SOURCE: "The 'Comic' Mode of The Winter's Tale," in Genre, Vol. III, No. 1, March, 1970, pp. 40-54.

[In the essay below, Uphaus discusses the role of language in establishing the integration of tragic and comic perception in The Winter's Tale.]

There are some striking affinities between tragedy and comedy, not the least of which is their mutual concern with perception. Both kinds of plays represent actions whose fulfillment, in diverse ways, is the fulfillment of feeling. (Susanne Langer has said that feeling is the intaglio image of reality, and I see no reason to argue against this point.) Both kinds of plays frequently challenge the meaning and, ultimately, the seriousness of the universe we live in, and for this reason alone the problems of tragedy are as easily accommodated, though less easily solved, in the comic form. Both kinds of plays also work within well-defined conventions and are built on a similar dramatic paradox: their image of reality heightens and intensifies as a tighter control or artifice is exerted on the play's subject.

Yet tragedy and comedy do not share a similar permissiveness, for they do not share a similar awareness of the nature of play. Tragedy, almost of necessity, represses the kind of knowledge that comedy thrives on—the knowledge that human vitality has a way of righting the inevitable wrong. Mistakes, the subject of both dramatic forms, lead to an inevitable degradation in tragedy while in comedy they bring about a fellowship of mutual remembrance. Much of this has to do with a primary structural difference: unlike tragedy, comedy is less dependent on one character's perception, which is usually all-encompassing, than on a multiple revelation of human possibility. This difference in accommodation of perception may be stated in another way: where tragedy deals with the disintegration of a head of a family, or of a head of state, comedy plays, sometimes very seriously, with a threatened disintegration of state which culminates, however, in an integration of feeling or festivity. This integrative element in The Winter's Tale—the subject of my paper—may be largely explained by a discussion of the play's unique mode of perception.

If comedy is the after-hours of tragedy's curfew, it is truant in the sense that it hangs around and plays in spite of the evening's menace. And its chief source of play is language, frequently the language of tragedy. This may be seen by looking at The Winter's Tale, a play strikingly built on the separation of tragedy and comedy, and by gauging the way the interaction of language and theme reveals this play's distinctive mode of perception.¹ The integrative element of Shakespearean comedy usually involves the purgation of a kind of language, and such a purgation is always reinforced by the presentation of a representative kind of dramatic event that is itself the reciprocal of the vying sets of language. And yet it is quite a distance from the recollection of identity (a theme common to Shakespeare's early comedies) to the redemption of the "world," which is the path The Winter's Tale travels. Certainly, like many of the early comedies, The Winter's Tale deals with the disjunction between feeling and fact, but the conversions in this play require a distinctive mode of perception, one that goes beyond the external fact (though it is occasioned by it) and moves more tellingly into the realm of inner being. And this mode of perception, established through a pattern of remembrance, is nowhere better evident than in the play's first scene.

In a scene of less than fifty lines the representative forces of Sicilia and Bohemia are openly revealed, and the play's imagery is inconspicuously established. One of the keys to the play and to this scene is "difference," a matter investigated and finally torn asunder by the play's universalizing impulse. Archidamus immediately alludes to the presence of difference—"You shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia." The difference is more than just a climatic one, but it is not until a few lines later that the presence of difference is internalized. Difference characterizes the tentativeness of Polixenes' and Leontes' friendship; having grown together in innocence, they have been separated by kingly responsibilities:

Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities made separation of their society, their encounters, though not personal, have been royally attorneyed with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies, that they have seemed to be together, though absent: shook hands, as over a vast; and embraced as it were from the ends of opposed winds.

(I. i. 26-32)²

It is interesting to observe that one aspect of ceremony (e.g., "royally attorneyed") is meant to overcome separation, yet the ceremony itself is evidence of the separation. Ceremony is used in these diverse ways throughout the play. Part of the play's pattern of remembrance—shaped, to a great extent, by the image of the "vast," together with the multiple functions of ceremony—appears in the last three lines of the play. Everyone, we are told, will "answer to his part / Performed in this wide gap of time since first / We were dissevered." The theatrical terms—"part," "performed"—are, of course, another aspect of ceremony.

