SOURCE: "Recasting Jealousy: A Reading of The Winter's Tale," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXVI, Nos. 1 and 2, 1990, pp. 50-77.

[In the following essay, Ronk compares Leontes to Othello, and demonstrates that the function of elapsed time in The Winter's Tale allows a psychological shift in Leontes which does not occur in Othello.]

In the middle of The Winter's Tale the character Time announces that Leontes disappears for sixteen years, only a piece of an evening in stage time, but symbolically crucial for positing the opportunity for change, for turning tragedy to romance, destructive obsession to grace. As in so many other Shakespeare plays, obliteration—here not just metaphorical but of an actual figure on stage—argues for possibility. Leontes takes on years of penance, following Paulina's prescribed routine, and finally, although she says otherwise here, moves the gods to forgive him:

Therefore betake thee
To nothing but despair. A thousand knees,
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
Upon a barren mountain, and still winter
In storm perpetual, could not move the gods
To look that way thou wert.

(III, ii, 207-212)

Having created jealousy out of nothing (cf. his repetition of this word at I, ii, 292-296), Leontes must now strip himself back and become "nothing but despair," his voice completely silenced. Like Paulina who vows to say nothing (III, iii, 229-230), he too says nothing at all. This is important not only because of the value of silence in other Shakespearean contexts—a particular type of knowledge associated with the non-verbal—but also because it signals a retreat from the conscious to some unconscious realm prior to language.²

Yet this period in which the major character of the play is absent is one of the most fertile in a play itself filled with images of procreation, pregnancy, and fertility, for it allows Leontes to reimagine the characters and scenes of the tragic opening of the play, giving us in Part II the comic pastoral and the miraculous rebirth of Hermione. Like Hamlet who disappears off-stage and is threatened by death before he can imagine the necessary end of his play, Leontes moves off-stage into the house of death, penance, and a kind of psychological winter (this aspect of the play's title) in order to rework himself and his dreams.

What I want to demonstrate here, using Othello as a kind of foil, is that although the two heroes are alike in uncanny ways, the structural maneuver at the center of The Winter's Tale not only allows a generic shift from tragedy to romance,³ but also provides a psychological basis for Leontes' change. Critics have already noted the similarities in Othello and Leontes: both are irrationally jealous of innocent wives; both are unable to accept mature sexuality and the loss of male intimacy; both tend to see the world and its creatures as entirely idealized or debased; once affected, both characters view the world in a paranoid and distorted way—everything becomes suggestive of copulation and cuckoldry; both appear destined for tragedy and death. What happens to each character in relation to a similar situation is, however, quite different, and it is this difference, especially Leontes' crucial time off-stage—a time not available to Othello—that I wish to examine here.

Why might Shakespeare have designed the play in what appears so awkward a fashion, and how can we come to "know" what happens in places we cannot see; what relationship does Time, both as character and as passing years, have to do with penance; what is there about the nature of penance that prevents it from being seen? What is the relationship between what we see on-stage and what we imagine as occurring off-stage; and what is the nature of the relationship between penance and Bohemia?⁴

Shakespeare might have presented Leontes in some conventional pose as the penitant described by Paulina: kneeling, weeping, flagellating himself, praying—but does not. What is gained then as a result is that Leontes is defined as different from an emblematic figure of Penance; whatever changes are occurring to Leontes are not those which would be visible to the eye, an important fact in a play that has already demonstrated the fallibility of the eye as trustworthy witness; rather the essential changes are within and involve the restructuring of Leontes' psyche and way of being. Although as audience we remain keenly aware of this missing figure, aware of absence and what it means as well, we do not see him, nor could we see the changes which Luther, for example, details as necessary for attaining grace. The sorts of bodily punishments which Leontes vows to undergo would mean nothing without the unseen operation of faith in a man's heart, an operation which his physical absence implies:

Just as faith alone gives us the spirit and the desire for doing works that are plainly good, so unbelief is the sole cause of sin: it exalts the flesh, and gives the desire to do works that are plainly wrong, as happened in the case of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Genesis 3:6⁵

Another important aspect of penance, beyond its invisibility, is that it requires time; although Leontes has destroyed his family and world by a momentary madness, he must spend years atoning for his crime, indeed a lifetime, and it is therefore appropriate that Time should announce his whereabouts and efforts. Moreover, Leontes must manage his penance in silence. Shakespeare removes him from the stage: no action and no words can demonstrate true penance, especially since his actions and words have been in error and quite at odds with what he should have known about the loyalty of his wife and of his friend. Like Lear, who also should have known of Cordelia's love and loyalty through years of demonstrated affection, Leontes ought also to know, although he does not. He accuses and rants and rails, even against the words of the oracle, and now he is appropriately silent.

Also, as we know from overhearing Claudius' prayers for forgiveness, a speech or gesture can seem convincing (and in this instance does to Hamlet) although one's heart is not in it; thus Shakespeare chooses another theatrical convention to represent Leontes' genuine penance. As Greek theater represented crucial dramatic events such as suicide and death as occurring off-stage, so here Leontes loses one sort of life in exchange for another, off-stage. The most significant and mysterious actions cannot be seen; moreover, because we do not see Leontes we are not tempted to judge his efforts as imperfect or inauthentic.

Thus the central character disappears and, although the relationship between on-stage and off-stage events over the course of theatrical history is too large a topic for this paper, in this case, as in others, we learn obliquely about Leontes from the images that appear on-stage. Like Oliver in As You Like It, Leontes is converted off-stage and while we witness other miraculous changes in a timeless pastoral world containing significant gestures of love, generosity, faith: the Duke, for example offers food to Orlando and Adam, and Perdita offers abundant flowers with her love. Only by withdrawing into silence and into a visual discourse prior to speech can Leontes hope to effect change; Shakespeare removes Leontes and in his place presents Bohemia, a visual representation of regeneration, possibility and growth, an Eden found for the one, as Luther mentions, lost.

In his famous discussion of archetypes, Northrop Frye argues that comic romances provide their characters with a green world, a pastoral world of healing, imagination, and rearrangements so that they may return to court rejuvenated and strong. In The Winter's Tale the mythical sea-coasted Bohemia serves as this green world, and "has analogies, not only to the fertile world of ritual, but to the dream world that we create out of our own desire."⁶ Interestingly, however, in this play we see a green world that does not include the central character; it is his world, but he is missing from it. He is not present as a participant or as a spectator on a balcony—certainly a possible staging—though Bohemia is surely his in some important way beyond the appearance of his stand-in daughter.

But the notion of a green world is not quite enough to explain how regeneration operates in this particular play, because unlike the more innocent characters of the early comedies, Leontes is not a part of this world; a decidedly fallen and tragic figure, Leontes is outside Bohemia even as it is potentially his. Secondly, the changes that occur in other green worlds happen far more quickly; here sixteen years pass between Leontes' vow of penance and the presentation of a world that contains within it the next (innocent) generation. As chorus Time refers to the metaphor of dreaming that dominates the play and asks that the audience accept the passing of years, "as you had slept between"; and thus in the play's own terms, it is as if Leontes' work of penance is coincident with dreamwork, as if Leontes has slept out the sixteen years in order to dream anew.⁷ Phenomenologically, what happens on stage is like something taking place in his unconscious; it is dreamlike and illusory, but also profoundly true, literal, and recognizable.

