SOURCE: "Ambition and Original Sin in The Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition, Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 222-79.

[In the excerpt below, Watson discusses the physical and spiritual reunification of the natural and artificial worlds of The Winter's Tale; including Perdita's rejection of the dead world of Sicily and her role in the redemption of Leontes' ambitious identity.]

Redemption and the Bohemian Garden

Immediately after Leontes resigns himself and his country to wintry stagnation, the scene shifts to an entire new world. The first three lines after his despairing vow tell us that we are in wild Bohemia, under an open sky, and tossed by swiftly changing weather. The shift of locale from one country to another is only the geographic aspect of this scene's highly complex transition, which is an exhilarating but frightening release from physical, spiritual, and temporal claustrophobia. The forces of nature Sicilia imprisoned and slandered lie waiting here in ambush, and attack the courtier Antigonus as the hapless emissary of that artificial world. Antigonus is carrying some dangerous baggage: his own version of Leontes' dream-induced doubt about Perdita's legitimacy (3.2.82-84; 3.3.16-46), and a ludicrously overcivilized notion of the workings of fallen nature. Taking up Perdita to begin the mission Leontes spitefully assigned him, Antigonus says,

Come on, poor babe.
Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens
To be thy nurses! Wolves and bears, they say,
Casting their savageness aside, have done
Like offices of pity.

(2.3.185-89)

Such handsome notions do not apply, as the young shepherd mentions, when the creatures are hungry (3.3.130-31). A real bear soon enforces a more realistic idea of its character on the emissary, despite his distinctly Sicilian protest, reported by the young shepherd, that "his name was Antigonus, a nobleman." The bear, not impressed, then "mock'd him" and consumed him (3.3.96-101).

The brutality of the scene raises for the audience a question that has troubled Christian minds over the centuries: "But how did man so lose his mastery over creation that irrational animals can devour him? [Augustine's] answer is that the present state of mankind is the consequence of sin. In paradise it had been totally different, and man's forfeited powers will be restored to him at the time of the resurrection."⁴⁹ The devouring of Antigonus by the bear, like the devouring of Leontes by the wild beast within him, is fallen nature's appropriate (if harsh) response to the presumption of paradise. Antigonus is truly "gone for ever" (3.3.58), and Leontes will be trapped in a barren ritual until the babe spared by the bear returns from Bohemia, first to symbolize, then to inspire, the redemptive resurrection of Hermione. On the Bohemian shore, Antigonus has only a very marginal understanding of the regenerative force he holds in his arms. He expresses the hope that the money and documents he leaves with the child will "breed thee" (3.3.48), whereas her breeding will depend more on the kindly nature of the shepherds than on such civilized Sicilian artifacts. The shepherds soon arrive to bury Antigonus and nurture this "Blossom" (3.3.46) who receives from his death a new life.

The figure of Time itself follows this transitional scene, and speaking (like Duncan and Malcolm) in terms of "growth" and "planting," propels us into Bohemia's ongoing natural life. When Leontes accused Hermione and Polixenes of "wishing clocks more swift; / Hours, minutes; noon, midnight" (1.2.289-90), he simply meant that they eagerly awaited each night's adulterous pleasure; but in the context of his other implicit denials of time, we may infer on a secondary level that he was accusing them of accelerating time itself, thereby compromising the roles of boy eternal and eternal host by which he claimed immortality. As long as he holds his wife's seduction responsible for bringing sexuality into his garden, he may as well also hold it responsible for the intrusion of time. But his effort to deny and even overthrow Father Time proves as futile as the earlier filial rebellions, and the ambitious figure again sees even his normal patrimony threatened when the father retakes authority. When the figure of Time requests that we "imagine me, / Gentle spectators, that I now may be / In fair Bohemia," the phrasing implies more than a change of setting. Time itself, as the character of Leontes' crime invited, and as the character of his penance indicates, has virtually ceased to exist in Sicilia. With his wife's "death," Leontes, like Macbeth, disappears into a series of meaningless "to-morrows," and renewal takes place only outside his kingdom, among his more "natural" enemies.

But the transition to Bohemia is not simply a renaissance of nature; it is the first step in a rapprochement between nature and artifice. The second half of the play points less to the abandonment of custom and civility than to the redemption of those notions by rediscovering their foundations. By the same token, the tragic portrayal of an ambitious identity destroyed gives way to the romantic portrayal of an ambitious identity saved by the recovery of its hereditary basis. The choral figure of Time, the most conventional sort of theatrical artifice, serves to introduce the drama of nature. Time's boasted ability "To plant and o'erwhelm custom" resubordinates social habit to a regenerative process, and his offer to "give my scene such growing / As you had slept between" provides a dramatic transition by the very forces of maturation and restfulness that distinguish the new locale from the old. The self-defeating manners of Leontes' overextended hospitality stand in grim contrast to the basic hospitality of the shepherds, which is a spontaneous response to Perdita's real human needs. At the sheep-shearing festival, guests are greeted with flowers and food rather than prolonged encomia, and the hosts worry more about buying and preparing the meal than they do about "customary compliment."

The language of the play similarly supports the ethical pattern, regaining health as it regains contact with literal meanings. The rhetorical absurdity of the first scene, where the metaphors clash with their forgotten literal meanings, prepares the social absurdity of the second scene, where good manners, out of touch with their basic purpose, clash with the underlying human sentiments. The overpopulation of dead metaphors in Sicilian speech foreshadows and helps create the ghost-town of Leontes' penance. Ernest Schanzer points out that Polixenes' "poetic embroideries" comparing himself and Leontes to "twinn'd lambs" yield later in the play to the shepherds' practical discussions of real sheep, and that the figurative references to planting and growing in the first half of the play "reappear in the second half on a more literal level in the horticultural debate between Perdita and Polixenes."⁵⁰ The same rule may be applied to images of birth: "issue" is generally used metaphorically early in the play (2.2.43; 2.3.153; 3.1.22), but from the moment Antigonus arrives in Bohemia (3.3.43) to the final reconciliation (5.3.128), the term tends to refer to actual human offspring.

