SOURCE: "'Grace and Remembrance': The Winter's Tale," in The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater, University of Illinois Press, 1989, pp. 80-99.

[In the essay that follows, Garner considers the dramatic tension of The Winter's Tale as a conflict between the present and time, as a place of innocence versus a realm of regret and longing.]

Literally as well as figuratively, Time stands at the center of The Winter's Tale, giving strikingly emblematic stage life to a theme that had occupied Shakespeare's imagination since the sonnets and the earliest plays, through the often turbulent drama of the playwright's middle years, and into the romances, those strangely fabulous works that play variations on what came before. The confusions of Syracuse and Illyria sort themselves out in the movements of time; Richard of Gloucester and Macbeth draw back to seize time's promise; an aging poet reminds his younger friend, still in time's graces, of time's quiet ravages: "That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang."¹ Though time constitutes an organizing motif in Shakespeare's nondramatic work, as this last example suggests, its presence is actionally more central to the world of the plays, where characters must confront dramatic time as it unfolds in the present and where actors must navigate through the temporal movement of performance. In drama, as we have seen, time is a theme by necessity, for in the medium of performance it stands as a structuring component of stage activity, and of the dramatic action that this activity bodies forth. In the sonnets, time makes its appearance through reflection, with the virtual atemporality characteristic of meditation and address; its movements and their consequences are presented within linguistic parameters, manifested through a poetic utterance that, textually fixed, itself eludes time. In the plays, time intrudes itself experientially, through the unmediated temporality of performance: moments happen in the theater and within the play, establishing time as a felt reality for characters and audience alike. Time lies at the heart of Shakespeare's dramatic interests, in large part, because of its centrality to the theater for which he wrote.

The Winter's Tale—with its memories fond and bitter, its plans and prophecies, its tales and ballads, and its striking leap of sixteen years—explores the experience of temporality with a prominence and self-consciousness unusual even for Shakespeare. As Inga-Stina Ewbank notes, "while in The Winter's Tale time has largely disappeared from the verbal imagery, it is all the more intensely present as a controlling and shaping figure behind the dramatic structure and technique."² In keeping with the other pairs that serve to organize this dramatic diptych—Sicilia and Bohemia, youth and age, Nature and Art, rosemary and rue—The Winter's Tale presents human engagement with time in terms of a duality edging into paradox. On one hand, humanity lives in the present, a moment so complete in its immediacy that it seems to escape time entirely. This experience of the Now, and its apparent eternity, infuses Polixenes' description of the childhood innocence that he and Leontes shared:

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

(I.ii.62-65)

His lines undermine the very idea of time, for the word today, charged with the force of the "eternal," subsumes behind and tomorrow in such a way that temporal distinctions blend and dissolve. Past and future warp into the seemingly boundless expanse of the present, and sequence unravels into a moment of Wordsworthian innocence, experienced as a condition outside Time's hourglass.

For all its apparent timelessness, however, this Edenic state is a memory, telescoped into what Prospero calls "the dark backward and abysm of time" (The Tempest, I.ii.50) in part by the very tense through which it is articulated. The stage presence of Leontes and Polixenes, both adults, constitutes a visual reminder of temporality, in which the present is barely an instant, collapsed into recollection by inexorable change. As Time boasts,

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

(IV.i.11-15)

These words recall the temporal world of the sonnets, where existence is subject to the ironies of mutability as it plays its movement from "glistering" to "staleness"—a world where "every thing that grows / Holds in perfection but a little moment."³ From this vantage point, time confronts humanity with the inevitability of consequence, since action, in the temporal realm, always has outcomes, foreseen or unforeseen: "I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror / Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error" (IV.i.1-2). The contrast is pronounced: if the present in The Winter's Tale is the realm of an almost prelapsarian joy, time is the province of memory and anticipation, nostalgia and longing, regret and foreboding. It is, in short, the province of narrative, public and private, that cognitive and social domain where the images of events assume a fixed relationship with each other.

That presence and temporality rule this play, halved as it is by its dramatic caesura between III.iii and IV.ii, comes as no surprise, for Shakespeare's dramaturgical break forces characters and audience alike to come to terms with time's changes and consequences. But the sixteen-year gap signaled by Time's appearance is only one of many instances in which temporal change dramatically and ironically counterpoints the present. Down to the level of individual lines, like those fondly spoken by Polixenes, the play displays a temporal intricacy rivaled, perhaps, only by Shakespeare's other romances. As a number of critics have noted, Shakespearean drama is characterized, as a rule, by relatively little antecedent action⁴: unlike the drama of Kyd or Tourneur, its action falls largely within a present that moves forward to its culmination. But the past bears on the present of The Winter's Tale through a number of subtler inclusions: the childhood of the two kings; the courtship of Hermione; the Old Shepherd's wife; the man who "Dwelt by a churchyard," frozen in Mamillius' "sad tale" (II.i.25-32); numerous moments of story and remembrance. This layering of past on present and present on past becomes more pronounced as the very stage moment in which the characters move is set against the broader passage of years, and as these years in turn verge upon an ever-emerging present. As The Winter's Tale progresses, in other words, it acquires—like Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Tempest—a temporal double vision tonally reminiscent of the opening lines of a fourth-century Chinese poem: "Swiftly the years, beyond recall. / Solemn the stillness of this fair morning."⁵

