[In the following essay, Garner analyzes The Winter's Tale in terms of two temporal aspects—the change and consequences of time, and the moment unaffected by it—and extends his discussion to the interpenetration of these aspects during the statue scene.]

Literally as well as figuratively, Time stands at the center of The Winter's Tale, giving strikingly emblematic stage life to a theme that had resonated in Shakespeare's imagination since the sonnets and the earliest plays, through the often turbulent drama of the playwright's middle years, and into the romances, those strangely fabulous works that play variations on all that came before. The confusions of Syracuse and Illyria sort themselves out in the movements of time; Richard of Gloucester and Macbeth draw back to seize time's promise; an aging poet reminds his younger friend—still in its graces—of time's quiet ravages: "That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang. . . . "¹ Though time constitutes an organizing motif in Shakespeare's nondramatic work, as this last example makes clear, its presence is structurally more central to the world of the plays, where characters must confront dramatic time—its threats as well as its opportunities—as it unfolds in the present, and where actors must navigate through the temporal movement of performance. In drama, time is a theme by necessity, for in the medium of performance it stands as an inescapable backdrop to dramatic action, as well as a fundamental condition of theatrical life.

The Winter's Tale—with its memories, fond and bitter, its plans and prophecies, its tales and ballads, and its striking leap of sixteen years—reveals this temporal background with a prominence and self-consciousness unusual even in Shakespeare. In keeping with the other pairs that serve to organize this dramatic diptych (Sicilia and Bohemia, youth and age, Nature and Art, rosemary and rue), The Winter's Tale presents the experience of time in terms of a duality—one that edges into paradox. On the one hand, man lives in the present, a moment so complete in its immediacy that it seems to escape time entirely. This experience of the Now, and all its apparent eternity, infuses Polixenes' description of the childhood innocence that he and Leontes shared:

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

(I.ii.62-65)

His lines subvert the very idea of time, for the words "behind," "to-morrow," and "to-day" work upon each other in such a way that their distinctions, which underlie the notion of temporal succession, blend and dissolve, warping past and future into the seemingly boundless expanse of the present, opening the moment into eternity.

For all its apparent timelessness, however, this Edenic state is a memory, telescoped into what Prospero calls "the dark backward and abysm of time," in part by the very tense through which it is articulated. The stage presence of Leontes and Polixenes, both adults, constitutes a pressing visual reminder of Time's hourglass, where the present is barely an instant, gone before it can be grasped. As Time boasts,

I witness to
The times that brought them in; so shall I do
To th' freshest things now reigning, and make stale
The glistering of this present, as my tale
Now seems to it.

(IV.i.11-15)

His speech recalls the temporal world of the sonnets, where existence is subject to the ironies of mutability as it plays its movement from "glistering" to "staleness"—a world where "every thing that grows / Holds in perfection but a little moment" (Sonnet 15, lines 1-2). From this vantage point, time confronts man with the fact of change and with the inevitability of consequence, since action, in the temporal realm, always has outcomes, foreseen or unforeseen: "I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror / Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error . . ." (IV.i.1-2). The contrast is pronounced: if the present in The Winter's Tale is the realm of an almost prelapsarian joy, time is the province of memory and anticipation, nostalgia and eagerness, regret and foreboding.

This duality of man's experience—immediate and temporal—is highlighted during the course of The Winter's Tale, most pointedly in the play's second half, where characters are forced to come to terms with time's changes and consequences. But the sixteen-year gap signaled by Time's appearance is only one of many instances in which temporal change dramatically and ironically counterpoints the present. Down to the level of individual lines, like those fondly spoken by Polixenes, the play displays a temporal intricacy rivaled, perhaps, only by Shakespeare's other romances. As William Archer noted early this century, Shakespearean drama is generally characterized by little exposition:² unlike the drama of Sophocles or Ibsen, its action lies largely within a present that moves forward to its culmination. But the past bears on the present of the play through a number of subtler inclusions: the childhood of the two kings; the courtship of Hermione; the Old Shepherd's wife; the man who "Dwelt by a churchyard," frozen in Mamillius' "sad tale" (II.i.25-32); numerous moments of story and remembrance. This layering of past on present, and present on past, becomes more pronounced as the very stage moment in which the characters move is set against the broader passage of years. As The Winter's Tale progresses, in other words, it acquires—like Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest—a temporal double vision strangely reminiscent of the opening lines of a fourth-century Chinese poem: "Swiftly the years, beyond recall. / Solemn the stillness of this fair morning."³

But Shakespeare's investigation of the relationship between the present and its temporal contexts is not restricted to the play's dramatic world; it extends, as well, to his audience's temporal experience of the play in performance—an experience that significantly parallels, in its duality, the experience of the play's characters. Drama unfolds in time, unmediated by the authorial "voice" of literary narrative, and it accordingly places specific demands on audience comprehension of its developing action. For one thing, spectators must impose coherence on the stage events they witness—locate the present within a specific framework of "dramatic time," construct a past out of planted clues, and project possible outcomes to complete this temporal whole. At the same time, like dramatic characters, spectators are faced—during performance—with a stage present which is actual, changing, always somewhat outside the temporal structures created to enclose it. Shakespearean drama is built, in part, out of the tension between these two poles of the audience's theatrical experience: in the irony with which we watch a stage event, aware of all its contexts and consequences, and—often most powerfully—in those moments when the stage reveals itself with an immediacy beyond such frameworks of comprehension. Lear howls blankly over the dead Cordelia, Feste fills the theater with the music of his lute—at these points the stage acquires a momentary autonomy, a presence slightly beyond time, which lasts until the audience returns the moment to its temporal outlines.