Moreover, the green world is not, as in earlier comedies, a stage to be passed through in order to learn enough to return to the real world, but a Romantic and mythical stage to be re-attained as if innocence could be re-imagined. Like the Romantic heroines in the film comedies of remarriage, Leontes has lost his sexual innocence—the point is emphasized—but as Stanley Cavell says in Pursuits of Happiness, "if we are to continue to provide ourselves with the pleasure of romantic comedies, with this imagination of happiness, we are going to require narratives that do not depend on the physics of virginity but rather upon the metaphysics of innocence."⁸

The second half of the play, parallel in so many obvious ways to the first half, reads like wish-fulfillment, Leontes' reworking of unconscious material in order to produce the right dream. Although both of Leontes' dreams are embodiments of similar obsessions, they differ radically. Leontes' original encounter with his own repressed unconscious material results in rage and death. At first his "dream"—that which he imagines is a vision of betrayal—is regressive and destructive,⁹ as Leontes sees Hermione's actions not as existing in their own right, out in the world and separate from his own state of mind, but as enactments of his own paranoia. As Hermione says, "You speak a language that I understand not / My life stands in the level of your dreams / Which I'll lay down" (III, ii, 78-79). Leontes' second and overwhelming dream comes, however, as a result of his conscious choice of penance; and in withdrawing to an inner life he creates the wish he expresses when he first glimpses his error: "Apollo, pardon / My great profaneness 'gainst thine oracle. / I'll reconcile me to Polixenes / New woo my queen, recall the good Camillo (III, ii, 150ff.). At this moment in the play, however, Leontes' wish is unearned, for it is the sixteen years when he believes his wife dead and when he is dead to stage life which provide the necessary rearrangements and shifts of material that enable romance to assert itself. There are several ways in which the processes of penance and dreaming overlap here, and several reasons why I see a close relationship between Leontes' penance off-stage and the dreaming which visualizes Bohemia. Both are intense internal activities in which the psyche is freed as a result of the body's removal from daily life by sleep, mortification of the flesh, entombment in darkness and solitude. Both concern what one is behind the facades and theatricalities of life—and also what one was originally, in early childhood or in being born, having one's origins in sin. Penance can be effected by meditation of visual images as Louis L. Martz argues in The Poetry of Meditation,¹⁰ and certainly dreams are powerfully visual (preceding the fall into language). Both are generated by a strong desire or wish (in Leontes' case for oneness with the feminine, his family, and the divine), and both demand belief of some sort, at the very least a belief in the reality of the experience itself. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud describes dreams as wishes visualized:

Here we have the most general and the most striking psychological characteristic of the process of dreaming: a thought, and as a rule a thought of something that is wished, is objectified in the dream, is represented as a scene, or as it seems to us, is experienced.¹¹

Moreover, penance obviously requires a belief in the divine and in powers beyond one's own control; although a person can kneel and pray, it is not solely in his or her power to experience penance without some intervening grace. In Luther's words:

Faith .. . is something that God effects in us . . . Faith puts the old Adam to death and makes us quite different men in heart, in mind, and in all our powers . . . what a living, creative, active powerful thing it is.¹²

Likewise in dreaming, something unconscious and beyond one's control produces the images encountered. Leontes' dream of Bohemia bears witness to his alteration; for without a change in his psyche he could not have had such a dream. Having lost his faith in his life previously, a loss signaled by his loss of a wife and son, his dream of Bohemia signals a new creative faith. Since what is at stake in this play is also how to interpret what one sees—Leontes having so badly misinterpreted his wife's hospitality towards Polixenes—the particular presentation of Bohemia lets the audience know that Leontes has suffered towards good ends, that he knows finally how to read his dreams.

In this context it is also useful to think of Victor Turner's description of liminal states as states of transition;¹³ such a place as Paulina's chapel would be a "betwixt and between" stage of institutionalized transition. Yet since it is a transitional threshold, between one place and another, it cannot be seen any more than the passage of time can be seen. Such liminal states are, according to Turner, characterized by transition, anonymity, absence of status and its accordant rites and obligations, sexual continence, humility, sacredness, silence, reference to mystical powers, acceptance of pain, and obedience. Leontes partakes of all these, giving up all his public functions in order to unmake himself, as if he had to strip himself (to become nothing) in order to remake himself as a new man. Leontes must lose his ego in order to be capable of the sort of renewal as a result of which Hermione's life indeed stands at the level of his dreams. That is, the profound change which Paulina effects makes possible the awakening of Hermione at the end; she does stand before him as a living statue, but for him—at least to begin with—she seems a dream of his own making. Miraculously, he gets exactly what he has wished for, both a new wife (life) and an emblem of the old: Hermione both unchanged and wrinkled by age.

What I would also argue is that, although the play does not specifically locate Leontes for the time he is offstage, it is appropriate to imagine him in a chapel which, if not identical to, is one which at least participates in or blurs with the chapel located in Paulina's house. Although Leontes indicates as he arrives to see the statue in Act V that he has not visited the place before, he also has several other contradictory experiences in this scene: his wife is dead and lives; his daughter is not lost but found; sixteen years have passed and none; stone is flesh. Moreover, he has been in a long and extreme state of mourning—a mourning that has stimulated the desire to restore what is lost—and if not entirely rapt and confused, certainly "so far gone" as to be absent from the stage. Does he really know, one might ask, where he has been? Since his efforts in one "place" create the miracle in the other, they are bound to collapse into one another for an audience which sees but one chapel although two are mentioned. Moreover, the residing spirit in each chapel is Paulina who effects the change in Leontes which makes possible the change in Hermione. Paulina herself is a liminal figure (representative of St. Paul) who is maternal, paternal, forgiving, judgmental, old enough for wisdom and a husband and children, and young enough to join the others in (re)marriage at the end of the play. Like other Shakespearean figures such as Falstaff, Rosalind, and Portia, who aid in transforming male character, Paulina functions to embrace opposite aspects of gender and generation, not as dangerously collapsed, but as signalling a Tiresian-like wisdom. More importantly, perhaps, she witnesses (to the extent that it is possible) Leontes' penance; in Luther's schema, one Christian confessing to another effects the peace of mercy.

