SOURCE: "Delusions and Dreams: The Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare's Other Language, Methuen, 1987, pp. 95-129.

[In the following essay, Nevo contends that, while the traditional dramatic unities are flouted in The Winter's Tale, fantasy shapes the drama's two interrelated plots around a pair of dreams, "where one represents a terror inelecutably realized and the other a restitutive wish-fulfillment."]

Death, as we all know, is not something to be looked at in the face.

(J.-B. Pontalis)

In The Winter's Tale the once mandatory dramatic "unities"—time, place, action and motivation tumble to the ground like a house of cards. Constructed out of two antithetical parts, in two different geographical locations, it is halved in the centre by a "wide gap of time" and propelled into action by an unmotivated outburst of ruinous rage. Among other notorious oddities, such as the bear-infested but nonexistent sea-coast of Bohemia, there is a memorable rogue who accompanies the second half of the play in a way which has defeated most attempts at interpretation.¹ These are no longer regarded as preposterous, as lapses, crudities or absurdities.²The Winter's Tale is safely ensconced among the masterpieces. Yet perplexities and uneasinesses remain.

Let me make a bold foray into the thicket of The Winter's Tale. If I were asked to formulate in one short sentence the gist of what The Winter's Tale is "about" I would say the following: In The Winter's Tale a child is lost, and a lost child is found: between these extremities The Winter's Tale runs its course. And I would add that the deeply embedded inner tale is Mamillius', a "sad tale" of "sprites and goblins" and of "a man" who "dwelt by a churchyard" (II.i.25-30), which has only a beginning, and is for Hermione's ear alone.

My attempt in the following pages is to reconstruct the fantasy which, I believe, animates and unifies the play, from which it derives its power to move us, and which determines and shapes its manifest drama. The fantasy has its roots in the deepest, most archaic, and most painful of our human experiences; yet, at the same time its expression by means of formal invention and mimetic verisimilitude, its orchestration of manifold means of dramatic representation and of dramatic utterance is particularly elaborate and rich. I believe that a rereading of The Winter's Tale receptive to the resonances of deep-level fantasy can take us beyond the traditional explanatory themes which are invoked as organizers and arbiters of meaning—the seasons of great creating nature, for instance, or the miracles of a benign providence—to uncover the sources of the play's emotional power. It can also take us beyond (or at least put into brackets) the orthodox psychoanalytic explications of Leontes' sudden onset of delusional jealousy.

In its own time the play was a masterpiece, in a new and popular mode. The particular version of pastoral called tragicomoedia (or, as it was sometimes called, comitragoedia) had become over the two decades preceding the composition of The Winter's Tale, one of the central projects in the Renaissance literary itinerary. It had bred, among other taxonomic peculiarities, a Latin closet drama of 1612-14 by Mario Bettini subtitled Hilarotragoedia Satyropastoralis which, besides out-Heroding Polonius, offered a smorgasbord of situations, character types, figures, topoi, and devices from the Renaissance repertory. It also developed a legitimate hybrid genre called commedia grave which was a conjunction of features from Cinthio's tragedia de lieto fin and from Arcadian comedy.³ Its declared intent was the mingling of hornpipes and funerals which Sidney had found so objectionable. Thus the compounding, conflating and juxtaposing of incompatible plots had become fashionable in late sixteenth-century Italy, intent upon a mannerist subversion of neoclassical rules, and an aesthetic of paradox and indeterminacy. That Shakespeare's art was affected by such trends is not in question. One recalls, among other anachronisms—English Whitsun pastoral rubbing shoulders with Greek oracles, for instance—the odd presence of Guilio Romano, Raphael's mannerist successor, at the court of Leontes, or at least within reach of Paulina's commission. As Rosalie Colie reminds us, "The Winter's Tale is an astonishingly timely play, seen against continental preoccupations" (1974, 265). That there is a craftsman's pride in the violence with which the two halves of the play are split apart, and the cunning with which they are spliced together, as if the controlling structures of tragedy and comedy were pitted against each other and locked in mortal combat, is perhaps indicated by the third gentleman's description of Paulina in the scene of reunions: "But O! the noble combat that 'twixt joy and sorrow was fought in Paulina! She had one eye declin'd for the loss of her husband, another elevated that the oracle was fulfill'd" (V.ii.72-6). The Winter's Tale, with its twinning of genres and generations, its gap (or compression) of time, its triumphantly double resolution and its bogus miracle is a contemporary tour de force. Pauline thus described, is a bizarre emblem of the play's duality, possibly a covert plea for the audience's admiration.

How are we to respond to this hybrid form? Are we merely to applaud a triumph of conscious virtuosity? We cannot easily say whether the tragedy is embedded in the comedy or vice versa. Is Leontes' destructive aberration a wintry episode in an ongoing unending story of growth and renewal? Or is the family good fortune a happy contingency in an ongoing unending Schopenhauerian story of loss and grief? Which of these is the The Winter's Tale? "A sad tale's best for winter" (II.i.25) Mamillius tells his mother and, since he is one of the play's two casualties, his view has a certain cogency; but does he point to part or whole? The Winter's Tale, fissured by its oppositions of time, place, tempo, mood, style, mode and genre is bound by innumerable linkages and mirrorings; yet in it tragedy will not absorb or synthesize comedy, nor comedy tragedy.

The gentleman who reports on the joyful reunion between Leontes and Polixenes makes this very point, and is unable to read the signs: "There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they look'd as they had heard of a world ransom'd, or one destroy'd" (V.ii.13-15).

The two halves of The Winter's Tale present us with a tragic structure powerfully compressed, and a recognizably familiar New Comedy in the pastoral mode which defers, but finally extends and deepens the anagnorisis. The final Act enacts a double resolution: the conflicts of both plots are defused by one and the same recognition—the discovery of the foundling Perdita—an admirable instance of the "well-tied knot" to which the writers of tragicomedy aspired, and a wish-fulfillment of the most tormenting of all human desires—to undo irreversible error.

The second part of the play, then, redeems the first, but it is also obsessively repetitive of the first, as if it were haunted by the same ghosts and goblins. New life is born in the first part and cast out to sea; new young love is born in the second, and cast out to sea, and in each case by "wintry" passions, Leontes' and Polixenes', doubles in their tyrannical ferocity as they were in their boyhood twinship. Antigonus saves an unacknowledged daughter from her father in the first part, Camillo an unrecognized son from his father in the second. The second part replays, reiterates the first in manifold ways. The triangle of the first part—Leontes, Hermione, Polixenes—is twice realigned, with intermingled variations, in the second: Leontes accuses his wife of relations with his old friend, and comes between them; or, if you will, the old friend comes between the couple. The old friend accuses his son of relations with Leontes' daughter, and comes between them; or, if you will, Hermione's daughter comes between father and son. Finally Leontes, momentarily tempted to come between his own daughter and the friend's son, sanctions their union. As James Edward Siemon puts it:

Each of the two halves of the play has a wrathful king; innocent victims; a princess slandered; a servant who serves his master's highest interests by betraying him; a kingdom without an heir or threatened with the loss of its heir; a voyage over a stormy sea; a providential revelation . . . each part has at its center two men and a woman: two "brothers" and a queen of Sicilia; father and son and a princess of Sicilia. There can be little doubt that the second part of the play represents a conscious variation on the themes and plot motives of the first. (1974, 13)

How do we respond to these obsessive doublings? The recurrences bind the contrasting structures, but they bind with a difference—as the suturing of a wound draws attention to the wound. They suggest the unstable asymmetry of a triad struggling, again and again, to right itself. The grip over our minds exerted by The Winter's Tale is beyond the cunning of connoisseurship or virtuosity. The play is not only a tour de force in contemporary dramaturgy; it is a tour de force in the theatre of reverie, which, . . . is the mode of Shakespearean romance. There is therefore another kind of cunning which I would wish to invoke in an account of The Winter's Tale: that of the most cunning of interpreters, and of his subject matter.