As a medium that fuses narrative with physical actuality, the theater engages the twin experiences of time and presence in unusually strong counterpoint. It is not surprising, therefore, that The Winter's Tale—Shakespeare's most explicit treatment of time—should manipulate these experiences, not only in its dramatic action, but also in its theatrical effect. As Inga-Stina Ewbank rightly observes, "while in The Winter's Tale time has largely disappeared from the verbal imagery, it is all the more intensely present as a controlling and shaping figure behind the dramatic structure and technique."⁴ In general, close study of Shakespearean structure and technique—and of the ways in which these dramatic elements shape response—demonstrates how fully his plays ground thematic issues within the theatrical experience, and how essential this experience is to dramatic meaning. This article will trace Shakespeare's dramaturgical balancing, in The Winter's Tale, of time's rhythms with a dramatic and theatrical present that can never be fully "staled." In doing so, it will suggest that this strange but powerful play forges clear experiential links between the dramatic action on stage and the stage's "action" on its audience.⁵

When Time exits from the middle of The Winter's Tale, he leaves a dramatic world disrupted by his passage. For the play's characters, time's impact is concentrated in "that wide gap" (IV.i.7) between the dramatic present and the events of the first three acts, a span during which, as Time informs us, Leontes has continued to mourn "Th' effects of his fond jealousies" (18) and during which Perdita and Florizel have grown up. The past, though, bears differently upon different characters. Those who have lived through it—the members of the now older generation—have hardened themselves against time by maintaining a sharp remembrance of its losses, a remembrance that they are nonetheless powerless to erase. Camillo misses Sicilia and still feels bonds of loyalty to Leontes, whose "sorrows" remain so tangible that Camillo calls them "feeling" (IV.ii.7-8). Polixenes, too, lives in memory, burdened with a past that refuses to fade:

Of that fatal country Sicilia, prithee speak no more, whose very naming punishes me with the remembrance of that penitent (as thou call'st him) and reconcil'd king, my brother, whose loss of his most precious queen and children are even now to be afresh lamented. (20-25)

Time, for these three, only fixes the memory of what has been lost, and in these losses the past seems more real than the present which has taken its place.

Polixenes, however, has more recent concerns to temper his bitterness. Shifting from friend to father, he urges Camillo to accompany him on a mission to discover the cause of his son's disappearance from court. The scene likewise shifts, and before the two arrive at the Shepherd's cottage the stage is given to Perdita and Florizel, who demonstrate a markedly different sense of past and present. Neither is burdened by the events at Sicilia, and both show an attitude toward their more immediate pasts unlike that of their elders. Perdita says nothing of her early years as a shepherdess, and Florizel hides the signs of his past by donning rustic clothes. To Perdita's concern over his father's disapproval of their match, he replies by affirming a love outside such threat and its consequences, modulating between the languages of present and future:

To this I am most constant,
Though destiny say no. Be merry, gentle!
Strangle such thoughts as these with any thing
That you behold the while. Your guests are coming:
Lift up your countenance, as it were the day
Of celebration of that nuptial, which
We two have sworn shall come.

(IV.iv.45-51)

Both are characterized by this forward-gazing anticipation, conceiving of the future as a never-ending continuation of the present, free of change, with "such a day to-morrow as to-day." In their innocence they dwell on this present and on the sounds, objects, and gestures that constitute it. Florizel's description etches Perdita within the moment:

Each your doing
(So singular in each particular)
Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds.
That all your acts are queens.

(143-46)

Perdita, more the realist, nevertheless allows hope to "strangle such thoughts." "O Lady Fortune," she exclaims, "Stand you auspicious!" (51-52).

When Polixenes and Camillo enter disguised and the sheep-shearing scene gets under way, the stage contains a mixture of attitudes toward time and its relationship to the present. On the one hand, it presents the lovers, with their sense of the immediate and their vision of possibility; on the other, it presents the king and counsellor, aged by time and scarred by its memories, their awareness of consequence a potential threat to Perdita and Florizel. By this point in the play, though, the audience has had its own experience of dramatic time shifted and modulated, through techniques more subtle than the mere passage of years. Theatrical versions of immediacy and temporality are counterpointed throughout the play's development—often in sharp juxtaposition, as we can see if we review the audience's comprehension of dramatic time in the first three acts. There is, for instance, the play's beginning, in which the stage image of friendship between Polixenes and Leontes—the present's version of the past's innocence—is abruptly dispelled by the King's distorted jealousy. William H. Matchett points out sexual ambiguities in the lines between Polixenes and Hermione and claims that the audience is made to feel suspicious (pp. 94-98), but these ambiguities are subliminal and largely recollected, if at all, in light of Leontes' misinterpretation of them.⁶ Vastly more pronounced is our sense of their "timeless" friendship—of which Archidamus has said "I think there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it" (I.i.33-34) and of which Polixenes has described the childhood origins. The initial stage interaction between the characters does little to dispel these accounts: gracefulness and compliment characterize the beginning of the scene, and the "gestural dialogue" of hands that Charles Frey discerns throughout the play (pp. 134-38) here expresses bond and affection. When Leontes' "tremor cordis" does appear, it constitutes an intrusion of dissonance into the scene's easiness, and the stage present becomes abruptly shadowed by the disturbing threat of consequence: "I am angling now, / Though you perceive me not how I give line" (I.ii.180-81). The words "angling" and "line" are revealing, for it is the essence of Leontes' jealousy to form imaginary connections between people and between incidents, quickly generating a web of misperception and suspicion that includes even Mamillius and Camillo. As Leontes begins to act on these misperceptions, consequences multiply with rigorous inevitability, and the stage present becomes increasingly pressured by a network of events, imaginary as well as real.