The "place" where Leontes is located then is representative of the unconscious mind, as Leontes is remembering, withdrawn into himself, out of all action. Thus, as the withdrawal is symbolic of Leontes' withdrawal into himself, we come to understand what occurs to him by what occurs on-stage, each aspect of his internal struggle dramatized by what we do see. In his book, Shakespeare and the Artist, W.M. Merchant argues that Shakespeare's staging is always symbolic, following the medieval principles of simultaneity and symbolic presentation. Since the arts of music, architecture, painting and verse were not separated from one another, he argues, a witty interchange of ideoms and methods was used to transfer significance from one medium to another: "drama adopted the essential qualities of the well-tried simultaneous setting in its most allusive and flexible form and it achieved ease of multiple reference by employing conceit, most obviously in the verse, but equally richly in the music employed and in the relationship of the architectural setting to the witty movement of the plot."¹⁴ An important way then of understanding Leontes' motivation and behavior, both early and at this moment in the play, is to examine what does appear in language, metaphors, staging, the embodiment of what cannot be seen and heard by what can be, by looking at his "dream" to understand his mind as Freud suggests: "The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind."¹⁵

A. The Consequences of Jealousy: Leontes and Othello

Before examining Leontes' final dream and the ways in which Leontes' escape from the stage allows for the dream of romance and allows the audience to follow his psychological shifts, I want to return to the starting points of The Winter's Tale and Othello to describe the similarities between the two characters in order to understand more completely the radical differences of the endings and the radical introduction in The Winter's Tale of the gap of time. Critics have often noted that both Leontes and Othello suffer from the same sort of projective paranoid jealousy as a defense against homosexual attraction; both are described as losing themselves to the irrational forces of the unconscious. As Murray Schwartz argues in his essay on Leontes, such men suffer a paranoia derived from homosexual desire (thus the formula: I do not love him, she does), and from a deeply ambivalent relationship towards both the maternal and paternal, the sexual and sacred: "In The Winter's Tale, jealousy and the sacred and dialectical terms; each implies the other, as separation implies union or winter spring."¹⁶ Schwartz further describes paranoia as a psychic imprisonment, the sort which traps Othello throughout, but the opposite of the bodily imprisonment which Leontes undergoes as he works to free his psyche:

Paranoia is a form of psychic imprisonment in which the loss of ego boundaries makes the external world nothing but a confluence of symbols, selected according to subjective and ambivalent wishes and fears. For the paranoid, others become what D.W. Winnicott has called "subjective objects," embodiments of psychic realities that exist only in relation to the subject. Others lose their otherness. In this sense, paranoia can be seen as a radical denial of separation, a perversion of the mutuality of the boyhood myth which shares with it a crucial element. In his delusions Leontes identifies with both Hermione and Polixenes and tries desperately to exclude himself from the fantasies he projects on them.¹⁷

What occurs in each play as a result of initial paranoia is, however, quite different. What happens to Othello is that his unconscious material becomes, in Freud's words, fixed, even as he is spatially trapped on the stage, not allowed to leave its confines for long enough. In speaking of patients with obsessional neuroses, Freud says that they are "fixed to a particular point in their past that they do not know how to release themselves from, and are consequently alienated from both present and future."¹⁸ Othello's experiences with the horrors of his unconscious is thus given no chance for revision. The consummation of his marriage, occurring off-stage and at some indeterminate time, triggers the release of unconscious material which Othello is never allowed time to rework. He is goaded by Iago, rushed by war and sword fights, pressed by his wife. He is kept in a state of permanent madness until he sees no way out of his nightmare but to still the flesh and blood which arouses him.

What most especially fixes Othello and holds him fixated on sexual consummation and its attendant confusion and horror is the overwhelming presence of the absent handkerchief, emblematic of his wedding sheets. The discrepancy between the ideal he has constructed of Desdemona and the real experience of marriage including both blood and passion, is more than he can bear. Moreover, Iago knows how to mirror his anxiety and to establish a male bond more powerful, familiar, and reassuring than the marriage bond; Othello is never permitted to dream again, but is instead kept by Iago ever crazed, ever in a state of frustrated excitation, his sleep and sexual performance interrupted, until finally he enacts such anxiety in a fit, and moves to rid himself of it by murder and suicide. Othello comes undone not only physically, but also, as others have noted, verbally¹⁹ as he loses his ability to proceed in a linear, narrative way, a horror for one who relies so heavily upon storytelling to construct his character. The mad Othello catches, repeats, makes "lie" (falsehood) into the "lie" of sexual hysteria, and "zounds" (God's wounds) into the fulsome female wound central to his madness. The divine Desdemona is no longer a pure diety to him, but a woman wounded:

Lie with her? Lie on her?—We say lie on her when they belie her.—Lie with her! Zounds, that's fulsome.—Handkerchief—confessions—handkerchief! (IV, i, 36ff.)

Leontes' fit of jealousy is quite similar. Like Othello's, his jealousy has its origin in a mistaken sense of his wife's behavior and it also surges up seemingly out of nowhere, in part in reaction to an ideal vision, for Leontes of his childhood past as described by Polixenes. It was a past without wives, as he says, without adult sexuality and without children:

We were as twinned lambs, that did frisk i'th'sun, And bleat the one at th'other; what we changed Was innocence for innocence; we knew not The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dreamed That any did; had we pursued that life, And our weak spirits ne'er been higher reared With higher blood, we should have answered heaven Boldly, "not guilty;" the imposition cleared, Hereditary ours. (I, i, 67ff.)

Out of this "dream" of childhood innocence, Leontes extracts the crazed "dream" of betrayal discussed by Schwartz and others²⁰ as Leontes converts his sexual tie to Polixenes into a perverse relationship between Polixenes and Hermione.²¹ One might also argue that as "twins" the two are competing for maternal love (emblemized by the pregnant Hermione) and that Leontes is hence catapulted into an infantile paranoid state in which ego boundaries are completely dissolved and other people become figures without external reality.²² Gazing at the two together, Leontes' aside reveals the crazed state of his mind: "Too hot, too hot! / To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. / I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances, / But not for joy, not joy." (I, ii, 109-111) In this diffuse state—"muddy," "unsettled" the mingling of friendship which Leontes has projected onto his wife and friend creates all manner of mingling: of sexes, of characters, of generations.²³ Leontes sees himself as merging with Polixenes who has usurped his role; with Mamillus who is like him in his boyishness (his desire to be "boy eternal"), as like him as one egg is to another; and with Hermione as he identifies with the female, envisioning both of them with their "gates" forced open. Although he begins by identifying with the cuckolds,²⁴ and seeing all neighbors as adulterers (as all neighbors blend into a disembodied "smile"), his imagery of ponds and gates becomes both female and ambiguously referential. Moreover, "Sir Smile" is a free floating image that draws attention not only to the neighbor's oily falsity, but to both a slit and an erection (by shape), and to male (Sir)/female (orifice) confusion:

And his pond fished by his next door neighbor, by
Sir Smile, his neighbor; nay, there's comfort in't,
Whiles other men have gates, and those gates opened,
As mine, against their will.

(I, ii, 194-7)

Most obviously, Leontes conflates his wife and his friend, blending their bodies into what for him is a terrifying image of male and female parts overlapping until there is no distinction between cheek and cheek, lip and lip, nose and nose, breath and breath (and as he moves into animal imagery, between "neb" and mouth). He defies Camillo's assertion of their innocence by anatomizing, by reducing each whole being to a small part:

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career
Of laughter with sigh (a note infallible
Of breaking honesty)?