In his "Revision of the Theory of Dreams," collected in New Introductory Lectures, Freud writes:

Franz Alexander (1925) has shown in a study on pairs of dreams that it not infrequently happens that two dreams in one night share the carrying-out of the dream's task by producing a wish-fulfilment in two stages if they are taken together, though each dream separately would not effect that result. Suppose, for instance, that the dream-wish had as its content some illicit action in regard to a particular person. Then in the first dream the person will appear undisguised, but the action will be only timidly hinted at. The second dream will behave differently. The action will be named without disguise, but the person will either be made unrecognizable or replaced by someone indifferent. This, you will admit, gives one an impression of actual cunning. Another and similar relation between the two members of a pair of dreams is found where one represents a punishment and the other the sinful wish-fulfilment. It amounts to this: "if one accepts the punishment for it, one can go on to allow oneself the forbidden thing." (1933, 56)

These remarks are extremely suggestive, though cast in terms too minatory and judgemental to be quite applicable to the eudaemonic ends of Shakespearean comedy. Freud's hypothetical case of a pair of dreams does not exactly fit the carriage of fantasy in Shakespeare's pair of interrelated plots, but his comment suggests a structural model with which to go to work. With The Winter's Tale in mind one would add a sentence to his: "Another and similar relation between two members of a pair of dreams is found where one represents a terror ineluctably realized and the other a restitutive wish-fulfillment." This, I shall argue, helps us to chart the trajectory of fantasy in The Winter's Tale and enables us to account for and respond to its particular force.

The text obtrudes its contradictory double nature from the very beginning. The prologue scene imparts preliminary information about the two kings' friendship, but the exchange of courtesies between Camillo and Archidamus is riddled by ambiguities—a palimpsest whose ulterior meanings subvert or nullify the decorous overt intention. "If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia, on the like occasion whereon my services are now on foot, you shall see (as I have said) great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia" (I.i. 1-4); "We will give you sleepy-drinks, that your senses (unintelligent of our insufficience) may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse us" (13-16); "You pay a great deal too dear for what's given freely" (17-8); Sicilia and Bohemia "were train'd together in their childhoods; and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection, which cannot choose but branch now" (22-4). Benignly horticultural, the branch—metaphor for flourishing growth—is itself also a metaphor for parting and division; and the image, rebuslike, conceals (or does not conceal) the ubiquitous Elizabethan cuckold's horns. The euphuistic description of the two kings' friendship contains its own antithesis: "they have seem'd to be together, though absent; shook hands, as over a vast; and embrac'd as it were from the ends of oppos'd winds" (29-33). It is totally reversible, indeterminately an affirmation of their togetherness when apart, or their estrangement even when together. These double, or treble, entendres in which the two possibilities, the idyllic and the catastrophic, coexist reflect the larger structure of the play and of Leontes' dilemma. The rhetoric of courtesy slyly rehearses it seems, the entire ensuing drama.

In the grand opening scene too, Polixenes' "Nine changes of the wat'ry star" (I.ii.l) refers ostensibly to the duration of his absence from Bohemia. But the presence on stage of Leontes' pregnant queen ineluctably fills, so to speak, the semantic space, and magnetizes, or sexualizes, in consequence the entire subsequent text: "Without a burthen," "filled up," "standing in rich place," "what may chance/Or breed," "to tire your royalty" (to weary you? to wear your robes? to prey upon you?). If the unconscious is structured like a language, in Lacan's famous apothegm, this language certainly seems to be structured like an unconscious, in which the benign and the threatening are held in contradictory suspension. What are we to make of this unruly text which seems to be constructing its own counterplot in defiance of any narrative logic? For on the face of it, in the prologue the courtiers are merely exchanging prefatory courtesies. In Act I, scene ii Polixenes is politely refusing his friend's pressing hospitality. Equivocation in the dialogue with Leontes must surely undermine the speaker's own purpose, for Polixenes would be unlikely to be interested in insinuating into his host's mind suspicions of a liaison with the latter's wife, should there have been any such. Does Leontes hear what we hear? Does he hear what we are not supposed, as it were, to hear? Or are we privy to a communication neither of the protagonists hear?

William H. Matchett provides an ingenious answer:

The language, no less than Hermione, is pregnant. Hermione, we are by now convinced, is accustomed to using more warmth with Polixenes. It is true that we must later discover that we were wrong, that this was all innocent, but Shakespeare's dramatic method here is first to mislead us in order to hasten the process of misleading Leontes. He has in fact misled us twice; first in scene i by preparing us for innocent friendship and now in scene ii by presenting an image of guilt where there is in fact innocence. (1969, 96, and passim)

Matchett fails to explain, however, why it is the manifest meaning, the "innocent" meaning that is operative in the prologue scene whereas in scene ii he claims priority for the innuendo—the "guilty" meaning. By line 77 Polixenes' "Temptations have since been born to's," ostensibly an elegiac lament for the passing of childhood innocence, we hear, Matchett is persuaded, "a sophisticated understatement shared with Hermione and the audience behind Leontes' back" (97), and by this time "we would be wondering when Leontes will face what is going on." Similarly, Hermione's

Th'offenses we have made you do we'll answer,
If you first sinn'd with us

(I.ii.83-4)

is not, according to Matchett, to be read as a confidant disavowal but, with the accent upon "first," as a sly confession. Shakespeare's "masterful manipulation," in Matchett's reading, causes us to become suspicious long before Leontes does. We should feel, he says, not that Leontes is too rapidly jealous, but that he has been very slow about it. And the point? If we ourselves have been led to mistake innocence for guilt, how can we entirely blame Leontes?

M. Mahood, who preceded Matchett in the study of the ambiguities, disagrees:

It is possible, of course, to read long-standing suspicion into all Leontes' speeches to Polixenes and Hermione, from the first appearance of the three characters. But this impairs the dramatic contrast between the happiness and harmony of the three characters when Polixenes has agreed to stay, and Leontes' subsequent outburst of passion ("Too hot, too hot"). . . . a sudden outburst of normally suppressed feelings, which struggle for their release in savage wordplay." ((1957) 1971, 348)

However, she, intent upon evidence of a wise Shakespearean tolerance of inexplicable human frailty, does not explain why there should have been such an outburst. Both these astute Empsonians construe univocally, in terms of their differing interpretative purposes, the entire string of comments with which Leontes punctuates his wife's persuasion of Polixenes, although at any point in the series ("Tongue-tied, our Queen? (27), "Well said, Hermione" (33), "Is he won yet?" (86), and "At my request he would not./Hermione, my dearest, thou never spok'st/To better purpose" (87-9)) either a generous and gracious innocence or a dissimulated but tormenting suspicion might be what is signified.

Let us attempt to relocate Leontes within the linguistic web of this scene. The undertones in Polixenes' "nine changes" speech cannot, with any dramatic feasibility, incriminate Polixenes, but they can be heard by Leontes with certain triggering effects. The mere reference to the number nine, Freud noted, "whatever its connection, directs our attention to the phantasy of pregnancy" ("A Seventeenth Century Demonological Neurosis" (1923) SE.XIX,93). This is a useful reminder, for if we read the resonances of the "nine months" speech as pointing towards Leontes' fantasy rather than as incriminating Polixenes, we then are enabled to perceive that a certain anxiety attends the fact, in itself, of his wife's condition. Polixenes has left his throne without a burden, he says. For Leontes "burden" may well evoke the thought of that with which his own throne is "filled up." In the ambivalence of "to tire your royalty," the hint of succession is subverted by the simultaneous hint of usurpation. If Leontes is reading himself in Polixenes' text, then "like a cipher standing in rich place" (I.ii.6-7) succinctly suggests the nothingness, the emptiness of exclusion from a once experienced plenitude. Our third ear, moreover, catches a disturbing note in both Hermione's exchanges with her husband. It is not perhaps Hermione's most felicitious move to offer to allow Leontes to overstay as long as a whole month in Bohemia should the occasion arise, and with the assurance: "yet, good deed, Leontes,/I love thee not a jar o'th'clock behind/What lady she her lord" (42-4). Any lady? Whatever lady you care to mention? It is an oddly noncommittal claim, surely, but worse is to follow:

What? have I twice said well? When was't before? . . .
But once before I spoke to th'purpose? when?
Nay, let me hav't; I long.

