SOURCE: "The Winter's Tale; or, Filling Up the Graves," in Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 125-75.

[In the following essay, Bishop provides an overview of The Winter's Tale, focusing on the characterization, the sources of Leontes' paranoia, and the mythological and narrative patterns that structure the play.]

O what venerable creatures did the agèd seem! Immortal Cherubims! And the young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! I knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally.

Thomas Traherne

Gib Deine Hand, Du schön und zart Gebild!
Bin Freund und komme nicht zu strafen.
Sei guten Muts, ich bin nicht wild.
Sollst sanft in meinen Armen schlafen!

Der Tod und das Mädchen

Dum stupet et medio gaudet fallique veretur,
rursus amans rursusque manu sua vota retractat;
corpus erat: saliunt temptatae pollice venae.

Ovid

Shakespeare seems to have been the first English dramatist to give his plays "poetic" titles, by which I mean not high-flown ones, but ones that stand in a complex figurative relation to the plays they name. Earlier dramatists offered proverbial titles such as Enough is as Good as a Feast or Like Will to Like, but this is not quite the same thing. The practice begins as early as The Comedy of Errors and Love's Labours Lost and reaches a kind of climax with Twelfth Night or What You Will Given this attentiveness to the resonance of title, we ought especially to pay attention when one of the plays makes a point of citing its title during the action. It does not happen very often, but when it does it orients us strongly on where the playwright himself sees the network of complex interrelations having one of its primary interpretive nodes. This is especially true of his comedies, for which there is a less neutrally designating set of title conventions than for, say, The Life of Henry the Fift or The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (though that "o f teases). At one point in the middle of his career, Shakespeare seems deliberately to have set out to mock or wrong-foot this very kind of attention with apparent throwaway titles like As You Like It and Much Ado about Nothing. All's Well that Ends Well looks like the same sort of gesture, except that the phrase then appears twice in increasingly rocky straits on the very lips of the heroine (IV.iv.35, V.i.25) and makes us pay attention.

In both The Winter's Tale and The Tempest, as if in this they were a pair, this underlining gesture is not merely a secret citation for our ears alone, but a reference to an act or occasion of story-telling itself, with an even higher degree of self-consciousness. Of Prospero we might expect such a metadramatic gambit, since he is at once magician and theatre-manager. He speaks his line to Ariel, almost to himself, looking back on his masterplot as its final suite of gestures is about to unfold:

PROSPERO Now does my project gather to a head:
My charms crack not: my spirits obey, and Time
Goes upright with his carriage: how's the day?
ARIEL On the sixth hour, at which time, my Lord,
You said our work should cease.
PROSPERO I did say so,
When first I rais'd "The Tempest."

(V.i.3-6)

This punctuation is tendentious, of course, but I think it matches what audiences hear, and the line points them to an enhanced awareness of the closing movement of the whole play.¹

In The Winter's Tale, on the other hand, the title-allu-sion has little of this deliberate affirmative to it. A small boy makes it, without even quite "getting it right," so that we may even work a bit harder to notice. Why would such a gesture of self-consciousness be given to a minor character in a scene that looks like an introduction or prologue to the main event of the act?² Or is Mamillius closer to the center of the play than he appears? What sorts of things do we learn about him in his two short scenes that might justify the dignity of having him allude to the play's title in this canny way? We know, or we may already feel, that he is to be sacrificed. Insofar as his name associates him with his mother, we may wonder whether he can escape his father's blind wrath against her.³ And though Leontes apparently decides that the child is after all his, solicitude for his son's welfare does not include actually bringing him with him in subsequent scenes: he is as effectively banished from the King's company as his mother is, more so in fact. Whether he cries on being haled from her we do not know, but we are reasonably sure he grieves terribly later on. Even Leontes proclaims this much, though he glosses it as shame at his mother's behavior—or on her behalf.

But what do we see that might help us understand why his small story bears the weight of the whole play? By his own criteria, his is a "winter's tale"—brief and clouded, haunted by haunted figures. His two appearances revolve first around his father, then his mother. "Revolve" as there is a prominent element of oscillation in the boy's movement in each case: he moves away (is pushed away in fact) and returns. This pattern of separation and recovery in relation to both parents is important for defining him as a dramatic figure. The stakes, it will appear, are high both for him and the play in understanding the tentative alternations between identification, detachment, and resistance that these stage movements come to map.⁴

It is in the scene with his mother, more set off from its surroundings than that with his father, that the play marks him for its own. Stanley Cavell has drawn attention to Leontes' discovery of the boy whispering to his mother, and read it as another scene of suspicion to add to his burgeoning fear and rage at the insidious knowledges of him he sees proliferating around him.⁵ For Cavell the moment focuses Leontes' secret wish—secret perhaps even from himself—to make away with Mamillius, and through and with him all generation. But the odd thing about Cavell's attention to this scene is that it seems in some ways to repeat Leontes' own gesture by banishing Mamillius himself from real consideration. For we see more of the scene than Leontes, and we know that Mamillius is not whispering a secret about him—or at least, not the secret he most fears and desires. What then is he doing with his "sad tale . . . of sprites and goblins"? Cavell speaks of the moment between mother and son as "a result of mutually seductive gestures," which is acute, but there are many kinds of seduction. What are the elements of this one that it should issue in this story?

I

The scene begins with Hermione pushing Mamillius—his mother's boy—away, in exasperation at something he has been doing, as if she were afraid he is about to exhaust her patience: "Take the boy to you; he so troubles me, / 'Tis past enduring." She speaks over his head, into an adult world that converts her command into a gamesome and seductive entreaty: "Come, my gracious lord, / Shall I be your playfellow?" But Mamillius knows enough to know what is going on, if not enough to respond with urbanity: "No, I'll none of you. . . . You'll kiss me hard and speak to me as if / I were a baby still." If he has been irritating his mother, perhaps the rub has been mutual: he is trying to grow away from a defenseless dependency he considers past. Making his own play for power, he tries to set his antagonist against her companion ("I love you better"), who is indulgent ("And why so, my lord?"). And now Mamillius has a chance to strut his discriminating knowledge of female beauty. Contrary to Polixenes' claims in the previous scene for the lambkin innocence of boyhood, this boy has a keen eye for sexual attractiveness and an interest in seeing how he can exploit what he sees. He even claims to have his lore from his own observation ("I learn'd it out of women's faces"), and he knows and perhaps resents it when his precocity is made fun of ("Nay, that's a mock"). The playfulnesses of this exchange are clear enough, yet they are not the same for boy and women, and the delicate psychological observation of the small scene rests in these differences. Though he relaxes into their indulgent teasing, even uses it to shine in, Mamillius has more to lose, and he finds in the end that their power to hurt is more real than he had hoped when they put before him the image of his strutted independence unpleasantly taken at its word, and begin to speak, again almost over his head, of "women's matters":

[1.] LADY Hark ye,
The Queen your mother rounds apace; we shall
Present our services to a fine new prince
One of these days, and then you'ld wanton with us,
If we would have you.
2. LADY She is spread of late
Into a goodly bulk. Good time encounter her!

(II.i.15-20)

Hermione interrupts the pair at this point with a rebuke, as though she knows the conversation is heading into deeper waters. She readmits the boy to her, offering reassurance of her continued presence and love, as though this were also a pledge for the future: "Come, sir, now / I am for you again."⁶ The expedient she hits on for letting him show his authority over her is that of story-telling, a move that allows mother and son to collaborate in a mutual dependence where he is active and controlling but still needs her consent and scope for his showcase. The two negotiate and Mamillius plays once more at refusal and aggression, a gambit Hermione is willing, even eager, to accommodate:

HERMIONE Pray you sit by us,
And tell's a tale.
MAMILLIUS Merry or sad, shall't be?
HERMIONE As merry as you will.
MAMILLIUS A sad tale's best for winter. I have one
Of sprites and goblins.
HERMIONE Let's have that, good sir.
Come on, sit down, come on, and do your best
To fright me with your sprites; you're pow'rful at it.
MAMILLIUS There was a man—
HERMIONE Nay, come sit down; then on.
MAMILLIUS Dwelt by a churchyard. I will tell it softly,
Yond crickets shall not hear it.
HERMIONE Come on then.
And giv't me in mine ear.

Enter Leontes, Antigonus, Lords

(II.i.22-32)

This is deft stuff. We watch Mamillius and his mother together shaping the stakes and prospect of his frightening her. No doubt she will exclaim with fear at suitable intervals, giving him the delicious pleasure of mastering at once her and his aggressive impulse against her, since he will know of course that she is not "really" frightened. The "winter's tale" proves a narrative device to stage and explore the psychic strain of their coming separation, alike feared and desired by both. It maps and cycles anxiety into story, just as the spatial movement away from and towards Hermione maps more complex separations ahead of the threat of his displacement—a threat contained in his own maturation, but also threateningly hastened by her insistent "goodly bulk." The story about ghosts itself ghosts much that cannot be directly faced. These are indeed "mutually seductive gestures," but they are carefully hedged by a definite agression also acknowledged sidelong by both.

What must Mamillius make then of his father's terrible irruption into this scene? It is sometimes asserted that Leontes in some sense "is" the man who "dwelt by a churchyard." For Mamillius, however, the "winter's tale" does not so much continue as spin wildly out of his control and into some weirdly hyper-literal realm, as though he had all along been casting a spell without knowing it. There could hardly be a worse nightmare than the sudden appearance of this dark phantasm of accusation in the person of his father. At some level, this is profoundly not what Mamillius had in mind, yet it may seem to him as if his own desires have somehow called forth this vengeful demon in the shape of his father: just how much of Leontes' appalling musings may we think of the boy garnering in the previous scene? As long as there is a medium for managing and so dispelling such forebodings, Mamillius can play secure. But now he must watch his own deeper half-promptings realized in the father who both demands and banishes him, at once fulfillment and retribution for his daring against his mother:

LEONTES Give me the boy. I am glad you did not nurse him.
Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you
Have too much blood in him.
HERMIONE What is this? Sport?
LEONTES Bear the boy hence, he shall not come about her.
Away with him! and let her sport herself
With that she's big with, for 'tis Polixenes
Has made thee swell thus.

(II.i.56-62)

To Mamillius, this exchange must be both horrifying and deeply inscrutable. To hear that he "bears some signs of this Leontes comes too close to what he has been imagining himself: recall his earlier claim to his father "I am like you, they say"—but would he want to be like this father? To be forced from his mother's side in this manner, leaving her to "sport" with the new child, is also too much like the way the scene began ("and then you'ld wanton with us, / If we would have you") and carries a darker undercurrent mixing childish and adult sexuality in Leontes' bitter reference to Hermione's "sport." Have his entwined desire for and rejection of independence begotten such a monstrosity as this between them? What relations obtain between the boy's desire against his mother and his desire for her? Is his mother now to suffer for what he has thought and felt, and at the hands of this dark cartoon of himself grown-up?⁷

Such considerations cast a terrible light on what we hear of the boy's decline through the rest of the play. It is important that Leontes' claim on him does not extend to more than enquiring after him, as far as we know. Mamillius is sequestered from both his parents, and Leontes' cry "Away with him" is only the first of many such cries to follow, cries that seek apparently to banish the whole world and leave him in the company only of his own fantasies ("Away with her, to prison"; "Away with that audacious lady"; "My child? Away with't"). Cavell's suggestion that Leontes' rage is against Mamillius as well as Hermione, in spite of his apparent solicitude, seems only too accurate, and although this may be because of the "too much blood in him" of which he speaks, it seems also to speak of a more pervasive aggression, one we find turning even on himself—sleepless, restive, and thought-fretted as he becomes.

Mamillius, then, awakes from a world whose nightmares he controls to one where they are alive, where they strut and glower and spit accusations. His response to what he has done is to sicken, neurotically as we may suppose from Leontes' description, though we need not accept Leontes' specific diagnosis:

LEONTES How does the boy?
SERVANT He took good rest tonight;
'Tis hop'd his sickness is discharg'd.
LEONTES To see his nobleness,
Conceiving the dishonour of his mother!
He straight declin'd, droop'd, took it deeply,
Fasten'd and fix'd the shame on't in himself,
Threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep,
And downright languish'd.

(II.iii.10-17)

Cavell on these lines is worth quoting directly: "this sounds more like something Leontes himself has done, and so suggests an identification Leontes has projected between himself and his son. The lines at the same time project an identification with his wife, to the extent to which one permits 'conceiving' in that occurrence to carry on the play's ideas of pregnancy."⁸ But may this not also be something Mamillius has done? If Leontes' interpretation of Mamillius' condition is suspect, his description of it need not be. Though "the boy," as he calls his son, has perhaps not "conceived" Hermione's dishonor (and both their notions of "conception" must be important here), he may regard her slander and punishment as in some way his doing, in which case his "fixing" of "the shame on't in himself would be an attempt to undo what his momentary aggression has so rashly and magically done. This would be acute child psychology certainly, and would explain and complete a strange circle of identifications among the members of this apparently doomed family. Mamillius is trapped between identifications with father and mother. Too like his father in his violence and sleepless languishing, he is now willing himself to take his mother's place in conceiving and drooping. It is indeed a noble gesture, but not quite of the kind Leontes imagines. By it Mamillius attempts to take his mother's part as the object of his father's sexual violence, and to perform this part partly to deny his part in his father (and his father's part in him). Bastardizing himself is, in a sense, the price of redeeming his mother. In effect, he will kill himself for being like his father by becoming like his mother, taking her place to pay for both his own and his father's violence.⁹ "With mere conceit and fear / Of the Queen's speed" he races his mother to a death he now identifies as the outcome (and perhaps the engine) of male desire. In this heroic resolution he is all too successful.

There is a sense of Mamillius as having "seen the spider" through these brief glimpses, but the spider in this case is a sexual intimation for which he has inadequate preparation and no expressive recourse save this of his fatal sickening. The question of his mimetic "conception" of his mother's dishonor is shadowed, and perhaps interpreted, by the fact of his own "conception" by her at an earlier time through an act of "sport" not unlike aggression.¹⁰ Paulina's language in describing the etiology of the Prince's decline touches directly on this point, since it sees Leontes' current slanderous rage to "sully the purity and whiteness of my sheets" (his own phrase at I.ii.326-7) as intimately but obscurely connected to the Prince's secret "conception" of the act that created him:

PAULINA Nor is't directly laid to thee, the death
Of the young Prince, whose honourable thoughts,
Thoughts high for one so tender, cleft the heart
That could conceive a gross and foolish sire
Blemish'd his gracious dam.

(III.ii.194-8)

Paulina here clearly indicates she regards the boy's death as induced by a "high" revenge enacted on himself for having a "heart" base enough to "conceive" of his mother's staining by his "gross" father. Some part of a divided Mamillius has made itself a party to that imagined or real act of pollution, while another part has determined to wipe it out as far as he can—by wiping out at once both the cause (his heart) and the effect (himself). Leontes, more ruthless or more selfish, has meanwhile chosen to attack what he calls, with his typical obscure clarity, "the cause . . . part o' the cause" (II.iii.3). But children often confuse cause and effect like this. D. W. Winnicott has spoken of the imaginative paradox of the "transitional object" in a way that deeply illuminates Mamillius' predicament:

it can be said that it is a matter of agreement between us and the baby that we will never ask the question: 'Did you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?' The important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated.¹¹

For Mamillius the imaginative object has spun horribly out of his control, and fused itself with dark images of "conception" that point fearfully to him. The threat to his mother precipitates the need to formulate and decide the question of "conception" as a matter of urgency through suggesting that some magical potency in his own tentative aggressions has re-created the world as a nightmare. Has he produced his father's accusation or not? If he has, he must punish himself; if he has not, he must protect his mother. Further underlying this traumatic complex of ambivalences lies a terrible but obscure intimation of sexual generation—the very act that produced him, that he has somehow now repeated—as intimately involved with violence, staining, and mortality. Rather than consent to his inevitable part in that nest of spiders, Mamillius revenges himself on mortality by depriving it of its prize in him.

II

These conjectures on the relation between the Prince and his parents may seem somewhat overdeveloped, but they follow strictly what we see or are told, and they have the advantage that they do not rely on Leontes' surely confused sense of "the cause" to explain what happens to the boy. The obscurity of the connections Mamillius makes is registered by the play both lexically and dramatically, in their withdrawal deep within the texture of his lines, and of his character itself from the action. Where Leontes "stages" his suspicions, for Mamillius the process of violent desire goes on "behind the scenes." The play shows us a complex triangle of identifications in which both males deeply, and perhaps similarly, mistake the nature of their relations with Hermione and with each other. We need therefore now to look at the play's own dreadful "primal scene" of Leontes' suspicions, a scene in which Mamillius is also an intrusive—and, I believe—catalytic, presence.