(I, ii, 285-89)

Once boundaries between people are broken in Leontes' mad dream, the boundaries between life and death are also broken and Perdita is sent to die and Mamillius does die.²⁵ In the case of Hermione the boundaries are blurred if not actually broken, since her death remains a seeming truth throughout most of the play. Each loss thus prepares him for the necessary loss of himself to himself and to the audience, and teaches him his tragic error. First, in losing touch with the world around him and specifically with the female in it, he loses both the nurturing and protective female (the pregnant Hermione) and the female as a potential force for courtesy, gracefulness, and grace (Perdita).²⁶ Although he describes Antigonus as dreading his wife, it seems rather as if Leontes has projected such fear onto him. It is Leontes who seems to dread all that is female, for when Paulina lays his child before him, he speaks in an hysterical fashion that merges female as whore and female as infant. He wants both "out":

Out!
A mankind witch! Hence with her, out o'door!
A most intelligencing bawd! (III, iii, 65-67)

But it is his other child whom he loses forever. As Richard Wheeler remarks, the loss of Mamillius in the actual world confirms its independent existence and wakes Leontes from his deluded "dream."²⁷ Leontes cannot have his boyhood, mirrored in Mamillius, again. Certainly he can never return to the boyhood Polixenes describes in Act I in which the two were without guilt, sin, or women. They were, as he says, "unfledged," without the plumage symbolic of adult sexuality, and untried. Thus in killing Mamillius, Leontes kills not only his son, but his own boyhood, and the living proof of his adult sexuality. In denying (as he denies the truth of the oracle) the truth of the psychosexual stages he has already passed through, in wanting to be, "boy eternal," Leontes must return to an unconscious state and begin again to construct himself.

Leontes also loses Antigonus, a loss which can be understood symbolically both as Antigonus represents both the larger world which is devastated by the king's madness, and as he represents an aspect of Leontes' own sick psyche. His name splits into parts (anti-gonad) indicating yet again male fear of sexuality. His speeches about his wife and daughters are also ugly in the extreme and match Leontes' imagination in their cruelty and male paranoia. Although his daughters are only five, nine, and eleven years old, he offers them up as sacrifices if Hermione proves false. He will keep them "girls eternal" and will castrate himself. Although he appears to be exaggerating only for the rhetorical effect of asserting Hermione's innocence, his language nonetheless reveals his similar obsession with betrayal and fear:

By mine honor,
I'll geld 'em all; fourteen they shall not see
To bring false generations. They are co-heirs,
And I had rather glib myself than they
Should not produce fair issue.

(II, i, 146-50)

Murray Schwartz comments that in this passage Antigonus confuses his own potency with masculine honor and duplicates the disease he repudiates: "He becomes, therefore, the surrogate for his master and the carrier of Paulina's curse (II, ii, 76-79), the vehicle for Shakespeare's displaced exorcism of Leontes' jealousy."²⁹ Sent to the seacoast with Leontes' child, Antigonus hears the name "Perdita." Having lost faith in Hermione's innocence, and believing falsely that she is dead, he dreams that Hermione appears before him, telling him to name the lost baby Perdita, but, of course, it is he himself, not the baby, who is lost, whom nature destroys.

Many readers have noted the parallels between the first and second parts of the play;²⁸ for example, in both parts a king has an irrational outburst, someone longs to return home by sea, a woman represents fertility, a pastoral scene is described or appears, gods reveal the truth. Critics have also noted that the romances are in many ways revisions of the tragedies; The Winter's Tale is of particular interest as it demonstrates the revision mid-way in a single play, and as it offers Leontes an experience denied Othello or Macbeth or Lear. Unlike these equally maddened figures, Leontes is allowed to settle and be still. Unlike Lear's frail, deluded dream of being imprisoned with Cordelia, Leontes' dream also growing out of imprisonment and total immersion in the self, proves robust and fruitful. In spite of the powerful conclusion, however, the vision of death is never quite expunged; perhaps indeed it contributes to Leontes' (and our) awe at the preciousness and cost of life returned as those that remain appear on stage together.

B. Recasting

The process which culminates in Leontes' time offstage and his new dream begins with his becoming nothing, and we know this as early as the courtroom scene in which Leontes is so certain of his accusations that he defies Apollo. According to Cleomenes' description of his own experience, one that Leontes is soon to replicate, the oracle manifests itself first as overpowering thunder and only then as clear words setting forth Hermione's innocence:

But of all, the burst
And the ear-deaf ning voice o'th' oracle,
Kin to Jove's thunder, so surprised my sense,
That I was nothing.

(III, i, 8-11)

It is this very experience of "nothing" which Leontes must come to know as Lear does on the heath; he must come to know that his suspicions were as he himself named them, "nothing," and that he created them out of nothing, and must therefore experience complete loss and nothingness. David Willbern in his wonderfully suggestive article on "Shakespeare's Nothing," gives a description of Leontes' destructive abilities; his essay does not explore, but does suggest that the awareness of nothing can be creative as well:

Psychoanalytic theories of the origins and acquisition of language, of perception, or reality testing, of the capacity to symbolize or to interact creatively with an environment, all start from the primary fact of absence, separation, loss. The loss of an immediate, felt relationship: to bring things symbolically to mind when they are not really present, or to make them present through some communicative act (like a cry). Awareness of absence thus results in imagined or reenacted presence: a recollecting or remembering of what was lost (my emphasis).³⁰

The scene in which Antigonus is pursued by a bear and in which the clown describes the tearing of Antigonus to bits (anatomized even as Leontes has anatomized Hermione and Polixenes) has frequently been described as grotesquely comic, a scene in which genres and tones are audaciously mixed. At the threshold of sea and land, sea and sky, as the ship bores the moon with her main mast, this coast presents those at the thresholds of life and death: Perdita, Antigonus, and the seamen. Yet in the midst of the clown's jumbled stories of destruction come the suggestions of miracle, the discovery of the baby and the idea of charity. It is tempting to read the clown's description as a description of the (re)birth of Perdita. Since Leontes cannot look upon the original birth, convinced that his wife is a whore and the child a bastard, we get it, like so much else in Part II of the play, a second time; and the clown's words seem in this context to describe not only the drowning but also intercourse, the yeasty rising of a pregnant belly, and finally crowning, birth, and the mother's cries of pain: "O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls! Sometimes to see 'em, and not to see 'em; now the ship boring the moon with her main mast, and anon swallowed with yeast and froth, as you'd thrust a cork into a hogshead" (III, iii, 89-93). Although the shepherd cannot save the men on board (to do so, as the clown says, would mean being able to walk on water), the two can value and care for the baby—which they do even before they discover that the baby's value is also measured in gold. This wrenching seacoast scene is analogous to Leontes' unconscious, off-stage wrestling with his own past as discordant elements are tossed up together. Many critics have noted the composite and unsettling nature of the seacoast scene, how like a dream it seems. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud writes:

The possibility of creating composite structures stands foremost among the characteristics which so often lend dreams a fantastic appearance, for it introduces into the concept of dreams elements which could never have been objects of actual perception.³¹

In this scene from The Winter's Tale, the common element comparable to the common element Freud describes as the organizing principle of a dream is the element of thresholds. Importantly, it is the scene that occurs immediately after Leontes announces that tears shall be his recreation: "Come, and lead me / To these sorrows" (III, ii, 240-41). Although Leontes cannot know it at this point, buried in his words is the hope of re-creation. The OED defines "recreation" as a restoration of vigor and health, and as a new creation, the re-creation necessary to make the old Adam into the new; "As in the creation he could have made all at once, but he would take days for it: so in our recreation by grace, Bp. Hall, 1611." Clearly this is the direction Leontes has been working towards during his time off-stage. The logic of romance almost requires an experience of death (often in association with water leading to new life). Out of his watery tears (presented on stage in images of the sea) comes the miraculous possibility of change, dependent, of course, on the image of Jesus which stands behind the shepherd and the reference to walking on water. Likewise, Hermione's initial tears of sorrow, the spouts of Antigonus' dream, become in her final speech, waters from the gods; both Leontes and Hermione are made anew, recreated out of something dead:

You gods look down
And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon my daughter's head.

(V, iii, 122-24)

The recreation allowed Leontes in The Winter's Tale is not allowed Othello. Like other critics of the play, I read Othello as one who in marrying loses his sense of separate identity as a self-defined soldier and storyteller, one whose past and character do not prepare him for marriage and specifically for sexuality in marriage.³² Oddly, Othello announces his own lack of appetite as he tells the Venetian senators of his modesty; one must wonder why he makes his private affairs so public and what he is defending against, what worries have slipped out in so inappropriate a setting when he says, "the young affects / in me defunct." How different this is from Desdemona's straightforward request to accompany her husband to Cyprus: "that I love the Moor to live with him."³³ Although Othello woos Desdemona with story, addresses her in fine language, and wishes to perceive her as alabaster, pure, and chaste, he is drawn not only by Iago, but by his own private vision of her "topped" into a morass of overwhelming feelings and confusions that he cannot sustain. It is Othello who has had the vision which Iago describes as the most horrible and which, were there not a murder, the audience too would be forced to witness in Act V; Iago cries:

Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on?
Behold her topped?

(III, iii, 393-93)

The consequent state of chaos, jealousy and sexual fantasy into which Othello plunges, literally undoes him as he falls to the ground in a trance. Once in this state, Othello, like Leontes, perceives an amorphous world of his own making in which "chaos is come again," and in which his vision of Desdemona merges with a picture of a whore. This double vision of her and his inability to imagine a woman of both delicacy and appetite is revealed throughout in language similar to Leontes' of anatomizing and splitting: "O curse of marriage, / That we can call these delicate creatures ours / And not their appetites" (III, iii, 268-69). It is also important to note here, as other critics have done, that dissolutions affect Othello's sentences as well as his perception and that it is not until the murder of Desdemona is complete that he again stands cloaked in fine phrases, a story of his own making, speeches appropriate to his image of himself as hero. The various ways in which Othello's language fails him or in which he merges with image are both odd and telling. For example, he conflates not Desdemona and Diana, goddess of the moon and chastity, but himself and the virgin Dian: "I think my wife be honest, and think she is not . . . / I'll have some proof. My name, that was as fresh / as Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black / As mine own face" (III, iii, 383-85). It is, as he reveals, the fact that he is black that disturbs him; and I would add that the character Othello is disturbing to the audience precisely because he does not totally break a slanderous stereotype: a black man, he is both sexually obsessed and threatening to the white world, a murderer.

In his farewell speech, Othello also creates an odd substitution which is revealing of how he sees himself. He begins the speech by asserting that he could have stood his situation, even if Desdemona had been tasted by the entire camp of soldiers, if only he had not known. Yet when he comes to list what he must say goodbye to, he moves from the logic of "Farewell the tranquil mind," to a list of farewells that is not, as one might expect, of bliss or contentment or Desdemona, but of troops, wars, steeds, banners, all manner of military items. What he has lost in suspecting Desdemona of adultery, it seems, is war; yet this makes psychological if not logical sense only if Othello has been "unmanned" (weakened like a virginal girl), only if what he has lost by his immersion in his sexual union with Desdemona is his sense of himself as potent soldier.

Unlike Leontes, Othello is unable to escape the state he has created. For one, this play has a villain, an embodiment of Othello's imagination presented in an exterior character who keeps Othello in a state of paranoid delusion and anxiety; each echoing "indeed" or "think" from Iago prevents Othello from recasting his perceptions, from recreating his initial vision: "To be once in doubt / Is to be resolved" (III, iii, 179-80). Moreover, it is Iago who interrupts Othello each time in the play that he is in bed with Desdemona; although it is impossible in the play to discover exactly when sexual consummation takes place (it seems to occur and not to occur throughout) it is possible to note that when Othello and Desdemona move toward an offstage bedroom, what we witness on stage as an emblem for what happens off-stage is a riot of shouting male figures, swords, moneybags, in essence a "nightbrawl." One might therefore assume that Othello finds it difficult to prevent sexuality from becoming violent, that for him sexual battle and battle merge; or that his image for the manly is so allied to soldiering that in trying to cast off the soldier, he finds himself unmanned as well. And yet, if there were a place which might offer the hope of Othello's revising his initial vision of sexual horror, it might very well be this bed, not as a place of impotence, but as a place of fertility, playfulness, the timelessness of sexual pleasure, dream.

Rather what seems to occur in the play is that Othello's initial horror is fixed in place, reified by Iago whose imagination of women, goats, and monkeys replicates his own, and by the emblem of the handkerchief and the image of the "beast with two backs." That is, in the play Othello's vision of a world without differentiation is given emblematic existence by the emblem-maker, ensign Iago who carries the army's flag and who waves this red and white flag of a handkerchief. The bit of cloth dyed in mummy gotten from the hearts of dead maidens is passed from hand to hand, from mother to Othello to Desdemona, to Emilia to Iago to Cassio to Bianca, and it seems in its passage across generations, genders, and classes to indicate a pervasive—albeit unconscious—obsession with the fearful destructiveness of sexuality.³⁴ It is as if the dominating vision is a bed, "lust-stained," spotted with "lust's blood" (V, i, 36). Othello's superstitions seem to touch everyone, even Desdemona who wishes she had never seen the handkerchief with magic in its web, but who also asks Emilia to put the wedding sheets on her bed. Perhaps this request is not exactly superstitious, but it does cause one to wonder what she knows, suspects, or fears, and what exactly she means when she says to Emilia that Othello will return to her at once, "incontinent." This word appears earlier as well when Iago attempts to pacify the eager Roderigo by telling him to "go to bed and sleep." Roderigo replies, "I will incontinently drown myself (I, iii, 300). If Othello has been unable to control his ejaculation and his fears of violence before, Desdemona must suspect she will encounter the same sort of man in her death bed as she did in her marriage bed.