For the play's characters, double vision of this kind eventually bridges the gap between memory and the present, between the frozen image of the past and the often robust vitality of the moment. For the play's audience, such multiple perspective constitutes the experiential matrix against which the play's action unfolds. Like the characters, though at an aesthetic remove, the audience is faced during performance with a dramatic world subject to the laws of temporal relationship, and with a stage present that is actual, changing, always somewhat outside the structures of time created to enclose it. The Winter's Tale, then, Shakespeare's most explicit treatment of time, counterpoints the twin experiences of temporality and presence, not only in its dramatic action, but also in its narrative and theatrical effects. As elsewhere in his plays, Shakespeare grounds thematic issues within theatrical experience, and makes performance fundamental to dramatic meaning through the audience's cognitive engagement. In relation to both characters and audience, The Winter's Tale displays a profound concern with perception and its consequences, and with the personal and social challenges posed by temporality in life and in the theater. In this chapter, we will trace Shakespeare's broader dramaturgical balancing in The Winter's Tale of time's outlines with a dramatic and theatrical present that can never be fully "staled." In so doing, we will see that this strange but powerful Shakespearean play, like Everyman and Mankind, forges clear experiential links between the dramatic action on stage and the stage's "action" on its audience.⁶

When Time exits from the middle of The Winter's Tale, he leaves a world disrupted by his passage. For the play's characters, time's impact is concentrated in "that wide gap" (IV.i.7) between the dramatic present and the events of the first three acts, a temporal fissure during which, as Time informs us, Leontes has continued to mourn "Th' effects of his fond jealousies" (1. 18) and Perdita and Florizel have grown up. This span, though, bears differently upon the various characters. Those who have lived through it, the members of the now older generation, have hardened themselves against time by maintaining a sharp remembrance of its losses, a remembrance that they are nonetheless powerless to erase. Camillo misses Sicilia and still feels bonds of loyalty to Leontes, whose "sorrows" remain so tangible that Camillo calls them "feeling" (IV.ii.7-8). Polixenes, too, lives in memory, burdened with a past that refuses to fade:

Of that fatal country Sicilia, prithee speak no more, whose very naming punishes me with the remembrance of that penitent (as thou call'st him) and reconcil'd king, my brother, whose loss of his most precious queen and children are even now to be afresh lamented. (11. 20-25)

Focused through trauma's inward gaze, time only underscores the memory of what has been lost, and in its irrevocability the past seems more real than the present that has taken its place.

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

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

(IV.iv.45-51)

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

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

(11. 143-46)

Perdita, more the realist, nevertheless allows hope to "strangle such thoughts." "O Lady Fortune," she exclaims, "Stand you auspicious!" (11. 51-52).

When Polixenes and Camillo enter disguised, then, and the sheep-shearing scene gets under way, the stage contains a mixture of attitudes toward time and its relationship to the present. On one hand, it offers the lovers, with their sense of the immediate and their vision of possibility; on the other, the king and counselor, aged by time and scarred by its memories, their awareness of consequence a potential threat to Perdita and Florizel. By this point in the play, though, the audience has had its own experience of dramatic time shifted and modulated, through the play's broader dramaturgical rhythms. Theatrical versions of immediacy and temporality are counterpointed throughout the play's development, often in sharp juxtaposition, as we can see if we review the audience's comprehension of dramatic time in the first three acts. There is, for instance, the play's beginning, in which the stage image of friendship between Polixenes and Leontes, the present's version of the past's innocence, is abruptly dispelled by the King's distorted jealousy. William H. Matchett points out sexual ambiguities in the lines between Polixenes and Hermione and claims that the audience is made to feel suspicious,⁷ but these ambiguities are subliminal and largely recollected, if at all, in light of Leontes' misinterpretation of them. More pronounced is the audience's awareness of their "timeless" friendship, of which Archidamus has said "I think there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it" (I.i.33-34) and of which Polixenes has described the childhood origins. The initial stage interaction between the characters does little to dispel these accounts: gracefulness and compliment characterize the scene's beginning, and the "gestural dialogue between hands" that Charles Frey discerns throughout the play here expresses bond and affection.⁸ When Leontes' "tremor cordis " does appear, it constitutes an intrusion of dissonance into the scene's easiness, and the stage present becomes abruptly shadowed by the threat of disturbance: "I am angling now, / Though you perceive me not how I give line" (I.ii.180-81). The words angling and line are revealing, for it is the essence of Leontes' jealousy to form imaginary connections between people and between incidents, quickly generating a web of misperception and suspicion that includes even Mamillius and Camillo. As Leontes begins to act on these misperceptions, consequences multiply with rigorous inevitability, and the stage present becomes increasingly pressured by a network of events, imaginary as well as real.