(89-101)

This is spoken jestingly, of course, but it is not unknown for jests to be used to camouflage resentments. Neither Leontes' description of the "three crabbed months" which soured themselves to death before Hermione's "I am yours forever" was uttered, nor his pointed reference to his dagger, muzzled "Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,/[As ornament] oft does, too dangerous" (157-8) do much to mitigate the impression we might receive of a couple in considerable marital stress, if not positive crisis.

It is in this context that Polixenes describes a nostalgic fantasy of perfect unity, when he and Leontes were as "twinn'd lambs, that did frisk i'th'sun,/And bleat the one at th'other" exchanging "innocence for innocence" (67-9).⁴ The yearning is for the timeless—"Two lads that thought . . . to be boy eternal" (63-65)—and, significantly, the speechless: for a moment, known in infancy and long since lost, of undifferentiated oneness with another being. Hermione, jesting, provokes the insertion into the scene of the mutations, the depradations, of time—"By this we gather/You have tripp'd since" (75-6). Polixenes' reply is fervent:

O my most sacred lady,
Temptations have since then been born to's: for
In those unfledg'd days was my wife a girl;
Your precious self had then not cross'd the eyes
Of my young playfellow

(76-9)

hers is flippant:

Grace to boot!
Of this make no conclusion, lest you say
Your queen and I are devils. Yet go on,
Th'offenses we have made you do we'll answer,
If you first sinn'd with us.

(80-4)

and Leontes' entire string of comments, as we have seen, is opaquely ambiguous until his explicit. "Too hot, too hot!" (108):

I have tremor cordis on me; my heart dances,
But not for joy; not joy. This entertainment
May a free face put on, derive a liberty
From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom,
And well become the agent; 't may, I grant.
But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers,
As now they are, and making practic'd smiles
As in a looking glass; and then to sigh, as 'twere
The mort o'th'deer—O, that is entertainment
My bosom likes not, nor my brows.
Mamillius, Art thou my boy? . . .
How now, you wanton calf, Art thou my calf?

(110-20, 126)

Leontes' torment is felt and uttered first as a problem of doubt, of what he can know, be sure of, in respect of his wife's fidelity, and subsequently as conviction of her sexual betrayal, but the question of adultery, we are enabled to perceive, is a mask, or a defence against a breach in his certainty which lies far deeper, in infantile fears of isolation, separation and abandonment. Leontes has been (visibly) separated, isolated, by the tête-à-tête between Hermione and Polixenes, especially by the intimacies of the twinned lambs exchange; but he has already been separated or isolated by Hermione's new intimacy with her unborn child. That it is by the archaic rage of a sibling rivalry for an undivided mother that he is overthrown is perhaps confirmed later by the ferocious violence with which he would consign the babe (and its mother) to the flames, in Act II, scene iii, would see it "commit[ted] to the fire" (96); "I'll ha'thee burned" (114); "Better burn it now" (156).

It is the ancient loss, I believe the play tells us, that lies at the root of Leontes' seizure. There is, we are told, in every delusion a grain of truth. Hermione does betray Leontes, with her children, and it is the repetition of that maternal betrayal which is displaced upon the supposed adulterers, doubly determined figures in the primal drama. If we take a cue from psychoanalytic theory it is in such primal' drama that all tragedy is rooted, and from its unassuaged pain that theatre-going draws its appeal. Leontes himself sets up the structure of a fantasied primal scene, in which he is the excluded third, spying, watching, testing, angling—"I am angling now,/Though you perceive me not how I give line. . . . How she holds up the neb, the bill to him!" (I.ii.180-3)—trapping Hermione in a double bind: "How thou lov'st us, show in our brother's welcome" (174). If she is cold she will appear an uncompliant and disobedient wife; if warm, a self-betraying adulteress; she cannot win, nor does he wish her to win, for beneath the available postures of patriarchal male jealousy ("Should all despair/That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind/Would hang themselves" (188-200) and "Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I/Play too, but so disgrac'd a part, whose issue/Will hiss me to my grave; contempt and clamor/Will be my knell" (187-9)) lies the threat that is the greater because it is unknown. "Gone already" (185) on the face of it refers to the speed with which Hermione and Polixenes vanish together into the garden, but its resonance surely comes from an absence long ago experienced.

Ostensibly Leontes' questioning of Mamillius' likeness to himself expresses a worry about his paternity of the boy, but if this were really so, surely the answer would not be so insistently affirmative. What does he seek as he gazes into the face of his son, his "sweet villain," flesh of his flesh? It is a "copy" of his own—they are "almost as like as eggs" (note the image of symbiotic enclosure and totality) though it is false women who say so (122-36, passim). It is the paternity, after all, of the second child, not of Mamillius, that has been, if it has, placed in doubt. It is that imminent interloper who has reawakened the archaic loss, the archaic grief and rage, has made Leontes, at this moment, a replaced, or supplanted child, reliving the anguish of the mother's betrayal.

Dissimulating his agitation Leontes avows the "folly" of his "tenderness" for Mamillius:

Looking on the lines
Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd,

In my green velvet coat . . .
How like (methought) I then was to this kernel,
This squash, this gentleman. Mine honest friend,
Will you take eggs for money?

(153-61)

We recall "We are almost as like as eggs" a few moments before, so that it is possible to interpret the question as a pained recognition of the illusoriness (as against the reality of money) of the unity-in-identity, the existential certainty that he had longed to find, if not in the mother, then at least in the mirror of his son's "welkin eye" (136). Then he turns to Polixenes with a question for his "brother": "Are you so fond of your young prince as we/Do seem to be of ours?" (163-4); and receives the expected tenderly affectionate reply:

If at home, sir,
He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter;
Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all.
He makes a July's day short as December,
And with his varying childness, cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.

(165-71)

It is worth pausing a moment over that reply. Why would one wish a long summer day to be as short as a winter one? On the face of it Polixenes is describing childish games—he is a father who enjoys playing cowboys and Indians or cops and robbers with his young son—but can we ignore the subversive connotations of "enemy," of "parasite," above all of the strange inversion of July and December? The game itself acts out subliminal hostilities. Thoughts that would thick the blood are indeed soothed, stilled, by the charm of a child but the child is also a threat, a supplanter, a usurper. The face that is his own will one day efface his own. Leontes hears what we hear and replies, "So stands this squire officed with me" (172-3). The strange double message of Polixenes reflects, then, an emotion shared by these two twinned figures, and enables us to take a further step in the understanding of Leontes.

Leontes' passionate cleaving to the boy is rooted in identification—they are both ousted rivals for the mother's love—but it is also traversed by the deeper, unrecognized source of dread. He sees himself in Mamillius: the child in himself, his double (154-5), but he also sees his successor, and his death. Later, we recall, he cannot bear Paulina's insistence upon the new-born baby's resemblance to himself.

It becomes of the greatest interest to follow the course of Leontes' struggle against the upsurge of a turbulence which threatens to overthrow him, his half-aware struggle to maintain a foothold in reality:

Come, sir page . . .
Most dear'st, my collop! Can thy dam?—may't be?
Affection! thy intention stabs the centre.
Thou dost make possible things not so held
Communicat'st with dreams (how can this be?),
With what's unreal thou co-active art,
And fellow'st nothing. Then 'tis very credent
Thou mayst co-join with something, and thou dost
(And that beyond commission), and I find it
(And that to the infection of my brains
And hard'ning of my brows).