It has been argued recently that Leontes' resentment and paranoia spring from his suspicion of female generativity in general, and his dependence on Hermione's in particular. His violence has been linked thence to the general history of patriarchy and its simultaneous use and devaluation of childbirth as "the woman's part." There is much truth in this view, yet it also seems to me insufficiently precise to account for just what happens in this case, where, for all the mystery of their genesis, there is a clear and precise notation of "events." One serious problem to be faced by the diagnosis of misogynist suspicion of women as the root cause though it is certainly the route Leontes' rhetoric takes once mobilized is that it is touched off not by femaleness in general (as it is in, say, Iago) or even with birth per se, but specifically with the birth of a second child. If it was merely a matter of suspicion of female sexuality in general, one would have expected it to have broken out with Hermione's first pregnancy, her first evidence of "openness" to male penetration, or even earlier, as it apparently does with Othello, around the initial moment of marital consummation.¹²

But this is not what happens. Instead the crisis precipitates only when mediated through the presence not only of Polixenes but of Mamillius, the latter a genuinely new element in the familial equation. It is worth recalling that the boy is first mentioned in the opening scene, in what seems otherwise a rather awkward transition, immediately after Archidamus has said of the two kings' love: "I think there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it."¹³ And though Leontes comes upon or is seized by his suspicion unprompted by any explicit thought of his boy, its efflorescence is curiously interleaved with another scene in which the child moves towards and away from his parent, alternately embraced and dismissed by him.

Yet if the actual genesis of Leontes' suspicions unfolds independent of Mamillius (though the boy is on stage and presumably doing something, perhaps playing, while his elders talk), the question of the sort of sexual consciousness boyhood has is very much in the air. It is discussed at some length between Polixenes and Hermione (does Hermione have her son in mind? are he and Leontes playing together?), and its nature is explored in images of a pastoral mutuality elsewhere reserved in Shakespeare for girlhood.¹⁴ What Polixenes recalls, or fantasizes, with especial plangency is a lack of any sense either of development and change or of sin, specifically of sexual sinnings associated with the appearance of women on the scene as occasions or, more strongly, instigators of (male) desire. The highlighting enjambment at "chang'd" is very relevant here, as though when we revise its meaning from "altered" to "exchanged" we, with Polixenes, avoid a thought of mutability:

HERMIONE Come, I'll question you
Of my lord's tricks and yours when you were boys.
You were pretty lordings then?
POLIXENES We were, fair queen,
Two lads that thought there was no more behind
But such a day tomorrow as today,
And to be boy eternal.
HERMIONE Was not my lord
The verier wag o' th' two?
POLIXENES We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun,
And bleat the one at th'other. What we chang'd
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did.

¹⁵

(I.ii.60-71)

If we suppose for the sake of argument that Polixenes and Hermione are here watching Leontes and Mamillius at play, the scene before them becomes doubled by an imagined scene which peculiarly charges it with a nostalgic pathos springing from the necessity of whatever was "chang'd" in adult development. A heretofore perfect economy between equals then suffered an imbalance, coincident both with the perception of time as mortality and with "the doctrine of ill-doing." Polixenes seems here peculiarly to repeat a moment in the past where, like Mamillius in a later scene, he had to decide whether the "stronger blood" of sexual excitement that bears within it the intuitions of both mortality and punishment has come to him from within or without. Hermione points out the implication despite Polixenes' delicate attempt to turn it aside by framing her as "most sacred":

Had we pursued that life
And our weak spirits ne'er been higher rear'd
With stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven
Boldly, "Not guilty"; the imposition clear'd,
Hereditary ours.
HERMIONE By this we gather
You have tripp'd since.
POLIXENES 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.
HERMIONE Grace to boot!
Of this make no conclusion, lest you say
Your queen and I are devils.

(I.ii.72-83)

Polixenes' way of putting it—of temptation's having been "born to's"—both points to the particular issue at stake and neatly sidesteps the need to decide precisely where the origins were of this "conception" for him and Leontes.¹⁶ His description of Hermione "crossing the eyes" of "my young playfellow"—which sounds rather like Leontes on Mamillius—likewise conceals inside a more neutral phrase a (remembered?) resentment or taunt or sense of damage at her hands. After seeing Hermione, Leontes' vision became faulty, even as his desire fledged.

The later scene between Hermione and Mamillius, from this point of view, explicitly responds to Polixenes' vision of male childhood as insulated innocence, and with it we can be precise about the latter's sentimentality. Sexual knowledge is continually in development, mediated and modulated through play and fantasy and in constant contact with other emotions such as anger and fear. It is not a catastrophic creation from some female "nothing." But the question that needs answering here is: does Leontes too think this is what happened to him? There is some evidence that he does, at some level—though this thought itself may, as we shall see, screen a deeper self-knowledge he wishes not to call to account.¹⁷

If we continue to imagine Leontes as coming into the scene from playing with Mamillius (hence as himself in contact with boyhood, even as Polixenes describes it), we can see at once the relevance of what Polixenes says about "eye-crossing" to what Leontes now finds before him. Indeed Leontes' testing and accusing of the world from here on frequently appeal to the arrant and visible truth of his fantasies to any "head-piece extraordinary." Though the "lower messes" are still "purblind" (as once both he and all were "Blind with the pin and web"), now he has "eyes / To see" all that's "beneath the sky" (I.ii.310, 180). His fierce accusation that Camillo is one who "Canst with thine eyes at once see good and evil" (I.ii.303) sounds not unlike resentment at having had his own eyes "cross'd" by his wife. And when he later confronts Hermione, he has the half-indulgent rage of an enlightened demystifier before his former illusion, redeeming himself by helping others on to the cure:

You, my lords,
Look on her, mark her well; be but about
To say she is a goodly lady, and
The justice of your hearts will thereto add
'Tis pity she's not honest—honourable.
Praise her but for this her without-door form
(Which on my faith deserves high speech) and straight
The shrug, the hum or ha (these petty brands
That calumny doth use—O I am out—
That mercy does, for calumny will sear
Virtue itself), these shrugs, these hums and ha's,
When you have said she's goodly, come between
Ere you can say she's honest: but be't known
(From him that has most cause to grieve it should be)
She's an adultress.

(II.i.64 78)

There is a remarkable anticipation here of the eventual image of Hermione's fate at Leontes' hands. With a brutal connoisseurish swagger, Leontes gives his men a tour of his wife as though she were some object of aesthetic pleasure and moral inspection he had unveiled for them, to delight and to instruct. The "aesthetic" distance he thus achieves measures the extent to which he must defend himself from the possibility of responding to her as a human presence. She is as it were an exemplary picture, a monitory emblem labelled "feminine fraud." Only a fool would take her for the real thing. The play here imagines Leontes' aesthetics as a defense against his psychology, against a deeper commitment or a more carnal knowledge. And as usual, wrapped up in his fulminations, Leontes lets a truth slip "out" which he must either ignore or repudiate. Here the neatly chiastic form of the passage—his calumny coming between him and his wife—telegraphs the "insideness" of this truth to Leontes, around which he buttresses the more extravagantly his theatrical, aestheticizing gestures. Now at last, with a colder vision, Leontes thinks he can recognize the truth of Polixenes' charge that Hermione "cross'd his eyes."

Polixenes' low but distinct note of suspicion against Hermione is also picked up and amplified into the theatrical in Leontes' own recollection of his courtship as a time when "Three crabbed months had soured themselves to death, / Ere I could make thee open thy white hand, / And clap thyself my love" (I.ii.102-4). Sexual longing and the intimation of mortality, a sense of being closed out, a sense Leontes has of forcing Hermione, and also a strange and alienating theatrical dependency—as if he were on a stage awaiting Hermione's applause—all intertwine here. (The last sense prefigures Hermione's scene with Mamillius, where she provides an audience for his performance.) As Leontes watches Hermione now give that same hand to Polixenes, much that was allayed by her speaking then is stirred up again.

If Leontes' experience of childhood and the springing of desire has been as Polixenes describes it, then the relevance of Mamillius to the scene as a potential double of a young Leontes is immediately clear. Leontes himself admits this much, and we need not assume he is fabricating; indeed, his sense that he is so hides the deeper truth of a man who keeps his variant self-knowledges precariously concealed from one another:

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, my dagger muzzled,
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove
(As ornament oft does) too dangerous.
How like (methought) I then was to this kernel,
This squash, this gentleman. Mine honest friend,
Will you take eggs for money?
MAMILLIUS No, my lord, I'll fight.
LEONTES You will? Why, happy man be's dole!

(I.ii.153-63)

Leontes' identification with his son is quite explicit here, even if the instant of recognition makes him (uncomfortably) "recoil." The figure of "myself unbreech'd" (incidentally revealing Leontes to be younger than we often think: under thirty—Hamlet's age), "unbreech'd"—either "not yet breech'd" or "with breeches removed"—and with his power to hurt in restraint or underdeveloped, is both a regression and an inversion of the adult, revealing by contraries how Leontes now thinks of himself.¹⁸ Particularly worth considering is the dagger: it seems, like a dog, to have a life of its own. In its adult form it is presumably unmuzzled and ready to bite, and its clearly phallic resonance suggests again that sexual maturity and damage go together, though an adult ought to be in control of both. But against whom is it now turned? The fear of the child's dagger biting "its master" might suggest that sexual maturity and desire threaten as much a self-wounding as an aggression directed against others, say against women. Deeper yet, the two potential woundings may be understood as one. Does the perception of desire as a wounding of others or of the self come first? The vision of rape or the vision of castration: can one say which is prior, or do they emerge simultaneously and without hope of disentanglement? Antigonus, a genial chauvinist, later takes his potency and patrimony alike to depend on Hermione's faith. If she is, as Don John would put it, "any man's Hero," then all bloodlines are as good as scrambled, and men might as well castrate themselves ("I had rather glib myself) and find some other means of grasping at the future than generation ("I'll geld 'em all; fourteen they shall not see / To bring false generations"). But Antigonus, with all his huffing and puffing, does not really see what's at stake for Leontes here. What kind of mastery does Leontes imagine himself to have achieved over his own violence, and what relation does that imagined violence have to the reproductive potency that both dagger and son shadow?¹⁹

Desire and violence are thus very intimately linked. When Hermione "cross'd the eyes" of Leontes, the harmlessness of his muzzled dagger was converted into danger, and it at once bit or breached its master. The "mutually seductive gestures" of the scene between Hermione and Mamillius also gloss the remembered scene of courtship.²⁰ Leontes' desire to wound Hermione, which she provokes and which is (a response to) his sexual desire, wounds him also by its inhuman aggression, so much against the tenor of a would-be idealization ("O my most sacred lady"). Desire's intimation of mortality and its revelation of himself as an aggressive and stained and staining figure are all alike laid at her door. His resentment and fear of his own violence is (inadequately) cloaked in the intuition of her crime—of her having (yet again) "cross'd his eyes." In response to Winnicott's "question not to be asked" Leontes wishes to reply that his "conception" has come from outside, from her. It was and is all her fault. Hence his central assertion throughout the following scenes, the one intuition that he must uphold, is: "It was not I who impregnated her." The rest follows from that. ("Yet it was someone like me—who better than my brother? Yes, it must have been he: look at him now—disgusting.") It is an implicit rejection of the universe of generation and mortality as one to which Leontes is necessarily bound through his desire.²¹ Leontes thinks to stand away from the world of generation and regard it as an object of contemplation, of lessons, even perhaps of beauty, but as fundamentally remote from him. Hence his intense frustration in Act II at his inability to find the "peace" which ought to come with his sequestration.

Such considerations can help us find our way through one of the most deeply obscure passages in Shakespeare, during the course of which Leontes tries to unfold to himself (or fold up in himself) his sense of what is happening to him:

Can thy dam?—may't be?—
Affection! Thy intention stabs the centre!
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communi cat'st with dreams (how can this be?),
With what's unreal thou co-active art,
And fellow'st nothing. Then 'tis very credent
Thou may'st conjoin with something, and thou dost
(And that beyond commission) and I find it
(And that to the infection of my brains,
And hardening of my brows).

(I.ii.137-46)

The dark stuttering that gives way to a hectic rhythm here suggests a deep disturbance that moves many ways at once. Leontes seems to be talking at once about perception, imagination, and sexual desire, uncertain where to locate or how to feel any of them: each bleeds over into the next. "Affection!" is a cry that refuses to settle even into clear rhetoric: is it noun? verb? apostrophe? diagnosis? accusation? Is it her emotion or his? Whose center does it stab, even supposing it is the referent of the following pronoun? It is at least the cry of itself as it wounds Leontes, as through Leontes it wounds Hermione with its/his unmuzzled dagger. "Thy intention" is equally difficult: as though an emotion could have one—and if it can, there is a sense of Leontes as possessed by some force with its own inscrutable, perhaps malevolent, designs. Is this perhaps a "tenting in" that stabs at some wound in the—heart? genitals? Some such quasi-etymology seems implied. But which way are affection and intention moving: towards or away from Leontes? "Affection" is somehow transformed into "infection," combated as an invader.

Any commentary on these lines threatens to reproduce their own turbulent movement, as the critic's imagination becomes "co-active" and joins in the act of reading Leontes' sense of being pushed around by obscure implicating forces. The same applies to the spectator, for whom the actor's expression and movement may both clarify and complicate.²² What the lines uncover or create or "fellow"—in a manner at once poetic and sexual—is an indeterminate and alarming hermeneutic plasticity which mimes a vertigo within or surrounding Leontes, where ambivalent cross-currents of attraction and repulsion coincide. All we can really count on is Leontes' sense that he has come across (but does he "find" or create it?) something that causes "infection" and "hardening"—terms that suggest at once groin and head, in a play that inquires how these two sites of knowledge are related. The very non-specificity of Leontes' first suspicious remark becomes important here: "Too hot, too hot! / To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods" (I.ii. 108-9). Though the coldness of his irony bespeaks adult control and self-observation, this is rather vague as the opening gambit of a specific jealousy. It sounds more like a horror at sexuality in general as contamination or overheating than at adultery in particular: the horror and disgust a child might express at discovering the truth (which so often seems like a bad joke) about its sexual origins. Just who is it that is (or was) "too hot"? And when? He and Hermione have just recalled their courtship and the "clapping" that concluded it. Only slowly does the particular accusation Leontes wants emerge, and it might as easily be a displacement resisting his own implication in acts of "mingling bloods," either as producer or as product. The play undertakes a curious "layering" of occasions from its beginning, insistently citing the kings' boyhood, their courtships, their progeny, and introducing an immediate image of the latter in Mamillius. The associative plasticity of Shakespeare's rhetoric at such moments invites us to see how many of these "stages" are caught up and addressed through the ongoing work of Leontes' fantasy.

Leontes' attitude to Mamillius throughout this "primal scene" of suspicion oscillates, not surprisingly, between identification and rejection: he hugs him ("Sweet villain! / Most dear'st! my collop!") and he spurns him ("Go play, boy, play."). His search of his son's face for signs of himself works not only in the obvious way to test and confirm paternity, but more deeply to evoke self-recognition ("yet were it true / To say this boy were like me")—and he finds himself there, not only in the nose which "they say . . . is a copy out of mine," but also in the "smutch" on the nose: the boy is sullied, as he has been (but when?), sinking both suddenly and gradually "Inch thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears." He treats his son with a kind of indulgent contempt, as if embarrassed at his own affection: the boy is a "kernel," a "squash," but also "mine honest friend" who will show how his manly spirit is being "higher rear'd" by offering to "fight," perhaps to fight him.²³ Yet he is no sooner alone with him than he sends him away in disdain, as though the thought of any relationship were greatly to his distaste. Marking this ambivalence is his use of the word "honest" ("Go play, Mamillius, thou'rt an honest man," I.ii.211), which has the ring at once of Iago on Cassio and, more oddly, of Othello on Iago. That Leontes is his own Iago is a commonplace, but it comes as more of a shock to hear him making his son one too.

Leontes' search for connection to his son thus gives him both less and more than he desires: less in that it does not seem satisfactorily to still the doubts and intimations that prompted it in the first place, more in that it revives in him thoughts and modes of thought long thought overcome or put aside—thoughts that reemerge from the strange amalgam of childhood, friendship, rivalry, and courtship that the scene anneals. This "complex" of thought and feeling is further glossed—from a developmental perspective—by the subsequent scene between Mamillius and his mother, where a broadly similar moment of tension is about to be allayed or managed by the introduction of "a winter's tale"—a tale not only for winter but also of winter, that winter of the heart in which aggression defeats, or worse unmasks, love.

III

The centrality of Mamillius to the unfolding of The Winter's Tale will now be clear. But the connection of his childish "play" to Shakespeare's own has still not been fully explored. Play is what we see him doing, and what most explicitly links him to his parents in Leontes' savagely punning formulation: "Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I / Play too" (I.ii. 187-8). Childish recreation, female sexuality, and male self-consciousness are yoked together in this triad, and allude in turn to the Shakespearean stage that represents them all. Before we reach the metadramatic proper, however, and the relation of Leontes' theatre of cruelty to Shakespeare's, we need first to face the question of Mamillius' play as child's play. Again, it is the emergence of Mamillius' play-story as the name also for Shakespeare's play-story (augmented into the winter's tale) that we are looking to explain.