The play now appears to be systematically divided into two opposing camps:

Sicilia	Bohemia
city	country
art	nature
ceremony	spontaneity
social artifice	human nature
figurative language	literal language
age	youth
linear time	cyclical time
dreams	senses/sleep
acts 1-3	act 4

Such a chart reveals the range of levels on which Shakespeare creates the contrast we feel. And if Shakespeare had permitted Bohemia to wage a vengeful war to free Sicilia from its withered tyrant, the right hand column marching against the left, we would have a play strongly resembling Macbeth in its ethical pattern and symbolic action. But Shakespeare's last plays tend to resolve, by miraculous reconciliations, the same sorts of divisions and conflicts that prove fatal in plays written only a few years earlier. The romances find ways to defuse the tragic threats of usurpation, political naiveté, premature death, incest, and the illusion of adultery; and The Winter's Tale defuses the subtler threat of moral idealism that defeated Coriolanus. As families in the romances ultimately reunite after a long and hazardous separation, so do the two sets of values charted above, and so, therefore, do the adopted and hereditary identities.⁵¹ Without the natural Bohemian basis, artificialities—manners, morals, language, marriage—become monstrosities. But with that basis, they become the "art / That Nature makes" which Polixenes defends so strongly (4.4.91-92), facets of the world's beauty, such as gillyvors, which only human endeavor can incite nature to produce.

The first scenes in Bohemia establish the opposed terms, and alert us to the need for a combination, by showing us a starkly natural world that is refreshing after three acts in Sicilia, but not altogether desirable in itself.⁵² The depredations of the storm on the crew, the bear on Antigonus, even Autolycus on the clown, remind us that natural law can be as capricious and tyrannical as ceremonial law. Where Sicilia denies the forces of time, sexuality, and mortality, Bohemia is obsessed by them. The old shepherd's first speech begins by lamenting the misbehavior accompanying puberty, and ends with the deduction that Perdita is the product of heated fornication; he then calls his son over to "see a thing to talk on when thou art dead and rotten" (3.3.59-81). Sin and death are on the son's mind too. Seeing the gold left with Perdita, he tells his father, "if the sins of your youth are forgiven you, you're well to live" (3.3.120-21); he then talks about the drowning of the mariners, the eating of Antigonus, and the obligation to bury what is left of him. The figure of Time itself appears next, followed by Camillo's complaint that "It is fifteen years since I saw my country; though I have for the most part been air'd abroad, I desire to lay my bones there." Polixenes resists this plea with a similarly morbid figuration: "'Tis a sickness denying thee any thing; a death to grant this" (4.2.2-6). Their conversation then turns to the illicit sexual motives that have apparently been drawing Florizel away from the court. Autolycus begins the following scene by singing about seasons, flowers, animals, and "tumbling in the hay," worrying about the prospect of hanging rather than about any "life to come."

By the time we arrive at act four, scene four, we may therefore be ready to regret the abandonment of the moral struggle that felt so oppressive in Sicilia. At the sheep-shearing festival, the chain of being seems to lie in a chaotic heap on the grass. Perdita speaks casually and publicly of Florizel's "Desire to breed by me" as if they belonged to some lower order of creation (4.4.103). Conversely, when she describes a flower closing at night and opening in the morning wet with dew, her wording fairly drips with overtones of human seduction and subsequent regrets: "The marigold, that goes to bed wi' th' sun, / And with him rises weeping" (4.4.105-06). Florizel's remarks show even less respect for hierarchies and solemnities:

Apprehend
Nothing but jollity. The gods themselves
(Humbling their deities to love) have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them. Jupiter
Became a bull and bellow'd; the green Neptune
A ram and bleated; and the fire-rob'd god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now. Their transformations
Were never for a piece of beauty rarer,
Nor in a way so chaste, since my desires
Run not before mine honor, nor my lusts
Burn hotter than my faith.
Perdita  O but, sir,
Your resolution cannot hold when 'tis
Oppos'd (as it must be) by th' pow'r of the King.

(4.4.24-37)

She means that his intention to marry her must yield to his ceremonial duties, but his speech should also make her fear that his resolution to respect her chastity "cannot hold when 'tis / Oppos'd (as it must be)" by the appetitive power that Bohemia embodies. The speech is laden with Freudian slips, most prominently the entire comparison of his disguise to those of various gods who descended from higher stature only long enough to seduce or rape maidens and then abandoned them. Perdita should think carefully about her own image of the marigold, which is left weeping after the sun takes her to bed. Florizel hastens to cover his tracks in the second half of his speech, but the lurking pun on "chaste" and the image of his desires not running before his honor only further remind us of Apollo's destructive pursuits of mortal maidens. At the same time, his diction may remind us of Christ as a much purer sort of deity whose love led him to humble his shape and walk among his inferiors. that better sort of love, and the Incarnation by which it answers man's Fall from Grace, are far beyond the ken of the Bohemians, who are celebrating a merely natural sort of regeneration. Their innocent ignorance of the need for Grace prepares us to appreciate the Christian aspects of Hermione's mock-incarnation, just as Leontes' willful ignorance of the Fall's impact on nature prepares us to appreciate the natural aspects of Hermione's survival.

The excesses that disturb the harmony of the sheepshearing festival and prevent the marriage are opposite to the ones that disrupt the Sicilian court and its central marriage. The faults in Florizel's language and behavior are negatives of the same faults in Leontes, and may therefore serve to redress the imbalance. The young man's desire to eternize Perdita's graceful youth bears some resemblance to Leontes' determination to remain "boy eternal" with Polixenes:

When you speak, sweet,
I'ld have you do it ever; when you sing,
I'ld 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.