(135-46)

This speech has been much commented upon. I think we can best understand it as exhibiting the moment of the switch-over in Leontes' thinking from the rational procedures of reality testing to the autistic, associational imagery of the primary processes, the imagery produced by the self's inner needs and dreads.⁵ It is his last bulwark. Henceforth ratiocination itself will be flooded by fantasy, saturated by an influx of representations welling up from the depths of the mind, eluding all attempts at repression. If "affection" is glossed, as it often is, to refer to Hermione's alleged aberrant passion, which stabs to the very center of Leontes' (or the world's) being, the rest of the speech becomes extremely obscure;⁶ but suppose we read it as a rearguard action, so to speak, half in sight, half in blindness, of a mind on the very brink of a self-induced, defensive delusion? "Affection" then is his own jealousy, which, seeking confirmation in reality has found, "communicat[ing] with dreams . . . with what's unreal," only that which feeds its flames. What if these intuitions do indeed stab the center, the bull's eye? The acknowledged power of fantasy to find a bush a bear now presents itself as doubly forceful confirmation of its divinatory powers when the bush really is a bear! Caught in these toils this Shakespearean snowman experiences the

intricate evasions of as,
In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness . . .
The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed for lands

⁷

and totally embraces the fiction which protects him, with the possessive masculine postures available to him in his society, from the deeper vulnerability, the unrecognized source of dread. Hence, in the flood of obscene images which follows, birth and copulation, entry and exit are scarcely to be distinguished.

Gone already!
Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a
forked one! . . .

And many a man there is (even at this present,
Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th'arm,
That little thinks she has been sluic'd in's absence,
And his pond fish'd by his next neighbor—by
Sir Smile, his neighbor. Nay, there's comfort in't,
Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open'd,
As mine, against their will. . . .
Be it concluded,
No barricado for a belly. Know't,
It will let in and out the enemy,
With bag and baggage.

(I.ii.185-206, passim)

Earlier, in the exchange with Mamillius on the need to be "neat" the threat of the primary process image-language of dream is still under control, though the pressure of its metaphors to subsume reality is formidably great:

Come, captain,
We must be neat; not neat, but cleanly, captain:
And yet the steer, the heifer, and the calf
Are all call'd neat.—Still virginalling
Upon his palm? How now, you wanton calf,
Art thou my calf? . . .
Thou want'st a rough pash and the shoots that I have
To be full like me

(122-9)

Now his world is a bestiary: "How she holds up the neb! the bill to him!" (183). Now Leontes is entirely at the mercy of his fantasy, as if the whole lexis is alive with pointing fingers, or with poisoned arrows. Every world of Camillo in the dialogue between them at once inflames his imagination and provides proof positive for his conviction: "You had much ado to make his anchor hold/When you cast out it still came home" (213-14); "Satisfy/Th'entreaties of your mistress? Satisfy?/Let that suffice" (233-5; my italics). Hermione is a "hobbyhorse . . . rank as any flax-wench" (276-7); were her liver as infected as her life, "she would not live/The running of one glass" (304-6). In his persuasion of Camillo fantasy positively parades itself, ostentatiously, as reality-testing, but reality is no longer separable from image:

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh . . .
horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs . . .
Is this nothing?
Why then the world and all that's in't is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

(284-95)⁸

Rhetorically, the figure he employs is an apodiosis, the indignant rejection of an argument as impertinent or absurdly false (Lanham, 1968, 13), but the ratiocinative appeal to items of evidence virtually conjures an act of intercourse into being. The body imagery, progressing from cheeks, noses, inside lip, horsing foot on foot, to the metaphorically sexual pin and web, and the "covering" sky, exacerbates an inflamed imagination, verbally creates the coupling that he imagines watching, that we imagine watching with him.

This "everything" with which Leontes now fills his dreadfully experienced nothingness (we recall "a cipher standing in rich place" (6-7)) denudes and impoverishes him, diminishes his very being—he is a "pinch'd thing" (51)—while it fills him with a sexual revulsion which the rhetoric of rational argumentation, again, to Camillo, ignites, rather than defuses. The metaphor of a soiled name collapses into the literality of a soiled bed, repulsive, loathsome:

Dost think I am so muddy, so unsettled,
To appoint myself in this vexation, sully
The purity and whiteness of my sheets
(Which to preserve is sleep, which being spotted
Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps)

(325-30)

Antigonus, whose rhetoric of denial echoes and aggravates his master's—if Hermione is "honor-flawed" he will "geld" his daughters (II.i.145, 147)—is rebuked for lacking just such enflamed—enlightened!—"seeing" as "communicat'st with dreams, with what's unreal": "You smell this business with a sense as cold/As is a dead man's nose; but I do see't, and feel't" (151-2). Leontes has seen the spider in the cup, and "cracks his gorge, his sides/With violent hefts" (44-5), vomiting what he drinks.

What the play has exhibited is the process of self-entrapment whereby a deeply confused, insecure and unhappy man enmeshes himself in the web that he spins to defend himself from thoughts that lie too deep for knowledge. The force and vividness with which primary process imagery invades the mind and speech of Leontes make him an astonishingly realistic, individualized figure. We can be lured into reacting to "him" as not merely realistic, but virtually real. Yet he is a fabrication, an epiphenomenon of the text. "What does Leontes want?" we ask, inducting ourselves into an invented mind as we simultaneously watch the manner of its invention. "What does Leontes want?" is thus, strictly speaking, a rhetorical question. What Leontes, or any textual personage wants is what we ourselves could conceivably want were our world constructed out of the same set of displaced signifiers. What Leontes wants is what we discover to be comformable, as we adjust empathetic introspection to the text's evocations, its figures, its twists and turns, its insistences, its peculiarities, with a meaningful scheme of things. Clues to that meaningful scheme of things we find wherever we can—in the language that we share with the Shakespearean personae, in the language that we no longer share with the Shakespearean personae, but that has to be reexplicated, in the language of symbols which is a remarkably tenacious subdivision of the shared language.

Spider venom, folklore informs us, is effective only if seen when the cup is drained. Leontes' metaphor for the curse of knowledge comes from this source. Spiders, psychoanalytic lore informs us, unconsciously symbolize devouring mother imagos;⁹ but in whose unconscious? Leontes'? Shakespeare's? The reader's? The fact that just that metaphor occurs at this point is surely interesting, and I offer it as a test case for the usefulness of the portmanteau notion of a textual unconscious, which, in terms of the Lacanian ellipse, includes the circuit from author to reader via the fictional persona who is no more than a synechdoche—a part standing for the whole of the textual transaction.

Our understanding of the fixation which will give Leontes no peace until it has compelled him to its own recognition is further advanced in the next phase of the play. Act II opens with Hermione, nearing her time and understandably bothered by her lively young son. "Take the boy to you; he so troubles me, Tis past enduring," she says (II.i.l). Her ladies, and the precocious Mamillius, who, we note, doesn't want to be treated "as if I were a baby still" (5), amuse themselves happily enough with reciprocal teasing, but there has been a rejection; and whatever wounded feelings we may impute to Mamillius can hardly be said to be mollified by the first lady's deliberate provocation "we shall/Present our services to a fine new prince/One of these days," says the First Lady, "and then you'll wanton with us, If we would have you" (16-19). The episode ends with renewed intimacy, out of earshot of the "cricket" ladies, between Mamillius and his mother, now recovered. A momentary maternal rejection, a provocation to sibling jealousy, a child's game effort to master fear with a story—this utterly ordinary little nursery scene has effectively reminded us of the griefs and losses that haunt the minds of children like the very sprites and goblins in Mamillius' tale; and it throws a melancholy light upon Leontes' breakdown.