There is no doubt that Shakespeare's play is interested from the outset in the question of "development," that is, as an aspect of time, and that the task of "development"—as we now speak of "childhood development"—is especially focused in Mamillius. Shakespeare seems as aware as any modern psychologist of the implications of "play" in this sense. Leontes also knows, though he uses the knowledge dismissively, that what children characteristically do, and must do as part of the business of becoming adults, is "play." But the concern with time and what it requires also goes deeper. It is the opening subject of the play. In the first scene, Archidamus and Camillo trace both the occasion of their speech and its urgent sense of economic and social indebtednesses to an earlier time when the recent difficult and attornied negotiations now perhaps becoming a burden—were part of a simpler structure. The large register of ebonomic language in the play noted by Cavell—all the talk of debt, payment, gift, redress, revenge, just desert, and so forth—emerges from a need to confront and reconcile differences that emerge developmentally as gaps, branches, partings, and "vasts."²⁴ What one party owes to another—that is, the difference between them and what to do about it (and among others what to do or say about sexual difference)—is an almost ubiquitous concern. Difference is the topic of the opening remark of the play, and its implications as debt are disputed in a courtly manner between Archidamus and Camillo throughout the first scene:

ARCHIDAMUS 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.
CAMILLO I think, this coming summer, the King
of Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the
visitation which he justly owes him.
ARCHIDAMUS Wherein our entertainment shall
shame us: we will be justified in our loves; for indeed—
CAMILLO Beseech you—
ARCHIDAMUS Verily, I speak it in the freedom
of my knowledge: we cannot with such
magnifìcance—in so rare—I know not what
to say—We will give you sleepy drinks, that
your senses (unintelligent of our
insufficience) may, though they cannot
praise us, as little accuse us.
CAMILLO You pay a great deal too dear for
what's given freely.

(I.i.1-18)

Archidamus' sense of "difference" between their two countries here concerns less their societies or landscapes than their resources for discharging the great debt of hospitality. Insofar as the kings take their names from their countries, this also suggests a network of obligation between the friends (one also expressed by Polixenes at the opening of the next scene). Camillo's denial of the obligation does not relieve Archidamus of his sense of an individious and unbridgeable "difference" which will only be overcome by some subterfuge—whether "sleepy drinks" or "cross'd eyes." Camillo in reply begins himself to chafe, and denies the need to feel any burden of "insufficience" by explaining the essential unity of the two kings from childhood friendship, a unity which has maintained its perfectly equilibrated economy of love almost by miracle. Within such a relationship there cannot be any question of a difference that can "count," of any "too much." Yet the strain of this mutual unity appears in a sense of the gigantic effort now expended to sustain it:

CAMILLO Sicilia cannot show himself overkind to Bohemia. They were trained together in their childhoods; and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection, which cannot choose but branch now. Since their more mature dignities and royal necessities made separation of their society, their encounters (though not personal) have been royally attorney'd with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies, that 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. The heavens continue their loves!

(I.i.21-32)

Camillo's concluding prayer almost suggests that something more than human will be required to maintain this stance. An immense quantity of material and social energy is being expended to "fill up" (as Polixenes will say) and hence in some sense to deny what is to all others a very palpable sundering. The flaw, as Camillo expresses it, lies in the inevitable changes of "development," of young trees "trained" together (are there two or one?), their roots intermixed but growing only to "branch." This suggests that development itself—the organic processes of life—necessitates the unraveling of primary unities into difference and separation, and that this unraveling can be traumatic, and hence generate resistance. Like Hegel's bud that contains in dialectic both the stem and the flower, time here is the engine of an unfolding that both flourishes and severs—two senses in which "affection" may "branch." Leontes and Polixenes strain ever more energetically to preserve a superseded version of their relation. And perhaps the strain is beginning to tell. It is precisely at this point that Archidamus first refers to Mamillius.

If the language of debt, gap, gulf, vast—and also "part"—emerges from this concern with ineluctable development and the management of its transforming consequences, the young Prince's task in relation to his parents—his play that is an attempt to cope with change within himself and his family—once more becomes a central focus of the tale. Change, ambivalence, the presence of contrary states of being or feeling in developmental dialectic with one another: how are these to be accommodated, processed, and represented by and to the ongoing self that mediates them? Mamillius' "sad tale . . . for winter" is, we saw, an attempt to do just this, and the play takes it appropriately as a model for its own processes of adjustment and symbolization. If we understand the child's play of the ghost story to be a way of responding to his developing ambivalences at once about his parents and about his feelings towards them, Shakespeare's play will also be understood as a tale told to mediate a complex ambivalence, to respond to a developmental pressure by acting on it symbolically through the control and disposition of the energies of narrative. But what ambivalence and pressure are at issue?

The answer is surely that they are, at least in part, Leontes' sexual paranoia and hysteria, and this returns us to the relation between Mamillius as "player" and Leontes' remark that "thy mother plays and I / Play too, but so disgraced a part, whose issue / Will hiss me to my grave" (I.i.187-9). If we understand Leontes not only to be speaking of "a part" that he "plays" here in some diabolical theatre (to that implication we will return), but also to be engaged in "play" like that of Mamillius in thus rubbing the quat of his desire into a wound of delusive jealousy, what do we imply that he is doing? Precisely that his jealousy is a narrative structure with its own logic and progress under his control which covers, manages, and substitutes for something else. Leontes almost admits this very connection between his imaginings and those of child's play in a moment of outraged self-justification:

No; if I mistake
In those foundations which I build upon,
The centre is not big enough to bear
A schoolboy's top. Away with her to prison!

(II.i.100-3)

The "centre" here seems moreover to refer back obscurely to that earlier "centre" stabbed by affection at the heart of his dark feeling. Both Leontes' jealousy and Shakespeare's play provide an "intermediate area"—and they provide it in response to the same fundamental fact or fantasy: male terror at the nature and implications of sexual desire.

Leontes' behavior invites us to see him as an hysteric terrified of his own capacity and wish to inflict the aggressive pain of his sexuality on the female. So terrified in fact that, "deciding" such an inhuman (as he sees it) impulse can hardly come from himself, he "prefers" to arrange it or act it out as a fantastic scenario of her guilt and his justice.²⁵ Leontes gives himself a sleepy drink to avoid knowledge of his own "insufficience"—hence the link between his spider-poisoned cup and Archidamus' joke.²⁶ This allows him the vicarious and secret pleasure of acting on his aggression even while denying it, in fact while outwardly justifying it as Hermione's fault even against his own more secret "knowledge" of the untruth of this charge. Hence Leontes' extraordinary and quite uncanny tendency all through these early acts to speak directly about his situation and yet not hear himself. Over and over again, in breathtaking acts of "unsight," he shouts out the truth: "Your actions are my dreams. / You had a bastard by Polixenes, / And I but dream'd it" (III.ii.82-4).²⁷

His bitter but exquisite announcement that "I play too" is therefore in part an acknowledgment of the constructing and manipulating aspect of his suspicion, of its aspects at once active and passive, exactly corresponding to his deep doubts about his sexuality—whether it is more properly "his" or something that "comes upon" him from outside, from Hermione. This split in the origin of his desire for "play" explains the sudden and overwhelming irruption of a theatrical consciousness into Leontes' world and language at just this point. As desire is both "his" and "not his," so also Leontes sees himself as both ruler and instrument, both on stage and remote manipulator/observer of the spectacle, at once (anti-)hero and playwright.

Leontes casts himself as either villain or dupe (or both) with "so disgraced a part / Whose issue will hiss me to my grave"—fatherhood becomes a demeaning, secondary role. His theatricalized consciousness even begins to bleed male suspicion out into the audience in an attempt to infect others in its own defense. The effect on an audience can be very disturbing indeed, the more so as it is difficult to shrug off:

There have been
(Or I am much deceiv'd) cuckolds ere now,
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 neighbour.

(I.ii.190-5)

This is equal parts disgust at female sexuality and comfort—even exultation—at the community of sufferers. The "it" to which the speech insistently returns is also presumably Leontes' way of referring to, without explicitly examining, the surging source of this kind of thought in a sort of primal "itness" at once of perception and feeling, his and not his. Metatheatricality is just one way of showing Leontes as half-aware of, intervening in, several levels of manipulation from this point on.

As playwright and supervisor, Leontes can assign roles himself, can arrange events to fit his fancy. This is a way to "solidify" perception by giving it at last reliable and external objects, everting it from the darker and more terrible contemplation of his own self-division: it distances comfortingly into a stance of spectation, erects a boundary between the play and audience along which a judicial and policing action can be staged. Yet that same staging must at the same time go unacknowledged, lest the spectator discover himself all along as the secret author of the piece, and therefore as implicated in its fantastic elaboration. Leontes continues to speak of himself at once as plotter and plotted against: "There is a plot against my life, my crown; / All's true that is mistrusted" (II.i.47-8) but "I am angling now, / Though you perceive me not how I give line" (I.ii. 180-1) and

the harlot king
Is quite beyond mine arm, out of the blank
And level of my brain, plot-proof; but she
I can hook to me—say that she were gone. . . .

(II.iii.4-7)

Leontes creates spectacles of Hermione ("You, my lords, / Look on her, mark her well") to keep her at arms' length, yet at the same time to control her, "hook her" to him in a terrible parody of an embrace. The trial he stages, as he says, to "openly / Proceed in justice" against one "too much belov'd " is a theatrical fiction already plotted out by him, "devis'd / And play'd to take spectators" (III.ii.36-7) as Hermione knowingly phrases it. The "flatness" of her misery, which she wishes her father could behold "with eyes of pity, not revenge" (III.ii.120-3), is the flatness of cardboard characters devised by an amateur and melodramatic imagination. And in the end the king's own sense of being trapped in a play not of his making, of being a foolish and infuriating theatrical spectacle, is part and parcel of his suspicion of his own fantasy: the only way to cast out his doubt is to make of it a finished device he can then stand aside from. Again, the impulse towards the aesthetic, towards the perception of a definite "shape" for judgment, defends against the inchoate threat of the psychological, with its implication of implication. Reading defends against being read. "Play out the play," cries Leontes, "I have much to say in the behalf of that Leontes!"

Leontes' imaginings are therefore a "theatre of cruelty" not only in that they are cruel, but also in Artaud's sense that that same cruelty is intended to be cathartic in some way—to purge passions and representations Leontes can neither disown nor acknowledge. Leontes himself speaks of prosecuting Hermione "to the guilt or the purgation" (III.ii.7), but it might as well have suited his purpose to say "the guilt and the purgation" since enforcing the one will accomplish, for him, the other. The courtroom drama is one devised to cover and deflect a deeper scenario of intertwined violence and desire which he cannot accept either as "his own or not his own." Unable to intuit the desire without the violence, he wishes to expropriate both. Yet this is not only or wholly a vicious strategy if we accept that an important reason why Leontes cannot accept his desire is that he finds its implications of violence towards its object at some level morally and humanly repulsive. Leontes' paranoia is scarcely an advance over Mamillius' suicide, yet it is rooted in the same impulse to refuse violence. Perhaps this sense that Leontes has the right problem but the wrong solution goes some way to explaining why the play in the end wants to recover him.²⁸ He has seen the spider all right—but the appropriate thing to do is to find the antidote, not smash the goblet.

IV

That versions of theatre seem to multiply in the middle acts of the play is only one way of drawing our attention to the stakes for theatre once Leontes has begun his pageant of calumny. The Winter's Tale incorporates a kind of "career in review" of the manifold dramatic modes in which Shakespeare has worked over the years. In the present case, our revulsion at the "Leontine" dramaturgy of paranoia and scandal threatens to turn itself backwards upon Shakespearean tragedy and expose it as no more than a vast and incomparably more sophisticated (but not therefore less impugnable) version of the same thing. Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus—all those delirious plays of female-blaming parade themselves, unwittingly indicted by Leontes' own desperately compensatory rage. Is this what has been at stake through those works, The Winter's Tale prompts us to ask? What fantasy were those plays all along managing and concealing that this play seeks at last to expose, confront, and, if possible, undo? Is the choice of Mamillius' "winter's tale" as the title of this play merely a way of denying the more apposite simulacrum in Leontes' forensic melodrama?²⁹ That Shakespeare should represent man' s sexual impulses as a source of hysterical terror and self-alienation to men themselves is one thing. That he should go on to see this terror as hysterically refused and converted into an animus against generation in general and women in particular, and then link this gesture to the modes of his own poetic and dramatic work, suggests great depth of self-reflection.

But Leontes' theatre is not the only one made available to us, and does not exhaust the range of Shakespeare's theatrical fictions. Alternative theatres or versions of theatre multiply throughout The Winter's Tale, according to the developmental principle of dialectical "branching" announced by Camillo: no one theatre will serve all consciousnesses or states of mind.³⁰ Even as Leontes speeds on in his theatre of blame towards an inevitable appointment with the death he must refuse to acknowledge in his own desires, his messengers, Cleomenes and Dion, tell us of another spectacle and voice, and another, if rarer, auditorium. Themselves "theorists" of a certain kind of knowledge, they are also "theatrists" of certainty in knowledge—a certainty guaranteed for us by the impact they record as audience of its impress on them.³¹ If Shakespeare cannot have us meet the gods directly (as he tried in Pericles and Cymbeline), he can at least suggest what an audience who felt they had might be moved to say:

DION . . . O, the sacrifice!
How ceremonious, solemn, and unearthly
It was I' th' off ring!
CLEOMENES But of all, the burst
And the ear-deaf'ning voice o' th' oracle,
Kin to Jove's thunder, so surpris'd my sense,
That I was nothing.

(III.i.6-11)

Much of the thematic vocabulary of wonder sketched out in Chapter One appears here: the appeals to eye and ear as distinct portals of perception, the sense of imminent damage which goes hand in hand with a rush to knowledge, the apocalyptic thrust, the ambush by a superior force, all play their part in sketching in the image of a "theatre of total conversion" in which selves and their knowledges are battered and reconstituted by a divine afflatus to which they willingly accede. Yet for us this remains an echo only, an ideal perhaps of a kind of drama never to be for us, since a modern stage at least could not present it without a self-consciousness that would inevitably at some point keep us at a distance. The play's presentation of such an experience through Cleomenes and Dion offers us a limit case at once of an absolute knowledge and an absolute theatre—a theatre whose powers of skepticism have been abolished by force majeure, and which has therefore abolished itself as theatre. This is what principally we take to guarantee that what Apollo says—with unusual clarity for an oracle—is a truth beyond the theatre of its saying.³²

Along with the Apollonian (anti-)theatre of absolute knowledge there is also the gelid theatre of remorse that emerges under Paulina's direction after Hermione's death. This theatre refuses all impulse of development: it remains stuck in a rocky and willed wilderness of abjection whose very unflinching severity is a punitive allegory of the stoniness of heart that brought it into being. It is also a futile performance since it cannot win the attention of the very audience it seeks:

PAULINA . . . therefore betake thee
To nothing but despair. 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.209-14)

This is a ghost-theatre, the permanent ossification of remorse into the posture forecast for it by Mamillius in the story of the churchyard man. Yet by being here lived instead of told, it cannot be escaped: it is a prison lacking a principle of release, of dénouement. Since the proper audience (the gods? Hermione?) is never present, it cannot fulfill itself, cannot be forgiven. It is damned to perpetual repetition: "Once a day I'll visit / The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there / Shall be my recreation" (III.ii.238-40), where the latter is also "re-creation." There is no other principle of development but this one of obsessive commemoration: any other gesture, as we are informed in Act V, is horribly shadowed by the repetitive vengefulness of its own sense of self-wrong in wronging others:

LEONTES Whilest I remember
Her and her virtues, I cannot forget
My blemishes in them, and so still think of
The wrong I did myself; which was so much
That heirless it hath made my kingdom, and
Destroy'd the sweet'st companion that e'er man
Bred his hopes out of.

(V.i.6-12)

There is no way out of such a structure. It must repeat in an older, colder key that same conjugation of Hermione's virtue and breeding, between which came Leontes' "blemishes" that killed her. Were it not for what Paulina knows in secret, she and Leontes would torment each other forever with images of Hermione's "sainted spirit," conjuring it to "Again possess her corpse, and on this stage / (Where we offenders now) appear soul-vexed" (V.i.57-9). Marriage in such a theatre is still and always linked to murder.³³ What now holds Leontes is only a moralized abreaction from his earlier contradictory intuitions about desire—this has not gone beyond them, it merely seeks to pay their price.

V

I have attempted to locate the origins of theatricality in the first half of The Winter's Tale in the difficult meditations of the self on its desires and in its attempts to shape responses to its intuitions about the meaning of those desires. The Winter's Tale is hardly exceptional among Shakespeare's plays in focusing attention on how human life copes with time and the changes it forces. Yet it does insist with unusual strength on the psychic difficulty of change, on the potential disasters that can occur. By this late stage in his career, Shakespeare's dramatic language has become an instrument subtle and searching enough to register not only the surface gestures of a character, but also the secret affections or intentions that inform those gestures. The imagination has become a layered thing, often obscure to itself, inventing its purposes moment by moment at several levels. Characters at times hardly hear what they say, so deeply can they become self-enchanted. In order to read such a language, it is sometimes necessary to extrapolate or extend an obscure inkling into an entire line of thought. In doing so, I have been employing a mode of discussion familiar to modern psychoanalysis, but I have preferred not to use the more technical vocabulary and, in particular, the shaping fantasies of that mode of interpretation. This is because it seems to me these modern fictions conceal at least as much about the pattern of Shakespearean psychology as they reveal. It is by no means certain that the mythological narratives that recent depth psychology has constructed will correspond to the inner mythography of a Shakespearean fiction. For that to be the case, one would have to posit either a universal structure not only of feeling but also of mythic transcription of that feeling, or a specific inheritance in psychoanalysis from Shakespeare (perhaps the most likely), or some common source for both.³⁴ That Shakespeare was a writer interested in the life and permutations of deeper fantasy, and in the possibility of curative action where fantasy was distorting personality, we have no reason to doubt. But the more pressing question for a full account of Shakespeare's psychology is the one not asked by most modern psychoanalytic critics: what are the particular mythological or narrative patterns subtending Shakespearean dramatic fictions, on which the fictions themselves are built and which they reflect? From what experience of the persistence of fantasies or fictional structures in the imagination did Shakespeare himself develop, without the benefit of modern psychology, his particular sense of their "layering," their struggle for expression, and their potential for change?