Two other motifs related to the "vast" also appear in this scene: the revivifying power of sons and the proper regard of utterance. Of Mamillius, we are told that he is "a gallant child; one that, indeed, physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh." This medicinal power is mentioned still again, first by Polixenes:

He makes a July's day short as December, And with his varying childness, cures in me Thoughts that would thick my blood.

(I. ii. 169-71)

And later, in a new variation, Paulina assumes this function:

.. . I Do come with words as medicinal as true, Honest as either, to purge him of that humor That presses him from sleep.

(II. iii. 35-38)

Shakespeare's use of language as purgation is as old as The Taming of the Shrew, but the range of implication here is considerably more varied. This is almost immediately apparent when we notice the connections between language as remedy and the dependence of such remedy on the truthfulness of expression—"medicinal as true / Honest as either." Shakespeare has evidently suspended the wit-combats of the earlier comedies, a form of excess meant to effect "remedy," and replaced them with a form of plain statement counterpointing the excess of "sick" people. Buttressed by some powerful disease imagery, health becomes less a pose than a real, almost tragic issue. Archidamus gives the linguistic formula for health, and by implication the index to illness, when he says to Camillo, "I speak as my understanding instructs me, and mine honesty puts it to utterance." (In this regard, it is well to recall Edgar's comment at the end of King Lear: "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.") The point is, something other than honesty puts Leontes' language to utterance.

Act I, scene ii dramatizes the divergence of language hinted at in I. i. Each dramatic occasion—Leontes' request of Polixenes to remain, Polixenes' resistance, Leontes' request of Hermione to intervene and her eventual intervention, and finally Leontes' jealousy—is supported by a corresponding rift in language. The exterior "vast" of separation seeps down into Leontes' language, and he becomes estranged by his own perverted suspicion. His initial request begins innocently enough, but the play's early attentiveness to language indicates the possibility of serious conflict:

LEONTES. Tongue-tied, our Queen? Speak you.
HERMIONE. I had thought, sir, to have held my peace until
You had drawn oaths from him not to stay. You, sir,
Charge him too coldly. Tell him you are sure
All in Bohemia's well. . . .
LEONTES. Well said, Hermione.
HERMIONE. To tell he longs to see his son were strong;

But let him say so then, and let him go; But let him swear so, and he shall not stay. . .

(I. ii. 27-31, 33-36)

"Tongue," "speak," "tell," "charge," "say," "swear"—these frequent references to language underlie the play's rhythm of events. It would be difficult to call all of this deception comic, for the source of conflict is language in toto, rather than wit alone. Leontes quickly associates language with the highest human events—his own marriage—and therefore as his suspicion grows he subverts all human discourse. To Hermione he says, "thou never spok'st / To better purpose" (with the exception of her marriage vow), only now he associates her purpose with the destruction of that vow. For the moment, then, it is the play's intention to "stab the center."

This sudden reversal of trust in turn brings about a mistrust of the "real." Leontes rejects his wife, his friends, his children—all in the name of "play." Where play in the earlier comedies is linked with the verbal, with dexterity of identity and enhancement of event, play now challenges the universe; it perverts the memory of human goodness and sullies human belief. Play intensifies suspicion where formerly it mediated mistrust:

Go play, boy, play: thy mother plays, and I
Play too—but so disgraced a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave; contempt and clamor
Will be my knell. Go play, boy, play.

(I. ii. 187-90)

The pun on "issue" distorts the revivifying powers of children; their innocence is corrupt because they reflect the memory of events gone sour; memory is brought to focus through suspicion:

Physic for't there's none;

(I. ii. 200)

Know't
It will let in and out the enemy,
With bag and baggage. Many thousand on's
Have the disease, and feel't not. How now, boy!