One of the most remarkable features of the developing Sicilia sequence is its tightness and autonomy; omitting Perdita's survival, it could stand by itself, brief but complete. Its incidents are relentlessly forward-moving and continuous. For one thing, the narrative line of Leontes' jealousy and its effects is—to an extent unusual even in Shakespearean tragedy—unrelieved by breaks. Hermione's exchange with Mamillius constitutes only 32 lines, and the scene in which Cleomines and Dion describe their visit to Delphos is shorter still (22 lines). Far from serving as self-contained interruptions, both are themselves interrupted, and swallowed up, by the omnivorous main action: the former by Leontes' entrance, the latter by a reminder of the proclamations against Hermione. For another thing, incidents and details are introduced and linked with a high degree of narrative continuity. Shakespeare changed the source material of Pandosto to increase the "probability" of the story's incidents,⁷ and he did so, in part, by tightening its plot connections: whereas Greene's young prince Garinter dies suddenly, for instance, Shakespeare's Mamillius sickens and dies specifically out of grief concerning his mother's situation. This tight sense of antecedents and consequences focuses audience attention even more closely on the unfolding narrative sequence, on dramatic time in its actual and potential outlines.

The sequence concludes with a pronounced note of closure, heightened by the rapidity with which its final events take place. The oracle's tersely declarative pronouncements reveal the truth concerning the preceding actions, a truth which the audience and all the characters save Leontes have known. Entering with news of Hermione's death, Paulina condemns his folly by outlining the consequences of his misconceived actions on Polixenes, Camillo, his abandoned daughter, Mamillius, and Hermione: "O, think what they have done, / And then run mad indeed—stark mad!" (III.ii.182-83). Her speech rings with summary force and—together with Leontes' heartbroken resolve to bury his wife and son in a single grave, to display an account of the "causes of their death" (237), and to visit it every day for the rest of his life—it gives the sequence of the play's Sicilian first half what J. H. P. Pafford has called "a Miltonic close fitting for the end of a tragedy" (p. lv).⁸

"The King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found" (III.ii. 134-36). A strand remains incomplete—an opening, as it were, in the closed sequence of action and its consequence which the audience has followed for over two acts. With Antigonus' entrance in III.iii, the narrative line continues. But the audience's temporal comprehension of the play's events and its orientation toward the stage and its actions shift in two important ways. First, attention no longer centers on the inevitable triumph of truth and the stripping away of a central character's delusion. Throughout the Sicilian sequence, the audience has had a kind of Olympian distance from Leontes' jealousy, secure in its awareness of the actual state of events. The audience, in other words, stands in the position of superior awareness that Bertrand Evans considers one of the characteristic dramatic principles of Shakespearean drama;⁹ and although its awareness is far from complete, the audience's understanding of temporal outlines is more closely aligned to that of Time than to that of any of the action's participants. Once the truth is revealed, though, subsequent action becomes open-ended: although the oracle's pronouncement suggests further resolution, this final clause is cast as a riddle and contains no details as to how the resolution might be achieved. Uncertainty, therefore, replaces inevitability; the outcome of events becomes less determinate, less subject to rigorously constrained consequence. Evans's ironic awareness is replaced by uncertainty, and the audience, like Perdita, is left in the wilderness—a wilderness, in this case, of the stage and its unpredictability.¹⁰

Second, the coherent narrative of the first part is replaced by a remarkable sequence of incidents, each of which is characterized by a striking immediacy, and all of which stand in sharp juxtaposition to each other. Immediacy is achieved partly through a dazzling array of "theatrical" effects—effects of sound, movement, and spectacle that display the stage at its most physical. Such effects are strikingly absent from the Sicilian sequence of the play's first half. Although the earlier sequence is characterized, as Daniel Seltzer points out, by numerous examples of "intimate stage business" between characters,¹¹ there is nothing to compare with the storm effects (suggested by the text), the bear, the sound of hunting horns, or the archaic staginess of Time's entrance. The immediacy of the sequence's incidents is heightened by their almost Brechtian juxtaposition: the mixture of tones and effects gives each a kind of discontinuous autonomy on stage, and this sudden, unprepared-for variety—following the vastly more streamlined narrative of the first half—forces abrupt, disorienting shifts in audience response.