(4.4.136-46)

However greatly they differ in pleasantness and mental health, Florizel and Leontes alike become so entranced by a mundane representation of grace that they forget the need for otherworldly Grace. Natural affection can no more assure such perpetuation than ceremonial manners can: only the combination of the two, resulting in legitimate procreation, can perpetuate the youth and beauty of humankind. But if Florizel commits a version of the error that ruined Leontes' marriage—a neglect of the rule of Ecclesiastes, that each thing has its own time and season—his image of eternity as "A wave o' th' sea" suggests an awareness that this world offers eternity only through cyclical renewal and not through stasis. There may be no new thing under the sun, but each new wave or babe reproduces a former one as if it were new again—as the blossom Perdita reproduces her mother's lily-like betrothal. Perdita is playing three overlapping roles in this scene: she is partly a new bride, the symbol of human regeneration, partly Flora, the goddess of vegetative renewal (4.4.2), and partly Proserpina, the figure who connects the cyclical human escape from death with the cyclical return of vegetation. While playing these roles, she necessarily perceives death as only a normal and unthreatening counterpart to sexuality, and is utterly unshaken by the idea of Florizel's flower-strewn "dying," in either sense (4.4.129-32). So Florizel may be half-consciously acknowledging something essential and redemptive about Perdita, in the very sort of praise that represented Leontes' half-conscious decision to overlook the essential mortality of those closest to him.

In the last two lines of his speech, Florizel implies that physical "acts" take precedence for him over the ceremonial heritage of royalty—a heritage dismissed as "dreams" three times in this scene. Where Leontes dreams of rampant appetitive nature (3.2.82), the shepherd predicts (with inadvertent acuity) that the hidden princess Perdita will bring Florizel "that / Which he dreams not of," and the hidden prince Florizel promises Perdita "more than you can dream of yet" (4.4.179-80, 388). When her royal marriage seems doomed, Perdita announces, "This dream of mine / Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther" (4.4.448-49). The natural and sexual values the Sicilians repress, and the ceremonial and hierarchical values the Bohemians repress, surface exactly where a psychoanalyst would expect repressed material to surface: in their respective dreams.

Perdita consistently represses the artificial on behalf of the natural, inverting her father's errors in the process. Florizel refuses to buy her any of Autolycus' finery, because "She prizes not such trifles as these are. / The gifts she looks from me are pack'd and lock'd / Up in my heart" (4.4.357-59). This is an admirable alternative to the hollowly gift-laden way love was formerly exchanged between the two royal families (1.1.24-31). Furthermore, if David Kaula is correct in claiming that Autolycus' trumpery represents Catholic relics and indulgences,⁵³ then Perdita's emphasis on gifts of faith is an admirable alternative and an appropriate corrective to her father's implicit belief in the saving power of worldly ornamentation. But the Puritanical mistrust of ornament can be carried too far, even in defense of nature. In expressing this same strict preference during the debate about the gillyvors, Perdita commits an inverted version of the error her father committed in rejecting her. He banished her as a "bastard," apparently because unrefined nature had a part in her making. She banishes these "blossoms" (the name Antigonus gave her) from her "garden" (the name the Sicilians gave the place where Leontes perceives the adultery) because she considers them adulterated by the artificial part of their creation. She desires such a mixture "No more than were I painted I would wish / This youth to say 'twere well, and only therefore / Desire to breed by me" (4.4.101-03). Cosmetics, revealingly popular with the women of the Sicilian court (2.1.8-15), may represent an ethical danger analogous to the other Sicilian excesses. As Ben Jonson writes, the thicker the lady is painted and ornamented with "th' adulteries of art," the safer it is to assume that underneath "All is not sweet, all is not sound."⁵⁴ In fact, Paulina characterizes Leontes' jealousy as that sort of extravagance: "Here's such ado to make no stain a stain / As passes coloring" (2.2.17-18).

But meretriciously painting over one's faults differs crucially from eliciting one's natural beauty by artificial additions, just as denying one's fallen nature differs crucially from nurturing one's remaining virtues by sensible social customs. By showing Perdita and Leontes overlooking these distinctions, The Winter's Tale urges us to remember them. The sheep-shearing scene evokes and then shatters the supposition that keeping in touch with agricultural nature corresponds to keeping in touch with hereditary nature. In the pastoral setting that Renaissance writers often used to espouse a primitivist ethic, Shakespeare compromises the apparent primitivist ethic of several earlier plays. Here human life and legacy can be as badly disrapted by a pure obedience to nature as by the pursuit of artificial ambitions. The dark undertones of Macbeth and Coriolanus, which resemble Florentine philosophy in suggesting that mere submission to nature is itself unnatural for human beings, become forthright and redemptive toward the end of The Winter's Tale. As Pico's Oration suggests, God's gift to Adam of choice and self-consciousness authorizes us to improve on our original nature, if such a thing can be said to exist at all; the same legacy of free will that permitted original sin to occur remains with us as an obligation to virtue. To respect our heritage is to battle our hereditary frailties.