(I. ii. 204-7)

Leontes links birth, once symbolic of innocence, with disease. Act I closes, however, with an effective counterpoint to Leontes' suspicion—the assertion of trust. Camillo implores Polixenes to flee the diseased kingdom, and for evidence he urges truth unverified as the only requirement: "Be not uncertain / . . . I / Have uttered truth; which if you seek to prove / I dare not stand by" (I. ii. 442-45).

Except for the important introduction of Paulina, Act II pretty well mirrors the design of Act I. The issues of language, belief, knowledge, play, disease, are all present, though the use of language seems to receive the thematic nod. Paulina is another in the long line of Ladies of the Tongue, yet her thematic function carries associations far exceeding the possibilities of a Kate or Beatrice. Indeed, as the "vast" widens and the characters are further separated from one another, Paulina becomes the character who perpetuates the play's pattern of remembrance: the re-creation of the past, and ultimately the regeneration of Leontes, is left almost entirely up to her. And, although Paulina dates back to Shakespeare's early use of "practicers," she performs a mediating function rather unlike any other in the earlier comedies: on her the redemption of the "world" and the final sanctity of art depend.

The three scenes of Act II successively trace out the play's pattern of illness and correspondingly they allude to the play's pattern of regeneration through memory. Scene i, centered around Leontes' repudiation of Hermione, abounds with references to the perversion of reason: "In my just censure, in my true opinion! / Alack, for lesser knowledge" (II. i. 37-38); "All's true that is mistrusted" (II. i. 48); "You smell this business with a sense as cold / As is a dead man's nose; but I do see't and feel't" (II. i. 151-52); "What, Lack I credit" (II. i. 157)—and this pattern of suspicion culminates in Leontes' final assertion that

Our prerogative
Calls not your counsels, but our natural goodness
Imparts this. (II. i. 163-65)

which is a perversion of Archidamus' opening statement (I. i. 19-21): "Believe me, I speak as my understanding instructs me, and as mine honesty puts it to utterance."

Scene ii works toward the redemptive power of Paulina's speech, itself established through her continual association with nature (particularly the cycle of Perdita's birth and Hermione's "death"). Paulina's medicinal powers, her power to evoke memory as a remedy to suspicion, lie of course in language—"If I prove honey-mouthed, let my tongue blister" (II. ii. 32); and far more conclusively:

Tell her, Emilia,
I'll use that tongue I have; if wit flow from't
As boldness from my bosom, let't not be doubted
I shall do good. (II. ii. 50-53)

Her ability to mediate the play's "tragic" conflict is unquestioned: "Do not you fear—upon mine honor, I / Will stand betwixt you and danger" (II. ii. 64-65). Act II, scene iii is built around two crucial and mutually interpenetrating speeches. Presenting herself as Leontes' "physician" and his most obedient "counsellor," Paulina attempts to purge Leontes of suspicion, only to experience an explicit dramatization of the "vast":

. . . I
Do come with words as medicinal as true,
Honest as either, to purge him of that humor
That presses him from sleep.
LEONTES. What noise there, ho?
PAULINA. No noise, my lord, but needful conference . . .

(II. iii. 35-39)

There is an evident distinction between "needful conference" and "noise," and it is the space separating the two views that Paulina directs her comments to. She has the unenviable task of mediating a potentially tragic conflict within a comic mode. Paulina is a practicer, but she is not Cassandra, nor is she, as Leontes thinks, "a most intelligencing bawd." Perhaps the following speech, seen against the background of Shakespeare's earlier comedies will explain why the first three acts are "tragic" though not tragedy:

PAULINA. . . . for he,
The sacred honor of himself, his queen's,
His hopeful son's, his babe's, betrays to slander,
Whose sting is sharper than the sword's; and will not
(For as the case now stands, it is a curse
He cannot be compelled to't) once remove
The root of his opinion, which is rotten
As ever oak or stone was sound.