Matchett observes that this sequence wrenches us "from our response to the plot and the action to a wider perspective. . . . Challenging our awareness, it opens us to fresh experience" (p. 101). He discusses this shift in terms of the art/nature opposition, but his observations apply still more valuably to the basic level of audience attention that this sequence engages. On this level, the sense of "fresh experience" is a result of elements that draw attention away from broader temporal outlines and heighten the autonomy of individual stage moments, much as the storm scene does to the dramatic world of King Lear. Such "fresh experience" in Shakespearean drama (and in drama generally) is that experience uniquely available in the theater: an experience of a stage present existing in its own right, intruding itself into the very "tales" that dramatists make it tell. When Time stands forward to signal the leap of years, in other words, he addresses an audience that is already undergoing its own experiential leap—from comprehension and irony to bewilderment and surprise—in the face of a stage turned strange and new.

As with the graceful present of the play's first scene, this scenic presence is dispelled, distanced. The couplets of Time's soliloquy telescope the seacoast sequence into the past and return the audience to the play's main narrative line. But this line, with its rigid chain of consequence, has been weakened by the appearance of incidents and stage elements outside its projected outcomes, and the theatrical moment in all its presence and autonomy looms large in time's subsequent developments. Indeed, the stage is now set for one of the longest scenes of stage presence in all of Shakespeare: the "sheepshearing" scene. Interestingly, this scene is introduced three times—by Time, by Polixenes and Camillo, and by Autolycus—and each introduction contributes a "timelessness" to the scene. The first two are usually viewed as "connective" scenes, linking past and present, and indeed (as we have seen) each does include references to the play's first half. Oddly, though, these references are less conjunctive than disjunctive: Time's reference to Leontes, after all, is offered to take "leave" of him (IV.i.17), and Polixenes finally urges Camillo to "lay aside/the thoughts of Sicilia" (IV.ii.51-52). Both scenes look ahead to Florizel and Perdita, and both do so, in part, by distancing the past. The result is that the sheepshearing scene bears few reminders of the Sicilian past. Even the Bohemian past is made less consequential to the scene: Shakespeare omits the marriage plans that Greene's Egistus made for his son Dorastus and has Polixenes visit the Shephered's cottage as much from curiosity as from suspicion.

The third introduction to the sheep-shearing scene also introduces one of its main participants. Despite the number of critical attempts to integrate Autolycus into the play's thematic structure,¹² this stage rogue continues to baffle the play's readers (while delighting its spectators). He is introduced later (IV.iii) than probably any other major Shakespearean character, yet he plays no part in the play's concluding scene. He becomes almost a genius of the Whitsun pastoral, yet he was once a member of Florizel's retinue—a detail introduced so casually (between stanzas of a song) that it risks being missed. But if we put aside attempts to incorporate Autolycus into the play's thematic framework and concentrate instead on his stage presence, his dramatic function in the play (and in the sheepshearing scene in particular) becomes clearer. In a play that counterpoints modes of time and presence, Autolycus represents life (and drama) at their most theatrically immediate.

Speaking to the Clown in a self-dramatizing third-person, Autolycus characterizes himself as a figure of Protean identity:

I know this man well; he hath been since an apebearer, then a process-server, a bailiff, then he compass'd a motion of the Prodigal Son, and married a tinker's wife within a mile where my land and living lies; and, having flown over many knavish professions, he settled only in rogue. Some call him Autolycus. (IV.iii.94-100)

On stage he displays a similar fluidity of roles, moving between them with an improvisational randomness that suggests his opportunism and delight in mischief. Like the Vice figures of earlier morality drama—or like Ben Jonson's comic knaves—he plays upon the moment, and the impulsiveness of his actions makes them strikingly self-contained. His major contribution to the main plot (discovering the Old Shepherd's secret and deciding to act on it) originates largely out of whim: "Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance" (IV.iv.712-13). Moreover, his incessant acting and his tumbling prose are charged with a vibrant selfassertiveness that draws attention away from more serious matters and toward himself. His wonder at the rustics' response to his ballads—"No hearing, no feeling, but my sir's song, and admiring the nothing of it" (IV.iv.612-13)—captures much of the distracting effect of his stage presence as a whole. Like the wares he hawks, Autolycus himself is largely an "unconsider'd trifle" (IV.iii.26), "inconsequential" in the strictest sense.