Shakespeare hints at this paradox by making Florizel necessarily deny his royal patrimony in pursuing an exclusively natural passion, just as Leontes must deny his fallen patrimony to pursue a strictly artificial purity. As his ambush by the unconsidered guilt of Adam's accident renders Leontes a wild-acting "feather for each wind that blows" (2.3.154), so Florizel describes his father's intervention as "th' unthought-on accident" that "is guilty / To what we wildly do" as "flies / Of every wind that blows" (4.4.538-41). The verbal echoes where there is little parallel in meaning are Shakespeare's invitation to associate the two incidents. In fleeing the constraints that are, Polixenes would tell them both, hereditary theirs, Leontes and Florizel perform desexualized versions of the ambitious man's Oedipal crime, and briefly lose their procreative hopes as a result. Both attempt to defy and even replace their limiting fathers: Adam, who forbids Leontes to ignore his natural impulses, and Polixenes, who forbids Florizel to obey them. Where Leontes imagines himself as something like Adam, Florizel imagines himself as his own "heir" and as King of Bohemia, promising Perdita, "Or I'll be thine, my fair, / Or not my father's; for I cannot be / Mine own, nor anything to any, if / I be not thine" (4.4.42-45). Obviously he would not be much without beings his father's as well: Shakespeare's plays are full of characters who become nullities, not "anything to any," by thus defying paternal authority. After the paternal force—this time the father himself—confronts him and forbids the marriage, Florizel reasserts this claim, but he sounds as if he were trying to reassure himself that his identity is still intact, like a man feeling himself after a bad fall: "Why look you so upon me? / I am but sorry, not afeard; delay'd, / But nothing alt'red. What I was, I am" (4.4.462-64). Fruitful marriage in Shakespeare generally requires a dutiful filial identity;⁵⁵ Florizel's loving promise effectively invites disaster to befall his engagement.

Florizel's narrow devotion to natural values also determines the type of disaster that will occur. Where Leontes' devotion to artificial values caused the vengeful return of the old Adam within him, along with brute sexuality and mortality, Florizel's father spies on him from behind a theatrical artifice, then attacks him on behalf of ceremonial royalty. Polixenes bursts from behind his mask, threatening to punish in kind what he sees as Perdita's crime against decorum and his son's crime against succession:

Mark your divorce, young sir,
Whom son I dare not call. Thou art too base
To be acknowledg'd. Thou, a sceptre's heir,
That thus affects a sheep-hook!

I'll have thy beauty scratch'd with briers and made
More homely than thy state. For thee, fond boy,
If I may ever know thou dost but sigh
That thou no more shall see this knack (as never
I mean thou shalt), we'll bar thee from succession,
Not hold thee of our blood, no, not our kin,
Farre than Deucalion off.

(4.4.417-31)

In threatening to avenge these offenses, Polixenes virtually recommits them. Perdita's beauty is actually the proper representation of her royal birth; and forbidding her father's wish "To die upon the bed my father died, / To lie close by his honest bones" (4.4.455-56) can hardly serve the hereditary order. In the last part of his tirade, Polixenes makes the same sort of ethical error in disavowing his son—an act reminiscent of Leontes' disowning of Perdita—as his son made in disavowing him. This speech only serves to escalate the conflict in Florizel, who now echoes his father's parenthetical threat—"he shall miss me (as, in faith, I mean not / To see him any more)" (4.4.494-95)—and simultaneously (like Macbeth) sets the entire process of generation against his hereditary obligations. If he leaves Perdita at his father's command, "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" (4.4.478-81). He cannot be heir to his natural affection any more than Leontes could be heir to his artificial affectations; his phrase recalls such failures of ambition to supplant heredity as Richard Ill's promise to make Tyrell "inheritor of thy desire," and Volumnia's announcement that she has seen in Coriolanus "inherited my very wishes."

Camillo repeatedly interrupts Florizel's oaths with pleas for reason and reconsideration, as he did Leontes' tirades earlier. Throughout the play Camillo is the good and steady advisor, retaining the balance between natural and artificial values that is lost in the two kingdoms he serves, and leading an exodus to the opposite when the imbalance precipitates a crisis. The parallels between these two hasty departures suggest graphically the play's mistrust of both extremes. The first follows Leontes' plea that Polixenes stay yet longer away from his homeland; the second follows Polixenes' similar appeal to Camillo, against similar objections. The Sicilian crisis emerges when Leontes watches his wife and friend embrace, and murmurs, "'Tis far gone" (1.2.218); the Bohemian crisis surfaces when Polixenes watches Florizel and Perdita embrace, and whispers, "Is it not too far gone? 'Tis time to part them" (4.4.344). Intriguingly, Camillo is given a soliloquy on both occasions to weigh his choices, and each time his decision to flee to the other kingdom is based on a perfect balance of principled Sicilian philanthropy and pragmatic Bohemian self-serving:

If I could find example
Of thousands that had struck anointed kings
And flourish'd after, I'ld not do it; but since
Nor brass nor stone nor parchment bears not one,
Let villainy itself forswear't.

(1.2.357-61)

Now were I happy if
His going I could frame to serve my turn,
Save him from danger, do him love and honor,
Purchase the sight again of dear Sicilia.

(4.4.508-11)

Camillo is therefore precisely the counselor this couple needs in its struggle to convert natural affection into a ceremonial bond. He prescribes for them a theatrical ploy which both literally and symbolically assists their effort to reach Sicilia and there achieve marriage. Echoing the phrase "royally attorney'd" that typified the overceremonious marriage of the two kingdoms at the start of the play (1.1.27), Camillo promises to have the couple "royally appointed, as if / The scene you play were mine" (4.4.592-93). Perdita sees that "the play so lies / That I must bear a part," and Florizel adds, "Should I now meet my father, / he would not call me son." (4.4.655-58). Camillo thus helps interrupt generational continuity, but only for the sake of curing such a breach. By giving them roles and disguises—they are not "like themselves" in the interim, as both Florizel and Leontes note (4.4.588, 5.1.88-89)—Camillo corrects their excessive naturalism, using the same theatrical device that led to their wedding's postponement. Such a correction symbolically qualifies them for entrance into Sicilia, where life has become the poor player's meaningless and monotonous hour upon the stage, just as it practically permitted their escape from Bohemia. Like the statue of Hermione, they are nature smuggled back into the dead kingdom under an artificial guise. The dramatic metaphor that haunted ambition in the earlier plays now serves as a corrective, bringing back the procreative order in a form the self-alienated king and kingdom can assimilate. As the Bohemian ships hastily set sail, they set a course back from the destructive extremes.