The handkerchief is, moreover, an emblem exactly suggestive of stained marriage sheets,³⁵ and it is therefore threatening to Othello in any scenario of off-stage action one might try to envision (although it seems to me that it is exactly this effort to envision and the equally forceful avoidance of it that makes the audience anxious even as the central character is anxious). Even in his final speeches Othello speaks in an equivocal and metaphoric way about Desdemona's body, his fear of marring her perfect alabaster skin with blood, his fear of penetration: "When I have plucked the rose, / I cannot give it vital growth again; It needs must wither" (V. ii, 14-16).

The other image, although one not given concrete realization, that dominates the play is the image of the two-backed beast, thrown up by Iago to Brabantio in Act I, Scene i.³⁶ The image is obviously designed by Iago to incite mischief, and it does. Moreover, reason and evidence to the contrary, it continues to live in memory, so that like the stain on the handkerchief it haunts the play, even if one is uncertain how to place it, how to understand it. The image is a false one. That is, we have no evidence that Desdemona and Othello are in bed together at the outset of the play, and in fact the play presents evidence to the contrary: Othello and Desdemona arrive at the council chamber where Brabantio will accuse them, not together but separately; and it is not until Cyprus that Othello gives a speech in seeming anticipation of their union: "The purchase is made, the fruit's are to ensue, / That profit's yet to come 'tween me and you" (II, ii, 9-10). The image can also be seen as false in its utter fearfulness and in its creation of a composite figure in which male and female, human and beast, front and back are merged into a deformed being with two backs. Yet, of course, it is just such a vision that is appropriate to Othello's crazed imagination, one way of understanding—via Iago—what drives the Moor to slay the woman to whom he is joined, who creates him a "beast" rather than a "perfect soul."

Once caught in this web, Othello is unable to escape, and indeed is kept from a return to the unconscious that might have created a new fate for himself. Rather, he becomes a rigid, almost caricatured version of the noble Moor, speaking his own praise by means of story (cf. V, ii, 334-352); he gets to be what he wants and needs: by killing Desdemona he makes her the rigid, cold, statue-like figure he originally adored, and he makes himself the separate, exotic figure he recognizes and understands.

In The Winter's Tale the wrenching that makes change possible is not easy or pleasant. If one views the seacoast scene as the scene that effects change, one can see that it is painful, discomforting, upsetting, not only for those on stage, but also for Leontes whose psyche is represented by the events as he remains in darkness, and who must acknowledge, as Prospero must, that darkness and all its evils belong to him ("this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine"). In so many of Shakespeare's plays, it seems that the path to revision lies through darkness, and when Freud describes the battle within a patient's unconscious as the patient tries through analysis to effect recovery, or when a Christian describes the battle between the old Adam and the new, they also describe something like the action of romance.³⁷

C. The New World

The revised world in Part II contains, as many have noted, parallel elements to Part I. It begins, for example, with Camillo, yet again the faithful helper, wanting to return home even as Polixenes wanted to leave court to return home at the outset of the play; his eventual leaving is the first of two sea voyages in Part II paralleling two voyages in Part I. In Part I Camillo speaks of Mamillius, the child who "makes all hearts fresh" (and who now must be, as Polixenes says, "afresh lamented") and in Part II he speaks of Prince Florizel. Instead of the robbing of honor Leontes imagines in Part I, Part II offers the robbery of sheets and Autolycus' robbery of the clown's pockets, closely related, but comic. Like Leontes, Autolycus robs himself although he does it by design, for controlled effect; and even his speech in which he confuses virtue and vice in a courtroom scene, echoes in miniature the earlier confusion in Sicilia's court of justice as Leontes makes Hermione's virtue into vice. Autolycus describes himself as having been whipped out of court for his virtues; the clown's correction is comic here, but reminds us nevertheless of Hermione's treatment in Part I: "His vices, you would say; there's no virtue whipped out of court" (V, iii, 91).

In Part II Polixenes calls his son too base to be acknowledged (IV, iv, 422) as Leontes refuses his daughter in Part I: "This brat is none of mine" (I, iii, 91). Yet of course, Polixenes' refusal is brief and completely transformed by the joyful reunions that dominate the ending of the play. Again, Polixenes breaks into an angry fit at the sheepshearing and threatens to scratch Perdita's face with briers. Although this is like Leontes' fury in Part I, it is here deflected, contained, immediately undone by the opening of the fardel, like the opening of a second oracle speaking truth from some hidden time and place in the written voice of Antigonus, his letters wrapped in Hermione's cloak.

Many of the same elements are presented in Part II, but they have been transmogrified into song and dance; art keeps us at some distance from the sharp experience itself and nothing is finally harmful. In fact, one might argue that Part II, including the revival of Hermione in which art and nature are conjoined, is a demonstration of the necessity of art for the success of romance. Thus the servant can describe Autolycus' songs as filled with that which horrified Leontes and no one is afraid: "He has the prettiest love songs for maids, so with bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of dildos and fadings; 'Jump her, and thump her'" (IV, iv, 194 ff.). Autolycus picks pockets and sings of "pins and poking sticks of steel; / What maids lack from head to heel" and the world does not come undone. The dance of the satyrs, emblematic of lust, who have "danced before the King," might be seen as a version of King Leontes' own animal rage of projected desire; yet here such raw energy is confined to a ritual for celebration.

The second half of the play is also, like the first part, dominated by the imagery of dreams, but here of course the dreams come true, and as the shepherd says, Perdita will bring Doricles "that which he not dreams of." The second half also refers to important issues of faith, echoing Leontes' loss of faith and parodying his inability to believe in something so obvious as his wife's virtue and his own paternity by presenting Autolycus' song about the woman turned fish "for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her." "The ballad" Autolycus asserts, "is very pitiful, and as true". (IV, iv, 281 ff.). The ballad also gives a low comic version in its description of woman turned fish of the miraculous high comic change of statue into woman. And both transformations are dependent not only on faith but on the presence of witnesses. According to Autolycus, "Five justices' hands at it, and witnesses more than my pack will hold," and in the chapel many are the "lookers-on," including those the audience, who witness Hermione dead become Hermione living.

The entire pastoral is a wonderful emblem of the "betwixt and between" state of the play that reigns until the final unveiling scene; the sheepshearing occurs between two seasons, "Not yet on summer's death, or on the birth / Of trembling winter," and it offers mixed flowers, mixed costumes, a mixture of classes and stations, a mixture of the high and the low in style and language.³⁸ As a revised projection from Leontes' own psyche, the pastoral is crucially different from the initial pastoral scene in which Leontes and Polixenes romped as twinned lambs, longing to be "boy eternal." This time the eternal aspect of this world is not in fixity, but in process, a process that goes on forever. Florizel praises Perdita by wishing that she would ever speak, sing, buy and sell, give alms, dance:

When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o'th'sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that—move still so,
And own no other function.