In the readings of The Comedy of Errors and Pericles, I attempted to demonstrate the workings of a dynamic of self-recognition in Shakespeare's drama, by which the poetic underpinnings of the plays are eventually brought to light and transformed. It is a curious fact about these structures that a surface influence or indebtedness often conceals a deeper one which emerges only during the course of the action. Thus the elaborately Plautine surface action of Errors converts itself eventually into a Biblical-Ovidian amalgam that shapes an early version of a peculiarly Shakespearean poetics I have called "incarnational." And in Pericles, an elaborately acknowledged indebtedness to Gower also overlies and eventually cedes to an awareness of underlying Ovidian myths—in particular those of Niobe and Narcissus. The Winter's Tale represents Shakespeare's fullest working-out of this pattern, and in it at last the presence of latent narrative substructures shaping action beneath acknowledged schemata is not only the method of the action but also one of its subjects. Mamillius' small tale already points us in this direction insofar as it shows surface narrative as an occasion for confronting and controlling less easily acknowledged kinds of feeling and knowing. So we are returned once more to Shakespeare's choice of title: at the level of the Shakespearean imagination what foundational myth is being confronted and metamorphosed anew by the action of dramatic composition?

Jonathan Bate's recent work on the complex relations between Shakespeare and Ovid notes of the opening act of The Winter's Tale that it "does not contain a single mythological reference. Everything seems to come from within Leontes' brittle psyche, nothing from the gods."³⁵ In fact the whole of the early part of the play having to do with Leontes is devoid of mythological or mythographic reference until very late, as though the king's "brittle psyche" had swept all clear. Yet this very brittleness and surface absence may point to a mastering myth within: there is no one so keen not to acknowledge the presence of a myth as he who is its captive. Following a suggestion variously put forward by both Stanley Cavell and Ruth Nevo, that Shakespeare's composition often moves, in Nevo's phrase, "backwards through a retrospective succession of partial recognition scenes," we should expect the relevant latency to emerge into view later in the play.³⁶ Bate's work points to one possible answer in his study of Perdita, the figure the play positions most forcefully opposite the dark king who governs its secret and in-terior undertale, and who will be eventually the corrective to his terrors. Perdita's chief mythological association in the play, as she herself announces, is with Proserpina. What Leontes throughout the opening action may be both resisting and, by the very hysterical intensity of his resistance, confirming, is the intuition of male desire as capture by death, couched in the archaic tale of the rape of Ceres' daughter.³⁷

E. A. J. Honigmann proposed some time ago that Ovid's tale and Golding's translation of it in particular provide a "secondary source" for the play, and showed how traces of Golding have worked themselves back into the play in several places.³⁸ It is possible to go further than these verbal traces, however, if one connects the tale of Proserpina's abduction by the King of Death, a terrible figure for all his imperial dignity, with Leontes' own dark intuition of the damage lurking in sexuality. There is some evidence that the myth (with that of Narcissus, one of Shakespeare's deepest purchases from Ovid) pervades the whole play, often in unexpected places. Leontes himself directly echoes Golding's Jove in calling his child a "collop" of himself, and the whole Ovidian episode provides a mythic background for the nomination of "winter" as the mode of the play's opening, as well as for its location in Sicily, where the rape took place.³⁹ As far back as A Midsummer Night's Dream, the passage in which Ceres curses the ground of Sicily and strips it of fertility had haunted Shakespeare's imagination.⁴⁰ Now that act of abomination, and the violence of male desire that underlay it and whose inner deathliness it responds to, returns as the deeper inkling of Leontes' fantasy, and turns the play he heads from a tale "for" or "about" winter into "The" Winter's Tale, the tale of Winter in its mythic origin, its sexual meaning, and its psychological inflection.

In Ovid's tale, initiation into sexual life for Proserpina is the rush into a darkness never to be thrown off, a snatching by and into the embrace of a frozen shadow. Dis' sexual desire is male sexual voraciousness as death, deriving from and inflicting death. In Ovid, its violence is figured in the blow of the "sceptrum regale" that opens a passage for Dis through the lacerated earth into the underworld.⁴¹ This may be the original blow that "stabs the center." In resisting the image of himself as Dis, Leontes resists all involvement in the sexual. Leontes will be Jove, judging from a distance, putting it all in order, righting the wrong his brother Dis/Polixenes has done. Paulina calls on him at last, like Ceres to Jove, to "Look down / And see what death is doing" (III.ii. 148-9), to pretend no longer to the immortality of the Olympian master, but to acknowledge himself at last as the very figure of Death, the bringer of death to his wife and child. Terribly, Leontes awakes and finds it true. The "man who dwelt by a churchyard" was the man who saw himself as Dis. For him sexual desire and death have secretly shared a certain hardness, which is also that of winter—rigor mortis and rigor sexualis have been coactive.

Other aspects of the play seem likewise to root in Ovid's tale. What happens to Hermione, deprived of her children by death and abduction, is given in what happened to Ceres when she heard at last where Proserpina had been taken: "Hir mother stoode as stark as stone, when she these newes did heare, / And long she was like one that in another world had beene" (632-3). Goddesses recover more quickly than humans, and it takes Ceres much less than sixteen years to put aside "hir great amazednesse" (634). But when she does, her announcement is strikingly similar to the one with which Paulina undoes Hermione's stony captivity: "Behold our daughter whome I sought so long is found at last" (643).⁴²

Even the fearful and silly bear may be an Ovidian/Leontine bear, a final emblematic product of the angry, wintry world. If he is hungry (as the Clown suggests) it may be because he has just endured—and woken from—his winter sleep. There is a strange verbal anticipation in some of Leontes' remarks that seems to conjure up the bear before his time, lurking especially within the more violent of his outbursts: "Bear the boy hence" (II.i.59); "the centre is not big enough to bear / A schoolboy's top" (II.i.102-3); "It is but weakness / To bear the matter thus" (II.iii.2-3) or "and that thou bear it / To some remote and desert place" (II.iii.175-6). This last puts the burden of bearishness on Antigonus immediately in advance of his fatal encounter.⁴³

So much for the underworld of Leontes' fantasy. But a "winter's tale" is also a story told against the apparent devastation that surrounds: it wants to shield us from the storm of aggression, to make it bearable, to explain, protect, and deliver us from winter's intimation of universal death. Shakespeare's play, that is, may also be a tale against male sexual violence, not merely opposing it, but attempting to recognize and incorporate it into a larger pattern in order to rewrite or control it, as the tale by the fire offers to deliver us from the regime that howls outside of and for our death. Shakespeare's drama would then speak of Leontes' enchantment by the vision of death only eventually to cure both him and itself of captivity to that vision, a captivity once embraced as tragedy. In enacting the undoing of Leontes' fantasies, the play also works through its own relation both to Shakespearean tragedy and, even deeper, to Ovidian fictions of metamorphosis. The bear is the emblem and commencement of a general unloosing both of narrative stringency and of tragic emotion insofar as its appearance must always be, for the audience, a moment of intense self-consciousness coupled with laughter—a laughter that, as Andrew Gurr has pointed out, looses the audience by its very staginess from too literal-minded and, following Barthes, "hysterical" a bondage to tragic fiction. Gurr comments that the bear "exploits [the] base level, the hysterical reaction, and then pushes the level of audience response higher up the scale by the blatant challenge to credulity which the bear offers," and Nevill Coghill calls the bear, in its staginess "a kind of hinge . . . passing from tears to laughter."⁴⁴

In the task of "unbinding" that the second half of the play undertakes. Perdita is the crucial figure. Where the disguised Florizel hints at a repetition of the pattern of metamorphosis and sexual betrayal, Perdita counters with a wish to go back to the play's primal deep moment of disaster and undo it, to recoup Proserpina's flowers at the very moment of their loss and by so doing bring what was dead back to life. This will be her function at the level of the family story also: she is a general solvent of overgrown rigidities.

VI

From the moment of her appearance. Perdita exhibits a profound suspicion of the various designs and theatricalities thrust upon her. Her response to Florizel's opening accolade to her "unusual weeds" that "to each part of you / Does give a life" (IV.i.1-2) is that these are "extremes" in which she has been "pranked up." In part these fears are inflected socially and address the distance between aristocrat and shepherdess, yet at the same time social distance also figures an anxiety about female vulnerability to male predation, also felt as a discrepancy in power. Perdita's response to Florizel's citation of Olympian precedents for his love, even with his added promise that "my desires / Run not before mine honor, nor my lusts / Burn hotter than my faith" (IV.iv.33-5), is distinctly skeptical:

PERDITA O but, sir,
 Your resolution cannot hold when 'tis
Oppos'd (as it must be) by th' power of the King.
One of these two must be necessities,
Which then will speak, that you must change this purpose,
Or I my life.

(IV.iv.35-40)

The last lines here may as easily intimate that the change will be in Perdita's life as a virgin as in her life as shepherdess, or that Florizel's changed "purpose" will be his protestation of honor. Florizel himself picks up the latter hint when he calls these "forc'd thoughts."

The scene of the presentation of flowers that follows has been commented on many times, but it is important to note that during its course Perdita at last refers directly to the myth of Proserpina I believe underpins so much of the play. Its open citation occurs here because now at last the implications of the myth are being directly confronted and resisted. Despite her doubts about the intentions inside male theatrical fictions such as Florizel's, Perdita publicly declares herself committed to active sexual expression, and to Florizel. Of all Shakespeare's young women, save perhaps Juliet, she is the most open in welcoming the biological life of the sexual body. But in order to assert this rightness of sexuality, she must somehow confront and defeat the pervasive connection between desire and death which has so far dominated the play.

For even as the play celebrates Perdita in the scene, it also hedges its account of her beauty with a male deathgaze whose implications we should by now be alive to. Perhaps jogged by her clearly expressed desire to have Florizel "breed by" her, together with her citation of the marigold "that goes to bed wi' th' sun, / And with him rises weeping" (IV.iv.105-6), Camillo's response to Perdita's beauty has wintry undertones that she quickly pinpoints and laughs away:

CAMILLO I should leave grazing, were I of your flock,
And only live by gazing.
PERDITA Out, alas!
You'ld be so lean, that blasts of January
Would blow you through and through.

(IV.iv.109-12)

Within Camillo's image of himself as "gazing" we may descry Leontes' use of the aesthetic stance as a way of resisting human connection. Though Camillo himself does not see it, his way of putting it "freezes" both himself and Perdita into the postures of statuary. Perdita follows up the implications for sexual life of such an idolatry in order to undo them. She at once turns to Florizel and her companion shepherdesses "that wear upon your virgin branches yet / Your maidenheads growing," and it is to apprehend and gloss the moment of defloration that the thought of Proserpina's flowers springs up. The lines are famous, but for that reason often skimmed. For instance, the metrical pause at the first "daffadil" may well be a way to mark the difficulty of negotiating imaginatively the very moment of abduction and winter. The mythographic profusion, the sexual personality and reach with which the flowers are conjured from this hiatus is remarkable, and indexes the intensity of Perdita's wish to exercise imaginative control over the choice and meaning of sexual surrender:

O Proserpina,
For the flow'rs now, that, frighted, thou let'st fall
From Dis's waggon! daffadils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primeroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength (a malady
Most incident to maids); bold oxlips, and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds
(The flow'r-de-luce being one). O, these I lack,
To make you garlands of, and my sweet friend,
To strew him o'er and o'er!

(IV.iv.116-29)

Lively enjambments, especially of the sexually-charged "take" and of "behold," give the passage great energy. The lines are infused with metamorphic and creative power, growing out of their population by images of reproductive potency. Jonathan Bate comments eloquently of them that:

the undertow of allusion to the classical gods forces us to read this speech mythologically as well as naturally. Flowers here have a metamorphic power—daffodils can charm the wild winds of March and yellow fritillaries can signify royalty. . . . And the language itself is metamorphic: "Ó, these I lack" comes as a shock because in the mind's eye the flowers have been present. . . . Something similar happens with the apostrophe to Proserpina: Perdita is saying that she is not like Proserpina, because she lacks the flowers, but in realizing the flowers linguistically she becomes Proserpina. She has picked up what her predecessor dropped when whisked away by Dis.⁴⁵

Yet this is not quite so: Perdita becomes not Proserpina, but the maiden for whom Proserpina's story stands as a warning—to whom it has not happened. The flowers emblematize what must not be allowed to happen, what Perdita's strong imaginative response to the energies, even dangers, of sexuality will war against in the name of life. It is Florizel, like Leontes before him, who sees himself as "taken" into death by the profusion of flower-language, who associates it not with reproduction but with elegy: "What? like a corse?" Perdita insists that Florizel's desire will not become the portal of death ("icta viam tellus in Tartara"), but will remain forever the body of his life, the "sceptrum regale" "not to be buried / But quick and in mine arms." Its only rigor will be hers willingly to enjoy: "a bank for love to lie and play on," its death one to be played out "o'er and o'er" in the dying and rising of sexual love. And suddenly she seems to have overcome Dis, to have the very flowers she wished for: "Come, take your flow'rs."

Imaginative energy intercoupled with sexual longing have carried Perdita herself into a strangely metamorphic ambience, which she now registers with some hesitation as a version of the very theatricality over which she had earlier hesitated: "Methinks I play as I have seen them do / In Whitsun pastorals. Sure this robe of mine / Does change my disposition" (IV.iv. 133-5). Sexual inventiveness, it seems, creates out of its own—human—energy a correspondent impulse into fiction and theatre. The insight, over which Perdita is in doubt, answers more surely than anything so far the rather stiff conversation on "art and nature" with Polixenes that has preceded. Sexuality spins itself a metamorphic theatricality that rushes to keep up with, express, and render for consciousness the developmental urgencies of generative process and time. Perdita's local myth of the flowers of life thus not only provides a dialectical outgrowth of her own and Polixenes' positions from the earlier dialogue on "art" and "nature," it also answers very carefully across the waste of Leontes' tragic nightmare to Mamillius' abortive allegory of his frostbitten desires.

That the moment of Perdita's triumph is full of poetic release for Shakespeare also is suggested by the extraordinary hymn to Perdita that he now finds for Florizel. It has been little noticed how the rhythm of her conjuration is sustained and answered by the drive of his. The interchange is surely motivated by the energies unleashed through Perdita's exorcism of the covering figure of sexual death. Unchained from that dark intimation, Florizel sees Perdita as the miraculously human site of a kind of endlessly mobile self-reproduction he can only apprehend as the charging of each separate moment with the force and sweetness of the whole motion—and vice versa. Perdita seen so is a force never expended and ever renewing, that resists the freezing even of aesthetic celebration. His is a strange outburst, synthesizing a kind of stop-action perception with the sense of a fluid energy and continuity, whose best formula is the abstract and motionless motion of a wave, and whose achieved rhetorical image a chiasmus wrapped around an oxymoron and prolonged into a pun, all instances of a complex tension between motion and rest at once syntactic, semantic, and lexical. It is infinitely stronger than the "grazing/gazing" gambit of old Camillo it recalls, and we can measure in that difference the transformative work done by Perdita's refiguration of desire in between. It is the crowning moment of the scene, and will be answered itself in turn in the final animation of Hermione's statue, also a greatly stilled and moving moment:

FLORIZEL What you do
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet
I'ld have you do it ever; when you sing,
I'ld have you buy and sell so; so give alms;
Pray so; and for the ord'ring your affairs,
To sing them too. When you dance, I wish you
A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so,
And own no other function. Each your doing
(So singular in each particular)
Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds,
That all your acts are queens.

(IV.iv.135-46)

Aesthetic perception here is in constant dialectic with the vitality of the world. Florizel experiences both a desire to arrest Perdita's movement for contemplation and a counter-desire to give himself over to that movement in its unexpectedness. His formalizing impulse is constantly deferred by the worldward orientation of his love and desire. We are close here to the heart of what The Winter's Tale wants to make of the relation between sexuality and fiction as aspects and motives of human activity. The fictions that humans create are energetic responses to the complex and ever-metamorphic motions of desire within them. They take their shifting life in turn from the constant and developing transformations of consciousness in dialectic with what comes to it—both from within and from without. Camillo's opening principle of dialectical "branching" becomes a description of how the production of fiction must answer the needs it is called upon to translate and manage into representation. The slight rhetorical stiffness of the "carnation" dialogue on art and nature that precedes these passages represents the same issue seen more abstractly as a question of the ethics of control. The carefully positioned ironies of dramatic situation between Perdita and Polixenes, so well explored by Rosalie Colie, work in part to frame our detachment from the exchange as a recognizable "topos" or debate.⁴⁶ Perdita is suspicious of just this kind of formalizing impulse imposed on the natural object, while Polixenes' sophistical chop-logic seeks to defend the prerogatives of planned intervention. But the central issue as the play has developed it is a slightly different one, less a matter of control than of decorum or correspondence: of what "kind" is the knack that fits a fiction to the need it answers, and how can we defend ourselves and others—as Leontes could not—against our generation of fictions that destroy or deform our needs into postures of sorrow or fatality, that "crush the sides o' th' earth together, / And mar the seeds within." The Bohemian pastoral shapes an answer to this only in the impassioned exchange of mutual fictions of desire between Perdita and Florizel.