The new garments therefore disguise the young people's natures only for the purpose of restoring them to their fathers and their ceremonial identities. The notion that garments can lastingly change one's social standing, implicit in Lady Macbeth's and Volumnia's metaphors and evident in the period's sumptuary laws, here is located only in the clowns, where it can be pleasantly satirized. As Perdita's nobility shows through her peasant trappings, so Autolycus' baseness is evident even to the gullible Bohemians: the old shepherd concludes, "His garments are rich, but he wears them not handsomely" (4.4.731-50). Autolycus gains his revenge two scenes later, when the shepherds absurdly insist that their expensive new "robes" are themselves "gentlemen born" and make their wearers such. At the same time, the shepherds take their metaphorical greeting by the royal family as "brother" and "father" literally, a humorously disarming version of Leontes' overly literal reading of "customary compliment" earlier in the play. The shepherds' mistake also playfully disarms the ambitious "family romance" of earlier plays, in which people claimed to be part of an exalted lineage to which their original birth gave them no right. To have been "gentlemen born . . . any time these four hours" is, as Autolycus suggests, entirely ridiculous (5.2.125-45). But it is ridiculous in a way that distances the characteristic errors of ambition from the main characters' redemptive reunion.

We arrive back in Sicilia shortly before the first Bohemian ship, and we quickly recognize how badly Sicilia needs the reunion. The repetitive cycle of Leontes' mourning has not forestalled aging, and the Sicilian lords, worried about "his highness' fail of issue," open the scene by urging him to remarry:

Cleomines Sir, you have done enough, and have perform'd
A saint-like sorrow. No fault could you make
Which you have not redeem'd; indeed paid down
More penitence than done trespass. At the last
Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil,
With them, forgive yourself.

(5.1.1-6)

Paradoxically, this assurance that Leontes' penance has eradicated all his earlier faults actually indicates that those faults still infect the Sicilian court. The diction is relentless in its theological implications, which are all too similar to those of earlier remarks underestimating the residual burden of original sin. Cleomines credits his king with "saint-like" conduct that has already "redeem'd" every conceivable "fault," that has actually outweighed his primal "trespass." Such forgiveness belongs only to heaven, according to Elizabethan doctrine, but this speech makes Leontes a co-executor of God's elective Grace.⁵⁶ Cleomines' plea that Leontes "forget your evil" is another example of Sicilia's careless diction concerning innocence: he simply means that Leontes should now put his mistreatment of Hermione out of his mind, but his phrase reminds us that he mistreated her because he was determined to forget his evil in a more general sense.

But, under Paulina's guidance, Leontes is no more susceptible to his former sort of presumption than he is to his lords' entreaties for a new marriage. He tells Cleomines that his childlessness is the rightful punishment for his violation, and when Paulina reminds him that the mortal sin which destroyed his marriage is permanent in its effects, he accepts that the wages of his error is death, though that fruit is "bitter / Upon thy tongue as in my thought" (5.1.6-19). The reward for this new-found humility is the return of the lost regenerative flowers, Perdita and Florizel, a counterpart to the destructive return of "the seeds of Banquo" and those of Duncan to Macbeth's Scotland. In greeting the young couple, Leontes carefully acknowledges his own sinfulness and his kingdom's diseased mortality:

The blessed gods
Purge all infection from our air whilest you
Do climate here! You have a holy father,
A graceful gentleman, against whose person
(So sacred as it is) I have done sin,
For which the heavens, taking angry note,
Have left me issueless; and your father's bless'd
(As he from heaven merits it) with you,
Worthy his goodness.

(5.1.168-76)

Like the Sicilians discussing innocence earlier in the play, like Caliban dreaming of the heavens in The Tempest (3.2.140-43), Leontes is groping with the darkened outlines of a Christian revelation, but unable yet to see it face to face. Instead, he displaces onto Polixenes the characteristics of the Christian God, the "sacred," "graceful" and "holy father" whose "goodness" actually "merits" every conceivable "blessing," and "against whose person" Leontes has "done sin." The theological emphasis of this passage is far too persistent to be accidental, and what it suggests is Leontes' growing recognition of his more abstract sin, though he cannot yet recognize its real character or its real victim.

Leontes' first words to the young couple suggest that his moral convalescence in other areas is similarly encouraging but incomplete:

Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince,
For she did print your royal father off,
Conceiving you. Were I but twenty-one,
Your father's image is so hit in you
(His very air) that I should call you brother,
As I did him, and speak of something wildly
By us perform'd before. Most dearly welcome!
And your fair princess—goddess! O! alas,
I lost a couple, that 'twixt heaven and earth
Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as
You, gracious couple, do; and then I lost
(All mine own folly) the society,
Amity too, of your brave father, whom
(Though bearing misery) I desire my life
Once more to look on him.

(5.1.124-38)

The first sentence acknowledges that a child's physical resemblance to the husband proves the wife's fidelity—precisely what Leontes refused to believe, in his deep mistrust of the senses, at Perdita's birth. The last six lines submit "wonder" to the process of "begetting," and credit both to the "grac[e]" expressed in the couple's bodily nobility. The final few lines clearly contrast with the Sicilians' former denial of time, suffering, and death, specifically as displayed in their patriotic but unrealistic attitude toward Mamillius: "They that went on crutches ere he was born desire yet their life to see him a man" (1.1.39-41). Faced with Florizel, Mamillius' parallel in age and role (1.2.16372; 5.1.115-23), Leontes hopes only to survive in pain long enough to see the boy's father, not the boy's own maturity. Certainly the Leontes who declares himself "a friend" to the young couple's "desires" at the end of the scene accepts human sexuality better than the man who furiously rejected the idea that he could have fathered Perdita.