His appearance before and during the sheep-shearing scene, then, contributes to its self-contained immediacy: along with the shepherds' dance which precedes him and the "Saltiers" who succeed him, his presence during the scene—with his "ribbons of all colors i' th' rainbow" (204-5), songs and ballads, and other antics—provides some of the play's most frenetic stage activity. Even before Autolycus' entrance as balladmonger, this scene has drawn characters and audience alike into an experience of less consequential timelessness. Among the characters, the past is suspended almost by consent: as we have seen, Polixenes and Camillo dismiss memories of Sicilia, and Perdita and Florizel "strangle" thoughts of his superior rank. Time and its effects (as well as its threat) remain present during the scene, especially in the disguised visitors, but the emphasis is on the moment, and even age is brought within its domain. Matching Florizel's "timeless" admiration, Camillo tells Perdita: "I should leave grazing, were I of your flock, / And only live by gazing" (109-10). Polixenes, too, participates in the festival atmosphere to an extent not generally acknowledged in discussions of the scene; his famous debate with Perdita concerning the "streak'd gillyvors"—for all its potential allusion to Perdita's station and its implications—is largely playful, a quality more evident in the theater than in the text, and one that tends to undercut threat. Moreover, when later in the scene the Clown remarks, "My father and the gentlemen are in sad talk" (310), Polixenes is "refreshed" enough by the entertainment to request the Saltiers. It would be a mistake to claim that Polixenes "forgets" his mission, even temporarily, but it would also be a mistake to neglect the extent to which even he surrenders to his disguise and submits to the scene and its diversions. Both visitors could, with truth, join Perdita in her confession: "Methinks I play as I have seen them do/In Whitsun pastorals. Sure this robe of mine / Does change my disposition" (133-35).

It is important to stress that the audience, too, is offered a "fresh experience" of the stage present, one that tends to subsume awareness of time and its consequences. Francis Berry claims that the audience, remembering the play's first half, "frames" the sheepshearing scene and modifies its response to the lovers "in the light of their parents' . . . experience."¹³ But pictorial metaphors such as this are misleading, since the theater is a temporal, as well as a spatial medium: earlier moments are rapidly distanced in performance, and memory often requires explicit reminders if it is to "frame" the stage present with past action. Such reminders are few, and the audience's awareness of threat is subordinated, in large part, to the scene's compelling immediacy—an immediacy heightened by the timeless love of Perdita and Florizel, by Autolycus' antics, and by a gracefulness of gesture that finds its natural culmination in dance. The audience may never completely abandon its apprehensive detachment from the lovers, but we must not underestimate how much the stage draws all who watch into its easiness.

With the exit of the dancing Saltiers, however, and Polixenes' interruption of the festivities, the audience is abruptly returned to an awareness of consequence and the claims that time exerts on the present. If Leontes' earlier attack of jealousy is painful because of the idyllic picture we have been given of his childhood friendship with Polixenes, the latter's remark to Camillo—"'Tis time to part them" (344)—is even more chilling, because we have been given an extended stage version of such carefreeness. Polixenes' subsequent explosion, like Prospero's truncation of his wedding masque, completes the disillusionment for the audience and for Perdita and Florizel, returning the audience to its awareness of consequence as it returns the lovers to the realities of their disparate stations. Perdita tells Florizel,

Beseech you
Of your own state take care. This dream of mine
Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch farther,
But milk my ewes, and weep.

(447-50)

Just as Time makes "stale" the "glistering" present, so Polixenes' rage makes the festival timelessness seem itself a dream.

When Camillo persuades the lovers to sail to Sicilia, the audience returns one last time to the play's broader narrative outline, reassuming a more privileged distance concerning events. But, relieved of the tragic irony of the first three acts, the audience now enjoys a new perspective of comic irony. Possessed of the secret of Perdita's recovery, the audience watches the characters—each of whom lacks at least one piece of information—move toward a reconciliation with romance inevitability. All converge on Sicilia—Florizel with Perdita, Polixenes with Camillo, Autolycus with the rustics and their secret. Audience attention centers on the logic of events, which unfolds with a neatness both providential and artistic; time, "that makes and unfolds error," begins to right the situation, and the audience is allowed the omniscience to appreciate its workings. Anticipation runs high, looking forward to a reconciliation that will redeem the present from the apparent irrevocability of the past, awaiting the wonder on the part of the characters when the apparently miraculous is disclosed.

It is part of the dramaturgical brilliance of The Winter's Tale that these expectations are at once fulfilled, unfulfilled, and more than fulfilled. On the one hand, the Gentlemen who report the reunion between Leontes and Perdita underscore the miracle of the encounter, calling it "so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion" (V.ii.28-29). On the other hand, despite the attempt of Nevill Coghill to defend the effectiveness of these messenger speeches (p. 39), if there is any clear scène à faire in the play, the disclosure of Perdita's identity is it, since, in fulfilling the oracle's prophecy, it gives Leontes an heir, Florizel a wife, and Perdita a royal family. The reunion effects a reconciliation between age and youth, past and present, Sicilia and Bohemia. Such a scene, the audience expects to see; ironically, the messenger scene is disappointing precisely because The Winter's Tale is not a tale, but a play, and a play's most powerful moments are stage moments. The very quality of the reunion which "lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it" (57-58) is that quality of immediacy which the stage provides. We want the scene to be a dramatic present, not deflected into a narrative past.¹⁴

The usual justification for the messenger scene is that the reunion is described to lend focus to the final scene, but this explanation underestimates both the disappointment of the former and the theatrical coup of the latter. For the audience, there is no play beyond this reunion; at least this is what the earlier scenes have indicated. The oracle's only prophecy concerns the lost child, as does Time's anticipation of the play's second half:

What of her ensues
I list not prophesy; but let Time's news
Be known when 'tis brought forth. A shepherd's daughter,
And what to her adheres, which follows after,
Is th' argument of Time.