VII

Seen in this light, Leontes' jealousy and the deep Ovidian generation of The Winter's Tale are intimately related to each other, and both to the small moment with which we began—in which a little boy gropes for a story whose purposes he hardly knows. The connection runs through their common practice of seeing the dynamic mediation of self and world performed via an imaginative structure, a story or fantasy which puts inner and outer fields of perception in touch with each other, sometimes benignly or even in such a way as to rectify or assuage discomfort, but sometimes in disastrous misprision. As Winnicott puts it: "the task of reality-acceptance is never completed, . . . no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and . . . relief from the strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience which is not challenged (arts, religion, etc.)."⁴⁷ The case of an aberrant or dan-gerous fantasy of the kind that Leontes develops, the idea of which runs all through Shakespeare's work, is also described by Winnicott and again related to other modes of imaginative elaboration which we associate with artistic activity:

Should an adult make claims on us for our acceptance of the objectivity of his subjective phenomena we discern or diagnose madness. If however, the adult can manage to enjoy the personal intermediate area without making claims, then we can acknowledge our own corresponding intermediate areas, and are pleased to find a degree of overlapping, that is to say common experience between members of a group in art or religion or philosophy.⁴⁸

The ease of movement from private to public fantasies here, and the sense of interconnection between danger and necessity in the functioning of the imagination to connect self and world, touch Shakespearean matters closely. In moments like the exchange of mutual imaginative visions between Florizel and Perdita, we see this process vividly at work as a spontaneous upwelling of imaginative apprehensions that feed at once and deeply on the needs of the self and its perceptions of the needs of the other. Florizel needs to be assured that his desire is not death-dealing, Perdita that her transformations are not self-betraying.

Janet Adelman suggests that the pastoral of Bohemia—and Perdita, its dramatic center—are a version of Winnicott's "object that survives" its destruction by the child, therefore the proof to the child's imagination of a universe outside the self that is not subject to the regime of death at the hands of the subject's aggression.⁴⁹ This complex of perceptions, I have argued, appears in the play as a doubt about the human value of sexual expression rather than as a problem in infant development per se, though it could no doubt be argued that the former is a translated reprise of the latter. For the play, the rural environs of Bohemia are indeed a place of survival. Leontes casts Perdita forth, as he imagines, to "some remote and desert place" (II.iii.176) only to have her return intact from the plenitude of Bohemia—a plenitude as much of fictions as of flowers. In Bohemian pastoral, the abundance of theatrical forms in apposition—songs, dances, masquing, roguery, gods, and satyrs all mixed up—the very length of the scene itself, witness a resiliency and productivity of pleasure that Leontes' absolute regime has shrunk and truncated. Even when the Leontine violence returns in the fearful images of what Polixenes will have done to those who oppose him, Camillo as playwright and Autolycus as survival's ready rogue (for whom "the red blood raigns⁵⁰ in the winter's pale") have their ways of outflanking and skewering that severity into a kind of comic impotence. From this point of view the infamous Bohemian "sea-coast" is neither a blunder nor a thumbing of the nose, but an insistence on the transgressive prerogative of the imagination in answering the needs of survival.

From this perspective too, the question of Autolycus' relation to the rest of the play becomes clear: he presents at once the necessary freedom of story to range where it will in order to find its always-variable rightness ("And when I wander here and there / I then do go most right," IV.iii.17-18), and the transgressive or resistive impulse resident within that freedom. He is a rogue always cheered by audiences because they see in him a spirit of their own energetic resistance to darker necessities, a resistance innately part of the impulse to play: Autolycus catches us grinning because in the theatre we are (or wish to be) his counterparts in imaginative ranging. His adoption—or theft—from Ovid is itself openly admitted in his name: poets take what they need and as they must.⁵¹ The prerogatives of fic-tion are subject to no law except that they must answer the needs that generate them. In Autolycus, as in Perdita though in different registers, we encounter a constant self-revision figuring a Shakespearean account of the temporality of fictions. The business of fiction-making is a never-ending one, endlessly and dialectically entwined with both itself and the need from which it springs to touch and open the world. Inside Shakespeare's play lie the husks of those fictions he has himself consumed or been fertilized by, sedimented in varying layers of acknowledgment and power: Greene, Peele, Ovid. As the occasion of playing transforms, so the medium and content of the play must also develop, in part out of its own history. The Winter's Tale, long observed to thematize seasonal transformation and renewal, also proffers that cycle of loss and recovery as the way of its own imaginative genealogy. It is necessary to learn to imagine the absoluteness of neither life nor death in order to enter such a landscape. These are hard lessons, not learned in Leontes, who precipitates out of Polixenes' fantasy of absolute boyhood life a terrible and reactionary image of absolute death, of "nothing."

The openness with which Shakespeare acknowledges his own poetic genealogy through the play is of a piece with his whole understanding of the dynamics of composition as a version of the general dynamics of human life in time. Though the Ovidian fictions that lie inside The Winter's Tale—Proserpina, Arachne, Niobe, Autolycus, even Pygmalion—all unfold in Metamorphoses as directly or indirectly associated with challenges to the authority of the gods, Shakespeare's own writing in the end does not display such challenge and competition.⁵² Harold Bloom has remarked (Anxiety of Influence, p. 11) on what he calls Shakespeare's extraordinary ability to "swallow his precursors whole." But perhaps "eating" is less apposite here than "breeding by." It appears from The Winter's Tale that his assurance, so unlike that of Marlowe or Jonson, springs ultimately from an understanding of human fictions as always in need of transformation, an understanding that absorbs the lessons of metamorphosis and generation not only at the level of bodies, but also at that of fictions.⁵³ Time has already stripped putative precur-sors of the necessity they had—from age to age, from reading to reading, they are not what they are. Hence Shakespeare's recurrent insistence, as also in Pericles, on the audience's active role in absorbing and recirculating fictions. And hence also perhaps his apparent, and to some puzzling, unconcern about publication, again so unlike Jonson, since his own "works" must in their turn be changed to answer the world they have in part transformed by their participation in it.

The climactic scene of the play's attention to the life of fictions is the final one of Hermione's statue. By now many strands of the play have gathered to make "the statuesque" a topic that combines a number of issues. It is for that reason principally that our consideration of wonder in The Winter's Tale, which must inevitably take the final scene as its central meditation, has had first to traverse the entire play. For whatever energies are released, caught up, opened, or conducted by the ceremonious and ecstatic rhythms of this scene, they have been led there carefully over the long haul. Though the scene celebrates and affirms, as commentators have pointed out, the vivifying and wish-fulfilling powers of theatre, there is a sense in which it also tells us of how at some point the theatre must be given up or relinquished. Through this feeling of "letting go" of theatre, a feeling linked to the other kinds of letting go the scene does—of mourning, of recrimination, of fear—the final moments of The Winter's Tale resemble nothing so much as the scene of relinquishment that concludes The Tempest.⁵⁴ In both plays Shakespeare points to a need to move beyond theatre towards some more direct recognition which will have no need of shadows, even if the latter have been the very media by which the imagination has arrived where it is. The theatre emerges at the end of the play as a homeopathic remedy for itself—but as fantasy and purgation negate one another, so both must accordingly be given up as theatricality, and the world inhabited once more unfantasied—for the time being.⁵⁵

VIII

The sense of undoing, of release, is almost overwhelming in the final scene of The Winter's Tale. Imagined most fully in the "depetrification" of the statue, it is also explicitly a verbal process sustained throughout, like saying a spell backwards. There is scarcely a line that does not deliberately tag a counterpart somewhere back in the first part of the play. Cordial for cordial, issue for issue, kiss for kiss, stain for stain, grace for grace, wooing for wooing, warmth for heat: each echo arises to its invocation as a kind of "underword," a ghost word to be laid and replaced by the strength of the scene to which it is summoned. The decision to confront the image of Hermione, and then the further attempt to recover Hermione herself from her being of stone, is a corollary of this process insofar as it reaches "underneath" the structure of likelihoods put in place by the play to the deeper rootedness of its sorrow and rupture, in order to effect an answering repair. At the same time, the scene shapes a gesture of almost direct acknowledgment to the Ovidian material that subtends so much of the earlier action, setting its Ovidian pretexts against one another, so that the myth of Pygmalion's misogyny and its overcoming is made to confront and resolve that of Proserpina's rape, the latter itself a tale of how life and time were split into antithetical halves by an abduction into an underworld realm. As a version of Shakespearean theatre and its vivifying powers, the scene also complements and negates its own internal competitors: Leontes' tragic theatre of calumny, the Bohemian pastoral of the self and its liberties, even the trumpery animal-act of the bear.⁵⁶

This is in short a scene that risks more than perhaps any other in Shakespeare's works: no other play brings the pressure of an entire structure to bear on its conclusion in quite this way. That it succeeds so well with most critics and audiences only makes it the more difficult to account for—since it seems willfully to violate all accepted canons of construction.⁵⁷ But then the necessity of risking excess is part of the scene's point also; in this too Shakespeare has a Blake-like energy. The scene has always had powerful and moving encomiasts, but each approach to it enters a risky defile and must carefully work through the turbulent dynamics of a peculiar Scylla and Charybdis: between a credulity that believes too much and a resistance that hardens too fast.

It is in just such a "between" as this that the peculiar and overwhelming effect of the scene develops: within the ambit of powerful transactions between words now and their counterparts then, between the statue and the living body (of both actor and character), between the present fiction and its pressing analogues, between stage and audience. The risk the critic runs is that of the characters—Leontes or Hermione in particular—of negotiating the transition between impression and expression, between silence and speech, between stone and flesh, improperly. The scene is one of general trial and to venture onto its ground is dangerous. Paulina knows this very well, and how failure to negotiate this exchange may rebound disastrously on all. Hence her protestations, her stern protocols and caveats, which must be ours too in approaching the articulation of our wonder at what the scene stirs in us.

Let me begin with a remark of Leonard Barkin's that "Leontes and Hermione are not independent organisms but a pair of Shakespearean twins, two halves of a single system. The husband treats the wife lovelessly, and she becomes a stony lady."⁵⁸ This sense of the couple as entwined, even in separation, we might take to be part of the point of having their "keeper" named Paulina, pointing us back to Shakespeare's Pauline sense of marriage as a "making one flesh"—or one stone. There is indeed a deep interdependence between the imperviousness of Leontes earlier in the play and the present immobility of Hermione's statue. But we should consider carefully the multiple resonances of this mutual stoniness. Barkin points to Hermione's petrification as an image of Leontes' coldness (Cavell would say, of his skepticism), and so it is; but it is also possible to see it as a defensive manoeuver in response, and therefore at once an effect or image of what Leontes does and a reply to it. Leontes certainly sees the stone as a moralization of his cruel error, and hence as an image of the connection of their fates: "does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it?" (V.iii.37-8). But for Hermione, the advantage of stone lies in its safety from attack, its impenetrability: within it she can survive, as it were, in hibernation. Hers is the gesture of Galatea discovering—at some later date—the misogyny and distrust of (female) sexuality which led Pygmalion to carve and love her in the first place.⁵⁹

There is a further thought within this dialectical circuit: what if stone were also the fate Leontes had himself imagined to protect Hermione from the brutality and hardness of his desire for her (here we are close to Cavell's discussion of Othello)—even perhaps to return that hardness in some way upon him, as the statue is now "piercing to my soul"? If Pygmalion's desire, even as it turned Galatea into a living woman, had turned his love of her to a brutal and implacable hardness, he might have wished to spare her that. Here we glimpse once more Shakespeare's churchyard horrorstory of heterosexual desire: that it should make men hard even as it softens women.⁶⁰ This would make of Leontes' own venture towards stone in the same scene at once a quest for Hermione's presence and experience and a homeopathic repetition of his own desire, scanning and testing it for residual blockishness and blindness (we recall the danger lurking still in his first response to Perdita, even as a simulacrum of Hermione). His impulses to kiss the statue and to become like the statue would then be counterparts in the scene's tracing of various modes of his relation to the thought of Hermione in him.

Another way of putting this would be to note that the scene undoes the making of Hermione into an object of cool aesthetic interest that we saw characterized one stage of Leontes' relation to her. Indeed it proceeds carefully backwards from the stance of the aesthete with his evaluative and technical gaze through the collapse or absorption of that distance into the more dynamic and interactive relations of the psychological, and finally the erotic. The scene insists with a fair degree of literalness on the absorption of Leontes—and to a lesser extent those around him—towards the mode of being of the statue, their sharing its stillness as a precondition of its coming to share their life. Perdita is observed "standing like stone with thee" and declares she could "stand by, a looker-on" for twenty years; Leontes' sense of the statue's life turns him to the thought of his own death ("Would I were dead but that methinks already—"); when Paulina offers to awake the image, Leontes declares "No foot shall stir," they must "all stand still," and when she moves he must "Start not" and must be told, like her, when to move and to "present your hand." The ideas of her (potential) motion and their lack of it are intertwined throughout. Only by creating a world of stilled lives can the statue be tempted to share any life.

This gradual, painful approach worked out between Leontes and the statue is not without risk. Kenneth Gross has best described what is at stake in the play's recalling other images of return (and, I would add, of artifice):

such images are like ghosts that the play must both conjure and exorcize before any further enchantment or disenchantment of the statue is possible. . . . The general fantasy of return is shared by many spectators; but Shakespeare allows us at least the thought that Leontes with Hermione could all too easily become like Lear with Cordelia, torn at the end of his tragedy between the deluded knowledge of his daughter's being restored to life and the absolute certainty that she is a corpse.⁶¹

Other ghost fates threaten as well, and not only for Leontes: other tales of animated idols press to mind, and may lie behind Paulina's apprehensions about how her conjuration may be understood, if things should go badly.⁶² Paulina's image of Leontes "marring" the stone lips and "staining" his own suggests a range of partial and improper relations between feeling and representation, lover and object, reader and text. They cannot simply meet: they must first exchange properties, even become metaphors for one another: mutual desire and mutual attentiveness are alike required.⁶³ What does it mean to read an aesthetic object as more than just an occasion for the exercise of one's skill or force in interpretation? What does it mean to respond to a person with fully engaged human attention? What, above all, is the relation between these two questions? (And what is it about our needs as humans that we must ask it?) Paulina's answer is "It is requir'd / You do awake your faith." But faith in what she does not say.

Likewise deliberately evoked is a correspondence between the statue's artifice and Leontes' frozen ceremonial of grief, that "theatre of remorse" we observed before as the ash of tragedy. The similarity is made plain by Camillo:

PAULINA O, patience!
The statue is but newly fix'd; the colour's
Not dry.
CAMILLO My lord, your sorrow was too sore laid on,
Which sixteen winters cannot blow away,
So many summers dry.

(V.iii.14-22) Camillo has perhaps noticed Leontes weeping here, but the odd image of him as painted picked up from Paulina's lines (as if his grief were make-up) also recalls Perdita's earlier objections against "painting" as falsification—even if augmenting a genuine impulse. This brings up the question once more of what fiction or form of representation can best match itself to or answer feeling. Camillo complains, albeit gently, that Leontes, in overdoing it, has only continued to damage himself, but it is enough here that Leontes' wet tears match the statue's undried color to indicate the way the two are approaching one another, mutual images or representations of artifice as a refuge from the pain of change as well as mutual figures of death in life. Art and desire front life and death in a complex dialectic of mutual combination in which each serves as the precondition of its antithesis. The structure has an inevitable temporal dynamic—a necessarily developmental impetus of binding and loosing. Each modifies the others and what one kills, its contrary vivifies.

One way to get at the way this complex motion works is to consider a key pair of terms that run through the scene: "mock" and "like." These seem chosen specifically to suggest at once modes of representation and moods of feeling, and to provide a subtle network of relations between these. Through them the scene exposes and Works through the connection of perception and emotion as explicitly as it can, a connection that goes back at least as far as the problem of Leontes' "crossed eyes" and his imagined trip-wire spider, and that underlies his increasingly hysterical attempts to straitjacket complex ambivalences in the paranoid theatricality of conspiracy theory. Consider the moment of unveiling the statue:

PAULINA As she liv'd peerless,
So her dead likeness, I do well believe,
Excels what ever yet you look'd upon,
Or hand of man hath done; therefore I keep it
Lovely, apart. But here it is; prepare
To see the life as lively mock'd as ever
Still sleep mock'd death. Behold, and say 'tis well.
Hermione like a statue.
I like your silence, it the more shows off
Your wonder; but yet speak.

(V.iii.46 51)⁶⁴

There is an insistent jingle here among "likeness,"

"look'd," "lovely," "life," "lively," and "like" which links what is "like" to what "likes" according to an ancient and true etymological connection that Shakespeare seems here to be dramatizing. Hermione's "likeness" will revive in Leontes his "liking"—not just his remorse—which in turn will lead on to her "life." A true likeness, one made as here "to the life" is, as Aristotle said of theatrical spectacle, "psychagogic": it attracts the soul. The silent response, the intensity of attention turned to the statue by its viewers, are things Paulina "likes."

