SOURCE: “Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare’s The Winter's Tale,” in The Winter’s Tale: Critical Essays, edited by Maurice Hunt, Garland Publishing, 1995, pp. 119-38.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1964, Tayler analyzes the underlying structure of The Winter's Tale and identifies the relationship between nature and art as a central concern.]

The Winter's Tale, like Book VI of The Faerie Queene, exhibits a specialized use of the traditional materials of pastoral in conjunction with an explicit interest in the philosophical problem of Nature versus Art. Discussion must involve, at least initially and briefly, some reference to Shakespeare's earlier work and then to Cymbeline and The Tempest, both from his last period; for these later works, in particular, share many of the same intellectual concerns as well as the romance form. The last plays suffered a period of criticism in which, like Spenser's Legend of Courtesy, they were dismissed because they resembled insufficiently the work of The Poet's Serious Period. After the sentimental pleasure nineteenth-century critics like Dowden took in visualizing Shakespeare On The Heights in his last years at Stratford, the reaction, led by Lytton Strachey, took the romances in one way or another as evidence of senile decay. Shakespeare's powers were declining; like Spenser he was being bored to death by life and art. In the past twenty years, however, the last plays have received favorable attention from such writers as G. Wilson Knight and E. M. W. Tillyard, who have come to regard the romances as organic extensions of Shakespeare's earlier preoccupations, as complementary to his earlier tragic concerns.

In one way or another the writers of recent criticism have endeavored to lend the last plays dignity by arguing that Shakespeare had more on his mind than cranking out remunerative romances. The verse, in its range and intensity, seems to support the idea that these plays have depths beyond what is usually allowed to the genre of romance. In Cymbeline, for example, the generally wooden Posthumus, at long last united to Imogen, exclaims in the moment of their embrace:

                                                            Hang there like fruit, my soul,
Till the tree die!

(V.v.263-64)¹

The sudden power of lines such as these appears to point to a degree of seriousness that seems incompatible with the form of dramatic romance, and in The Winter's Tale and The Tempest the percentage of such lines increases.

A convenient example of the kind of intensity of which Shakespeare was capable at this time occurs in The Winter's Tale when Leontes describes his state of mind at discovering his wife's supposed infidelity:

                                                            How blest am I
In my just censure, in my true opinion!
Alack for lesser knowledge! how accurs’d
In being so blest! There may be in the cup
A spider steep’d, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge
Is not infected; but if one present
Th’ abhorr’d ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.

(II.i.36-45)

We are of course at liberty to see the rhetorical mastery and violent strength of verse like this as melodramatic; what is harder is to see it as appropriate to romance. Accordingly, recent criticism has quite properly tried to find “symbolic” and “mythic” undercurrents beneath a “superficial” surface of romance and pastoral elements. D. A. Traversi, for example, maintains that the “plot of The Winter's Tale is a perfect example of the symbolic technique perfected by Shakespeare in his last plays. It is the story of the division created in love and friendship by the passage of time and by the action of ‘blood,’ and of the healing of those divisions through penitence and renewed personal devotion.”²

Granting it seems unwise to dismiss the genre of romance without having scrutinized it at all closely, most of us will nevertheless sympathize with such attempts to lend the last plays a serious purpose, if only because we are dissatisfied with the picture of Shakespeare as an elderly romanticist yawning his way through imitations of Beaumont and Fletcher. The tendency is to seek this serious purpose at some “mythic” or “symbolic” level because the romantic and pastoral elements are generally regarded as merely entertaining.

Putting aside for a moment the knowledge that pastoral does not preclude philosophy, the fact remains that the improbable plots of the last plays invite symbolic interpretation. In each of the plays a royal father loses his offspring through his own passionate excess, so that an initial atmosphere of prosperity and tranquillity precedes a time of confusion and suffering. In each the lost child is restored after living for a time among shepherds or in the wilderness, so that after the period of suffering, and out of the green world, emerges a new atmosphere of prosperity and tranquillity. This symbolic pattern is, however, so overlaid with the highly stylized elements of traditional romance—sublimely faithful love and excessive jealousy, complex incident and intrigue, puppet characterization, mistaken identity, disguisings, coincidence, innocuous poisons, white magic, amiable savages, and the like, that the pattern is hard to discern and harder still to exhibit as part of Shakespeare's conscious or unconscious intention.³

Although The Winter's Tale reveals a particularly complete and intense formulation of the “mythic” or “symbolic” pattern that critics suppose to be characteristic of the last plays, this underlying configuration is of such a comprehensive type that it has proved susceptible of translation into a variety of different terms: it may be a derivative pattern of a quasi-psychological kind, as in Tillyard's theory that the last plays represent a vital extension of concerns revealed by Shakespeare during his tragic phase; or it may be an anthropological pattern, a sophisticated vegetation myth, its ultimate meanings looking back on folk ritual;⁴ or it may even be, despite the elements of romance, a theological pattern of sin, atonement, and redemption.⁵ So far as The Winter's Tale is concerned, the problem is not so much whether the underlying pattern exists, but how it is to be theorized about.