(II. iii. 82-89)

All the elements of tragedy are here—honor, curse, diseased perception. But there is no "plague," for Leontes' disease is centripetal not centrifugal. Leontes' tragic uncertainty may appear to shake the "world," so to say, but Paulina's assurance—as unwavering "as oak or stone was sound"—more than compensates for a potentially tragic disillusionment.

Paulina, then, brings us back to language, the source of this play's and the earlier comedies' mode of perception and illusion. In betraying his family to "slander," Leontes joins his predicament, at least in form, with Claudio's repudiation of Hero in Much Ado About Nothing. And the comic formulation of remedy in The Winter's Tale is similar to that of the earlier comedies: like Hero in Much Ado, Hermione will "die to live," and like Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, Leontes will be "killed in his own humor." Though the comic resolution of The Winter's Tale is a good deal more resonant, Leonato's explanation of Hero's "resurrection" in Much Ado aptly formulates the conditions for Hermione's reappearance: "She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived."

Act III is almost exclusively taken up with three forms of ceremony, embodying, as they do later, the conjunction of diverse events into one pure and all-encompassing reconstruction of memory. The divine, the secular, and the natural are the three forms of ceremony; and each takes its substance from the dramatization of the "vast." The oracle is the divine, and Cleomenes' description of the island—"delicate," "most sweet," "fertile"—anticipates the later pastoral qualities of Perdita and Florizel. At the same time Cleomenes' and Dion's language in III. i. in some ways anticipates the reverence of V. ii. and V. iii. The tribunal in III. ii. dramatizes the "vast" by pointing to the diseased disjunction of feeling and fact. Certain of his accusation, Leontes dismisses Hermione's resistance, and she immediately recognizes the source of her estrangement; "and / The testimony on my part no other / But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me / To say, 'not guilty"' (III. ii. 22-25). Acknowledging Leontes' rejection of honesty, Hermione reasons in much the same manner as Friar Francis does of Hero's predicament in Much Ado: "To me can life be no commodity." However, the nature of Hermione's appeal clearly differentiates the depths of The Winter's Tale from Much Ado. For in The Winter's Tale, the source of conciliation must be in "powers divine." Apollo will be Hermione's judge; so the appeal is to a higher principle of "reality." Moreover, the disjunction between feeling and fact is, for the moment, absolute:

HERMIONE. You speak a language that I understand not.
My life stands in the level of your dreams,
Which I'll lay down.
LEONTES. Your actions are my dreams.
You had a bastard by Polixenes,
And I but dreamed it. As you were past all shame—
Those of your fact are so—so past all truth;

(III. ii. 78-83)

As with Paulina, so with Hermione: they both, in Leontes' view, speak "noise."

Soon Hermione and Mamillius perish, with a suddenness as startling as Leontes' initial fit of jealousy. Yet with their "deaths" the tragic action exhausts itself: one vein has been mined, one set of purposes has been realized. But Leontes' perceptions to this point are as fool's gold to the rich vein of human experience that Paulina uncovers. Twice in the first three acts Leontes makes an important request. The first—asking his wife to detain Polixenes—brings about his "tragedy," and the second, made of Paulina, greatly affects, in a far deeper way than he appreciates, the restoration of life:

I have too much believed mine own suspicion.
Beseech you tenderly apply to her
Some remedies for life. Apollo, pardon
My great profaneness 'gainst thine oracle.

(III. ii. 148-51)

Hermione "dies," a necessity for the revitalization of life, and Paulina at once purges memory and promotes a reconstruction of the past through the resources of language. Correspondingly, the references to speech abound: "I have deserved / All tongues to talk their bitt'rest" (III. ii. 213-14), "Say no more" (III. ii. 214), "th' boldness of your speech" (III. ii. 216), "Thou didst speak but well" (III. ii. 230). Indeed, Paulina's use of speech is so well established that her medicinal language no longer requires utterance, for Leontes' memorialization of his own past through the ritual reenactment of guilt becomes a symbolic expression of Paulina's medicinal language.

