[In this excerpt, Orgel explores the importance of Bohemia to Shakespeare's development of pastoral elements, as well as the play's treatment of the relationship between nature and art.]

Pastoral

To anyone familiar with the tremendous variety and vitality of Renaissance pastoral (as of its Virgilian and Theocritean models), the modern division of the mode into idyllic and realistic visions, the critical dichotomy of 'soft' and 'hard', will seem absurdly reductive. Indeed, the play that established tragicomedy as a serious genre in the Renaissance was itself a pastoral, Guarini's Il Pastor Fido (1590, first translated into English anonymously in 1602); and for most of the dramatists of Shakespeare's age, pastoral was the mode in which tragedy and comedy became inseparable. The lives of shepherds, Renaissance pastoral assumes, exhibit within a small compass all the elements of human life—that is why it is worth attending to: not because it is an escapist fantasy about the golden age, but because of its moral and emotional capaciousness.

In The Winter's Tale the tragicomic aspects of the mode are epitomized at once in those two touchstones of theatrical perversity, the shipwreck on the seacoast of Bohemia and the bear that devours Antigonus. The bear, indeed, has been shown by Louise Clubb to constitute, in itself, a tragicomic topos in sixteenth-century continental drama, a generic commonplace.¹ As for the Bohemian seacoast, which Shakespeare found in Pandosto and retained, it is not an error, but one of the elements stamping the play as a moral fable—like the title itself, it removes the action from the world of literal geographical space as it is removed from historical time.² Despite the fact that Shakespeare plays are not notable for geographical accuracy, the setting has provoked several centuries of complaint and specious explanation. In 1619, Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden that 'Shakespeare in a play brought in a number of men saying they had suffered shipwreck in Bohemia, where there is no sea near by some 100 miles'.³ Hanmer resolved the problem by declaring the Folio's compositor to be at fault and changing Bohemia to Bithynia. No subsequent editor followed his lead, though both Garrick, for his version of the play, Florizel and Perdita, and Charles Kean for his famous production at the Princess's Theatre in 1856, set the pastoral scenes in Bithynia. . . .⁴ But Furness observed that since Jonson complained about the play's geography four years before the Folio was printed, the error must have been Shakespeare's. Several critics (one as recently as 1955) have argued that since for brief periods in the thirteenth and early sixteenth centuries Bohemia was part of the Austrian empire, it therefore did have a seacoast—this is rather like arguing that since the 1536 Act of Union Wales has been on the North Sea. But most commentators have been content to explain the error away as Pafford and Schanzer do, by observing that it is simply adopted from Greene. However, if there is a problem, this merely shifts it from Shakespeare to Greene.

It is, of course, entirely possible that both writers found Bohemia a pleasantly euphonious name (by early 1610 it had the additional merit of its staunch and embattled Protestantism) and considered the facts of geography irrelevant to the fairy-tale world of the story. But the seacoast of Bohemia seems also to have had a special resonance in Jacobean England. The Variorum cites three instances in which references to the Bohemian coast are used to characterize a particularly foolish or ignorant speaker; S. L. Bethell argues on the basis of these that the setting was an old joke, analogous in modern times to references to the Swiss Navy or Wigan Pier, and suggests that if W. S. Gilbert 'presented us with an admiral in the Swiss navy', this would be a good indication to a Savoy audience of 'the degree of reality to be attributed to his plot'.⁵ If this is correct,the setting of the pastoral scenes would then be, like Shakespeare's title, an alienating device, and an index to both tone and genre.

In any case, the relevance of seacoasts to Bohemia in the Renaissance imagination is in fact demonstrable: Wenceslaus IV, King of Bohemia (1361-1419), took as his impresa a storm-tossed ship, with the motto Tempestati Parendum ('stormy weather must be prepared for') . . . . I am not suggesting that Greene and Shakespeare were familiar with the ancient King of Bohemia's impresa, but rather that the ruler of this landlocked country found a ship in a storm an appropriate emblem of his condition for moral and ethical reasons, not geographical ones.