And yet bracketed inside this intercourse of likeness with liking is a counterpun in which life is "mock'd": imitated, yet also made fun of as sleep makes fun of or plays games with death (Paulina knows the statue can be awakened). The specific simile here insists on the one hand that aesthetic or mimetic "mocking" of this kind is as much a heightening of "life" as it is a gaming; one might even go further and say a gaming in order to heighten. But it also insists on a power to humiliate or damage the living that resides in artifice (recall Hermione's sense of her trial as a "mock-trial"). Leontes will reinforce this sense of vulnerability or victimization at the hands of the statue twice, and both times the "mockery" is keyed to the statue's ability to challenge ordinary notions of what constitutes "liveliness" and what sort of emotion ought to be directed towards works of art: "The fixure of her eye has motion in't, / As we are mock'd with art" and at last, desperately, "Let no man mock me, / For I will kiss her" (V.iii.67-8; 79-80). With Paulina's warning reply that what Leontes proposes is only a mistaken parody of the contact he seeks (like Pygmalion bedding his ivory), the scene reaches a momentary stalemate. Paulina will allow no further approach, Leontes will not let the curtain fall but stands, as his daughter says, for ever "a looker-on."

Each of these postures of response, we may feel, even this risking of indecorum and humiliation, must be passed through as stages of Leontes' "trial by mockery" before the statue can be invoked to life, according to the crucial condition "If you can behold it." Hermione's return takes place on a middle ground "between" stone and flesh onto which Leontes in particular ventures in love and danger. And the scene compares this transaction between man and stone to the complex mediations of all our forms of address to fictional objects: the emotional investment we make in them, their mode of being through that investment for us, our mode of being through their challenge to us, the claims we make on them and on each other through them, and so forth.

Yet the moment of Hermione's revival remains extraordinary by any measure. Nevill Coghill has drawn attention to the length of the scene as a way of confirming for us her actual stoniness through her lack of motion, so that an audience may be "reconvinced against hope that she is a statue." This strategy is the play's own version of the deferral of Leontes' desire. Coghill demonstrates the point by reprinting the Folio text of the passage, remarking that "only at the end of the long, pausing entreaty, when the suspense of her motionlessness has been continued until it must seem unendurable, is Hermione allowed to move":⁶⁵

PAULINA Musick; awake her: Strike:
'Tis time: descend: be Stone no more: approach:
Strike all that looke vpon with meruaile: Come:
Ile fill your Graue vp: stirre: nay, come away:
Bequeath to Death your numnesse: (For from him,
Deare Life redeemes you) you perceiue she stirres. . . .

The insistent and repetitive character of the lines is well caught by the look of the Folio text. Apart from "'Tis time"—a kind of declarative command—only one utterance before Hermione's stirring is not an imperative. Each seems to punch itself into being against a resistance, a resistance registered in the strange sense of violence and blockage in the lines, as if Paulina's call had somehow to bore through or chisel away layers of deafness to reach its target ear. "Strike," she cries as though directing a blow at the statue, and an echo rebounds off it into her invitation to deliver a return blow that will "Strike all that looke vpon with meruaile," as if the statue should revenge on "the lookers-on" all the trauma of its awakening through their wonder at it. Yet Paulina's very insistence that "'Tis time" overgoes itself, to suggest that it is in the end up to the statue to approach them rather than to be summoned. The spectators invite, would relish, would take pleasure in, nothing so much as suffering the statue's marvelous blow if it only meant their dream of life and motion had come true. Paulina's imperatives are those of entreaty, even prayer; her cry of "Come" is a version of the ancient hymn: "Veni, creator spiritus."

These lines, in their complex mixture of exultation, power, fear, and vulnerability, crystallize from the scene as a whole the typically turbulent metaphoric energy of "wonder" that is the focus of this study. All the elements of wonder reappear here, and much more vividly realized than with Cleomenes and Dion: the sense of inhabiting a borderline "between" knowledge and emotion, of a fearful power both in and beyond the spectator, an acute self-consciousness of the medium of representation which reinforces rather than drains the expectation of enlightenment. Even the recurrent sense of spectral doubles as pressing onto the scene of wonder appears, not only in the twinning of Leontes and Hermione, but also in Paulina's odd phrasing of her warning to Leontes not to "shun her / Until you see her die again, for then / You kill her double" (V.iii. 105-7).⁶⁶ And as we have already seen, there is a program-matic exploration throughout of ways in which Leontes and Hermione are alike. Longinus spoke of the strange sense of readers "producing what they had only heard." Here that very sense is taken by the play to correspond to and "justify" the general desire that Hermione's recovery be real. What Paulina calls their (and our) "faith" will produce its object "if you can behold it." It is not enough here to speak of "the power of theatre" or of "art": the impact of the scene grows also from the power of a collective desire for its success which stems from its audience. It answers a general need to test what fiction can be called upon to do in the way of reparative and sustaining work for us; to justify at last, despite the pathos of his own failure, Mamillius' sense that what was needed to deliver himself and his mother safely to one another was some fiction, if only the right one could be found. The dangers of that search, its delicacies, are recalled here through Paulina's sense of her perils, of her responsibility. The one sentence in her invocation which is not a command must be construed as in part an offer, in case of disaster, to go down to death herself in Hermione's place: "I'll fill your grave up." This beautifully resonant line suggests that Hermione's may have been somehow an open grave all these years—or one just reopened, at great risk. The gap of the gaping grave is now to be closed, its image of sundering to be not merely denied, like that of Polixenes and Leontes with which we began ("Time as long again / Would be fill'd up . . ."), but repaired. In a dialectical reversal, Hermione will die to death, bequeathing him the very "numnesse" that belongs to him. So that the fatal shadow of Dis can at last depart.

It is therefore appropriate that the play's image for the consummation of this repair, and I think its most moving moment (at any rate the one that angles for my eyes) should be a slow, hesitant, astonished clasping of hands closing the gap between two bodies through their organs of most developed, most typically human feeling. And again, according to the scene's therapy of repetitive reversal, recalling that very moment of Leontes' hostility for being made a spectacle before a Hermione who would not "open thy white hand and clap thyself my love." The play deliberately draws attention to this in Paulina's urging that "When she was young you woo'd her; now, in age, / Is she become the suitor." The Folio does not give a question mark here, and this seems to me right. On stage the moment is electrifying: its element of the startling breaks forth through Leontes, our surrogate in touching the impossible, in that expressive "O," as if he had been given a shock: "O, she's warm!" The claims of imagination to deliver the world we wish, and sustain us, if anything can, from death are now specifically ratified by his proclamation: "If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating."

Yet, as long as we are in the presence of someone called Paulina, we ought to be at least careful of claims about what may and may not be eaten. For though eating per se is lawful, this does not imply that all eating is lawful, or even appropriate at all times. In Jacobean England, some kinds of eating were expressly forbidden. Meat in Lent, for instance, was unlawful without special dispensation (as for pregnancy). And so was theatre. Moreover, even if lawful, it is not always a good idea to eat just anything: some things are positively dangerous as foods, and some are dangerous for some people at some times. Proserpina, for instance, might have done better not to have eaten seven pomegranate seeds in the halls of Dis. And though bears may eat people when hungry, people mostly do not—unless they are really bears in disguise, or have names like Tereus and Tamora. Paulina instructs those on stage that they should their "exultation / Partake to every one" as though it were a food like the feast that ends many another comedy. But if fiction is to be our food, we should be discriminating about it, and only eat what is good for us, what is lawful, what sustains. But how shall we know it?

The answer is that we cannot, but that certain signs can make us confident and "awake our faith." One of these is the presence of a certain kind of intuitional and self-conscious surprise at a pertinence beyond the moment, a sudden waiving of the barriers to self-knowledge, what I have been describing throughout this study as an experience of "wonder." In speaking of his psychiatric work with children, Winnicott tells of the "scribble game"—an improvisation in which child and physician alternate making and interpreting scribbles on paper. Sometimes the game would yield out of its own insouciant dynamics of mutual play a moment of enlightenment, of which Winnicott remarks that "the significant moment is that at which the child surprises himself [or] herself. It is not the moment of my clever interpretation that is significant."⁶⁷ The emphasis on surprise here seems to me close to the use in Shakespearean drama of wonder as "the significant moment" at which the whole fiction aims through its various divagations, the precipitation out of an experience of play of a moment that addresses the world directly, not only in terms of knowledge about it but in ways that release emotion at once towards it and towards the self in it. Winnicott's surprised children come upon themselves and their stories unexpectedly, excitedly, in the scribble game. Audiences of Hermione's recovery, on stage and off, come upon themselves, though less unexpectedly, in the act of wishing her fervently back into life—and this tells them something about themselves, about their own desires, and about the uses of fictions in recognizing, enacting, and understanding those desires. This is so even for those in the audience who might not wish in this way, who might need, for whatever reason, to resist such a wish, to imagine some other theatre.

These considerations illuminate both why the imagination that needs to find itself in the world among other imaginations should turn to the thought of theatre to screen itself, and why that same thought of theatre must eventually be given up in its turn. As the figure of Father Time explicitly shows with his hour-glass, time is always at once both a flowing and a turning. The Time who says "I turn my glass," and presumably does so, visually embodies both. He even suggests that the flowing might itself prove a turning insofar as the sands of his glass flow back on themselves. His whole speech speaks of a process that, while it moves always forward, both "makes and unfolds error" (as if error were at times a folded thing), and can both create and "slide O'er" a "wide gap." The theatre is implicated in this "branching" process, even in the moment of its self-recognition, since Time will "make stale / The glistering of this present, as my tale / Now seems to it" (IV.i.13-15). Through the set of deep puns on "depart, parting, departure, apart, party to, partner, and, of course, bearing a part" noted by Cavell, the question of coping with Time's partitioning (and parturitioning) flow is linked to the finding of a form of play in response.⁶⁸ And this link allows us once more to see that the source of Leontes' theatrical self-awareness in Act I was of a piece with his implication in Time's flow through his growth into desire and with his resistance against the world of generation that spoke of his emasculating mortality. Against Leontes' theatre of "one self king," the play eventually ripostes another of collective desire for vulnerability after all, for risking the wounds alike of wonder and of love. Truth may be the daughter of Time, but her other parent is Imagination, and their marriage is that of Blake's Prolific and Devourer.

Shakespeare's elaboration of wonder as a "between" state that precipitates recognitions, that marries Time and Imagination, necessarily includes—even begins with—the actors who inhabit and enliven the play's "parts" and who actively adjust the fit between self and role moment by moment in the theatre to answer the flow of "live" performance with a new inflection here, a more sudden movement there. As actors are the ones who take on and interact most deeply with the theatrical fiction, so the final scene is, as has been often noted, charged with the heady self-consciousness of an explicitly "actorly" task: what is the actress playing Hermione doing? Playing a statue? Playing Hermione playing a statue? How long can she hold the pose without breathing, etc? Our skepticism and our pleasure at the pretenses of the theatrical meet each other in pursuing this kind of question, and the result is a tremendous influx of self-conscious excitement, so that we feel our very attentiveness to the scene, even our sense of being "mock'd," becoming part of the developing action.⁶⁹ Kenneth Gross comments: "That the closing scene allows us neither self-evident faith in magic nor the quiet comforts of disenchanted irony is where its real difficulty lies. Finally, the enchantment . . . is in the willfulness of the fiction of disenchantment, the fantasy of the relinquishment of fantasy."⁷⁰ The fine balance of that formulation itself reproduces the sense of being "caught between" that the scene so carefully fosters. Bate remarks of the final scene that "It is not enough to say of the statue scene that nowhere does Shakespeare's art substitute more brilliantly for myth, nowhere is there more powerful testimony to the creative, even redemptive, power of drama, nowhere is there a creative coup more wonderful. For it must also be said that the redemption is only partial, it is neither a reversal of time nor a transcendence into eternity" (pp. 238-9). It seems to me, however, that the wonder so finely caught in the first sentence draws its power precisely from the point made in the second: not its war against time, but its awareness of the temporal in the imaginative, its finely balanced sense of their balance. Fervencies of self aside, it calls on us to see the aspect of surrender inside that imaginative demythologizing Bate calls "the distinctively Shakespearian species humanitatis"

The ancient metaphor of the human being as an actor and life as a stage here touches a new elaboration: the making and unmaking, the composition and decomposition of the self in its fictions becomes a process of continual dialectical pulsion and response, like the actor making his performance—not in slavish obedience to the script, but in interpretive and immediate tension with it. The theatre which was a screen for Leontes' darknesses is removed to reveal another theatre. Each in its turn must be acknowledged, and given up. But if we must give up the theatre, we do so only for an interval, before its return.

As our own excitement becomes the "subject" of the final scene, even as it prepares to end itself and leave us to ourselves, so the space "between" stage and audience becomes the site of the scene's imaginative activity, in which the whole community may "participate." No doubt this sort of thing is occurring all the time in the theatre: where else is the action at any time if not between us? But we are not always made so deliberately conscious of the stakes of our "investment" in this way. When Hermione prays: "You gods, look down / And from your sacred vials pour your graces / Upon my daughter's head!" (V.iii.121-3, beautifully undoing as she does so Paulina's agonized cry to Leontes to "Look down / And see what death is doing") there is a sense in which the theatre audience are at once co-petitioners and the powers to whom the petition is being addressed. The audience contemplates the action from within and without, and stands beside older fictions invoked as gods around their latest offspring to offer it, as much as precursors can, deliberate blessing.⁷¹ This self-conscious invocation of the audi-ence as parties to the outcome is also presumably one point of the return, at the play's end, of the theatrical language first introduced in Leontes' fear of and resistance to the world of generation. Through Leontes' last lines, the actor seems to speak to his fellows of a get-together in the green room, with jokes about dropped cues and missing props, and how good Autolycus was tonight, and how the bear tripped up on his way offstage:

LEONTES Good Paulina,
Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely
Each one demand, and answer to his part
Perform'd in this wide gap of time, since first
We were dissever'd. Hastily lead away.

(V.iii.151-5)

If these last lines call upon both cast and audience to "answer to," and hence to move away from, this theatre, as though to stay in it too long might risk repetrification, the lines also insist there must be an "answer" to this theatre somewhere else, that it must take in turn a "part" in some other life. As in Pericles, the work of the theatre does not stop at the stage door. It prolongs itself and finds its proper answer in some future turning of Time's glass. And we should note that even inside this imagined off-stage fellowship another, more truly final scene shapes itself, where each hearer will more strictly "answer to his part" as Polixenes once saw himself answering "heaven / Boldly, 'Not guilty'." The eschatological impulse that becomes explicit at the end of The Tempest is also present in The Winter's Tale, if hidden for now behind the image of our fellowship. The gap between the two marks an interval at once of play, of reflection, and of reflection on play, since what we will be called to answer to will be the kind of part we have played—not only in our lives but in the fictions that fed, and fed on, those lives. Leontes' "wide gap of time" extends back through the two hours' traffic, the sixteen years, and all our lifetimes of "branching," to our collective distance from an ancient sundering and an all-but-forgotten Paradise where "first" we were "Not guilty." Yet though that gap admonishes, it also invites. Between this end and The End the work of poetry must go on unfolding its metamorphic task. Though fiction quails in the final analysis, in today's green room and street and by tomorrow's hearth there is still room for it to branch and bud. Hence even in foreshadowing the end of fiction, the play concedes that that end is not yet, and that the question of how this fiction has answered its part arises for us as a question about the life, death, and afterlife of fictions in the world of generation.

It is not therefore surprising to find that this scene is at once one of Shakespeare's most powerful and characteristic and at the same time one of the most saturated with the presence of other fictions, especially Ovidian ones. Just as the fantasy generating Leontes' nightmare theatre of jealousy is both repeated and overcome, so also a secret register of alternative fictions at the level of composition bodies itself forth as an open allusiveness of acknowledgment and transfiguration. In part the scene's sense of being released from constriction registers the way it both realizes and undoes its indebtedness to earlier fantasies of mortality and animation, demonstrating their corrosive power as motivating fantasies in Leontes, then forcing them to the surface and repealing them. Shakespeare transmutes the myths of both Proserpina and Galatea by confounding and contaminating them into something new. In the recurrent search for the antidote to a fiction that has become petrified and petrifies, Shakespeare looks not to a counterfiction that "confronts" but one that "answers to" and so includes its occasion. The dynamics of psychological and poetic process are analogous to each other rather than recourses from each other, and neither is properly prior. Critics have often marveled at Shakespeare's invention of a newly resonant or "deep" psychological complexity in representing character. The Winter's Tale makes clear that that invention and the poetic question of inventio are intimately linked, that is that the framing of psychological complexity goes hand in hand with a complex response to the fact of "sources and analogues" as the sites of poetic invention.⁷² There is therefore no question of a final, workable distinction between art and life. Where Ovid declares Pygmalion's artistry in creating Galatea one in which "ars adeo latet arte sua"—a formulation that became a Renaissance touchstone—Shakespeare's scene of vivification insists on deliberately displaying its intimate investment in and by works of art.