Act III, scene iii dramatizes the modulation of tragic illusion to comic perception through the reenactment of death. The scene pulls away from the secular, the logic of tribunals, and immerses itself in the natural. Perdita's desertion awakens the life impulse, for she is not so much deserted as planted in the earth, there to awaken, without memory, into pure time. Destiny in the guise of Fortune prevails; accident awakens life. Even when the bear kills Antigonus, there is no evidence of malignity but rather a natural purpose doused with some humor—"They [the bears] are never curst but when they are hungry." The dark side of death is illuminated by the comic mode of perception; great creating nature is beneficent as well: "Heavy matters, heavy matters! But look thee here, boy. Now bless thyself; thou met'st with things dying, I with things new born." The tone of "heavy matters, heavy matters" aptly commands the remainder of the play, shaping the perspective necessary for the blossoming of human feeling. The "savage clamor" of the tempest, to some extent an analogue to the tragic, quickly subsides with Perdita's awakening into life; she is the birth of the floral.

With Paulina absent, Act IV sustains the play's pattern of remembrance through the presentation of new memory as it merges with the old. Camillo and Polixenes talk about the old, as do Perdita and Florizel about the new, but their conversations remain smaller instances of the play's dramatization of memory. The Bohemia scenes to a large extent parallel the events of Sicilia, with the notable addition of Autolycus. The play, having now digested death in III. iii., reworks old memories within an evident comic mode, and Autolycus is one aspect of that impulse. He is the new practicer, but it is interesting to see how he is separated from any significant encounter (save one) with the "high" plot. He is rightly submerged, though his presence is continually felt; his impulse is fundamental to the comic mode, but it is, nevertheless, the very impulse that comedy must master. His presence mirrors, to a degree, the play's sense of transformation: Autolycus' forays on society stand in effective relief with Leontes' more serious pillages on human integrity. The two men amount to diverse aspects of disorder, aspects of the Dionysian if you will, and the play, we should recall, steadfastly moves toward an Apollonian assertion of the primacy of form. Autolycus, then, is one part of the re-creation of memory, but Act IV provides many additional instances.

Time is fundamental to the play's reconstruction of remembrance. Sixteen years have passed, sixteen years for things to change; and some things have changed. For one thing, there is a list of new characters. Yet in another sense the situation remains the same. Time refers to "that wide gap," which is a clear allusion to the "vast" of the first three acts; and this allusion in turn leads us to a reconsideration of Archidamus' initial comment in the play (I. i. 3-4): "You shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia." Obviously the theme of "difference" remains a vital issue, performing diverse functions, some ironic. There are at least two possible uses of "difference": difference between and difference within. There are several differences between Bohemia and Sicilia: they are separated by the sea (geographic difference), and one is temporarily more peaceful than the other (social and psychological difference). There is yet another difference between Bohemia and Sicilia, for they are in conflict with one another, though at the time of Archidamus' comment this was not so. Finally, and more fundamentally, there is not (ironically) a great difference between the two countries because the same differences within Bohemia occur within Sicilia.

Memory, then, is dramatically established and revivified through the recapitulation of former events. Bohemia becomes Sicilia. Act IV scene ii opens with Polixenes' imploring a wistful Camillo to remain, just as Leontes and Hermione earlier begged Polixenes to stay. Yet for Polixenes the remembrance of Sicilia is still divisive: "Of that fatal country Sicilia, prithee speak no more, whose very naming punishes me with . . . remembrance." Having said this, he then asks for his son, dramatically a displaced memory of Mamillius, and a note of suspicion is heard. In fact, his suspicion is so familiar to Leontes' (in form) that Shakespeare invests his speech with one of Leontes' images. At the height of his jealousy, Leontes said:

I am angling now,
Though you perceive me not how I give line.

(I. ii. 180-81)

And now Polixenes:

That's likewise part of my intelligence; but,
I fear, the angle that plucks our son thither.