Antigonus' vision of Hermione and his encounter with the bear make it clear that pastoral is no more a golden world than the Sicilian court is. It is violent and dangerous, nature at its wildest; it exhibits, moreover, from the outset the same problems of knowledge, judgement and interpretation as the world Antigonus has left. And if faith is required for Leontes' ultimate salvation, it provides no help in Antigonus' case, merely misleading him and demonstrating his naivety. His belief in a providential universe convinces him that since fate has brought him to Bohemia, Perdita must be Polixenes' child; and despite his earlier adamant assertion of Hermione's innocence, he interprets his vision of her 'In pure white robes, / Like very sanctity' (3.3.21-2) to imply her death, and if her death, her guilt as well. He arrives at this conviction not passionately or maliciously, but through reason and faith (under the circumstances, his return to Sicily would scarcely be auspicious). And the bear assures us that nature in this play is no kinder than civilization.

Antigonus' death is another of the play's unrestored losses. He is the faithful servant to an irrational and vindictive master. He has been criticized for obeying Leontes, but however barbarous the King's orders may be, the alternative to obeying them is to see Perdita burnt. He commits himself and the infant to the protection of Providence—naively, no doubt, but that is the point. Paulina essentially writes him off as soon as he leaves (see ), and when, at the play's end, Camillo is offered as a replacement, there is no question of her remaining true to her husband's memory: he is, in the play's terms, a total loss. But the fatal bear is also the pivot on which the play turns from tragic to comic, the index to a radical change not of subject but of tone.⁶ 'Though authority be a stubborn bear,' says the Clown late in Act 4, 'yet he is oft led by the nose with gold' (4.4.795-6): by this time there are even ways of dealing with the savagery of authority and bears. Antigonus' death, as the Clown recounts it, becomes a black comedy; the abandoned infant, as the shepherd takes it up, is assumed to be the offspring of 'some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door work' (3.3.71-2)—to be, in fact, exactly what Leontes had claimed—but this is now no impediment to pity, charity, love. Bohemia, as the play develops, is hardly an ideal world, except perhaps for disguised princes and con-men looking for easy marks; but it offers a set of alternatives to the dramatic issues of Sicily, a way of rethinking and re-enacting them.

The most striking of these, in terms of dramaturgy, is the introduction of a narrator, Time personified, as Chorus to Act 4—the tale begun by Mamillius and interrupted by the drama of Leontes now becomes the play. Criticism has on the whole been unhappy with this; Hazlitt considered it (along with Antigonus on the coast of Bohemia) one of the play's 'slips or blemishes';⁷ Quiller-Couch used it as a prime example of the play's 'flagrant specimens of inferior artistry',⁸ and Dover Wilson rescued Shakespeare from it by declaring it the work of a collaborator.

The presentation of a narrator had been, in Pericles, a consciously archaizing device, reviving moral Gower to supply the authority for Shakespeare's only morality play. The expedient had been popular but artistically dubious, according to Ben Jonson, who saw the play exactly as Shakespeare intended, but in the worst way—not as a drama but as 'a mouldy tale, . . . stale / As the shrive's crust, and nasty as his fish'.⁹ In The Winter's Tale, Time's narration expresses quite a different kind of moral authority. The speech is unnecessary for the purposes of conveying information; everything we learn from Time is repeated at once in the ensuing dialogue between Camillo and Polixenes. But the move from action to narration is another pivot, turning the drama we have experienced with such immediacy into a tale with a teller who both claims control over the apparently free play of the characters and offers a disturbingly amoral overview:

I that please some, try all; both joy and terror
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error . . .

Through the operation of Time both good and bad experience both joy and terror; some are pleased, all are tried; both error and its painful revelation are Time's responsibility. Veritas filia temporis, 'Truth', the aphorism says, 'is the daughter of Time'; but this has ceased to be a comforting commonplace—the only truth revealed is, ironically, 'error'. Nor do human institutions, such as the orderly operation of what we normally understand as time (or, as Capell shrewdly such as the dramatic unities)¹⁰ constrain this suggested, figure, for

it is in my power
To o'erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
To plant and o'erwhelm custom.