(IV.i.25-29)

In terms of the audience's expectations since the shipwreck, Perdita's return represents the projected end of the narrative movement, and the audience has anticipated it as final. To extend the play beyond this promised conclusion is to press stage action, once again, beyond the apparent confines of plot.

We have been studying The Winter's Tale in terms of two interrelating experiences: that of time, understood through its effects of change and consequence, and that of the moment, experienced as something seemingly beyond these effects. We have explored, too, how the play represents a complex dramaturgical manipulation of temporality as it is experienced within performance—drawing attention away from narrative outlines into the stage present, distancing the present by the perceived intrusion of time and its effects. In the play's own vocabulary, occasioned by Perdita's gift of "rosemary and rue" to the disguised king and counsellor, we have been exploring the interacting rhythms of something like "Grace and remembrance" (IV.iv.76) and the ways in which Shakespeare builds these rhythms into the play's dramaturgy and stagecraft. The statue scene, justly praised as one of the culminations of Shakespeare's art, represents the play's crowning interpenetration of these two poles of temporal experience.

As in The Tempest, the final reunion of this play is orchestrated by a master of ceremonies in command of the secrets behind all events. When Paulina reappears with Leontes in the fifth act, however, she does so, not as a provider of second chances, but as a spokesman for memory, keeping fresh the remembrance of an apparently irretrievable past and feeding its hold on the present with almost unpleasant insistence. Cleomines appeals to Leontes to "Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil, / With them, forgive yourself (V.i.5-6), and Dion urges him to consider his heirless kingdom; but Paulina, who "hast the memory of Hermione .. . in honor" (50-51), pressures his conscience with the claims of the past:¹⁵

Were I the ghost that walk'd, I'ld bid you mark
Her eye, and tell me for what dull part in't
You chose her; then I'ld shriek, that even your ears
Should rift to hear me, and the words that follow'd
Should be "Remember mine."

(63-67)

After sixteen years, in other words, she appears as a rather grim spokesman for time's irrevocability. To the servant's praise of Perdita's beauty, Paulina laments:

O Hermione,
As every present time doth boast itself
Above a better gone, so must thy grave
Give way to what's seen now!

(95-98)

Her lines deny the possibility that loss can ever be replaced, or that the present can in any way heal the past. At the same time, unknown to Leontes and to the audience, these lines are half-truths, since the play's conclusion will dramatize a transcendence of memory and a better "present" that will fill time's grave. In their paradoxical truths and untruths, Paulina's lines anticipate the transformation of time that structures the statue scene itself.

This transformation is seamless in its movement from one temporal vision to the other. Leontes' initial response to the statue unveiled before him is one of acute "remembrance" of a past so cunningly recreated in stone that its image is resurrected, with equal vividness, in memory: "O, thus she stood, / Even with such life of majesty (warm life, / As now it coldly stands), when first I woo'd her!" (V.iii.34-36). The statue, in short, confronts Leontes with the past and with his responsibility for its loss, while paradoxically bringing it so vividly into the present that this loss seems to vanish. As he continues to gaze, the harsh line between past and present blurs, shading the memorial presence of the statue into the living presence of Hermione. In a word that reverberates throughout the scene, time's apparent irrevocability is "mocked" by a reappearance that seemingly occurs outside time's laws, and memory is both dissolved and brought to life in the face of the present's revelation. With this dramatic stroke, Shakespeare steps beyond Aristotle, whose third form of anagnorisis bears striking resemblance to the statue scene:

The third kind of recognition is through memory: we see one thing and recall another, as a character in the Cyprians of Dicaeogenes saw the picture and wept, or the recognition scene in the lay of Alcinous, where Odysseus listens to the bard and weeps at his memories, and this leads to the recognition.¹⁶

Recognition in The Winter's Tale, by contrast, moves beyond memory into the miraculous—it occurs when what is seen actually becomes what is recalled.

Paulina commands the statue to "Strike all that look upon with marvel" (100), and the final brilliance of Shakespeare's stagecraft in The Winter's Tale lies in the audience's inclusion in the striking marvel of this scene. The stage reconciliation that the audience was denied in V.iii takes place, but the disclosure that makes it possible—Hermione's survival—comes as a revelation for the audience as well as for the characters. The earlier image of Hermione falling to the stage floor, Paulina's confirmation of her death, Leontes' plans to bury her, and Antigonus' ghostlike dream-apparition (recalling "visitors from the dead" elsewhere in Shakespeare), all establish the queen's death as a dramatic reality for the audience, breaking sharply with Shakespeare's usual practice (in plays such as Twelfth Night and Pericles) of making his audience confidants to all secrets and partners to all contrivance. Much more in the manner of Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare withholds a narrative detail the revelation of which transforms both the outcome of the play and the significance of what has preceded it.