(IV, iv, 140-43)

Most importantly, this time the pastoral world is populated with a boy and a girl instead of two boys, a match which makes union and generation possible as it was not before.

If there is a single character in the midst of this pastoral who represents flexibility, changeability, potential and mirth, it is Autolycus. According to the servant, his songs transform the most mundane of objects into something divine: "why, she sings 'em over, as they were gods or goddesses; you would think a smock were a she-angel." Moreover, there is a way in which Autolycus replaces the absent Leontes and signals his change; while the major character is off-stage, this onstage figure represents and enacts the other. As Freud asserts, every dream treats of oneself, one's ego often hidden behind a strange person.³⁹ Both Autolycus and Leontes see themselves as victims, Autolycus' false pleas as victim literalizing Leontes' false pleas as cuckold, the difference between them being that Autolycus knows he is playing both the parts, whereas Leontes has to learn that he is. Like Leontes Autolycus is turned in on himself, even his name is self-referential, and like Leontes he can pull from his bag all manner of tricks and dreams—some destructive and some recreative, though all in a comic jumble. He is, moreover, that aspect of Leontes which remains "boy eternal." True only to himself, childishly selfish, he is the play's version of his puppet show character, the Prodigal Son, who unlike Leontes never grows up, never marries, but who will try, as he says in his last speech, to become the "tall fellow" the clown describes him as being. Here the clown declares his faith in one he knows to be false, because, one can only assume, of affection and his own essentially good nature, and this simple declaration takes us forward to the end and to Leontes' own declaration of faith and love.⁴⁰

Autolycus also provides the parody of torture in his story of how the clown will be tortured; although Autolycus' account of what never takes place is not verbally similar to what happens at some off-stage place to Leontes, as he talks we know that Leontes has also been suffering penance and sorrow. Yet again, Part II of The Winter's Tale has removed a painful human experience to a story and has thus presented and also protected us from it, has turned a "tragic" moment to a comic one: "He has a son," says Autolycus to the clownish son, "who shall be flayed alive." Although the death of a son has occurred in Part I, we are now about to enter the changed world not only of Leontes' psyche, but of the conscious world of the court as the character Leontes appears on stage, rather a miracle in and of itself.⁴¹

Finally, Autolycus represents the impulse towards and the enactment of change that Leontes has worked long years in isolation to achieve; Autolycus himself is never still, flitting from place to place, changing costume, service, tone, and position. He moves, for example, from the seeming perpetrator of action in urging the clown and shepherd onto the boat bound for Sicilia to the receptive audience who hears from the first gentleman what occurred when the shepherd opened the fardel. Like Leontes he exerts effort, but must await the ultimate fulfilling. His overflowing bag represents the possibilities of the mind, the possiblities which Leontes' immersion in the unconscious bring forth.

In the final act of the play Leontes is taken to the chapel to see a statue of his wife. The paranoic fixity that completely dominates Othello and keeps his mind rigid, his jealousy aroused and frozen in position, has in The Winter's Tale produced several deaths and has turned a warm, living, witty, sexual woman into a statue; even as Othello, unable to endure his wife's sexual nature, turns her by means of imagery and murder into a statue-like figure as well:⁴²

Yet I'll not shed her blood,
Not scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die.

(V, ii, 3-6)

Yet The Winter's Tale will move from marble to flesh as we begin to know through the story of Perdita, the child whose flesh bears the imprint of both mother and father. When Perdita hears of her mother's death, she weeps and sighs, and, as the third gentleman reports, "Who was most marble there changed color." As Hermione comes alive, she does so in parts; when Leontes went about to slay her, he did so by anatomizing her. Here in the chapel, first she appears, then she seems to breathe, her veins to bear blood, then she moves, and her hand and Leontes' hand meet, and finally she descends to embrace him in a silence analogous to their sixteen years of mutual silence. Each of the senses is awakened one by one. The parts become whole again. Unlike Othello who wants to cut off the air that gives Desdemona life, who fears her breath as countering the justice of his deed, Leontes longs for it, seems to breathe life into Hermione by wanting breath from her:

Still, methinks,
There is an air comes from her. What fine chisel
Could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me,
For I will kiss her.

(V, iii, 75ff.)

This is a miracle of many sorts, of the seasons, of faith, of birth, of life itself. It is the celebration of process over fixity, and as Leontes admires what is before him, his words echo those of Florizel gazing at and admiring Perdita, singing, dancing, doing whatever she does (IV, iv, 135.): "What you can make her do, / I am content to look on." (V, iii, 92-93). But it is also a miracle of wish-fulfillment out of which Leontes is shown to produce not just a dream of destruction, but also a dream of memory and rejoining—the entire family brought together as he says, after a wide gap of time, "since first / We were disserved."⁴³ Although Leontes is off-stage for a long period of the play, we in the audience are keenly aware of his absence. He is the central character, the missing figure we remember. His being is kept vivid, as I have argued by parallel figures and speeches on stage during this second half, and by the presence of his daughter, an exact copy of the father: "although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father," a mirroring that can be underscored in a production by careful casting, costumes, gesture, rhythms of speech. The plotting also keeps us in obvious suspense waiting for Leontes' reappearance . . . and aware of his absence. As Florizel and Perdita play at king and queen of the festival we await the royal couple. When Polixenes "discovers himself to Florizel, we anticipate the other king's reappearance. When Florizel argues that his union with Perdita cannot fail "but by / The violation of my faith" (IV, iv, 480-81), we think of the person who is demonstrating, albeit off-stage, his own faith, as it turns out, not only in his sins but also in (re)union. As the play moves with the powerful logic of romance, a quest through ritual death towards a final scene of recognition and life, we remember Leontes and what he is doing as the absent participant. In playing his part in off-stage darkness, he moves to reunite with his old role and his queen; according to Frye:

Translated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality .. . Translated into ritual terms, the quest-romance is the victory of fertility over the waste land. Fertility means food and drink, bread and wine, body and blood, the union of the male and female.⁴⁴

Leontes' dream can thus be seen as behind the ending of the play. In taking on a mock-death by his absence, moving to the innermost stage of being, Leontes produces on-stage that which uses elements of the past (Part I of the play) to produce the future. Dreams, says Freud, are derived from the past in every sense:

Nevertheless the ancient belief that dreams foretell the future is not wholly devoid of the truth. By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are after all leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past.⁴⁵

Leontes as the hero of romance grafts life onto that which would otherwise be stone. Perdita lives. The earth lives after winter. Hermione lives in a perfect likeness of the past. As his unconscious dreams are realized both in the stage action while he is absent and in the chapel scenes where he is present, he becomes both the creator and the witness—since he is dependent on divine and psychological elements beyond his total control—of that which is more wonderous and powerful than even he could have dreamed possible.

Notes

¹ All references to the plays are to the Signet Classic Shakespeare edition, The Winter's Tale, ed. Frank Kermode, and Othello, ed. Alvan Kernan (N.Y.: NAL, 1963).