What Leontes sees is the intimate communion of mother and son, Hermione and the boy with the mother-like name, from which he in his isolation is excluded, as he believed he was at the beginning, as Mamillius has just been. There is certainly no sport in his savage "Give me the boy. I am glad you did not nurse him . . . Away with him! and let her sport herself/With that she's big with" (56-9, passim). Leontes is now a man driven by an unassuagable rage, defended only by the revengeful jealousy to which he clings, which he will not relinquish and from which he will not emerge until he has cast out. his new-born infant to well-nigh certain destruction, received the news of Mamillius' death and, in effect, hounded Hermione to hers.

It is the news of Mamillius' death that brings him to his senses, releases him from the grip of the fantasy which the sexual jealousy masks. The key to that deepest level fantasy is to be found in Leontes' reiterated "nothing" in the speech quoted above. What the speech contends is that the evidence of Hermione's infidelity is so palpable as to be impossible to ignore. Its rhetorical form is the setting out of an impossible postulate: if whispering, etc. is nothing, then nothing is anything; but the ulterior meaning of these frenetically iterated "nothings" is best understood as a rhetorical barricade against the admission of that which "has already been experienced"—I take the phrase from D.W. Winnicott's account of the "fear of breakdown" (1974, 104). "There are moments," he writes, "when a patient needs to be told that the breakdown, a fear of which destroys his or her life, has always already been." It is something the ego is unable to encompass because it is unthinkable: "a fear of the original agony which caused the defence . . . a fact that is carried round hidden away in the unconscious." Leontes' sense of nothingness, of emptiness, of annihilation is exactly that state which "cannot be remembered except by being experienced for the first time now." What we cannot remember we are forced to repeat, as we know. The death of the child who is Leontes', who is Leontes, following the abandonment of the other child that he feared, is thus the terror, the unthinkable agony, which is experienced "for the first time now."

Winnicott's insight illuminates to perfection the plight of Leontes, the backward drift which the tragic part of The Winter's Tale articulates. The nightmare of the child's death realizes the terror of a child's death which has already been, which has always already been, for Leontes as for Everyman. It is because that dread resonates with our own most primal terrors that we yield with such pleasure to the counterfantasy of the pastoral in Act IV, the transition to which, however, must first engage our attention.

The central scene of Act III, and of the play, is the great scene of the trial in which Leontes arraigns his Queen in a travesty of the justice he invokes. The scene shows Leontes totally isolated, and imprisoned, in his wounded narcissism. She is dignified, noble, abused as wife, as mother, as daughter ("The Emperor of Russia was my father. O, that he were alive, and here beholding/His daughter's trial" (III.ii.119-20)) by this unleashed male aggression. He is omnipotent, punitive, persecutory; she defenceless, deprived of her children, dragged from her prison childbed. "Sir," she says,

You speak a language that I understand not.
My life stands in the level of your dreams,
Which I'll lay down.

(80-2)

One of the remarkable features of The Winter's Tale is the degree of unaware awareness with which its characters are endowed. We have already heard Leontes struggling, half-knowingly, with his own conflicting modes of cognition. Now his scathingly scornful reply, ironically affirming what it denies, causes one to shudder at the identity of rhetorical denial with its unconscious counterpart:

Your actions are my dreams.
You had a bastard by Polixenes,
And I but dreamt it.

(82-4)

In terms of formal tragedy the scene enacts both reversal and recognition. Its action is the inevitable issues of choices already made—the culmination of error—and results in the ironically irreversible fatality which marks the midpoints of Shakespeare's tragic structures. Hermione, blameless, is condemned, but the oracle justifies her. The oracle is read but its message defied. Mamillius' death—immediate nemesis—is announced, Hermione collapses and to the now heartstruck Leontes is brought the news of her death. Leontes is led away to his sorrows, but we do not witness his terrible remorse. The play, as we know, will swerve away from tragic closure into the luxury of a dream of undoing, but the passage from nightmare to dream is mediated by another death.

Since Measure for Measure Shakespeare has bettered his instruction in the art of tragi-comic conjunction. In Measure for Measure the genre shift occurs abruptly, at the height of the crisis of Act III, with an unprecedented change of style, diction and mode. In The Winter's Tale, Act III, the Act which at once opens the breach between its two localities and bridges them, obtrudes its intermediary function, achieving a remarkable chiastic interlocking, both formal and symbolic. Act III consists of three scenes symmetrically divided to form a triptych. The two flanking scenes suggest the two antagonistic drives which tragicomedy commingles, each representing a landscape of the mind appropriate to the two opposed halves of the play. For Cleomenes and Dion on their way back from the oracle the climate is "delicate, the air most sweet,/Fertile the isle" (III.i.1-2); the sacrifice was "ceremonious, solemn, and unearthly" (7), their journey "rare, pleasant, speedy" (14). This scenic symbolism suggests the landscape of a mind whole and at peace. In extreme contrast with the benign and sensuous serenity of this locus amoenus, a maternal body, is the "savage clamor" (III.iii.56) of the Bohemian coast where Antigonus lands with his charge. Scene iii recounts the fate of the "poor souls" aboard Antigonus' ship, and of Antigonus himself, against a seascape ruinous, disintegrated and chaotic: "I am not to say it is a sea, for it is now the sky; betwixt the firmament and it you cannot thrust a bodkin's point. . . . how it chafes, how it rages . . . now the ship boring the moon with her mainmast, and anon swallow'd with yeast and froth, as you'd thrust a cork into a hogshead. And then for the land-service, to see how the bear tore out his shoulder bone, how he cried to me for help . . . how the sea flap-dragon'd it . . . how the poor souls roar'd, and the sea mock'd them; and how the poor gentleman roar'd, and the bear mock'd him, both roaring louder than the sea or weather. . . . I have not wink'd since I saw these sights. The men are not yet cold under water, nor the bear half din'd on the gentleman" (87-106, passim). The clown's imagery grotesquely mingles pity and terror, records dismemberment with a cannibalistic detachment, condenses orgasm and death-throe. Where the temperate climate of Cleomenes evokes a longed-for restitution still to come, this chaotic seascape figures the break-down already undergone.

The ambassadors to the oracle in scene i, certain of Hermione's innocence, anticipated rescue and remedy, yet catastrophe occurred; the Bohemian shepherd who rescues the abandoned babe has no doubt about ill-doing: "Though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-doorwork," he says (72, 73), yet he is the agent of deliverance. The babe is rescued and the treasure found, to the haunting rhythm of the shepherd's "thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born" (113-14), as the play moves into its remedial phase, accompanied by the pitiful and pitying figure of Hermione in Antigonus' strange vision.

Antigonus' gruesome death and his vision have puzzled many commentators. "Shakespeare's solution," says Tillyard, referring to the problem of transition from the tragic to the pastoral, "is to drive the tortured world of Leontes and Hermione to a ridiculous extreme in Antigonus' vision. In so doing he really puts an end to it" ((1938), in Kermode (1938, 78)). There is nothing ridiculous, I submit, in Antigonus' powerful soliloquy as he deposits the babe on the Bohemian shore. It is a premonition of his own death—he will never see his wife again—and the account of an hallucination. It records an experience truly uncanny:

I have heard (but not believed) the spirits o'th'dead
May walk again. If such thing be, thy mother
Appear'd to me last night; for ne'er was dream
So like a waking. To me comes a creature,
Sometimes her head on one side, some another—
I never saw a vessel of like sorrow,
So fill'd, and so becoming

(III.iii.16-22)

Antigonus himself is in doubt about the status of his vision, uncertain whether he has dreamed a dream or seen a ghost. He settles, with somewhat anachronist Protestant scepticism, for the ghost theory—"for this once, yea superstitiously" (40)—he believes that "this was so, and no slumber" (39). We may recognize hallucination (for which there was as yet no word available in Shakespeare's vocabulary)¹⁰ but what, we must ask, is its function in the drama.