(IV. ii. 48-49)

But there remains a significant difference of commitment, one indicative of the play's modulation from the tragic to the comic. Polixenes carries out his plan in disguise, comedy's special form of illusion, so no serious loss of identity is involved. Furthermore, before Polixenes finds his son and before he can go through the gestures of suspicion, Shakespeare presents Autolycus' use of disguise (IV. iii.). Here we have a new variation of the theme of theft, an analogue, in other words, to Leontes' and Polixenes' accusations: Autolycus traffics in "sheets," his form of prize, and not in wives, daughters, and sons. In the one instance disguise effects theft; in the other case it confirms theft (e.g., Polixenes' jealousy). But the point is, in Bohemia disguise governs all.

The subject of disguise carries over into IV. iv., unquestionably the most important scene in Bohemia. Disguise is viewed as at once indicative of difference and symbolic of transformation. First Perdita is fearful and chides Florizel:

Your high self,
The gracious mark o' th' land, you have obscured
With a swain's wearing;

(IV. iv. 7-9)

and later she says (IV. iv. 17) "To me the difference forges dread." Then the language of transformation accumulates, tracing a unifying line from the divine to the natural. Of the god's transformations, Florizel observes:

Their transformations
Were never for a piece of beauty rarer,
Nor in a way so chaste . . .

(IV. iv. 31-33)

and Perdita, still aware of opposition, remarks "that you must change this purpose, / Or I my life" (IV. iv. 38-39). It is, of course, the latter possibility which occurs, again through disguise: "sure this robe of mine / Does change my disposition" (IV. iv, 134-35). And the line of transformation through disguise culminates with the convergence of high and low plot. Autolycus and Florizel exchange garments, signifying, perhaps, both the dexterity of the comic mode and the fertility of the "world." At least Autolycus would have it so:

What an exchange had this been without boot! What a boot is here, with this exchange! Sure, the gods do this year connive at us, and we may do anything extempore. (IV. iv. 678-82)

Fortune "drops booties" in more than one mouth and in more than one way. There is Perdita for the high plot and Autolycus for the low plot: flowers for one, gold for the other.

The most important re-enactment of memory, however, occurs with Polixenes' attempted interference with Florizel and Perdita. Now in Bohemia the roles and reversed: Polixenes, not Leontes, plays the jealous father, and Florizel and Perdita play youthful versions of Leontes and Hermione. All the issues of speech, reason, counsel and remedy reappear, save that the play this time is better prepared to absorb the conflict. Polixenes urges "Reason my son / . . . hold some counsel / In such a business," but the former theme of separation, mirroring the division between feeling and fact, still obtains:

FLORIZEL. Mark our contract.
POLIXENES. Mark your divorce . . .

(IV. iv. 421)

This time, though, love commands an affirmative avowal. Florizel honors love as steadfastly as Leontes has repudiated it; he is as certain of his own identity as he is of his own faith: "What I was, I am" (IV. iv. 468). It is especially important to notice how Shakespeare associates the memory of Polixenes and Leontes with the urgency of Florizel's vow. The very thing that Leontes and Polixenes are unable to accomplish, Florizel does with ease. He reaffirms the sanctity of one form of ceremony—the constancy of love-and in doing so he rejects a form of reason and counsel. Contrary to Leontes' and Polixenes' madness, Florizel's madness, to borrow from Emily Dickinson, is "divinest sense." But Florizel does ask the counsel of Camillo, who like Paulina effects a mediating and medicinal experience: "Camillo—/Preserver of my father, now of me, / The medicine of our house—how shall we do?" (IV. iv. 589-91).