The middle part of his speech, however, indicates that Leontes' education on these points is not yet complete. He perceives Perdita as a "goddess"—what her costume at the sheep-shearing had made her—and places the couple "'twixt heaven and earth." As he displaces his earlier godly role more humbly but still wrongly onto Polixenes, so he displaces his role as an immortal inhabitant of Eden onto this pair; good and lovely as they may be, they are not Adam and Eve any more than he and Hermione were. The hard-won generational distinction threatens to collapse in Leontes' impulse to embrace young Florizel as if he were the young Polixenes. Though for the moment Leontes keeps this impulse safely in the subjunctive, as Polixenes did his "not guilty" plea, we sense its appeal to him.

Later in the scene, the time-denying impulse returns and conquers him in a parallel case of substitution, a case clearly designed to make us morally mistrustful of such a tendency:

Florizel Beseech you, sir,
Remember since you ow'd no more to time
Than I do now. With thought of such affections,
Step forth mine advocate. At your request
My father will grant precious things as trifles.
Leontes Would he do so, I'ld beg your precious mistress,

Which he counts but a trifle.
Paulina Sir, my liege,
Your eye hath too much youth in't. Not a month
Fore your queen died, she was more worth such gazes
Than what you look on now.
Leontes I thought of her,
Even in those looks I made.

(5.1.218-28)

As plausible and sufficient as this reply may seem, it reveals the dangerous absurdity of a moral idealism that leads toward incest; indeed, in Shakespeare's source, the Leontes-figure tries to seduce his unrecognized daughter, and threatens her with rape when she resists him. Even with his only son dead, Leontes finds himself in a sort of Oedipal struggle, because his desire to be "boy eternal" leads him to desire a girl-eternal version of his wife.

The same problem recurs when, on seeing the statue, Leontes protests,

Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems.
Polixenes O, not by much,
Paulina So much the more our carver's excellence,
Which lets go by some sixteen years, and makes her
As she liv'd now.

(5.3.28-32)

He still tends to prefer the version of Hermione that time-denying art would conventionally strive to create, rather than the version nature would have created had she survived. But art and nature are so thoroughly interwoven in the symbolic presentation that Hermione and Perdita form a web of integrated identity, a safety net through which he cannot fall, because "the art itself is Nature," to use Polixenes' earlier formulation (4.4.97). The human Perdita is praised as static art, and only the supposed statue shows nature's progress. Where Macbeth could reunify himself neither by resolute advance nor by tedious retreat, Leontes finds a saving integration of natural and artificial identities every way he turns.

But only Perdita's return can rouse into life the latent nature in Leontes' and Hermione's artificial poses. Leontes declares the young couple "Welcome hither, / As is the spring to th' earth," and a servant calls Perdita "the most peerless piece of earth, I think, / That e'er the sun shone bright on" (5.1.151-52, 94-95). Paulina immediately chides the servant for forgetting Hermione "As every present time doth boast itself / Above a better gone," but Perdita is rightly time's choice to replace Hermione. The servant's poem, which Paulina bitterly reminds him had declared that Hermione "'had not been, / Nor was not to be equall'd,'" was merely a typical piece of Sicilian art, emptily flattering the royal family with the illusion that it could overcome time. The very fact that the poem has itself been refuted by time is the most fitting commentary on it.

As the transplanting of Bohemia's flora restores Sicilia's natural foundation and thereby ends its unnaturally prolonged winter, the fantastic "winter's tale" regains a reality that allows it to progress toward a happier season. The stories of destructive and redemptive nature are repeatedly described as "like an old tale" (5.2.27-29, 61; 5.3.116-17), but they are also described in words that associate them with the procreative miracle that allows them to be true. The report that Leontes has "found his heir" is "Most true, if ever truth were pregnant by circumstance," and the story of Paulina's statue gives hope that "some new grace will be born" (5.2.29-31, 110-11; cf. 132). The play's ethical pattern forbids it to win its audience with unnatural events, as Autolycus' ballads about unnatural births and diets do. Instead, the restoration of naturally-born children and natural appetites makes the reunions so wonderful "that ballad-makers cannot be able to describe it" (5.2.24-25). The elements of fantasy and artificiality persist in these closing scenes, but in a form that allows Shakespeare to show they are actually part of a natural reality whose scope and worth (as in Macbeth) have been badly underrated, and whose miracles are so frequent and ubiquitous that we tend to overlook them. The characters on stage disable our suspicions that this is all merely an old tale or a magical conjuration, by echoing those suspicions and then putting them aside as the miracle of nature unfolds.

Act five, scene two, returns the linguistic arts to their natural basis, and prepares us for the statue's reconciliation of art and nature, by the way it describes the reunion of Sicilia with its Bohemian exiles. The play has moved from the courtiers' dangerous assumption, in the opening scene, that flowery language could fully embody their kings' mutual affection, to concessions by two Sicilian gentlemen that their words cannot adequately describe the wordless expressions of the kings' reunion (5.2.9-19, 42-58). Natural feeling, once smothered by ambitious language, is here protected from language by a double wall of humility. The Third Gentleman reports the next reunion in terms that suggest the convergence of artificial elements of identity with natural ones: he speaks of "unity in the proofs," which include Hermione's garment and Antigonus' letters as well as "the majesty of the creature in resemblance of the mother; the affection of nobleness which nature shows above her breeding; and many other evidence [that] proclaim her with all certainty, to be the King's daughter" (5.2.30-39). The association of nobleness with nature, and of majesty with hereditary physical appearance, suggests that the false distinctions that disrupted Bohemia are disappearing along with those that disrupted Sicilia.