In accordance with the principles of splitting and replication in dramatic (and dream) representation when psychic burdens become too heavy to be borne, Antigonus, I suggest, is a part of the Leontes persona. Counterpart to Paulina, who is an externalized conscience to Leontes throughout, he is the latter's destructive, ambivalent will in the abandonment of the babe. He has already echoed Leontes' violent, reflex misogyny (he would "geld" his daughters should Hermione prove false, we recall). The oscillation in his view of women as either ideal or animal represents the ferocious need of the frail masculine ego for a feminine ideal which will defend it against Oedipal anxieties. He has born the brunt of Leontes' projective accusation regarding his emasculated dependency upon his "Dame Partlet." The apparition he experiences is an angelic suffering figure, who was nevertheless, he is persuaded, guilty, and therefore justly punished. Leontes' secret sharer, he thus reflects the violent psychic split which was his master's; and suffers his retributory death as scapegoat for the latter's guilt. If his vision represents, in already fading retrospect, the precedent split in Leontes, Antigonus' behavior prefigures the reparative renewal of tenderness, of compassion—"Blossom, speed thee well" (III.iii.46) which will take the place of the flaying self-punishment Leontes embraces at the end of the trial scene. A similar transition is adumbrated by Paulina when, following her

O thou tyrant . . .
A thousand knees,
Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,
Upon a barren mountain, and still winter
In storm perpetual, could not move the gods
To look that way thou wert

(III.ii.207-14)

she is moved to pity him.

In both the tragic Shakespearean form and the comic, the penultimate Act plays with remedy. In tragedy possible remedies (like the return of Cordelia in Lear) are, so to speak, offered, only to be snatched away, terribly, by the onward momentum of the consequences of previous fatal errors. In comedy remedy, the absent identity, or person, or information required to solve the errors and conflicts which in the play's center come to an impasse is found, or begins to be found. In The Winter's Tale this is indeed the case, except that disaster, for Leontes, has already happened, and that this "remedy," the finding and eventual recovery of Perdita, is given an entire expanded, separate comic plot of its own, which, however, reproduces, as it were, compulsively, the plot which fathers it.

The play's structure of duplications allows for complex reevaluations, as samenesses and differences are simultaneously taken in. As has been pointed out, the second part reiterates the first. It repeats the story of rupturing, envious jealousy, of fear of usurpation, with Polixenes doubling for Leontes, Florizel for his father Polixenes, and Perdita for her mother Hermione. Polixenes' disavowal of his previous approval of the marriage of "a gentler scion to the wildest stock" (IV.iv.93) when his own posterity is at issue is as violent as the flare-up in Leontes of a possessive and dispossessed rage. Polixenes' ferocity is partly conventional—expected in a New Comedy senex—as is Florizel's unfilial indifference: "One being dead," he says, "I shall have more than you can dream of yet" (387-8); and in reply to the question whether he has a father, and whether his father knows of his betrothal, his cavalier reply is: "I have; but what of him? . . . He neither does, nor shall" (392-3). Partly, at least, the generational conflict serves as a recurrence and confirmation of the usurpation theme in the first part of the play.

Yet, as indeed the play informed us in its first lines: "If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia, on the like occasion whereon my services are now on foot, you shall see (as I have said) great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia" (I.i.1-4). The Winter's Tale realizes its dream of a second chance in Bohemia, through its second generation, as well as its second genre. New life means new possibilities, new comprehensions, new solutions. In Bohemia, the generational conflict is acted out overtly, in its own terms and without dissimulation. The desires of the young lovers in Bohemia are not undermined by the grip of archaic fears, by the drift back into the claustral recesses of the mind: "I was not much afeard," says Perdita, despite the dire threats of Polixenes,

for once or twice
I was about to speak, and tell him plainly
The self-same sun that shines upon his court
Hides not his visage from our cottage, but
Looks on alike.

(IV.iv.443-6)

And Florizel is "but sorry, not afeard" (463) as he renounces "succession" to be "heir to [his] affection" (480-1).

The green world in The Winter's Tale is a return, not of an unreconstructed childhood but to a childhood—a fantasied (benign) childhood, where fathers are good shepherds, and children unthreatened, and therefore unafraid—restitutive, rather than exorcist in its emotional effect. The sprites and goblins of Mamillius' sad tale have been exorcized, violently, in the first part of the play. In the wide gap of time, off stage, expiation is undergone by the absent Leontes, mourning his losses. What the play's dreaming tells us is that expiation, self-condemnation, is not enough. If consciousness is not irradiated by a knowledge of what could constitute a transcendence both of isolation and of fusion, a harmony of needs, mutual recognition, freely expressed desire, no reparation, or rehabilitation, or renewal will take place. It is this possibility of a different outcome that the pastoral fantasy of Florizel and Perdita, most eudaemonic of Shakespeare's green worlds, opens up. Nobody, perhaps, puts it better than the shepherd:

He says he loves my daughter.
I think so too; for never gaz'd the moon
Upon the water as he'll stand and read
As 'twere my daughter's eyes.

(171-4)

What Perdita says with flowers undoes courtly duplicity without foregoing courtesy, as she tactfully adjusts her floral offerings to her guests, or rather to the age her guests would like to think they belong to, while nevertheless stubbornly maintaining her position regarding gillyvors. The flowers mesh into a Renaissance debate about art and nature (read: culture and heredity) which is relevant to the question of a Queen of curds and cream, but they are richly symbolic in other ways too. They mediate the passage from winter to spring by themselves moving, so to speak, backwards through the seasons: Perdita begins with the offering of rosemary and rue which last through the winter, attempts to mollify Polixenes' response to the gift of wintry flowers with an emphasis on the present autumn season, "not yet on summer's death, nor on the birth/Of trembling winter" (80-1), negotiates the gillyvors hurdle triumphantly with the lavender, mint, savory, marjoram and marigold "of middle summer" (107) and only then turns to Florizel with the famous lyrical invocation of the flowers of the spring, and of Persephone. Perdita's mythopoeia conjugates erotic awakening with seasonal rebirth, moving from the virgin branches, Proserpina's fallen flowers, the daffodils that take the winds of March with beauty, the dim, sweet eyelids of Juno, Cytherea's breath, the pathos of primroses "that die unmarried ere they can behold/Bright Phoebus in his strength," to the frankly phallic "bold oxslips" and "crown imperial" (118-26) and the final routing of Thanatos:

No, like a bank for Love to lie and play on;
Not like a corse; or if, not to be buried,
But quick and in my arms.

(130-2)

The separate Perdita story is a chapter in the Greek romance narrative of long-lost children, family vicissitudes and family reunions, but it is also a recognizable Terentian comedy with all the formulaic constituents: a foundling, a casket to provide identification when required, a high-born lover in disguise on account of parental disapproval, the fortunate disclosure not only of a desirable identity for the girl, but positively of her own lost parents, and the restoration of amity both within and between the families concerned. It even has a tricky servant to negotiate the errors, mishaps, and mistaken identities of the comic plot in which young lovers outwit or evade parental disapproval. But has it?

Autolycus has been Florizel's servant, we learn, but is no longer, though we are not told why he is "out of service" (IV.iii.14). He is now in business on his own but nevertheless it is he who exchanges clothes with Florizel so that his may provide the prince with a further disguise for his escape with Perdita from the wrath of Polixenes. Later, removing another piece of disguise, his peddlar's beard, for the purpose, he becomes ambassador from Perdita's shepherd father to Polixenes to whom the bundle is to be shown, thus proving the shepherd adoptive father only and so saving him from retribution for his adopted daughter's fatal charms. This is a con, however, and instead of conducting the shepherd-with-bundle to Polixenes' court, he conducts him to his former master's escape ship, wondering, reprobate that he is, how it is that Fortune insists upon tempting him into "honesty" do what he will. (IV.iv.831). These machinations of Autolycus in fact delay the discovery of the bundle's contents, so that the secret remains undiscovered until the shepherd carries his fardel to Polixenes himself (now also in Sicilia), and is catapulted into the status of "gentleman born" (V.ii.127) as a reward. It turns out, therefore, that Autolycus, who prides himself upon the possession of an open ear, a quick eye, a nimble hand and a good rogue's nose for the smelling out of opportunities for advancement has allowed himself to be deprived of an obvious bonus. Ebullient as ever, he resigns himself to the set-back: "But 'tis all one to me; for had I been the finder-out of this secret, it would not have relish'd among my other discredits" (V.ii.121). In the role of tricky servant, it seems, Autolycus does not shine, but he has other resources for making a living, learned partly from the distinguished company of sharp-witted vagabonds who were beginning to populate the literature of the picaresque, and partly from his Ovidian genealogy. Ovidian Autolycus (in Golding's translation "a wyly pye" without peer for filching and theft) was, it will be recalled, the son of no other than Mercury/Hermes.