One of the most remarkable features of the developing Sicilia sequence (I.i through III.ii) is its narrative tightness and autonomy; omitting Perdita's survival, it could stand by itself, brief but complete. Its incidents are relentlessly forward-moving and continuous. For one thing, the narrative line of Leontes' jealousy and its effects is, to an extent unusual even in Shakespearean tragedy, unrelieved by breaks. Hermione's exchange with Mamillius constitutes only thirty-two lines, and the scene in which Cleomines and Dion describe their visit to Delphos is shorter still (twenty-two lines). Far from serving as self-contained interruptions, both are themselves interrupted, and devoured, by the omnivorous main action: the former by Leontes' entrance, the latter by a reminder of the proclamations against Hermione. For another thing, incidents and details are introduced and linked with a high degree of narrative continuity. Shakespeare changed the source material of Pandosto to increase the "probability" of the story's incidents,⁹ and he did so, in part, by tightening its plot connections: whereas Greene's young prince Garinter dies suddenly, for instance, Shakespeare's Mamillius sickens and dies specifically out of grief concerning his mother's predicament. This tight sense of antecedents and consequences focuses audience attention even more closely on the unfolding narrative sequence, on dramatic time in its actual and potential outlines.

The sequence concludes with a pronounced note of closure, heightened by the rapidity with which its final events take place. The oracle's tersely declarative pronouncements reveal the truth concerning the preceding actions, a truth the audience and all the characters save Leontes have known. Entering with news of Hermione's death, Paulina condemns his folly by outlining the consequences of his misconceived actions on Polixenes, Camillo, his abandoned daughter, Mamillius, and Hermione: "O, think what they have done, / And then run mad indeed—stark mad!" (III.ii.182-83). Her speech (11. 175-214) rings with summary force, and—together with Leontes' heartbroken resolve to bury his wife and son in a single grave, to display an account of "the causes of their death" (1. 237), and to visit it every day for the rest of his life—it gives the sequence of the Sicilian first half what J. H. P. Pafford has called "a Miltonic close fitting for the end of a tragedy."¹⁰

"The King shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found" (III.ii.134-36). A strand remains incomplete—an opening, as it were, in the closed sequence of action and its consequence that the audience has followed for over two acts. With Antigonus' entrance in III.iii, the narrative sequence continues. But the audience's temporal comprehension of The Winter's Tale's events and its orientation toward the stage and its actions shift in two important ways. First, attention no longer centers on the inevitable triumph of truth and the stripping away of a central character's delusion. Throughout the Sicilian sequence, the audience has indeed enjoyed an Olympian distance upon Leontes' jealousy, secure in its awareness of the actual state of events. The audience, in other words, stands in the position of superior awareness that Bertrand Evans considers one of the characteristic dramatic principles of Shakespearean drama;¹¹ and although its awareness is far from complete, the audience's understanding of temporal outlines is more closely aligned to that of Time than to that of the action's participants. Once the truth is revealed, though, subsequent actions become openended: although the oracle's pronouncement suggests further resolution, this final clause is cast as a riddle and contains no details about how the resolution might be achieved. Uncertainty, therefore, replaces inevitability; the outcome of events becomes less determinate, less subject to rigorously constrained consequence. Ironic awareness is replaced by uncertainty, and the audience, like Perdita, is left in the wilderness—a wilderness, in this case, of the stage and its unpredictability.

Second, the coherent narrative of the first part is replaced by a remarkable sequence of incidents, each of which is characterized by striking immediacy, and all of which stand in sharp juxtaposition to each other. Immediacy is achieved partly through a dazzling array of "theatrical" effects: effects of sound, movement, and spectacle that display the stage at its most physical. Such effects are strikingly absent from the Sicilian sequence of the play's first half: although the earlier sequence is characterized, as Daniel Seltzer points out, by numerous examples of "intimate stage business" between characters,¹² there is nothing to compare with the storm effects (suggested by the text), the famous bear, the sound of hunting horns, or the archaic staginess of Time's entrance. The immediacy of the sequence's incidents is heightened by their almost Brechtian juxtaposition: the mixture of tones and effects gives each a kind of discontinuous autonomy on stage, and this sudden, unprepared-for variety, following the vastly more streamlined narrative of the first half, forces abrupt, disorienting shifts in audience response.

Matchett observes that this sequence wrenches us "from our response to the plot and the action to a wider perspective. . . . Challenging our awareness, it opens us to fresh experience."¹³ He discusses this shift in terms of the art/nature opposition, but his observations apply still more valuably to the basic level of audience attention that this sequence engages. On this level, the sense of "fresh experience" is a result of elements that draw attention away from broader temporal outlines and heighten the autonomy of individual stage moments, much as the storm scenes do to the dramatic world of King Lear. Such "fresh experience" in Shakespearean (as in all) drama is that experience uniquely available in the theater: of a stage present existing in its own right, intruding itself into the very "tales" that dramatists make it tell. When Time stands forward to signal the leap of years, in other words, he addresses an audience that is already undergoing its own experiential leap, from prescience and irony to uncertainty and surprise, in the face of a stage turned strange and new.

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

The third introduction to the sheep-shearing scene also introduces one of its main participants. Despite the number of critical attempts to integrate Autolycus into the play's thematic structure,¹⁴ this stage rogue continues to baffle the play's readers (while delighting its spectators). He is introduced later (IV.iii) than probably any other pivotal Shakespearean character, yet he plays no part in the play's concluding scene. He becomes almost a genius of the pastoral festivities, yet he was once a member of Florizel's retinue, a detail introduced so casually (between stanzas of a song) that it risks being missed. But if we put aside attempts to incorporate Autolycus into the play's thematic framework and concentrate, instead, on his stage presence, his dramatic function within the play (and within the sheep-shearing scene in particular) becomes clearer. In a play that counterpoints modes of time and presence, Autolycus represents life (and drama) at their most theatrically immediately.