The dialectic of creative absorption and conversion has important implications for a Shakespearean conception of "tradition." I argued earlier that Shakespeare was essentially conservative in artistic practice insofar as he looked to preserve and adapt from what came to him whatever could continue to serve the needs of the present. This is a specifically "dynamic" conservatism, one that insists on recognizing the Mutabilitie (as Spenser would put it) of social and psychological structures. For such a view, tradition lives and does its sustaining work most of all in the vortex of its rupture and reassembly, in the struggle at once to retain what we have known and loved and to fit it to what we know and love now. In such fires tradition burns—to re-emerge as the phoenix, or as the turtle, or in some yet unknown shape of darkness or glory. It is not a Homeric or, more to the point, Miltonic battle of giant forms in a celestial and apocalyptic eyrie. The energy of its self-overcoming is Ovidian. Tradition is like wax before the fire, waiting for the thumb to turn and mold it again.

It follows further, and last, that we should not be surprised to find Shakespeare's work unfurling a similar relation of adaptation and inclusive correction to itself. The Winter's Tale seems, almost alone of Shakespeare's works, to be able in the end to affirm the image of a sexually vigorous and assertive woman, both in Perdita's explicit longing for Florizel and in the final scene's emphasis on Hermione's longing for her daughter. Indeed, the tale of the play is in part that of its own desire to rescue and affirm that image from behind the screen of an anger that repeats the gestures of tragedy. The play's ability to face and face down some of the fantasy substructures that have informed Shakespearean drama itself is one of its most remarkable and moving powers. Though Shakespearean wonder arises throughout his work in the context of imagined sexual generation, of the reproduction of the world (likewise the task of drama), after The Comedy of Errors the maternal figure who most literally embodies and enacts such regeneration is largely withheld.⁷³ Adelman relates this impulse to withhold the maternal figure, to keep her locked in an Abbey, an Ephesian Temple or a "remov'd house" until the play's dénouement, to a fear of the overwhelming image of a "suffocating mother." I want here rather to extend the argument to include the dramatic occasion. What implications does the appearance of this figure have for the relations, on the one hand, between the play and the "matrix" of earlier fictions from which it springs, and, on the other, between the play and the attendant audience towards which it is directed? To return to the image of mothers and generation at the end of these plays points to an entire complex of ideas about the source and direction of imaginative energy.

I noted earlier that Shakespeare's final scenes find in themselves both the ease and the fragility of a "right" language for desire's success in the world as love. The restless metaphoric energy of Shakespeare's dramatic language is both heightened and, for a moment, stilled into a silence full of the energy of contact. In the final scene of The Winter's Tale, this contact is at once erotic as between characters, theatrical as between play and audience, poetic as when a metaphor finds or makes its world, and what we might call "metapoetic" as when a fiction joins hands with its fellows. The image of the mother registers origin and connection in more ways than that of developmental psychology. It emerges as Shakespeare's most charged image for the discovery of the world, that world that desire touches with a confidence that expresses the faith of an imagining self as it, we might say, "matriculates" into it. It is through the search for this contact that the notion of "incarnation" becomes so important for Shakespeare. Through "incarnation" conceptions are made acts, desires are made bodies, and scripts are made actors. Because the regimes of the imagination and of the bodily world are alike metamorphic and complex, the work of making them touch is difficult. The recovery of contact acknowledges the mutual turbulences, even while subliming them.

But we must not give in to the temptation to identify the world into which we matriculate as at once and only material and maternal. Such an identification has an ancient history, but one finally refused by Shakespeare, if not by other parts of his culture.⁷⁴ The world has its materiality, of course, but it also is composed of the residue of past words, images, and fictions, just as the imagination that meets it has "taken in" impressions we call "objects." The process is a mutual conception. To label this side "self and the other side "mother" is to refuse to acknowledge their interfusion in a "between" space that is both and neither. As Hermione's revival shows, it is the shared "between" ground that must be ventured onto in order for the petrified world to become a presence to and of the human.

What Shakespeare offers in the last scene of The Winter's Tale is not the "unearthly" revelation, the "burst / And th'ear-deaf'ning voice of the oracle" that Cleomenes and Dion experience at the theatre of Apollo. Shakespeare's theatre of wonder speaks to a mortality renewed in its sense of the Tightness and the vivid earthwardness of its language and desires. Language and desire meet the world not in the form of a pronouncement (a scroll or a pair of tablets) but as a human body, vulnerable and marked in time. In Shakespearean wonder, one hears not so much the great voice calling (as in Milton) as the human tongue speaking. The strenuous and fatal energies of challenge and competition are converted into aspects of a continuing, fecund dialectic of life and death, art and desire.

Notes

¹ I note also that the 1623 Folio gives the phrase as "rais'd the Tempest" (The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman, p. 34), though it is not unusual to find nouns capitalized like this. My sense that we are close to allegorical and metadramatic talk here is also reinforced by what seems a hidden picture of a human in the passage—one with a "head," "charm," and "spirits" who "goes upright." The famous Oedipaf riddle may also be somewhere close by: though it is late in the day, human time still has his two legs and all his charming faculties. In particular this suggests Prospero as designer of the entire enterprise. (Caliban, of course, slouches under his many burdens.)

² Other title-allusions are, as with Prospero, given to major or principal characters: Helena in All's Well, the Duke in Measure for Measure (V.i.411). More remote cases are Rosalind in the epilogue to As You Like It, the Princess in LLL (V.ii.520), Don Pedro in Much Ado (II.iii.57) and Hortensio at the very end of Shrew.

³ "Mamillius" has no precise meaning (perhaps that is part of the boy's problem), but suggests at once mother, breast, and littleness, as though he were a kind of diminutive or (more strongly) dependent of his mother's body. For an interpretation that makes this relation the central issue of the play, see Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 220-38. I read Adelman's account of the play after mine was already drafted, but note several points of similarity between us, especially a shared sense that the work of D. W. Winnicott has much to say to it.

⁴ Freud's description of the game of "fort-da" he watched his grandson play with a toy he interpreted as representing the child's mother is relevant here. See Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in James Strachey, ed. and trans., Standard Edition of the [ . . . ] Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), vol. XVIII, pp. 14-17. Even more so is D. W. Winnicott's discussion of "transitional phenomena" and the developmental process of "illusion-disillusion" throughout his Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

⁵ Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 194-5.

⁶ My emphasis, but the meter supports it.

⁷At the same time, the very literality and solidity of the Leontes who now enters, with his own history and agenda, marks a crucial difference in representational strategy between the Shakespearean mode and that of the allegory that seems imminent yet avoided here. Consider how our reading of the scene would differ if it were to take place in The Faerie Queene. In Shakespeare, an allegorical relation is registered yet overgone by a preference for "personation" or what I have been calling "incarnational" translation. Yet though this difference is crucial for the definition of Shakespearean representation, the play as a whole remains aware of Spenser in a spectral, perhaps sponsoring way. Other contacts include the baby-and-bear conjunction in III.iii, so teasingly reminiscent of Faerie Queene VI.iv, and the location of the final scene in a Spenserian chapel/gallery where a statue comes to life and invokes the gods (cf. Britomart's dream in Isis Church in F. Q. V, yet there the image is not living flesh). Such resemblances suggest a deeper relation between the epic and the dramatic poet than is usually claimed. The most extensive exploration remains W. B. C. Watkins, Shakespeare and Spenser (Princeton University Press, 1950).

⁸Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, p. 194.

⁹ Oscar Wilde's wry homoerotic joke that a man's trag-edy is that he does not become like his mother is queerly apposite here. At this point we should also reveal that a dying Camillo confessed that Mamillius did not die at all, but was transported to the sea-coast of Denmark, where he was adopted as the King's son and re-christened "Hamlet" after him. A scrambled echo of his former name remained nonetheless, and he later had a recurrence of the "old tale": Leontes returned in a dream disguised as the Danish King's ghost to make the same old accusations about his "brother." Mamillius/Hamlet thereupon himself became the man who dwelt by a churchyard and finally accomplished the protracted self-murder he had forgotten how to seek, while using on the "harlot king" Camillo's old poison-cup, which had made the voyage with him in his childhood bundle.

¹⁰ Freud's concept of the "primal scene" of parental copulation might be invoked here, though my reading does not depend on it. Freud's sense of the child as perceiving an act of violence performed by the father brings the two models into particularly close alignment. Freud's interest in this fantasy first appears in The Interpretation of Dreams (Standard Edition, vols. IV and V, 1905), though it is not until the "Wolf Man" case study (1918) that the term "primal scene" is specifically applied. The theatrical resonance of the idea of a "scene" is especially relevant to my argument later—note that Freud did not insist that the "scene" should actually have been witnessed, but rather thought it could be compiled phantasmatically through hints and inferences. See also J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973) under "Primal Phantasies" pp. 331-3 and "Primal Scene" pp. 335-6.

¹¹ Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 12. The whole of Winnicott's conception of the transitional nature of "play" is acutely relevant to Shakespeare's dramatic fable, insofar as both are concerned with the vicissitudes and dangers of growth and "development," whose deformation in the play deeply illuminates the relation between sexuality, fantasy, and dramatic mimesis.

¹² On Othello from this perspective, see both Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, Ch. 3 and Peter Stallybrass, "Patriarchal territories; the body enclosed," in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy Vickers, eds., Rewriting the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 123-42.

¹³ This apparent change of subject that may hide a clue to the real direction of the play may be compared with the similar moment in the opening scene of King Lear, where Kent responds "Is not this your son, my lord?" to Gloucester's remark of Albany and Cornwall that "curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moi'ty" (I.i.6 8). The "curiosity of nations," as Edmund calls it, in choosing their proper heirs will be precisely the source of Gloucester's problem.

¹⁴ Between Hermia and Helena in Midsummer Night's Dream for instance, or Rosalind and Celia in As You Like It, and perhaps Marina and Philoten in Pericles.

¹⁵ This line might be stressed " . . . when you were boys" to emphasize the child's presence.

¹⁶ One might compare here Angelo's fudging of the similar issue of whether he or Isabella is to blame for his desires when he speaks of "the strong and swelling evil / Of my conception" (II.iv.1-7; this just after we have seen the pregnant Juliet catechized by the Duke in prison). The tactic is still unfortunately familiar in contemporary legal proceedings on rape and sexual assault.

¹⁷ "Screen" here should be understood in the senses both of concealing ("screen from view") and revealing ("screen a film"). Compare Freud's concept of a "screen memory."

¹⁸ This linking of clothing with wounding rather recalls the discovery of Duncan's body in Macbeth (both the embroidered corpse and the grooms' daggers "unmannerly breeched with gore"), and suggests there may be a further pun on Leontes the boy as "unbreached"—that is not yet wounded with that master-biting dagger.

¹⁹ We might also consider whether the identification of father and son here (and the connection of this scene with II.i) suggests that within the adult's discovery of his wife and friend as secret adulterers lies a dim and difficult memory of discovering his own parents as partners in a sexual "crime" that also excluded him. This might well have been Freud's reading, but the play is not quite explicit about it. Of course, Leontes is not quite explicit about his mental processes either.

²⁰ Cavell (Disowning Knowledge, pp. 190-1) sees a similar strategy of "deferred representation" as shaping the final scenes of several of Shakespeare's plays, among them The Winter's Tale.

²¹ Here we may note an important difference between Leontes' jealousy and that of Othello. Where Othello's torments generate a heightened sense of the sexual appeal of Desdemona, most horribly played out in the "brothel" scene, in Leontes there is no such sense of any residual attraction to his wife. Yet as though a powerful feeling of "heat" were being fiercely imagined somewhere, his thoughts seem to run a great deal on the literal fire with which he will consume Hermione and the bastard child.

²² Stephen Orgel has recently discussed this passage and its difficulties under the heading of "The poetics of incomprehensibility," Shakespeare Quarterly 42:4 (1991), 431-8. Orgel's warnings on the dangers of forcing meanings on the passage or others like it in the play are salutary. I would note however that the fact that this sort of speaking is very frequent in The Winter's Tale is something about which a critic might legitimately frame questions: why would a play deliberately, as it seems, cultivate obscurity as an aspect of its texture? What is the dramatic function of this sense of sense as veiled or layered in too much possibility?

²³ Leontes' references to Mamillius as a "kernel" and a "squash" continue the submerged sexuality of his line of thought, especially the latter, aptly glossed in G. B. Harrison's edition (London: Penguin, 1947, p. 131) as a "peapod before the peas have swelled." Cf. Bottom's joke to Peaseblossom: "Commend me to Mistress Squash, your mother, and to Master Peascod [cf. Codpiece] your father" (MND IV.i.186-7).

²⁴ On the economic register of the play, in addition to Cavell, see Michael Bristol, "In search of the bear: spatiotemporal form and the heterogeneity of economies in The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Quarterly 42:2 (1991), 145-67.

²⁵ These verbs must remain in quotation marks to indi-cate that they are not quite mental acts, but nor are they quite "unconscious." They are rather "overlooked" or "ignored." But perhaps the latter is a closer characterization of what is often called "unconscious" thought.

²⁶ The link goes right through the crossed eyes again,since Leontes has now "seen the spider." Hence too the more ghastly pun on the "cordial" poisoncup he wishes to have Polixenes given that will give him "a lasting wink," as if in parodic revenge for his duplicitous carnality. Note that the word "cordial" returns when Leontes looks upon the statue: "For this affliction has a taste as sweet / As any cordial comfort" (V.iii.75-6).

²⁷ A similar point is made by Ruth Nevo, Shakespeare's Other Language (New York: Methuen, 1987), p. 115.

²⁸ That this be not thought merely a sentimentality, I note that the reason Hermione is restored to Leontes is not because of his long repentance, but because he was persuaded not to have Perdita "consumed with fire" in Act II. This persuasion in turn seems to stem from Leontes' desperate need to refuse the image of himself as a man of violence, the same need that lies together with violence at the heart of his intuition about desire.

²⁹ Recent feminist criticism has described Shakespearean drama, and especially the tragedies, as produced by just such a paradigm of scandal and blame, generated out of male anxiety. See, among others, Madeion Gohlke, "T wooed thee with my sword': Shakespeare's tragic paradigms" in Murray Schwartz and Coppella Kahn, eds., Representing Shakespeare (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), pp. 170-87; Coppella Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Adelman, Janet, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Routledge, 1992). The Winter's Tale is at one level an acknowledgment of the strength of this critique, yet also frames an attempt to look further, to how the knot might be loosed.

³⁰ On the proliferation of theatres and the defiance of orderly generic expectations by the play, see esp. Rosalie Colie's account in Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton University Press, 1974), pp. 265-83.

³¹ On the etymology of "theorist" alluded to here, see Chapter One above. It is always possible to cast doubt on such reports, as Howard Felperin has recently attempted to do. Casting doubt is one of the things theatre is for, but also a thing represented here in Leontes himself as autist and skeptic. It seems truer to say that the play here reads the critic than vice versa. But this is a danger we all run. See Felperin, "The deconstruction of presence in The Winter's Tale" in The Uses of the Canon (Oxford University Press, 1990), Ch. 1.

³² It is worth pondering the choice of Apollo as the play's sponsoring deity (that Shakespeare followed Greene in this is neither here nor there: he chose to do so where he need not have). The choice is justified in particular by the play's concern to show Leontes as involved with questions of poetic composition through his deliberate "scripting" of Hermione's infidelity. The change made to Greene in having Leontes deny the truth of the oracle not only heightens the dramatic moment through the blasphemy, but frames a concealed instance of an "agon" of the poets, in which Leontes plays Marsyas to Apollo's oracle. Leontes attempts to outscript the god by calling the divine plot "mere falsehood"—a piece of business, a red herring. As usual, Apollo is quick to punish challenges not only to his divinity, but to his poetic pre-eminence. The god knows an overweening rival when he sees one. The punishment of child-deprivation might even be compared to that of Niobe, who boasted she had excelled Apollo's mother in fecundity—she ended up, of course, frozen and petrified in grief.

³³ The link between this play and Hamlet appears againin the curious echo of Paulina's proposing to appear as Hermione's ghost, to "shriek, that even your ears / Should rift to hear me, and the words that follow'd / Should be 'Remember mine.'" (V.i.65-7). The combination of second marriage, mourning, and murder is presumably part of the trigger here, but the connections go deeper, as I have already suggested.

³⁴ As a result of its dependence on recent myth, psy-choanalytic criticism of The Winter's Tale has for the most part been forced to import sooner or later into its reading a symbolic transcription of Shakespearean psychological tokens into Freudian or post-Freudian ones. A particular popular instance has been Leontes' "spider in the cup." Some recent critics have translated this into a fearful fantasy of the overwhelming pre-Oedipal mother poisoning the maternal milk, while others have preferred to see the ravenously sexual Oedipal mother of a later stage of development. The basic insight here—developmental ambivalence towards the residues of infantile dependence—is hardly a modern instance, but these particular translations have a decidedly arbitrary feel. The play is, I would argue, deliberately occluding the spider from transcription, and that blockage is what needs to be noted the more so as Leontes thinks he is expounding an image for the acquisition of (infected) knowledge. For this reason, such readings cannot help feeling to me distinctly partial at this point: insofar as they do not explore the contours of a particularly Shakespearean psychic mythology, they can read the historical dimension of Shakespeare's work only imperfectly, and cannot incorporate the question of his theatre and its self-awareness into the psychological dynamic. For my part, it seems to me more likely that the spider is Arachne—who competed with Athena for pre-eminence by weaving a tapestry of divine rapes. Arachne's tapestry figures via Pandos to in Florizel's later catalogue of divine metamorphoses (IV.iv.25-31). See esp, the citations gathered in Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 354, n. 54.