Hermes, hardly out of his cradle, was already stealing the oxen of Apollo, who was appeased however, by the child's skill at the lyre (which he invented by stretching strings across a tortoise shell). Messenger, herald, conductor of souls between the worlds of the living and the dead, protector of travelers, whose signposts and landmarks were named for him, worshipped by shepherds in his native Arcadia, god of trading, good luck and gambling, of divination (he invented sign-systems), of eloquence, cunning and fraud; and of dream.

Shakespeare's cony-catching rogue (his only lowlife foolish-wise clown with a Greek name), a reembodiment of this versatile god, is a wonderful composite of the mercurial and the picaresque, of failure and recovery. Born under the appropriate star, "litter'd under Mercury" as he puts it (IV.iii.25), he is a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, a singer of lowlife catches about daffodils and doxies, in which the "red blood reigns in (reins in? rains in?) the winter's pale" (4); a titillator of preposterous fancies about usurers' wives brought to bed of twenty money-bags at once (263). Never at a loss, he has been ape-bearer, process-server, puppeteer, impersonator, gambler, whoremaster; he pinches sheets hanging out to dry (and anything else that comes in handy); he peddles tawdry trinkets and bawdy broadsheet ballads with such hypnotic success that all "senses stuck in ears: you might have pinched a placket, it was senseless; 'twas nothing to geld a codpiece of a purse" (IV.iv.610-11); and the last we see of him bodes ill for his latest patron, or victim—his old acquaintance the shepherd, newly come into a fortune. He, "having flown over many knavish professions . . . settled only in rogue" (IV.iii.98-100), but his coup de théâtre in The Winter's Tale is to con the clown by enacting the part of his own victim, in order to rob him of the money for the raisins and currants, prunes, pear-pies, rice, nutmeg and ginger for the feast.

Trickster, cutpurse, masquerader, shape-changer—what do we make of this strangely gratuitous, outlaw character, so apt for his part, yet without, it would seem, a part?

We know that he pleases us; that he marks the transition from winter to spring and from dire consequences for actions to lucky improvizations and escapes. He provides what is desired, reputable or disreputable, markets fancies, images, caters to and exemplifies the instinctual and uninhibited appetites. What he feels like doing he does, with the cunning of disguise and dissimulation and a total disregard for regulatory conscience. So we see in him a pleasure principle, laxity and relaxation, and welcome his conduct of us from the repressive world of Sicilian punishments to the compensatory wish-fulfillment of Bohemia. Yet he is a thief. What is a thief doing in Shangri-La? Possibly he is there for the same reason as is Polixenes' rage. In the dream they are harmless and judgment is suspended, but their presence reminds us that harmless surfaces conceal explosive depths.

Critics, reading the play and read by it, have recorded contradictory responses in interesting ways. He is a harbinger of spring, says Northrop Frye, "imaginary cuckoo where Leontes is imaginary cuckold" ((1963) 1971, 333). Traversi, more sentimental, finds in him an "affirmation of the warm, living 'blood' of youth against the jealousy and care-laden envy of age"; his song represents the "tender, reborn heart of the year"; his vitality saves the play from abstraction (1965, 136-7). For Tillyard, on the other hand, he is delinquent but "prophylactic," "his delinquencies keep the earthly paradise sufficiently earthly" ((1938) in Kermode, 1938, 84). For Lawlor too, he "offsets any unrealities of pastoral" ((1962) in Palmer, 1971, 300). One might add that the ballads he purveys to the village girls are not without a certain polyphonic relation to the fancies Leontes has entertained. One tells of a monstrous birth, how "a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden"; another of a fish-woman "turned into a cold fish for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her" (IV.iv.263, 279). Most comprehensive perhaps is Joan Hartwig's formulation: "Autolycus absorbs some of the disordering aspects of Leontes' disturbed imagination. . . . contain[s] disorder through comic inconsequence" (1978, 101). In sum: Autolycus is a figure of libido, unruly, lawless and volatile, uninhibited, cunning, subversive. Harmless, even benign sometimes, however reluctantly, he offers a semilegitimized illicit enjoyment; but there is a self, and a wolf also, in his name.

He is a pervasive presence in the wishful Bohemian scenes, but he is demoted in Sicily, where he must seek preferment under the patronage of the new "true gentlemen" clowns (V.ii.162). Act V deserts the pastoral fantasy to return to the world. There Leontes' restoration is figured, not by dream, but by the art of drama.

The statue scene is the culminating moment of the play. It is carefully prepared for by a cumulative series of encounters, all but the first reported, in order, I suggest, not to detract from the climax, but also to establish the latter's peculiar difference.

A mode of transference takes place in these encounters. The old traumas are reactivated, lived through again, the old wrongs done "stir afresh" within Leontes (V.i.148-9): the death of Hermione: "She I kill'd? I did so; but thou strik'st me/Sorely, to say I did. It is as bitter/Upon thy tongue as in my thought" (16-9); the childhood twinship:

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 performed before

(126-30)

the loss of his children: "O! alas/I lost a couple that 'twixt heaven and earth/Might thus have stood, begetting wonder" (131-3); the threat to a "gracious couple" through betrayal.

The old desires too. Leontes' instant attraction to Perdita (in the source story resulting in actual incest), which requires Paulina's stern monitoring to deflect, is touching because of the daughter's resemblance to her mother, but it is again threatening. If then Leontes desired a lost mother, and now desires, though unknowingly, his daughter, he is not yet out of the wood. Yet, remembering Autolycus, are we not to see that this piecing together of a dismembered whole—a family, a mind—depends upon the resurgence of desire which is itself beneficent. The reunions are not merely a return of the oppressive past, a nostalgia. The children are as "welcome hither, as is the spring to th'earth" (151-2):

What might I have been,
Might I a son and daughter now have look'd on,
Such goodly things as you!

(176-8)

These recognition scenes are as yet partial. Leontes first recognizes Polixenes' son in the encounter with the young lovers; then Perdita's identity is discovered in the meeting between all three and Polixenes. This second scene narrates the finding of the King's daughter with all the oratorical art the third gentleman can muster:

Sorrow wept to take leave of them, for their joy waded in tears. . . . Our king, being ready to leap out of himself for joy of his found daughter, as if that joy were now become a loss, cries, 'O, thy mother, thy mother!'; then asks Bohemia forgiveness, then embraces his son-in-law; then again worries he his daughter with clipping her. Now he thanks the old shepherd. . . . I never heard of such another encounter, which lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it (V.ii.45-62, passim)

and the whole series is parodied by the counterpoint drollery of the clown's version of these wondrously moving events:

For the King's son took me by the hand and call'd me brother; and then the two kings call'd my father brother; and then the Prince, my brother, and the Princess, my sister, call'd my father father; and so we wept; and there was the first gentlemanlike tears that ever we shed. (140-5)

Only then is the culmination of these reunions brought about in the final scene. Shakespeare's self-reflexive art in the earlier comedies had constantly called attention to itself by means of metadramatic comment and epilogue: we recall Theseus' "The best in this kind are but shadows," and Puck's riposte, "If we shadows have offended." Now we are offered a tour de force in the kind, under the sign of Paulina's wildly anachronistic "rare Italian master," and the trompe-l'oeil of illusionist art.