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

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

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

His appearance before and during the sheep-shearing scene, then, contributes to its self-contained immediacy: along with the Shepherd's dance that precedes him and the "Saltiers" who succeed him, his presence during the scene—with his "ribbons of all colors i' th' rainbow" (11. 204-5), songs and ballads, and other antics—constitute some of the play's most frenetic stage activity. Even before Autolycus' entrance as ballad-monger, this scene has drawn characters and audience alike into an experience of atemporality. Among the characters, the past is suspended almost by consent: as we have seen, Polixenes and Camillo suspend memories of Sicilia, and Perdita and Florizel "strangle" thoughts of his superior rank. Time and its effects (as well as its threat) remain present during the scene, especially in the disguised visitors, but the emphasis is on the moment, and even age is brought within its domain. Matching Florizel's "timeless" admiration, Camillo tells Perdita: "I should leave grazing, were I of your flock, / And only live by gazing" (11. 109-10). Polixenes, too, participates in the festival atmosphere to an extent not generally acknowledged in discussions of the scene; his famous debate with Perdita concerning the "streak'd gillyvors," for all its potential allusion to Perdita's station and its implications, is largely playful, a quality more evident in the theater than in the text, and one that tends to undercut threat. Moreover, when later in the scene the Clown remarks that "My father and the gentlemen are in sad talk" (1. 310), Polixenes is "refreshed" enough by the entertainment to request the Saltiers. It would be a mistake to claim that Polixenes "forgets" his mission, even temporarily, but it would also be a mistake to neglect the extent to which even he surrenders to his disguise and submits to the scene and its diversions. Both visitors could, with truth, join Perdita in her confession: "Methinks I play as I have seen them do / In Whitsun pastorals. Sure this robe of mine / Does change my disposition" (11. 133-35).

The audience, too, is offered a "fresh experience" of the stage present, one that tends to subsume awareness of time and its consequences. Francis Berry claims that the audience, remembering the play's first half, "frames" the sheep-shearing scene and modifies its response to the lovers in light of their parents' experience.¹⁵ But pictorial metaphors such as this are misleading, since the theater is a temporal as well as a spatial medium: earlier moments are rapidly distanced in performance, and memory often requires explicit reminders if it is to "frame" the stage present with what has already occurred. Such reminders are few, and the audience's awareness of threat is subordinated, in large part, to the scene's compelling immediacy, an immediacy heightened by the innocent love of Perdita and Florizel, by Autolycus' antics, and by a gracefulness of gesture finding its natural culmination in dance. The audience never completely abandons its apprehensive detachment from the lovers, but we must not underestimate how much the stage draws all who watch into its easiness.

With the exit of the dancing Saltiers, however, and Polixenes' interruption of the festivities, the audience is abruptly returned to an awareness of consequence and the claims that time exerts on the present. If Leontes' earlier attack of jealousy is painful because of the idyllic picture we have been given of his childhood friendship with Polixenes, the latter's remark to Camillo—"'Tis time to part them" (1. 344)—is even more chilling, because we have been given an extended stage version of such carefreeness. Like Prospero's truncation of The Tempest's wedding masque, Polixenes' subsequent explosion completes the disillusionment for the audience and for Perdita and Florizel, returning the former to its awareness of consequence as it returns the latter to the realities of their disparate stations. Perdita tells Florizel:

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

(11. 447-50)

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

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

It is a measure of the dramaturgical complexity of The Winter's Tale that these expectations are at once fulfilled, unfulfilled, and more than fulfilled. On one hand, the Gentlemen who report the reunion between Leontes and Perdita underscore the miracle of the encounter, calling it "so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion" (V.ii.28-29). On the other hand, despite Nevill Coghill's attempt to defend the effectiveness of these messenger speeches,¹⁶ if there is any clear scène à faire in the play, the disclosure of Perdita's identity is it—since, in fulfilling the oracle's prophecy, it gives Leontes an heir, Florizel a wife, and Perdita a royal family. The reunion effects a reconciliation between age and youth, past and present, Sicilia and Bohemia. Such a scene the audience expects to see; ironically, the messenger scene is disappointing precisely because The Winter's Tale is not a tale but a play, and a play's most powerful moments are its stage moments. The very quality of the reunion that "lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it" (11. 57-58) is that quality of immediacy the stage provides. We want the scene to be represented as dramatic present, not deflected into a narrative past.¹⁷

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

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

(IV.i.25-29)

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

We have been studying The Winter's Tale in terms of two interrelating perceptions: that of time, evidenced through its effects of change and consequence, and that of the moment, experienced as something seemingly beyond these effects. We have explored, too, how the play represents a complex dramaturgical manipulation of temporality as it is experienced within performance: drawing attention away from narrative outlines into the stage present, distancing the present by the perceived intrusion of time and its effects. In the play's own vocabulary, occasioned by Perdita's gift of "rosemary and rue" to the disguised king and counsellor, we have been exploring the interacting rhythms of something like "grace and remembrance" (IV.iv.74-76) and the ways in which Shakespeare builds these rhythms into the play's dramaturgy and stagecraft. The statue scene, justly praised as one of the culminations of Shakespeare's art, represents the play's crowning interpenetration of these two realms of temporal experience.