³⁵ Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1993), p. 222.

³⁶ Nevo, Shakespeare's Other Language, p. 41. For Cavell, see above, n. 20.

³⁷ See Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, pp. 230-3. Bate is, of course, not the only commentator to identify the story of Proserpina as relevant to the play: see the next note.

³⁸ See Honigmann, "Secondary sources of The Winter's Tale," in Philological Quarterly [hereafter, PQ] 34 (1955), 27-38. Ovid is only one of three proposed "sources," and the pervasiveness of traces of Golding especially is not followed out in the brief note. Honigmann is following up a suggestion originally made by W. F. C. Wigston in 1884. Honigmann's complaint that work up until the time of writing "failed to bring the Proserpine-myth into the discussion" no longer applies, as the Ceres Proserpina story has become a regular discussion point. See esp. Carol Thomas Neely, "Women and issue in The Winter's Tale," PQ 57 (1978), 181-94 (revised in Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, pp. 198-9); Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, p. 360. The tale is now usually cited in discussing the mother-daughter axis of the play, without inquiring into its image of male sexuality or the role of that image in the play, or indeed of the deeper aspects of an Ovidian "source" generally. Yet if one is dealing with questions of "issue" or "origin," it seems important to ask where and how the question of "poetic source" obtrudes.

³⁹ Honigmann ("Secondary sources," p. 37) was the first to suggest the connection between the Sicily of Ceres' curse and the location of Shakespeare's play. It explains Shakespeare's otherwise puzzling reversal of the locales from Greene. Bate incorrectly (Shakespeare and Ovid, p. 232n) attributes the word "collop" to Golding's Ceres. That this echo is not a coincidence is suggested by the fact that both Leontes and Jove are asserting their part in their offspring against a challenge: Ceres has just begged that Jove "have not lesser care / Of hir (I pray) bicause that I hir in my bodie bare." But for Leontes, the challenge comes from himself, and may turn on precisely such questions as lie within Ceres' entreaty. See Golding's translation printed as Shakespeare's Ovid, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961), p. 114, 11. 641-2.

⁴⁰ Following out this suggestion, we might re-envision Oberon as a kind of middle figure between Dis and Leontes—a dark and jealous spirit who wishes to capture and manage female sexual expression. Like Leontes, Oberon wishes to wrest a boy from his spouse, and occupies himself creating images of the monstrosity of her desire ("ounce or cat or bear / pard or boar with bristled hair"). We might also recall Oberon's epithet "King of shadows" (MND III.ii.347), which closely translates Ovid's "rex . . . silentum" (V.356), and his ancient kinship with Alberich and the Nibelungen tribe of earth-dwellers. Ceres' curse in Golding is also worth scanning with Titania's account of the recent weather in mind (MND II.i.88ff):

But bitterly above the rest she banned Sicilie,
In which the mention of her losse she plainly did espie.
And therefore there with cruell hand the
earing ploughes she brake,
And man and beast that tilde the ground to
death in anger strake.
She marrde the seede, and eke forbade the
fieldes to yeelde their frute.
The plenteousnesse of that same Ile of which
there went such brute
Through all the world, lay dead: the corn was
killed in the blade:
Now too much drought, now too much wet
did make it for to fade.
The stars and blasting winds did hurt, the
hungry foules did eat
The corn in grounde: the Tines and Briars did
overgrow the Wheate,
And other wicked weedes the corne
continually annoy,
Which neyther tylth nor toyle of man was able to destroy.

(Shakespeare's Ovid, ed. Rouse, p. 113)

⁴¹ The relevant lines in Ovid follow the vain attempt of the pool-nymph Cyane to invoke the proper course of courtship and to stop Dis. They are among the more horrible pictures of rape in classical literature:

haud ultra tenuit Saturnius iram
terribilesque hortatus equos in gurgitis ima
contortumque valido sceptrum regale lacerto
condidit, icta viam tell us in Tartara fecit
et pronos currus medio cratere recepii.

(Metam. V.420-4)

Latin citations of Ovid are from the edition of William S. Anderson (Leipzig: Teubner, 1977). Golding translates these lines (11. 525-8) as:

His hastie wrath Saturnus sonne no lenger then could stay.
But chearing up his dreadfull Steedes did smight his royall mace
With violence in the bottom of the Poole in that same place.
The ground streight yeelded to his stroke and made him way to Hell,
And downe the open gap both horse and Chariot headlong fell.

⁴² Likewise the Paulina who takes the newborn girl to Leontes in loco matris, insisting that "We do not know / How he may soften at the sight o' th' child" may recall Golding's Ceres, who avows to Jove: "I hither come if no regard may of the mother be, / Yet let the child hir father move." The episode is not in Greene.

More remotely, the image of Hermione in Antigonus' dream (III.ii), where her eyes become "two spouts," resembles in wateriness the fate of Cyane, the nymph who attempts to prevent Dis from abducting Proserpina, and whose grief at her failure and his abuse of "her fountaines priviledge" causes her to dissolve "so that nothing now remained whereupon / Ye might take hold, to water all consumed was anon" (11. 542-3). In Ovid, Cyane seems to stand for the deep, inarticulate grief alike of mother and daughter at the violence of the rape, as Cyane directly witnesses the blow of Dis' "royall mace." Martin Mueller argues for the additional presence of some version of the Alcestis myth in the play's final scene ("Hermione's wrinkles, or, Ovid transformed: an essay on The Winter's Tale," Comparative Drama 5:3 [1971], 226-39). Though a narrative of descent into death and return is covered both in the Proserpina myth and in the Orphic frame of the Pygmalion story in Ovid, the (non-Ovidian) Alcestis tale may also be relevant.

⁴³ The Old Shepherd later calls authority "a stubborn bear" (IV.iv.802). For the bear as an Ovidian beast, see also Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, pp. 224-7. The inchoate shape of bear-cubs made them especially apt as metamorphs, of course. I note also that the title pages of the first three editions of Golding's Ovid (STC 18956, 57, and 58, dated respectively 1567, 1575, and 1584) all sport the emblem of a bear muzzled, chained down and leaning on a dead tree stump. Shakespeare had already associated bearishness with the violence of a man's desires, both to himself and others, in the Count Orsino ("Bearlet") of Twelfth Night, who begins the play speaking of himself as hunted (though as "an hart" not a bear) and ends it threatening to kill others out of frustration. Bear-baiting also figures several times in the play, and an Ovidian context is provided by Orsino-as-Actacon, and perhaps Malvolio-as-Narcissus "practicing behavior to his own shadow." Bristol, "In search of the bear," has more information on bears and bear-lore.

⁴⁴ Andrew Gurr, "The bear, the statue and hysteria in The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983), 420-5 at p. 424; Nevill Coghill, "Six points of stagecraft in The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Survey 11 (1958), 31-41 at p. 35. Barthes' "hysterical" reader who takes the text as literal truth is the lowest in a hierarchy to be found in Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Editions Tel Quel, 1973), pp. 99-100. Gurr does not connect the bear and its moment of hysterical "resolution" with the character of Leontes and the tragic theatre of transferred blame which has dominated the preceding acts. It remains also to consider whether taking the stage action for "true" at some level is entirely so primitive a response as Gurr (and Barthes) seem inclined to claim. This is an issue which will be addressed most fully in the closing scene of the play.

⁴⁵ Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, pp. 231-2.

⁴⁶ Colie, Living Art, pp. 274-7.

⁴⁷ Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 13.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 14.

⁴⁹ Adelman, Suffocating. Mothers, pp. 231-2 and 358-60.

⁵⁰ This is the Folio spelling which suggests "reigns in," "reins in," and "rains in" all at once.

⁵¹ The question of "thievery" that emerges with Auto-lycus also connects with the insistent economic language of the play. On Autolycus' Ovidian roots, see Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, pp. 228-9.

⁵² The sequence of stories involving Proserpina, Niobe,and Arachne is told in Ovid's Books V and VI, in a framework set of "mortals competing with gods." The set begins with the Piérides' challenge to the Muses, against whom Calliope sings the tale of Proserpina, which victory prompts Minerva to think of Arachne's challenge, whose unhappy destiny fails to instruct her friend Niobe, whose fate in turn reminds her townsmen of that of Marsyas, the final and most disastrous example. Not only is Autolycus born in the competition between Mercury and Apollo to impregnate Chione, his mother, but she in turn is killed for boasting against Diana of her motherhood (Metam. Book XI). Pygmalion's decision to sculpt a bride stems from his disgust at the whoredom of the Propoetides, their punishment for refusing to acknowledge Venus (Book X). On the latter, see also Leonard Barkan, "Living sculptures: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter's Tale," ELH 48 (1981), 639-67, esp. p. 644.

⁵³ Barkan ("Living sculptures") suggests that an ele-ment of competition emerges not at the level of authors or authority, but at that of artistic media through the tradition of the paragone or contest among the arts, which Shakespeare incorporates into the end of the play when he compares the incredible narrations of the Gentlemen in V.ii against first the silence of sculpture in Hermione's statue and finally the "living statues" of the theatre when she descends. Barkan points out (p. 663) that "the ultimate destination of the paragone . . . is the rivalry of art and life." Even here, however, competition evaporates into the more complex dialectic of what Barkan calls (p. 664) "the mutual triumph of art and nature." But at this point the competitive language of "triumph" begins to get in the way and might be abandoned in favor of some other relation, such as the complementary or the dialectical.

⁵⁴ See also the remarks on this point of Mueller, "Her-mione's wrinkles," 236-7.

⁵⁵ Here once again,Cavell's account of the return of Hermione as the recovery of "the ordinary" against the forces of both cynical skepticism and excessive enchantment is pertinent. I have also found the discussions of "the statuesque" by Barkan ("Living statues") and especially by Kenneth Gross illuminating and suggestive. See Gross, "Moving statues, talking statues" in Raritan 9:2 (1989), 1-25 and expanded in The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

⁵⁶ On the statue scene and the bear scene as counter-parts in self-consciousness, see Gurr, "The bear, the statue and hysteria." This time, however, the challenge offered to the audience is precisely to credit and embrace what Gurr identifies as an "hysterical" reaction: that the action is literally taking place—an actor is no longer pretending to be a statue—and that the faith and pleasure in that trick legitimately stand for deeper repairs of trust and enlivenings of story. At this level, the play insists on the reality of its theatricality as a force of truth-telling, and opposes its therapeutic "hysteria" of "faith" to the pathological and misplaced hysteria of Leontes' skepticism.

⁵⁷ See the brief citations given by Barkan, "Living sculptures," p. 664, n.l and the editorial strictures cited by Coghill, "Six points," passim.

⁵⁸ Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 284. See also Cavell's remarks on the couple's relation, on how "For her to return to him is for him to recognize his relation to her; in particular to recognize what his denial of her has done to her, hence to him. So Leontes recognizes the fate of stone to be the consequence of his particular scepticism" (Disowning Knowledge, p. 125). But I wonder whether Hermione's part in the transaction must be as passive as this suggests. What does Leontes' attack mean for her, and how is stone her response to it?

⁵⁹ Bate's claim that the tale of the Propoetides is "not relevant" to the scene (Shakespeare and Ovid, p. 234) seems to me wrong-headed. That prehistory of misogynist disgust forms a close parallel, which Shakespeare transforms by fusion with the Dis abduction story. Both the fate of the Propoetides and that of Proserpina, incidentally, stem in Ovid from a parallel refusal to acknowledge Venus: "Pallada nonne vides iaculatricemque Dianam / abscessisse mihi? Cereris quoque filia virgo, / si patiemur, erit" (V.375-7).

⁶⁰Shakespeare had first represented such an antithesis and interrelation in The Rape of Lucrece, where Tarquín's desire and Lucrece's vulnerability are explicitly linked (though the poem does not suggest any softening of desire in her): "His ear her prayers admits, but his heart granteth / No penetrable entrance to her plaining: / Tears harden lust, though marble wear with raining" (558-60); cf. Lucrece's lament: "For men have marble, women waxen minds, / And therefore are they form'd as marble will" (1240-41), where "they" refers to both men and women, linked by the shaping of a hardened "will" at once noun and verb, mental act and physical implement. Mentation migrates and hardens into the erection itself, and becomes insensible.

⁶¹ Gross, "Moving statues," p. 17.

⁶²In the case of Lear it is those around him that Lear accuses of having been turned into "men of stones" by the deadness they confront, as if it exposes or creates a deadness in them. Apart from the "monumental alabaster" that Othello makes of Desdemona, there are also Viola's spectral self who "sat like Patience on a monument" and the "marble-breasted tyrant" Olivia, the Mariana who warrants her truth by offering herself as a "marble monument" in its guarantee (V.i.230-3), the Marina who looks "like Patience gazing on kings' graves," and, in her own monument, the Cleopatra who declares herself "marble-constant" (V.ii.240). Some of these return to life and some do not, but all are images of the survival of female will in its chosen posture beyond the power of onlookers to get at it. That Coriolanus of the crystalline will who advances on Rome like a revenging robot is another, more alarming image of the animate idol. See Barkan, "Living statues," p. 665 n. 2 and Honigmann, "Secondary sources." Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue, discusses the larger issues in detail. The topos of animation survives into modern fiction of course—my own favorite instance of how not to wake a statue occurs in C. S. Lewis's The Magician's Nephew.

⁶³ I have in mind here W. H. Auden's description of love as an "intensity of attention" which seems to me highly relevant to this scene. It may be worth noting that another forum for such intense attention is that of the inquisitor, which Leontes has already adopted in default of love. Paulina's deliberate "slowing down" of Leontes' desire here, forcing it to attend to the right moment, may be a counterspell to the terrible haste of Dis in the Ovidian story, a hotness of libidinal sight which was nevertheless blind in every other way to its object: "paene simul visa est dilectaque raptaque Diti: / usque adeo est properatus amor" (V.395-6).

⁶⁴ I have given here the Folio readings of "Louely" and the stage direction. Most modern editors expand the latter and emend the former to "Lonely." Either reading is possible: one emphasizes the power of the statue's "likeness" to stir love—a key thread of the scene; the other prefigures the discovery of life and emotion in the statue itself, since it makes little sense to speak of a statue as per se "lonely."

⁶⁵ Coghill, "Six points," p. 40. Coghill also notes that this passage is "the most heavily punctuated passage I have found in the Folio," which points to the way it makes visually clear its interest in (the difficulty of) getting from one moment to the next, an interest we should compare to Florizel's encomium of Perdita discussed above. (The lines are V.iii.98-103 in Riverside.)

⁶⁶ This strange sense of alternative or "ghost" figures of other versions of the play being present at its end is found in other final scenes of wonder in Shakespeare. In particular there is the darkening pressure exerted by that "other" and happier Claudio and Hero at the end of Much Ado about Nothing in Hero's words upon her unveiling: "And when I liv'd, I was your other wife, / And when you lov'd, you were my other husband" (V.iv.60-1). When the Friar counsels all to "let wonder seem familiar" (1. 70), we may wonder how much his words point to the unexorcised, "familiar" ghosts of a less shadowed matrimony.

⁶⁷ Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 51, emphasis in original. For particular, often very moving, examples of these sessions, see also Winnicott, Therapeutic Consultations in Childhood (New York: Basic Books, 1971).

⁶⁸Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, p. 200. He continues: "That last phrase, saying that parts are being born, itself suggests the level at which theater . . . is being investigated in this play; hence suggests why theater is for Shakespeare an endless subject of study; and we are notified that no formulation of the ideas of participation and parturition in this play will be complete that fails to account for their connection with theatrical parts[.]"

⁶⁹ There is a comparable moment of metadramatic fun at the end of Henry IV, Part One when (the actor playing) Falstaff makes fun of (the actor playing) Hotspur for obeying the rules about being dead on stage. An audience's recurrent, and enjoyable, cynicism about "dead" actors ("I can see him breathing!") is thereby incorporated into the play's gaming with itself, just as here. Rosalie Colie's remarks on "tragicomedy" as a genre of various "mixings" and of the "between" are also relevant here (Living Art, pp. 278-83).

⁷⁰ "Moving statues," p. 20.

⁷¹ A similar double movement out to the immediate audience and up to the gods as a second ring of spectators is explored by Harry Levin for the Player's Speech in Hamlet in his The Question of Hamlet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 139-64.

⁷² As so often, William Empson anticipates this way of putting it in his reflections on the importance to Hamlet of the existence of a previous hit play on the same subject. See Empson, Essays on Shakespeare, ed. David B. Pirie (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Ch. 3.

⁷³ A partial but powerful exception to this is the per-sistent association of Titania with motherhood (and with the mortality that so frequently attends it), so that the scenes with Bottom take on a peculiar blithe confidence and indulgence, with Bottom in part "his Majesty the Baby" in delicious and beguiling fantasy. Only from without, and from the perspective of aristocratic disdain, are these scenes called disgusting. Within them they have an amplitude of mutual enchantment untouched by anxiety that has come to be an index of the Shakespearean dramatic imagination itself. That Oberon regards this with vengeful loathing is important, but not conclusive.

⁷⁴ Adelman bases her identification of "fantasies of maternal origin" in part on a review of early modern views of childbirth and nursing that saw "matter" as "Mater." See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, pp. 1-10 and 239-45. And though Shakespeare consistently identified this aspect of the world, what I am calling its "matriculation" of us, as female, there seems no essential or inherent need for that function in fact to be performed only by females.