willes, History of Travel; as quoted by C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 308.

¹⁵ Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1964), pp. 282-83.

¹⁶ Burton, Antatomy of Melancholy, III, 264 (Pt. 3, Sec. 3, Mem. 1, Subs. 2).

¹⁷ Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans. R. Knolles (London, 1606), as quoted by Hodgen, Early Anthropology, p. 279.

¹⁸ Terence Hawkes, "Swisser-Swatter: Making a Man of English Letters," in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. Drakakis, p. 36.

¹⁹ Bodin, The Six Books of a Commonweale, as quoted by Hodgen, Early Anthropology, p. 282.

²⁰ I am grateful to André Beteille of the Delhi School of Economics for several valuable suggestions in the preparation of this article.

Source: "'What means Sicilia? He something seems unsettled⁵: Sicily, Russia, and Bohemia in The Winter's Tale," in Comparative Drama, Vol. 30, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 311-24.