As in The Tempest, the final reunion of this play is orchestrated by a master of ceremonies in command of the secrets behind external events. When Paulina reappears with Leontes at the beginning of the fifth act, however, she does so, not as a provider of second chances, but as a spokesperson for memory at its most fixed, keeping fresh the remembrance of an apparently irretrievable past and feeding its hold on the present with almost unpleasant insistence. Cleomines appeals to Leontes to "Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil, / With them, forgive yourself (V.i.5-6), and Dion urges him to consider his heirless kingdom; but Paulina, who "hast the memory of Hermione . . . in honor" (11. 50-51), pressures his conscience with the claims of the past:¹⁸

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

(11. 63-67)

To the servant's praise of Perdita's beauty, Paulina laments:

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

(11. 95-98)

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

This transformation, when it occurs, is seamless in its movement from one temporal vision to the other. Leontes' initial response to the statue's unveiling is an acute "remembrance," directed toward a past so cunningly recreated in stone that its image is resurrected, with equal vividness, in memory: "O, thus she stood, / Even with such life of majesty (warm life, / As now it coldly stands), when first I woo'd her!" (V.iii.34-36). The statue, in other words, confronts Leontes with the past and with his responsibility for its loss, while paradoxically bringing it so vividly into the present that this loss seems to vanish. As he continues to gaze, the harsh line between past and present blurs, shading the memorial presence of the statue into the living presence of Hermione. In a word that reverberates throughout the scene, time's apparent irrevocability is "mocked" by a reappearance that seemingly occurs outside time's laws, and memory is both dissolved and brought to life in the face of the present's revelation. With this dramatic stroke, Shakespeare moves beyond Aristotle, whose third form of anagnorisis bears striking resemblance to the statue scene: "The third kind of recognition is through memory: we see one thing and recall another, as a character in the Cyprians of Dicaeogenes saw the picture and wept, or the recognition scene in the lay of Alcinous, where Odysseus listens to the bard and weeps at his memories, and this leads to the recognition" (Poetics, XVI).¹⁹ As Aristotle's examples make clear, art serves a function much like memory, giving form to the flux of experience, and in Aristotle's moments of recognition it points to the life from which it has been abstracted. Recognition in The Winter's Tale, by contrast, moves beyond memory into the miraculous: it occurs when what is seen actually becomes what is recalled, through a transformation that merges past and present, image and life, narrative and a moment beyond its predictions.

Paulina commands the statue to "Strike all that look upon with marvel" (1. 100), and the final accomplishment of Shakespeare's stagecraft in The Winter's Tale lies in the audience's inclusion in the striking marvel of this scene. The stage reconciliation that the audience was denied in V.iii takes place, but the disclosure that makes it possible, Hermione's survival, comes as a revelation for the audience as well as for the characters. The earlier image of Hermione falling to the stage floor, Paulina's confirmation of her death, Leontes' plans to bury her, and Antigonus' ghost-like dream apparition (recalling "visitors from the dead" elsewhere in Shakespeare), all establish the Queen's death as a dramatic reality for the audience, breaking sharply with Shakespeare's usual practice (in plays such as Twelfth Night and Pericles) of making his audience confidants to all secrets and partners to all contrivance. Much more in the manner of Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare withholds a narrative detail, the revelation of which transforms both the outcome of the play and the significance of what has preceded it. That the play hinges on such a deception is, by now, a commonplace in criticism οf The Winter's Tale. But, like many Shakespearean commonplaces, its full implications for audience response remain imperfectly understood, even though dramaturgical decisions invariably adjust the audience's relationship with the developing stage action. Most obviously, the audience is forced into a collective experience that mirrors that of the stage characters, chiefly Leontes, whose discovery constitutes the scene's principle focus. Like Leontes, the audience is initially forced into its own moment of remembrance. It matters little at what point the audience realizes that Hermione is alive; when the statue shows signs of life, the audience scans its memories, recalling the play's earlier scenes, trying to find the connections that could justify a development so beyond expectation. Hermione explains to Perdita that she remained in hiding to await the fulfillment of the oracle's prophecy, but this detail, like all others in the closing scene, is subsumed in the moment itself, luminous in its freedom from anticipation. In place of the ironic superiority over characters usually enjoyed during such dramatic reconciliations, Shakespeare creates a theatrical experience for which, as we noted earlier, the critical lexicon lacks descriptive terminology, an experience that constitutes the opposite of irony, for in this instant, as the statue becomes that which it has commemorated, the present is vastly more than we thought: fuller and richer, freed from irony's frameworks.