Like the Chorus in Henry V impugning the power of the stage, reducing the theatre's representations to its physical limitations, Time returns The Winter's Tale to its source, a narrative which declares itself, in its subtitle, The Triumph of Time. The difference, however, is that we have become Time's creatures too.¹¹

Nature and Art

Theocritus wrote his idylls from the Alexandrian court for an audience of powerful, educated and sophisticated readers; pastoral is, in its inception, embedded in the courtly. The mode had always been available as a way of talking about that other world of ambition, privilege and power. For George Puttenham, in 1589, its primary character was indirection, 'under the veil of homely persons and in rude speeches to insinuate and glance at greater matters, and such as perchance had not Alexander been safe in any been to have in the disclosed first English other sort'.¹² AlexanderBarclay, in the first English eclogues, pubBarclay, lished in 1515, explains that through his shepherds he delineates 'the miseries of courtiers and courts of all princes in general'.¹³ The involvement of court with pastoral was not, moreover, a poetic fiction in Shakespeare's England. Keeping sheep was big business, enclosures had been an increasingly serious economic and political issue for almost a century, and the impulse of pastoral poetry to represent the world of shepherds as pretty and harmless has a political dimension that is quite invisible to us. The idyllic pastoral is predicated on the satiric pastoral—Barclay's shepherds, like Spenser's in The Shepheardes Calender, are as likely to curse their masters as to celebrate their country pleasures. The double edge of the mode is evident in the double vision of Rosalind and Celia, fresh from court, overhearing the shepherd Silvius elegantly complaining about love, and then receiving a straightforward lesson from his colleague Corin in the hard economics of the pastoral life.¹⁴

The presence of aristocrats in the rustic world, therefore, is of the essence of pastoral. It is also, however, a threat to it, and is sometimes positively destructive: the effects of Florizel's and Polixenes' presence at the sheep-shearing are, in their way, entirely conventional. When, in Book VI of The Faerie Queene, the knight of Courtesy enters the pastoral world in pursuit of the Blatant Beast, he finds the traditional otium and love in the person of Pastorella, but he also abandons his knightly quest, intrudes upon and disrupts a dance of rustic deities, and drives away the Graces, the source not only of poetry but of the Courtesy he himself embodies. The classic model for the destructive intrusion of royalty into pastoral is invoked by Perdita herself: the appearance of Dis, King of the Underworld, to carry Proserpina off from the Sicilian field of Enna as she gathers the flowers Perdita catalogues.

Perdita's catalogue has a long history relating to love and death. In Theocritus, the lovesick Polyphemus offers Galatea lilies and poppies, flowers respectively of winter and summer; Adonis' bier is strewn with garlands and blossoms in Bion's elegy, and Moschus calls on roses, anemones, hyacinths, and 'flowers in sad clusters' to mourn for the dead Bion.¹⁵ Virgil, elaborating Polyphemus' offer, has the shepherd Corydon tempt the disdainful youth Alexis with flowers in profusion, precisely enumerated:

for you the nymphs
bring—look!—baskets of lilies; a fair naiad
gathers pale wallflowers and the buds of poppies,
and blends narcissus and the fragrant dill,
then interweaves with cassia and sweet herbs
soft hyacinth and yellow marigold . . . 

Renaissance examples abounded (see ), but for English poetry, Shakespeare's catalogue established the norms of the topos, both in its elaboration and detail, and in its extraordinary expressive range.

'O Proserpina, / For the flowers now that frighted thou letst fall / From Dis's wagon . . .': the ensuing list depicts the natural world as engaged in a cosmic love affair, and thereby evokes a nature that is no longer Virgilian but Ovidian. Indeed, the association of the flower catalogue with the rape of Proserpina derives from Ovid. In the Metamorphoses, she is gathering only 'violets or white lilies' (5.392), but in the Fasti, the list is extensive: her companions picked marigolds, violets, poppies, hyacinth, amaranth, thyme, rosemary, sweet clover, roses, and 'sine nomine flores'—'nameless flowers', more flowers than can be catalogued; she herself picked crocuses and white lilies (4.435-42). Why is the rape of Proserpina being invoked in the middle of a country sheep-shearing festival? It acknowledges, to begin with, the dangerous aspects of pastoral love affairs, and thereby serves as another version of Polixenes' Edenic myth; but it also reverses it: in this case the interloper is male, the innocence destroyed female. The mythological association of flowers with rape, indeed, is already implicit in the scene in the very persona Florizel has devised for Perdita: he has costumed her as Flora, goddess of flowers (4.4.2-3, 9-10). The costume does more than reflect his name; Flora, according to Ovid, was at first the simple nymph Chloris, beloved of Zephyrus, the west wind. He pursued her, she fled, but he seized her and raped her, and then to make amends filled the earth with flowers and gave her dominion over them—'arbitrium tu, dea, floris habe'.¹⁷ Florizel several times denies that his intentions are anything but honourable; but in the allusive structure of the play, the rape has already been committed twice. Florizel himself, indeed, cites three additional examples as precedents for his own behaviour:

The gods themselves,
Humbling their deities to love, have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them. Jupiter
Became a bull and bellowed; the green Neptune
A ram and bleated; and the fire-robed god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now.

(4.4.25-31)

The scene invokes myths in which male sexuality is characteristically disguised, violent, compulsive, often bestial, but also an essential part of nature; and through it—through acts of sexual violence against women—the world is filled with flowers and poetry.¹⁸

The Proserpina story is also a story about time, refining and redefining both the terms of Time's chorus and the very concept of a winter's tale. It is a myth that explains the cycle of seasons: the abduction of Ceres' daughter, like the loss of innocence in Eden, is responsible for the fact that winter exists at all, that the 'perpetual spring and harvest' of Spenser's Garden of Adonis, or the eternal round of growing and reaping that Ceres promises Ferdinand and Miranda, can be no more than a poetic fiction.¹⁹ But the cycle also includes a time of restoration and reconciliation, with the annual return of Proserpina to her home in Sicily. If Shakespeare took the Proserpina story as an underlying fable for the play, rather than as a mere local allusion, it would explain why he switched the locations he found in Pandosto, so that Perdita's return, as 'Welcome hither, / As is the spring to th'earth' (5.1.150-1), would be to Sicily, not to Bohemia, and would thus be true to the myth.²⁰

Nature, as Perdita presides over it, excludes 'the fairest flowers o'th' season . . . carnations and streaked gillyvors, / Which some call nature's bastards'; as cultivated flowers, they do not grow naturally in her garden, 'and I care not / To get slips of them' (4.4.81-5). The term 'bastard' was used for hybrids; it also meant 'counterfeit', a sense which colours the botanical usage (ironically, the child who is prejudicially called 'natural' provides the prejudicial epithet for the art that usurps nature). In her resolute resistance to bastards, Perdita doubtless shows herself to be her father's daughter, but her brief debate with Polixenes on the uses of art extends beyond the play and is informed by topoi reaching back to antiquity. Kermode in his introduction to the Arden Tempest gives an excellent overview of the matter, citing parallel passages from Florio's Montaigne and Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie expressing Perdita's and Polixenes' positions respectively, and observes that the latter commonplace can be found as far back as Democritus.²¹ Polixenes' view, that the hybridizer's art is learned from nature and acts as its agent to improve it, is countered by Perdita's, that anything that interferes with nature will necessarily corrupt it. The 'bastard' flower, she implies, is thus correctly characterized, an index to our own corruption as it is the creation of our illicit pleasure. This, in fact, constitutes her ultimate moral position: her objection to the 'art' is not to its practice (she agrees that 'the art itself is nature') but to the impulse motivating it, which is to produce a more attractive flower,

No more than, were I painted, I would wish
This youth should say 'twere well, and only therefore
Desire to breed by me.

(4.4.101-3)

The ironies inhabiting this brief exchange are obvious: the invocation of the art that mimics nature, Giulio Romano's lifelike sculpture, is essential to the play's resolution, the embodiment of restoration, forgiveness, grace; and marrying 'A gentler scion to the wildest stock' (1. 93) is precisely what Florizel proposes in marrying Perdita, and what Polixenes adamantly forbids. But the ironies are, in human terms, rather less telling than criticism has found them; our opinions, even philosophical ones, are not invariably consistent—if this is a failing, it is a very ordinary one—and what we believe to be right for flowers we need not necessarily believe to be right for our children. It is the violence of Polixenes' response to his son's rustic fiancée that is surprising, not its failure to coincide with his botanical observations.