That the play hinges on such a deception is, by now, a commonplace in criticism of The Winter's Tale. But, like many Shakespearean commonplaces, its implications for audience response, and Shakespeare's manipulation of this response, remain imperfectly understood, even though (as this article has tried to suggest) dramaturgical decisions invariably adjust the audience's relationship with the developing stage action. Most obviously, the audience is forced into a collective experience which mirrors that of the stage characters, and chiefly that of Leontes, whose discovery constitutes the scene's focus. Like Leontes, the audience is initially forced into its own moment of remembrance. It matters little at what point the audience realizes that Hermione is alive; when the statue shows signs of life, the audience scans its memories, recalling the play's earlier scenes, trying to find the connections that could justify a development so beyond expectation. Hermione explains to Perdita that she remained in hiding to await the fulfillment of the oracle's prophecy, but this detail—like all others in the closing scene—is subsumed in the moment itself, luminous in its freedom from expectation. In place of the ironic superiority over characters that audiences usually enjoy during such dramatic reconciliations, Shakespeare creates a theatrical experience that we have no word for, an experience that constitutes the opposite of irony, for in this instant, as the statue becomes that which it has commemorated, the present is suddenly vastly more than we thought—fuller and richer, freed from irony's frameworks.

By setting the statue scene outside the audience's comprehension of plot and time, in other words, and by making the stage action, literally, beyond the anticipation that has sought to contain it, Shakespeare allows the stage itself, one last time, to assume a heightened autonomy and presence. As in the sheep-shearing scene, attention is directed toward individual objects, movements, and gestures, carefully orchestrated by dramatic speech highlighting the particular.¹⁷ Polixenes' "The very life seems warm upon her lip" (66) and Leontes' "The fixure of her eye has motion in't" (67) recall, in their specificity, Autolycus' ribbons, the "flow'rs of winter," and (most tellingly) Florizel's admiration of Perdita's movements:

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.

(IV.iv.140-43)

Ewbank writes of this scene:

Speeches are short, the diction plain, the language almost bare of imagery: as if Shakespeare is anxious not to distract attention from the significance of action and movement. .. . An unusual number of speeches are devoted just to underlining the emotions and postures of people on-stage, as in Paulina's words to Leontes: "I like your silence, it the more shows off Your wonder." (p. 97)

This shift of emphasis away from language and toward gesture is heightened by the audience's own attention on the actress playing Hermione, as it watches for signs of breathing and movement, trying to detect the gesture that will reveal whether or not Hermione lives. The final discovery of The Winter's Tale, then, lies in a surrender to the moment; and for the audience, this involves surrender to the stage moment, a moment in which the most riveting activity is pure gesture; outlined, almost pictorially, within the stage's stillness, and to which the most appropriate response is rapt attention and "wonder." Indeed, so self-contained is this moment in its theatrical immediacy that, with the accompanying music, gesture approaches the expressive fluidity of dance.

It is easy to see why the play's conclusion has tempted critics toward Christian interpretations of the play—especially in light of Paulina's reference to redemption from death and her pronouncement that "It is requir'd / You do awake your faith" (94-95), and in light of the word "grace," which recurs throughout the play like a musical motif.¹⁸ Though strictly Christian frameworks are hard to attach to the play as a whole, the final scene is indeed charged with an almost religious sense of grace as something freely given, beyond desert. Hermione's reappearance provides characters and audience with a development beyond the apparent consequence of events as the play has suggested them, with "the experience of restoration after total loss" (Matchett, p. 106). In this sense, the scene is beyond time, or at least beyond time as it has constituted a reality in the minds of characters and audience alike. If time participates in the play's denouement, it is less the stock figure of the play's middle than a force of mystery, always outside comprehension's grasp, revealing itself in the miracles of the present. For the audience, grace is born in the "wink of an eye" (V.ii. 110), when the stage action severs itself from rigorous connection with the "dramatic time" which has ruled for much of the play.

In the midst of its transformations, however, such grace is never completely free of remembrance. The first four acts have presented grace in terms of freshness, innocence, and simple gracefulness: Hermione has been called "a gracious innocent soul" (II.iii.29), and Perdita was first described as "now grown in grace / Equal with wond'ring" (IV.i.24-25). This grace, like the youth of Polixenes and Leontes, is timeless because it has not yet been subjected to change and consequence. The grace of the final scene, however, is richer because more dearly bought, and the passage of time out of which it emerges leaves traces to spark remembrance. For one thing, the scene contains reminders of irreversible change. Hermione has grown old: "Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems" (28-29). And while Perdita has found a mother, she has also acquired a history, which, like Prospero's narration to Miranda in Act I of The Tempest, marks her emergence into a world that contains, among other things, time and its changes.

Also present are reminders of consequences not rescued from time. Paulina recalls the dead Antigonus with moving regret, and Leontes' decree that she should marry Camillo does not fully dispel this awareness of "wither'd" loss (133). Similarly, the scene lacks Mamillius, who actually was buried. Although he is never explicitly mentioned in the final scene, he has been mourned as recently as V.i, and his absence leaves the reunited family vaguely incomplete. While Florizel serves as a replacement for Mamillius, he is also a reminder of his loss. In other words, with its image of a world ransomed from time, the play's conclusion resolves the plot, but it nevertheless remains marked by the memory of that which time has destroyed.