² David J. Gordon, Literary Art and the Unconscious (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), p. xxii: "If, as seems reasonable, we identify consciousness and verbal language, then we must postulate some sort of mental activity or preverbal language anterior to consciousness, and we must think of creation as taking place, to some extent, at the Threshold of Consciousness."

³ Many recent studies focus on the issue of genre in Shakespeare. See, for example, Stephen Orgel, "Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama," Critical Inquiry (Autumn, 1979), 107-123; Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); David Young, The Heart's Forest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972).

⁴ Especially here, but throughout, I am grateful for the probing questions and critical insights of Professor Robert Byer.

⁵ Martin Luther, "Preface to The Epistle of St. Paul to The Romans," Martin Luther Selections, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City: Doubleday, 1961), p. 22.

⁶ Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 183.

⁷ Sigmund Freud, "A Dream is the Fulfillment of a Wish," The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (N.Y.: Avon Books, 1965), pp. 155-168.

⁸ Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 54.

⁹ Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 583.

¹⁰ Louis L. Mantz, The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954): "It is this habit of feeling theological issues as a part of a concrete, dramatic scene that the meditative writers . . . stress as all important for the beginning of a meditation."

¹¹ Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 572.

¹² Luther, p. 24.

¹³ Victor Turner, "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period," The Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967).

¹⁴ W.M. Merchant, Shakespeare and the Artist (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 7.

¹⁵ Freud, Dreams, p. 647. Cf. also the insights of Madelon (Gohlke) Springnether, "'I wooed thee with my sword': Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms," Representing Shakespeare (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1980), p. 171. In the same volume, cf. Murray Schwartz, "Shakespeare Through Contemporary Psychoanalysis," and Meredith Skura, "Interpreting Posthumus' Dream from Above and Below: Families, Psychoanalysts, and Literary Critics."

¹⁶ Murray Schwartz, "Leontes' Jealousy in The Winter's Tale," American Imago, XXX (1973), 260.

¹⁷Ibid., 262.

¹⁸ Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Pocket Books, 1969), p. 284.

¹⁹ Many critics have commented on this. See, for example, Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974) pp. 164-167; and on The Winter's Tale, Carol Thomas Neeley, "The Winter's Tale: The Triumph of Speech, SEL, XV (1975), 321-38.

²⁰ Murray Schwartz, 250-73. J.I.M. Steward, Character and Motive in Shakespeare (London, 1949), pp. 30-39. C.L. Barber, "'Thou that beget'st him that did thee beget': Transformations in Pericles and The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969), 59-67. Stephen Reid, "Othello's Jealousy," American Imago, 25 (1968), 274-93.

²¹ Schwartz, p. 251.

²² Schwartz, p. 262. Schwartz is here using the theories of D.W. Winnicott.

²³ Richard Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies, Turn and Counter-turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). This book influenced my reading especially in its emphasis on the psychological need for autonomy and fear of merger in Shakespeare's plays.

²⁴ For a discussion of male fear of sexuality, cuckoldry, and loss of boundaries in many Shakespeare plays, see Coppella Kahn, Man's Estate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

²⁵ Joel Fineman, "Fratricide and Cuckoldry: Shakespeare's Doubles," Representing Shakespeare, ed. Kahn and Schwartz (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1980), p. 86. Fineman uses Girard's theory to discuss the horrors of "no difference" between twinlike characters in Shakespeare's plays.

²⁶ Several recent articles and books focus on gender and its misuse in Shakespeare. See Kahn, Fineman, and also essays by Janet Adelman, "Anger's My Meat," Madelon Gohlke, "I wooed thee with my sword," C.L. Barber, "The Family in Shakespeare's Development," all in Representing Shakespeare. See also Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (New York: Methuen, 1981)

²⁷ Wheeler, p. 217.

²⁸ Ernest Schanzer, "The Structural Pattern in The Winter's Tale," REL 5.2 (1964), 72-78. Richard Proudfoot, "Verbal Reminiscence and the Two-Part Structure of The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Survey, 29 (1976), 67-78.

²⁹ Schwartz, p. 260. I am a bit hesitant to equate characters with aspects of the psyche, and indeed in emphasizing the psychological aspects of the play in total exclusion of the religious, for it does seem to me that the play can also be read, as Frye for one reads it, as a Christian play in which Leontes' penance leads to grace. See Northrop Frye, "Recognition in The Winter's Tale, " Essays in Shakespearian Criticism, ed. Calderwood and Toliver (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970). See also Robert Hunter, Shakespeare and The Comedy of Forgiveness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965); and of the sonnets, Martha Lifson, "The Rhetoric of Consolation," Assays (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 1982).

³⁰ David Wilbern, "Shakespeare's Nothing," Representing Shakespeare, p. 250.

³¹ Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 359.

³² Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 481-96. Throughout, I am indebted to this fine reading.

³³ Carol Neeley, "Women and Men in Othello, " Shakespeare Survey, 10 (1977), 138.

³⁴ Schwartz, p. 225.

³⁵ Majorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare, p. 137. I wrote this during Professor Garber's NEH faculty seminar at Harvard, 1984, and am indebted to her insights and crucial comments on this work.

³⁶ Another powerful image of "no difference" in the play is the image of men eating men, the cannibals whom Othello mentions in his original stories: "And of the Cannibals that each other eat / The Anthropod, and men whose heads / Grew beneath their shoulders" (I, iii, 142-44). I would urge that these powerful images of frightening merger dominate Othello's and hence our imagination during the course of the play.

³⁷ Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, p. 445.

³⁸ Peter Lindenbaum, "Time, Sexual Love, and the Uses of Pastoral in The Winter's Tale," MLQ, 33 (1972), 323, argues that it is actually June, and that this speech simply explains why Perdita doesn't have certain flowers available to give.

³⁹ Joan Hartwig, "Cloten, Autolycus, and Caliban: Bearers of Parodic Burdens," Shakespeare's Romances Reconsidered, ed. Kay and Jacobs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 98-100; and Freud, The Basic Writings, ed. Brill, p. 349.

⁴⁰ Lee S. Cox, "The Role of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale," SEL, IX (1969), 283-301, discusses the significance of swearing and saying the play and focuses on this exchange between the clown and Autolycus, and makes similar points to mine.

⁴¹ In the movement from Act IV to Act V, it is amusing to note that the word "bear" occurs, reminding us of the real bear on the seacoast and again providing the transitional object cluing the shift; proposing to bribe his way out of torture, the clown says, "though authority be a stubborn bear, yet he is oft lead by the nose with gold" (IV, iv, 809-10). Such a detail underscores the care by which the play has been structured; even transitional movements are made parallel.

⁴² Cavell, The Claim of Reason, pp. 481-96.

⁴³ Recent critics on the family in Shakespeare remain centrally indebted to C.L. Barber's work; see "The Family in Shakespeare's Development: Tragedy and Sacredness," Representing Shakespeare.

⁴⁴ Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p. 193.

⁴⁵ Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, p. 660.