By setting the statue scene outside the audience's comprehension of plot and time, and by making the stage action, literally, beyond the anticipation that has sought to contain it, Shakespeare allows the stage itself, one last time, to assume a heightened autonomy. As in the sheep-shearing scene, attention is directed toward individual objects, movements, and gestures, carefully orchestrated by dramatic speech highlighting the particular. Polixenes'²⁰ "The very life seems warm upon her lip" and Leontes' "The fixure of her eye has motion in't" (11. 66-67) recall, in their specificity, Autolycus' ribbons, the "flow'rs of winter," and (most tellingly) Florizel's admiration of Perdita's movements:

When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so,
And own no other function.

(IV.iv.140-43)

Ewbank writes of this scene: "Speeches are short, the diction plain, the language almost bare of imagery: as if Shakespeare is anxious not to distract attention from the significance of action and movement. . . . An unusual number of speeches are devoted just to underlining the emotions and postures of people on stage, as in Paulina's words to Leontes: 'I like your silence, it the more shows off/Your wonder' [11. 21-22]."²¹ This shift of emphasis away from language and toward gesture is heightened by the audience's own attention on the actress playing Hermione, as it watches for signs of breathing and movement, trying to detect the gesture that will reveal whether or not Hermione lives. The final discovery of The Winter's Tale, then, lies in a surrender to the moment; and for the audience, this involves a surrender to the stage moment, in which the most riveting activity is pure gesture outlined, almost pictorially, within the stillness of performance, and to which the most appropriate response is rapt attention and "wonder." With the accompanying music, movement and gesture acquire balletic expressiveness.

It is easy to see why the play's conclusion has tempted critics toward Christian interpretations of the play, especially in light of Paulina's reference to redemption from death and her pronouncement that "It is requir'd / You do awake your faith" (11. 94-95), and in light of the word grace, which recurs throughout the play like a musical motif.²² Though strictly Christian frameworks are hard to attach to the play as a whole, the final scene is indeed charged with an almost religious sense of grace as something freely given, beyond desert. Hermione's reappearance provides characters and audience with a development beyond the apparent consequence of events as the play has suggested them, with "the experience of restoration after total loss."²³ In this sense, the scene is beyond time, or at least beyond time as it has constituted a reality in the minds of characters and audience. If time participates in the play's denouement, it is less the stock figure of the play's middle than a force of mystery, always outside comprehension's hold, revealing itself in the miracles of the present. For the audience, grace is born in the "wink of an eye" (V.ii.110), when the stage action severs itself from rigorous connection with the "dramatic time" that has ruled for much of the play.

In the midst of its transformations, however, such grace is never completely free of remembrance. The first four acts have presented grace in terms of freshness, innocence, and gracefulness of gesture and bearing: Hermione has been called "a gracious innocent soul" (II.iii.29), and Perdita was described by Time as "now grown in grace / Equal with wond'ring" (IV.i.24-25). This grace, like the youth of Polixenes and Leontes, is timeless because it has not yet been subjected to the laws of change and consequence. The "grace" of the final scene, however, is richer because more dearly bought, and the passage of time from which it emerges leaves traces to spark remembrance. For one thing, the scene contains reminders of irreversible change. Hermione has grown old: "Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems" (11. 28-29). And while Perdita has found a mother, she has also acquired a history, which, like Prospero's narration to Miranda in Act I of The Tempest, marks her emergence into a world that contains, among other things, time and its changes. Also apparent are reminders of consequences not redeemed by the present. Paulina recalls the dead Antigonus with moving regret, and Leontes' decree that she should marry Camillo does not fully dispel this awareness of "wither'd" loss (1. 133). Similarly, the scene lacks Mamillius, who actually was buried. Although he is never explicitly mentioned in the final scene, he has been mourned as recently as V.i, and his absence leaves the reunited family vaguely incomplete. While Florizel serves as a replacement for Mamillius, he also stands as a reminder of his loss.

The play's conclusion, in other words, resolves the plot with its image of a world ransomed from time, but it nevertheless remains marked by the memory of what time has destroyed. The paradox of temporal experience resolves itself into a duality of perception, a double vision in which time and actuality infuse and qualify each other, a balance of faculties appropriate to a world of coexistent loss and gain. The play has shown that time's effects are inescapable, since action, for all the world's miracles, does have consequences. One cannot escape the reality of change in a sublunary world ruled by mutability's "staling" hand. Festivity must end: Perdita and Florizel enter the cycle of the generations, and Autolycus, after his appearance in the penultimate scene, simply vanishes. Nonetheless, through Shakespeare's manipulation of the stage and its narrative possibilities, the audience feels the rigor of temporality open, again and again, into a stage presence always slightly beyond time's changes and consequences. Sicilia gives way to the wilderness of Bohemia; Polixenes, despite his age and station, succumbs in part both to the festival's liveliness and Perdita's charm. Most of all, in the play's final stroke, the audience discovers that, when it tries to predict time's outlines and outcomes, it risks amazement—that the present can mock not only consequence, but comprehension as well.

Notes

¹ Sonnet 73, 11. 1-2.

² Inga-Stina Ewbank, "The Triumph of Time in 'The Winter's Tale,'" Review of English Literature, vol. 5, no. 2 (April, 1964), p. 84.

³ Sonnet 15, 11. 1-2.