In the play's closing lines, Leontes alludes to "this wide gap of time, since first / We were dissever'd" (154-55). Shakespeare's investigation of time in The Winter's Tale has left the audience with both poles of its temporal experience in balance. The audience has seen, in the end, that time's effects are inescapable, since action, for all the world's miracles, does have consequences. Nor can one escape the reality of change in a sublunary world ruled by mutability's "staling" hand. Whitsuntide must end: Perdita and Florizel enter the cycle of the generations, and Autolycus, after his appearance in the penultimate scene, simply vanishes. Nonetheless, through Shakespeare's manipulation of the stage and its possibilities, the audience feels the rigor of time open, again and again, into a stage presence always slightly beyond time's changes and consequences. Sicilia gives way to the wilderness of Bohemia; Polixenes, in spite of his age and station, succumbs in part both to the festival's liveliness and Perdita's charm. Most of all, in the play's final stroke, the audience discovers that, when it tries to predict time's outlines and outcomes, it risks amazement—that the present can mock, not only consequence, but comprehension as well.

Notes

¹ Sonnet 73, lines 1-2. Quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

² "In sum, then, it was Shakespeare's usual practice, histories apart, to bring the whole action of his plays within the frame of the picture, leaving little or nothing to narrative exposition" (Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1912], p. 98).

³ T'ao Ch'ien (A.D. 365-427), in A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, trans. Arthur Waley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919), p. 116; quoted (with slight inaccuracy) and discussed in William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), pp. 30-32.

⁴ "The Triumph of Time in 'The Winter's Tale,'" REL, 5, No. 2 (1964): 84.

⁵ Investigating this connection brings us into the company of those critics who have already begun to explore this play's dramaturgy and stagecraft: Nevill Coghill, "Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter's Taler ShS, 11 (1958): 31-41; William H. Matchett, "Some Dramatic Techniques in 'The Winter's Tale,'" ShS, 22 (1969): 93-107; Barbara A. Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976); and Charles Frey, Shakespeare's Vast Romance: A Study of "The Winter's Tale" (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1980). The Winter's Tale has made itself available to some of the finest "theatrical" readings in Shakespearean criticism, perhaps because (as we have long sensed) its dramatic effects depend, more than those of other plays, on its realization in performance. The statue scene alone has been an important school for such readings.

⁶ Shakespeare, after all, makes the relationship between Hermione and Polixenes much less "ambiguous" than Greene did in Pandosto, where Bellaria, "willing to shew how unfainedly she loved her husband, by his friends entertainment, used him likewise so familiarly, that her countenance bewrayed how her mind was affected towards him: oftentimes comming her selfe into his bedchamber, to see that nothing shuld be amisse to mislike him" (The Descent of Euphues: Three Elizabethan Romance Stories, ed. James Winny [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957], p. 69). For a discussion of ways in which this question has been addressed in productions of The Winter's Tale, see Dennis Bartholomeusz, "The Winter's Tale" in Performance in England and America, 1611-1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 229-32.

⁷ See Stanley Wells, "Shakespeare and Romance," in Later Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 8 (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 66-67; and J. H. P. Pafford, ed., The Winter's Tale, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1963), p. lxiv.

⁸ Though Mowat disputes the claim of critics such as E. M. W. Tillyard that the first three acts constitute the equivalent of Shakespearean tragedy (pp. 5-21), it is nonetheless striking how dramaturgically similar this concluding scene is to the tragedies, and how many devices it borrows from them: the stage configuration of assembled characters grouped around a locus of suffering, commemoration of the tragic events in the form of narrative, the ironic counterpointing of knowledge and loss.

⁹Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. vii-ix.

¹⁰ It is also significant, in this regard, that Shakespeare here abandons Greene's narrative, which has helped structure the events of the play's first half, and moves into his own dramatic material, though the theatrical implications of this shift into unfamiliarity would be more strongly felt by the play's original audience.

¹¹ 'The Staging of the Last Plays," in Later Shakespeare, p. 137.

¹² One of the most extensive thematic studies of Autolycus' role within the play is Lee Sheridan Cox, "The Role of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale," SEL, 9 (1969): 283-301.

¹³ "Word and Picture in the Final Plays," in Later Shakespeare, p. 93.

¹⁴ To a much lesser extent, the reunions between Leontes and Polixenes and between Leontes and Camillo are also "obligatory," and these too are merely reported.

¹⁵ In this role, she anticipates Ariel, who likewise scourges memory in his "ministers of Fate" speech to Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian:

But remember
(For that's my business to you) that you three
From Milan did supplant good Prospero,
Expos'd unto the sea (which hath requit it)
Him, and his innocent child. . . .

(The Tempest III.iii.68-72)

¹⁶Poetics 16.1454b-55a, in Aristotle: On Poetry and Style, trans. G. M. A. Grube (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), p. 33. For Grube's "Antinous," I have substituted the more familiar "Alcinous;" see S. H. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and Fine Art with a Critical Text and Translation of "The Poetics, " 4th ed. (1907; rpt. New York: Dover, 1951), p. 59.

¹⁷ For a discussion of the ways in which Shakespeare uses specific notations in the text to control the theatrical realization of the statue scene, see Jörg Hasler, "Romance in the Theater: The Stagecraft of the 'Statue Scene' in The Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare: Man of the Theater, ed. Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio, and D. J. Palmer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), pp. 203-11.

¹⁸ See S. L. Bethell, "The Winter's Tale": A Study (London: Staples Press, [1947]); and Roy Battenhouse, "Theme and Structure in 'The Winter's Tale,'" ShS, 33 (1980): 123-38.