In closing his description of the reunion scene, the Third Gentleman furthers our impression that art is being reincorporated into nature, by remarking that "Who was most marble there chang'd color" (5.2.89-90). This grand metaphor, like those of the play's opening speeches, will soon become much more literal than its speaker can anticipate; but this time the literal level provides reconciliation rather than "separation" (1.1.26). Four lines later, he informs us that the court have all gone to see the statue of Hermione, "a piece many years in doing and now newly perform'd by that rare Italian master Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape." This description recalls Leontes' promise in the preceding scene not to remarry "Unless another, / As like Hermione as is her picture, / Affront his eye," which will only be "when your first queen's again in breath," when the work of art becomes again a work of nature (5.1.73-84). But Julio Romano's potentially Promethean powers are kept safely in the subjunctive here, like Polixenes' earlier speculations on escaping original sin, or Leontes' recent ones on ignoring generational time. The Sicilian court has learned that cultural endeavors alone, however skillfully refined, can provide neither eternity nor natural life to inhabit it. The Gentleman adds, "Thither with all greediness of affection are they gone, and there they intend to sup" (5.2.102-03). The hearty affections and appetites that were Bohemia's great merits have returned to cold, abstemious Sicilia.

Paulina promptly puts this new naturalness to the test—a sort of Rorschach test—by presenting the statue for evaluation in a radically cultural and ceremonial context. The setting as well as the occasion encourage distant reverence rather than human interaction. We are not only in Sicilia but in a chapel, not only in a chapel but in an art gallery within that chapel, with the theater's own discovery-space curtain probably hiding the statue itself. This is typical of the benevolent misleadings performed by Shakespeare's comic heroines, such as Rosaline and Portia and Rosalind, who test the results of their educational programs under the most trying circumstances available, to be sure that the romantic maturity of a Berowne, Bassanio, or Orlando will last. Paulina wants the audience in general, and Leontes in particular, to acknowledge the beneficent natural basis for even the most artificial-seeming of phenomena. Before revealing the statue, she assures him that it "Excels whatever yet you look'd upon, / Or hand of man hath done" (5.3.16-17), which is a beautifully equivocal clue. It encourages and then forbids him to view the statue as a superhuman creation of human art; it forbids and then encourages him to view it as the divinely created woman he has known.

At first, in their eagerness for reunion with Hermione, Leontes and Perdita nearly fail the test: they choose the artificial basis for reunion, making themselves into companion statues instead of eliciting the statue's living humanity. Leontes says he feels "more stone than it," and observes Perdita "Standing like stone with thee" (5.3.37-42). When Perdita and Leontes yield in turn to a natural desire to kiss the statue, Paulina restrains them by asserting again—in hopes of curing entirely—the delusion that this woman is a work of static and cosmetic art rather than nature, and should be treated as such. These warnings challenge father and daughter to appreciate the "art / That Nature makes." Perdita, who earlier preferred natural to cosmetic colors, here has trouble telling the difference (5.3.46-48). Leontes asks,

What fine chisel
Could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me,
For I will kiss her.
Paulina Good my lord, forbear.
The ruddiness upon her lip is wet;
You'll mar it if you kiss it; stain your own
With oily painting. Shall I draw the curtain?

(5.3.78-83)

By kissing the statue, Leontes would not turn into a painted companion-piece; he would return fully to life, as her conjugal companion.

Leontes has earned such a transformation essentially by wishing for it. He no longer views conjugal relations as a mutual staining and marring, and retracts his implicit foolish wish for a pure, cold, unchanging version of his wife. Instead, like King Lear holding the dead Cordelia, he insists that a single breath of life in her would surpass all that human art can achieve, however fine its chisel. By insisting on staying with the statue, insisting that the curtain not fall on this imitation of life, Leontes makes the crucial choice for a living Hermione over an elegantly artificial one;

Paulina I'll draw the curtain.
My lord's almost so far transported that
He'll think anon it lives.
Leontes O sweet Paulina,
Make me to think so twenty years together!
No settled senses of the world can match
The pleasure of that madness. Let't alone.
Paulina I am sorry, sir, I have thus far stirr'd you; but I could afflict you farther.
Leontes Do, Paulina;
For this affliction has a taste as sweet
As any cordial comfort.

(5.3.68-77)

An appetite for life has replaced Leontes' life-denying madness of the first act, typified by the transition from the poisoned "cordials" he imagines drinking and serving Polixenes to this sweet and salutary one. He finds a value in affliction, a use for adversity, and leaves his "settled senses of the world" to restore Hermione's life rather than (as earlier) to destroy it. In making this choice for the statue, and in fondly making his visitors represent his lost children, he in effect wills his family back into existence; and he thereby becomes the natural self he "might . . . have been" that would have saved him from losing his family in the first place (5.1.176-78).

But to maintain the play's moral pattern, Shakespeare must emphasize that these fantasies come true because they have a basis in nature, and not solely because of Leontes' life-affirming imagination. He takes the trouble to explain that Paulina "hath privately twice or thrice a day, ever since the death of Hermione, visited that remov'd house" where the statue is lodged, and where the royal family now retreats "to sup" (5.2.103-07). We may infer in retrospect, after the statue awakens, that Paulina brought Hermione meals—a significant inference, because the play often uses eating as a symbol or synecdoche of ongoing natural life. From this perspective, it is dangerously wrong to indulge in the fantasy (as some critics do) that Hermione has essentially "come back to life. We do not, that is to say, seek to explain the impossible away. Instead, we gladly accept the impossibility for the sake of the symbolic pattern."⁵⁷ Shakespeare's didactic pattern, like Paulina's, demands natural explanations that dispel the tempting illusion of impossibility. Northrop Frye suggests that "in The Winter's Tale nature is associated, not with the credible, but with the incredible: nature as an order is subordinated to the nature that yearly confronts us with the impossible miracle of renewed life."⁵⁸ What we must remember is that the appearance of a new generation is finally as miraculous a phenomenon as the survival and reappearance of the old. As the witches induced Macbeth to forfeit regenerative nature in favor of supernatural tricks, so Shakespeare's and Paulina's plays lead us, together with Leontes, to overlook temporarily the miracle of "great creating Nature" (4.4.88) in our fascination with the apparent miracle of art, the enlivened statue. Only if our values shift in retrospect, and we come to respect food and shelter and human patience as the necessary basis for such impressive art, have we shared in Leontes' successful education.