Guilio 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" (92-100) is the creator of Hermione's "statue," the instrument of Paulina's bogus miracle, and, artist as con-man, the genius loci of the play's closing phase, as Autolycus was of its wishful dream.

Guilio Romano was a famous mannerist artist of the sixteenth century. In Vasari's Lives his Latin epitaph is as follows: "Jupiter saw sculptured and painted statues breathe and earthly buildings made equal to those in heaven by the skill of Giulio Romano" (see ). There are good reasons, therefore, for Paulina's (or Shakespeare's) choice, though the entire reference to Romano, has been found pointless. "We do not need his kind of art," says Northrop Frye, "when we have the real Hermione . . . neither he nor the kind of realism he represents seems to be very central to the play itself (1963, 113). But, I submit, it is central. Because the bogus miracle is a mask for the remedial therapy of Paulina.

The magical effect is made possible by the concealment from the audience of the fact that Hermione is alive. Such concealment is rare in Shakespeare, and its effect is to pull the audience perforce into the experience, making it "real" in a distinctive way: we really see what Leontes sees. The point I am making is that it is a mirror-image of Romano's illusionist skill. Romano's craft made statues so real-seeming that they seemed real persons. Paulina has made a real person so statuesque as to seem a statue. There is of course, no miracle at all. Hermione, never dead, is not resurrected, but what we are shown—Leontes' transport of mingled anguish and joy at its lifelikeness, and then its descent from the pedestal—feels as miraculous, and mysterious, as a return from death or as a birth. We are truly deluded, momentarily, with Leontes. Leontes anticipated a frozen image from the past—"not so much wrinkled, nothing/So aged as this seems" (V.iii.28-9)—with which, perhaps, to prolong and memorialize his stony remorse, to perpetuate nostalgia. This moment creates an illusion of resurrection for Hermione, for Leontes, which is a true coup de théâtre, a triumph of the illusionist's art. But the fictive resurrection of Hermione effects a real resurrection in Leontes. Fantasy is transformed into reality as the lost is found. The enchanting moment carries us beyond illusion or deception. It is an embodiment of return—the always unimaginable, the always imagined desire.

When Hermione steps down from the pedestal she is not only a wifely, but a maternal presence. Though she embraces him first, her first words are for her daughter. She is the agent of his rebirth, of his enfranchisement from the sprites and goblins that haunted him when he was death-possessed, seeing only the skull beneath the skin. It is surely not fortuitous, but a wheel come full circle, when Leontes remembers her "as tender/As infancy" (26-7) and has recourse to an image of primal need, of primal containment and content to express the fullness of his joy "If this be magic, let it be an art/Lawful as eating" (110-1). It is an odd simile, taken at face value. Yet how powerfully resonant it becomes when it can be seen in the chain of signifiers which allow us to reconstruct the untold story of The Winter's Tale. Consider the primal oral fantasies which erupted in the tragic phase of the play: the spider-poisoned cup which made Leontes "crack his gorge . . . with violent hefts" (II.i.44-5); the "bespiced" cup which will give his enemy "a lasting wink" (I.ii.316-17); Hermione's provocative "cram's with praise, and make's/As fat as tame things" (I.ii.91-2). Voracious bears and devouring seas accompany the catastrophe. In Bohemia Perdita is "queen of curds and cream" (IV.iv.160), Autolycus steals the money for the festive delicacies which the clown evocatively enumerates, and in his grotesque ballad the usurer's wife "longs to eat adders' heads and toads carbonadoed" (264). Now at last, in Leontes' "lawful as eating," is hunger legitimized, and, no longer signifying a fantasy of incorporation, but a real communion, stilled; family likeness can speak of regeneration, not usurpation, and the existence of others, separate from the shadow play of one's own mind, be acknowledged.

The sprites and goblins are dispersed, but they haunt still, as does, surely, the ghost of Mamillius. The image of gap (Old Norse yawn; a hole or opening made by breaking or parting; a breach) with which The Winter's Tale would end the text of its temporal narrative evades closure, evoking not only the fierce disruptions we have witnessed, but beyond these the painful trauma of birth itself, with its continuing, ineluctable, besetting anxieties:¹¹

Good Paulina,
Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely
Each one demand and answer to his part
Performed in this wide gap of time since first
We were dissevered.

(V.iii.151)

Notes

¹ For confusion about his role see Lee Sheridan Cox, "The role of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale," Studies in English Literature, 9 (1969) 287, and passim.

² Nevill Coghill, "Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter's Tale," Sh.Survey (1958) introduced his defence of the play with the statement: "It is a critical commonplace that The Winter's Tale is an ill-made play: its very editors deride it" (31). How far the balance had been redressed by 1978 may be judged by Charles Frey's judgement in "Tragic Structure in The Winter's Tale": "The Winter's Tale carries its often painful but always instructive burden extremely well" (Kay and Jacobs, 1978, 124).

³ See Louise George Clubb, "Shakespeare's Comedy and Late Cinquecento Mixed Genres" in Shakespearean Comedy, ed. M. Charney (New York, New York Literary Forum, 1980).

⁴ Psychoanalytically minded critics have pounced upon the "twinned lambs" speech as upon a treasure trove for explication. J.I.M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare (1948) was the first to find a displaced return of repressed homosexuality in Leontes' obsessional outburst, and W.H. Auden ("The Alienated City," Encounter, 1961) was convinced that "Leontes is a classic case of paranoid sexual jealousy due to repressed homosexual feelings" (11). Stephen Reid, "The Winter's Tale" (American Imago 27 (1970)) and Murray Schwartz, "Leontes' Jealousy in The Winter's Tale" (American Imago 30 (1973)) and "The Winter's Tale: Loss and Transformation" (American Imago 32 (1975)), proceed from Freud's formula for defensive projection ("I do not love him. She does") to further analytical variations on the theme of delusional jealousy. These critics provide a clinical diagnosis for a sudden seizure like Leontes'; what they do not do is to provide an entry into the play. They lead out of the drama, not into it. Their phantasmagoric choreography of Kleinean projections and introjections is unlikely to be available to readers and audiences, even those most closely attuned to the vagaries of primary process; and they produce a distinct impression of overkill. There is a danger in overexplication; the danger, as J-B. Pontalis aptly puts it in a corrective essay, "of strangling the eloquence of oneiric life" ("Dream as an Object," Int. Rev. of Psychoanalysis, 1974, 1).

⁵ For a useful account of the two principles of mental functioning see Pinchas Noy (1979), 185 and passim. See also Robert Rogers (1978). Carol Thomas Neely, "The Winter's Tale: The Triumph of Speech," Studies in English Literature, 15 (1975) gives an account of the speech in terms of the rationalistic language of euphuism and the "indeterminate" language of passion.

⁶ See the Arden edn, (London, Methuen, 1963) for extended commentary on the speech. Older commentary extends to three pages (27-30) in the Variorum.

⁷ Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," xxviii, The Palm at the End of the Mind (New York, Vintage, 1972), 349.

⁸ David Willbern, "Shakespeare's Nothing" (Schwartz and Kahn, 1980) gives an illuminating exposition of the imagery of Shakespeare's "dialectic of nothing and all" (252). See also Antoinette Dauber, "This Great Gap of Time," Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts, 11,2 (1983) for an excellent reading of the play along similar lines.

⁹ See Freud, "Revision of Dream Theory," New Introductory Lectures (1933) 53.

¹⁰ OED gives 1604 for the first usage of the term; the sense was "to deceive or blind." The word occurs nowhere in Shakespeare.

¹¹ I am much indebted to discussion with Stanley Cavell for insight into this manifestation of the textual unconscious.