Notes

¹ 'The Tragicomic Bear', Comparative Literature Studies, 9 (1972), 17-30. Other particularly useful discussions of the bear are Dale B. J. Randall, '"This is the Chase": or the Further Pursuit of Shakespeare's Bear', Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 121 (1985), pp. 89-95, which calls attention to Horace's complaint, in Epistles II.1.185-6, against audiences who 'call in the middle of a play for a bear or for boxers'; Dennis Biggins's '"Exit Pursued by a Beare": A Problem in The Winter's Tale', ShQ 13 (1962), pp. 3 ff.; and Michael Bristol's 'In Search of the Bear', ShQ 42 (1991), pp. 145-67, which places the bear in the context of both Renaissance folklore and seasonal economics. Daryl Palmer relates the bear to Hermione's invocation of her imperial Russian father, pointing out that the Russian emperor best known to Shakespeare's age was Ivan IV ('the Terrible', d. 1584), who murdered his son and, according to Purchas, amused himself 'with letting bears loose in throngs of people': 'Jacobean Muscovites: Winter, Tyranny and Knowledge in The Winter's Tale', ShQ 46 (1995), 323-39.

² In Pandosto the kingdoms are reversed; Pandosto is King of Bohemia and Egistus King of Sicilia. But Bohemia still has a seacoast: Egistus 'provided a navy of ships and sailed into Bohemia to visit his old friend and companion' (see Appendix B, p. 235). For a speculation on the reason for the reversal, see below, pp. 45-6.

³Conversations with Drummond, in Ben Jonson, ed. Herford and Simpson, vol. ii, 11. 208-10.

⁴ For the printed version of Florizel and Perdita, Garrick returned the play to Bohemia.

⁵The Winter's Tale: A Study, pp. 32-5.

⁶ Nevill Coghill calls the bear 'a dramaturgical hinge,a moment of planned structural antithesis', 'Six Points of Stage-craft in The Winter's Tale ', Sh. Survey, 11 (1958), p. 35.

⁷The Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), in A. R. Waller, za., Collected Works (1902), i. 324.

⁸ New Shakespeare Winter's Tale, pp. xxv, 159.

⁹ 'On The New Inn: Ode. To Himself, 21-3.

¹⁰ Cited in the Variorum, p. 156.

¹¹ The best discussion of time in the play is Inga-Stina Ewbank's 'The Triumph of Time in The Winter's Tale', REL 5 (1964), pp. 83-100.

¹²The Arte of English Poesie (1589), i. 18; the text is modernized.

¹³ Beatrice White, ed., Eclogues of Alexander Barclay (1928), p. 1.

¹⁴As You Like It 2.4. The pioneering discussion of the relation between pastoral and the Elizabethan wool industry is Louis Adrian Montrose's 'Eliza, Queene of the shepheardes', ELR 10 (1980), 153-82.

¹⁵ Theocritus, Idyll 11, 56-7; Bion, Idyll 1, Lament for Adonis, 75-6; Moschus, Idyll 3, Lament for Bion, 5-7

¹⁶ Eclogue 2, 45-50; the translation is by the editor, and appears in Poetry 116 (1970), 353-5.

¹⁷Fasti, 5.212

¹⁸ Paul Alpers sees Florizel's pastoral guise, and more specifically his Ovidian allusions, as an antidote to the destructive hyperbole of the opening scenes, a redemptive and liberating mode of idealization: 'After the anguish of Leontes' Sicily, where fantasies of bestial sex and the wearing of horns poison the imagination . . . Florizel . . . provides an alternative to a courtly habit of hyperbolic asseveration that is implicated in the tragedy of the first three acts' (What Is Pastoral?, forthcoming).

¹⁹ See Faerie Queene 3.6.42; Tempest 4.1.114-15.

²⁰ E. A. J.Honigmann calls attention to the play's Ovidian background, and includes a similar speculation on the reversal of the locations, in 'Secondary Source of The Winter's Tale', Philological Quarterly, 34.4 (1955), pp. 27-38.

²¹The Tempest (1954), pp. xxxv-xxxvi; Pafford argues that the importance of the debate has been greatly overstated, but nevertheless gives extensive quotations from the sources cited by Kermode. Both discussions are indebted to Harold S. Wilson, 'Nature and Art in The Winter's Tale', Shakespeare Association Bulletin, 18 (1943), pp. 114-20. See the note on 4.4.87-103.