⁴ "It was Shakespeare's usual practice, histories apart, to bring the whole action of his plays within the frame of the picture, leaving little or nothing to narrative exposition" William Archer, Play-Making: A Manual of Craftsmanship [New York: Dodd, Mead, and Co., 1912] p. 98).

⁵ T'ao Ch'ien (A.D. 365-427). Arthur Waley, trans., A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1919; popular ed. 1923), p. 116; quoted (with slight inaccuracy) and discussed in William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930), pp. 30-32. This thematic duality of the temporal and the atemporal no doubt drew upon the opposition present in the Elizabethan/Jacobean conception of temporality, in which time was viewed both as an unchanging realm of universal abstraction and as the more familiar realm of contingency and temporal change. Bernard Beckerman terms these two notions of time iconic and historic, and suggests that the development of Tudor drama saw a general movement from the former conception of time to the latter; see "Historic and Iconic Time in Late Tudor Drama," in Shakespeare: Man of the Theater, ed. Kenneth Muir, Jay L. Halio, and D. J. Palmer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983), pp. 47-54. While the thematic celebration of unchanging ideals may have been relatively muted by the reign of James, The Winter's Tale demonstrates that the theatrical manifestation of iconic time in the stage's immediacy was being explored with unabated dramatic interest.

⁶ Investigating this connection brings us into the company of those critics who have approached this play's dramaturgy and stagecraft: Nevill Coghill, "Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Survey, 11 (1958), pp. 31-41; William H. Matchett, "Some Dramatic Techniques in 'The Winter's Tale,'" Shakespeare Survey, 22 (1969), pp. 93-107; Barbara A. Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances (1976); and Charles Frey, Shakespeare's Vast Romance: A Study of The Winter's Tale (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980). The Winter's Tale has made itself available to some of the finest "theatrical" readings in Shakespearean criticism, perhaps because (as we have long sensed) its dramatic effects depend more than any other play on its realization in performance. The statue scene alone has been an important school for such readings.

⁷ Matchett, "Some Dramatic Techniques," pp. 94-98. Shakespeare, after all, makes the relationship between Hermione and Polixenes much less "ambiguous" than Greene did in Pandosto, where Bellaria, "willing to shew how unfainedly she loved her husband, by his friends entertainment, used him likewise so familiarly, that her countenance bewrayed how her mind was affected towards him: oftentimes comming her selfe into his bedchamber, to see that nothing shuld be amisse to mislike him." James Winny, ed., The Descent of Euphues: Three Elizabethan Romance Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 69. For ways in which this question has been addressed in productions of The Winter's Tale, see Dennis Bartholomeusz, The Winter's Tale in Performance in England and America, 1611-1976 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), esp. pp. 229-32.

⁸ Frey, Shakespeare's Vast Romance, pp. 134-38.

⁹ See Stanley Wells, "Shakespeare and Romance," in Later Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 8 (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 66-67, and J. H. P. Pafford, ed., The Winter's Tale, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1963), pp. lxiii-lxvii.

¹⁰ Ibid., p. lv. Though Mowat disputes the claim of critics such as E. M. W. Tillyard that Acts I through III constitute the equivalent of Shakespearean tragedy (The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances, pp. 5-21), it is nonetheless striking how dramaturgically similar this concluding scene is to the tragedies and how many devices it borrows from them: the stage configuration of assembled characters grouped around a locus of suffering, commemoration of the tragic events in the form of narrative, the ironic counterpointing of knowledge and loss.

¹¹ Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (1960) and Shakespeare's Tragic Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

¹² Daniel Seltzer, "The Staging of the Last Plays," in Later Shakespeare, pp. 137-38.

¹³ Matchett, "Some Dramatic Techniques," p. 101.

¹⁴ One of the most extensive thematic studies of Autolycus' role within the play is Lee Sheridan Cox, "The Role of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale," Studies in English Literature, 9 (1969), pp. 283-301.

¹⁵ Francis Berry, "Word and Picture in the Final Plays," in Later Shakespeare, pp. 93-94.

¹⁶ Coghill, "Six Points of Stage-Craft," pp. 38-39. "In practice this scene is among the most gripping and memorable in the play" (p. 39).

¹⁷ To a much lesser extent, the reunions between Leontes and Polixenes and between Leontes and Camillo are also "obligatory," and these too are merely reported. The Messenger speeches do contribute something important to the play's conclusion, in part through their narrative activity. The Messengers present the offstage events in the terms of story and fable—"like an old tale" (V.ii.28); "like an old tale still" (1. 61)—contributing to the almost formal narrativity of the play's final scenes. But the scene itself underscores the limits of such narrativity, for the burden of these reports is to suggest how fully the offstage reconciliations exceed the bounds of story—"Such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it" (11. 23-25); "I never heard of such another encounter, which lames report to follow it, and undoes decription to do it" (11. 56-58)—and to make the conventions of narrative feel inadequate to the "wonder" recounted and (unknown to the audience) soon to be staged. Marjorie Garber discusses the messenger scene in terms of the "inexpressibility topos"; see "'The Rest is Silence': Ineffability and the 'Unscene' in Shakespeare's Plays," in Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett, ed. Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter (New York: AMS Press, 1984), pp. 47-48.