Paulina therefore insists repeatedly that no one mistake her awakening of the statue for the black arts. She intends to restore the very sort of regenerative order that witchcraft subverted in Macbeth's Scotland, and were she to recreate Leontes' family by conjuration, she would contradict the lesson in obedience to nature. If supernatural Grace is at work here, and for complete salvation it must be, a sort of prevenient grace arising from nature rather than descending from above it must also contribute.⁵⁹ So Paulina declares that she is not "assisted / By wicked powers," that hers is not "unlawful business," and that her "spell is lawful" (5.3.90-105). If this is magic, it is magic of an allowed sort, and therefore similar to the play's allowed sort of ambition. The only kind of magic generally considered lawful in the Renaissance was "intransitive," intended not to impose on nature but rather to elicit the best qualities already inherent in people or objects.⁶⁰

Earlier Leontes had demanded that Paulina be burnt as "A mankind witch" (2.3.68) for her efforts to make him acknowledge his paternity of Perdita. Now, confronting him with another instance of natural survival and his human kinship, Paulina is understandably fearful that it will again be dismissed as witchcraft. When he first sees that statue, Leontes clearly demonstrates the threat to Paulina's project:

O royal piece,
There's magic in thy majesty, which has
My evils conjur'd to remembrance, and
From thy admiring daughter took the spirits,
Standing like stone with thee.

(5.3.38-42)

The living Hermione is here portrayed as a conjurer who revives past evils, steals people's spirits, turns them to stone as if she were a Medusa, and uses magic to simulate majesty—hardly a generous description of a woman who is standing passively, displaying the natural majesty of her birth. When the same majestic nature wins Florizel's heart for Perdita, Polixenes errs in strikingly similar terms, calling her an "enchantment" and a "fresh piece / Of excellent witchcraft" (4.4.434, 422—23).

Both women might well complain to the kings (as Othello does to the Senate at 1.6.169) that a noble nature is the only witchcraft they have used; but the very fact that they are thus accused demonstrates how easily the blessings of nature can be mistaken for strayings from nature. Since Eve, women have been accused of witchcraft merely for eliciting an amoral sexual impulse that men fear and deny in their own nature. Only when Leontes can make himself reach lovingly out for Hermione does he correct these characteristic errors:

Paulina Nay, present your hand.
When she was young, you woo'd her; now, in age,
Is she become the suitor?
Leontes O, she's warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

(5.3.107-11)

Paulina is reminding us, as she reminds Leontes, of the courtship that took place exactly a generation ago, when at last he clasped Hermione's flower-like hand in marriage (1.2.102-04). That cycle of winter and spring has repeated itself, yielding the nubile "Blossom" Perdita, and Leontes has regained the ability to appreciate such miracles of nature. His fond embrace of Hermione contrasts sharply with his earlier disgust at physical expressions of affection, and his endorsement of eating contrasts with his earlier revulsion from food and drink, which in him as in Coriolanus evinced an effort to deny his bodily frailties. . . .

Notes

⁴⁹ Rondet, Original Sin, p. 115, cites De Genesi contra Manichaeos, I, 29; PL col. 187.

⁵⁰ Schanzer, "The Structural Pattern," p. 95.

⁵¹ C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), discusses a similar dialectical pattern in the earlier comedies.

⁵² Philip M. Weinstein, "An Interpretation of Pastoral in The Winter's Tale/' Shakespeare Quarterly 22 (1971), 97-101, discusses Bohemia as a flawed but corrective counterpart to Sicilia.

⁵³ David Kaula, "Autolyeus' Trumpery," Studies in English Literature 16 (1976), 287-303.

⁵⁴ The words are from Clerimont's song in Epicoene, 1.1.91-102. John Byshop, Beautifull Blossomes . . . from the best trees of all kyndes (London, 1577), pp. 21-24, warns against the delusive appeal of elaborate clothing and cosmetics. Arthur O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), p. 330, notes Tertullian's warning against betraying God as the "Author of nature" by coloring one's garments. See also Erasmus on Fucus in the Praise of Folly.

⁵⁵ See Burgundy's rejection of the newly disowned Cordelia, King Lear, 1.1.206. Thomas F. Van Laan, Role-Playing in Shakespeare (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 37 and 170, observes that the paternal interventions blocking marriage in Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet bring familial identity dangerously into conflict with personal identity. Near the end of Sidney's Arcadia, Euarchus resembles Polixenes in denying his disguised son and nephew any special rights as princes, and instead condemning them for allowing sexual passions to displace them from their royal roles into false, degrading identities and circumstances.

⁵⁶ Roland M. Frye, Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 243, points out that Cleomines is guilty of claiming, on behalf of his king, "sufficient contrition," a claim Luther characterized as inherently "presumptuous."

⁵⁷ Janet Adelman, The Common Liar (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 167.

⁵⁸ Northrop Frye, "Recognition in The Winter's Tale, " in Muir, p. 197.

⁵⁹ Van Laan, Role-Playing, p. 114, suggests that the redemptive power in the romances usually rests in someone who has remained strictly faithful to her "true identity" as a human being, "and this suggests that the magic depends in part on some sort of collaboration . . . that, perhaps, the fidelity in some way 'earns' the divine intervention." By accepting her own mortal identity and humanity's mortal limitations, Paulina can succeed in the sort of semi-Pelagian project Leontes mishandled, and repair the damage caused by his denials.

⁶⁰ D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958), p. 32 and passim.