Overall, Act V presents the miracle of transformation spoken of in IV. iv. The play moves through the purgation of language (V. i.) and advances experience into the realm of the ineffable (V. iL, V. iii.). With the return to Bohemia, the drama abounds with redemptive language. Cleomenes speaks of Leontes' "saintlike sorrow" and his being "redemmed"; and Leontes' who has been urged to "forgive" himself, later says "sorry" to Florizel several times. However, the antagonism between Paulina and Leontes (III. ii.) reappears, except this time the conflict is softened by the bittersweet remembrance of the past. Responding to Paulina's reminder that he "killed" Hermione, Leontes says "it is as bitter / Upon thy tongue as in my thought" (V. i. 18-19), and yet he realizes that Paulina "hast the memory of Hermione." Now, having purged Leontes' language Paulina becomes the oracle; her recommendation to Leontes about marriage closely resembles the oracle's edict: "That / Shall be when your first queen's again in health / Never till then." But memory is pushed into an even higher realm, one beyond speech where madness is "divinest sense" (IV. iv. 486-88). Though Leontes welcomes Florizel "as is the spring to th' earth" (displacing, in other words, the "winter" of the past), he is afraid that his former madness will re-emerge with Florizel's appearance:

Sure
When I shall see this gentleman, thy speeches
Will bring me to consider that which may
Unfurnish me of reason.

(V. i. 120-23)

But the play's final appeal rests with the restorative power of remembrance: Leontes becomes the advocate of Florizel's love and arbitrates what he formerly repudiated—the union of father and son, a motif as old as life.

Language, the center of Leontes' disease, has been cleansed, and with this purgation there occurs in V. ii. the celebration of a new level of perception. Reason is set aside; the limitations of language are dramatized; the way for belief—assent without proof—is prepared. The miraculous converges with the ineffable:

They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes. There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed.

(V. ii. 12-17)

Later in this scene the Third Gentleman asks the Second, "Did you see the meeting of the two kings?" and when he answers "no," the Third Gentleman replies, "Then have you lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of." Still later the Third Gentleman continues, "I have never heard of such another encounter, which lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it." All this amounts to a preparation for the highest madness, enacted through Hermione's "resurrection"—namely, the perception of the unity of being.

Looking back, one can trace this ever-widening perception of transformation by charting a line beginning with the divisions of language, seen at first as an aspect of the "unreal," later modulated by the introduction of art, and finally explicitly presented through its dramatic reciprocal—the resurrection of Hermione. In the first instance (I.ii.) the division is all too evident:

Thy intention stabs the center.
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat'st with dreams—how can this be?—
With what's unreal thou coactive art,
And fellow'st nothing. (I. ii. 138-42)

In IV. iv. the mediating function of art, its power to "make possible things not so held," is presented; and art is clearly able to overcome the opposed forces that Leontes' suspicion cannot contain:

You see sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend Nature, change it rather; but
The art itself is Nature.

(IV. iv. 92-97)

Finally, in V. iii. Leontes, stunned by Hermione's reemergence into life, concludes:

No settled senses of the world can match
The pleasure of that madness. Let't alone.

(V. iii. 72-73)

Art is nature, for Hermione's statue lives. The "vast" no longer exists.

One more comment about the play and then I will "Let 't alone." In a sense, the conclusions to Much Ado and The Winter's Tale are similar. The rebirth of Hero and Hermione is dependent on the purgation of language. We are told about Hero, "She died, my lord, but whiles her slander lived"; and early in The Winter's Tale (I. ii, 94) Hermione utters a similar formulation: "Our praises are our wages." Yet the mode of perception in The Winter's Tale is different, in that, as one character says, "Every wink of an eye some new grace will be born." In a word, where the earlier comedies tentatively establish the need for a belief beyond understanding, The Winter's Tale uncovers the articulate silence of the peace that passes all understanding.

Notes

¹ My approach to Shakespeare's use of language in The Winter's Tale partly grows out of my essay on Chaucer, "Chaucer's Parlement of Foules: Aesthetic Order and Individual Experience," TSLL (Fall 1968), pp. 349-58.

² All textual references are to Frank Kermode's edition of The Winter's Tale (New American Library, 1963). Although I have refrained from citing secondary sources in this essay, I would like to express my special indebtedness to the work of C.L. Barber, Northrop Frye, G. Wilson Knight, Susanne Langer, and D.A. Traversi.