¹⁸ In this role, she anticipates Ariel, who likewise scourges memory in his "ministers of Fate" speech to Alonso, Antonio, and Sebastian: "But remember / (For that's my business to you) that you three / From Milan did supplant good Prospero, / Expos'd unto the sea (which hath requit it) / Him, and his innocent child" (The Tempest, III.iii.68-72).

¹⁹ Aristotle, On Poetry and Style, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), p. 33. For Grube's "Antinous," I have substituted the more familiar "Alcinous." See Aristotle's Poetics, p. 28.

²⁰ For a discussion of the ways in which Shakespeare uses specific notations in the text to control the theatrical realization of the statue scene, see Jörg Hasler, "Romance in the Theater: The Stagecraft of the 'Statue Scene' in The Winter's Tale," in Shakespeare: Man of the Theater, pp. 203-11.

²¹ Ewbank, "The Triumph of Time," p. 97. On the importance of gesture within Shakespearean drama, see David Bevington, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 67-98.

²² See S. L. Bethell, The Winter's Tale: A Study (London: Staples Press, [1947]), and Roy Battenhouse, "Theme and Structure in 'The Winter's Tale,'" Shakespeare Survey, 33 (1980), pp. 123-38.

²³ Matchett, "Some Dramatic Techniques," p. 106.

FURTHER READING

Adams, Robert M. "The Winter's Tale." In Shakespeare: The Four Romances, pp. 90-122. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989.

Compares The Winter's Tale with Robert Greene's Pandosto, the prose romance thought to be Shakespeare's source for the play.

Bristol, Michael D. "Social Time in The Winter's Tale" In Big-time Shakespeare, pp. 147-74. London: Routledge, 1996.

Claims that spatio-temporal discontinuities shape the social relationships in the play.

Burton, Julie. "Folktale, Romance and Shakespeare." In Studies in Medieval English Romances: Some New Approaches, edited by Derek Brewer, pp. 176-97. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1988.

Positions The Winter's Tale in the history of Middle English romances according to its manipulation of the pattern of traditional folktale types, most notably the separation of family members and their eventual reunion.

Cohen, Derek. "Patriarchy and Jealousy in Othello and The Winter's Tale" Modern Language Quarterly 48, No. 3 (September 1987): 207-23.

Contends that, in both Othello and The Winter's Tale, "the examples of Othello and Leontes demonstrate that in a patriarchy the fidelity of wives is the major prop and condition of social order."

Girard, René. "The Crime and Conversion of Leontes in The Winter's Tale." Religion and Literature 22, Nos. 2-3 (Summer-Autumn 1990): 193-219.

Against a religious background, views Leontes' conversion as an overcoming of "mimetic desire."

Hardman, C. B. "Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and the Stuart Golden Age." The Review of English Studies XLV, No. 178 (May 1994): 221-29.

Contends that The Winter's Tale contains "a consistent series of allusions which function as a reinforcement of the tragicomic structure: the harmonious conclusion to potentially tragic events may be seen as analogous to the promised restoration of the [Jacobean] Golden Age."

Hunt, Maurice. "The Winter's Tale." In Shakespeare's Romance of the Word, pp. 74-108. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990.

Claims that the play dramatizes the breakdown in the communicative power of language.

Overton, Bill. "Part Two: Appraisal." In The Winter's Tale, pp. 55-85. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989.

Places the play in its historical context in an effort to appreciate the meaning of several frequently misunderstood scenes, including the theatricality of Leontes' jealousy and the dramatic function of Autolycus.

Sanders, Wilbur. "The Hypothesis of Hope (Act 5)." In The Winter's Tale, by William Shakespeare, pp. 101-114. Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1987.

Argues that a tragic background looms over the comic elements of The Winter's Tale.

Sokol, B. J. "The Statue's Tale: Metaphoric Art." In Art and Illusion in The Winter's Tale, pp. 55-84. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Examines Hermione's statue against Shakespeare's possible source materials in an effort to illuminate his psychological topography.

Spriet, Pierre. "The Winter's Tale or the Staging of an Absence." In The Show Within: Dramatic and Other Insets. English Renaissance Drama (1550-1642), edited by François Laroque, pp. 253-66. Montpellier: Publications de Université Paul-Valéry, 1992.

Deconstructs the claims of many modern interpreters of The Winter's Tale in an effort to expose their ideological assumptions and contrast them with those of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

Tylus, Jane. "Tut yourself under his shroud, / The universal landlord': Shakespeare and Resistance to Authorship." In Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance, pp. 144-73. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Explores The Winter's Tale in order to reconstruct Shakespeare's attitude toward James' monarchy; Tylus interprets the play to be "a carefully crafted challenge to the cultural poetics of the Jacobean court."

Ward, David. "Affection, Intention, and Dreams in The Winter's Tale" The Modern Language Review 82, Part 3 (July 1987): 545-54.

Examines a puzzling passage in act one, scene two of The Winter's Tale, interpreting it as a reflection of multiple levels of consciousness and self-deception.

Watterson, William Collins. "Shakespeare's Confidence Man." The Sewanee Review CI, No. 4 (Fall 1993): 536-48.

Discusses the character of Autolycus, concluding that "Autolycus's unrepentant egotism [is] an avatar of Shakespeare's creative self."