The language and the imagery of the play, remarkably rich in allusions, seem to offer justification for psychological, theological, anthropological, and other interpretations, but my own conviction is that we are not likely to settle anything through appeals to different systems of abstraction; all such systems appear to be so comprehensive as to include the fundamental story elements of which the romances are compounded. My own contribution, in any case, is not to offer a new system of abstractions (for I intend to describe the underlying pattern in as neutral language as possible), but to point out that a fundamental part of the pattern reveals Shakespeare's literary and philosophical concern with Nature and Art. In other words, the “symbolic” pattern of The Winter's Tale, turning on images of the seasons, of birth and death, of the sea as destroyer and savior, works together with the conceptual pattern of Nature and Art.

The division between Nature and Art occupied Shakespeare throughout his career. It is implicit in the pastoral episodes of As You Like It, and even as early as Venus and Adonis he is toying with the conventional notion of strife between Nature and Art in painting:

Look, when a painter would surpass the life
In limning out a well-proportioned steed,
His art with nature's workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed.

(ll. 289-92)

And in reference to a painting of the siege of Troy in The Rape of Lucrece:

A thousand lamentable objects there,
In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life.

(ll. 1373-74)

The association of “art” with death and “nature” with life persists even so far as the “dead likeness” of Hermione in The Winter's Tale; and the commonplace pairing of Nature and Art is alluded to in play after play, reappearing at some length in Timon of Athens, shortly before the writing of the last romances. In the opening scene that advertises the main concerns of that play, the Poet and the Painter are discussing an example of the Painter's work, and the Poet is amiably self-important in traditional terms:

                                                            I will say of it,
It tutors nature. Artificial strife
Lives in these touches, livelier than life.

(I.i.36-38)

Such statements are commonplace, and despite some attempt at variation the similarity of wording implies that Shakespeare produced such literary detritus from his memory on demand, without thought and without effort, as the appropriate occasion presented itself.

Although Shakespeare's use of the division in his allusions to the fine arts is entirely traditional, Nature and Art represented a vital and living problem for him in the ethical speculations of the last plays. In Cymbeline the beginnings of what is to be an intense preoccupation may be glimpsed in one of the major ethical contrasts of the play—between the King's stepson, Cloten, and his real sons, Guiderius and Arviragus. Cloten is the product of the “art o’ th’ court” that Belarius, the guardian of the real sons, continually disparages. Guiderius and Arviragus, having been brought up in savage surroundings apart from the court, represent the triumph of Nature untutored by Art. As Belarius explains it:

                                                            O thou goddess,
Thou divine Nature, how thyself thou blazon’st
In these two princely boys! They are as gentle
As zephyrs blowing below the violet,
Not wagging his sweet head; and yet as rough,
(Their royal blood enchaf’d) as the rud’st wind
That by the top doth take the mountain pine
And make him stoop to th’ vale. ’Tis wonder
That an invisible instinct should frame them
To royalty unlearn’d, honour untaught,
Civility not seen from other, valour
That wildly grows in them but yields a crop
As if it had been sow’d.

(IV.ii.169-81)

The opposition between Nature and Art is not absolute for Shakespeare—he allows the Princes to express an awareness that courts may be in many respects superior to caves—but throughout the terms have been manipulated in such a way as to provide a main theme of the romance. As far as the Princes are concerned, Shakespeare agrees with Spenser and the courtesy books in making Nature more powerful than nurture; and thus it is appropriate that Nature unaided by Art should figure in the reconciliation scene at the end of the play. Granted the thematic value of the terms, remarks like those of Belarius' attain in context a force beyond that which may be assigned to a commonplace. In Cymbeline statements about Nature and Art have become part of the dramatic design, so that they function, perhaps a little creakily, as part of the plot and not merely as isolated allusions.

By the time of The Tempest the process has been developed and intensified, passing from the relatively derivative use of the division to a more subtle and skillfully articulated study of the traditional opposition of Nature to Art. Frank Kermode's elegant Introduction to The Tempest takes full account of Nature and Art and there is no need to rehearse his arguments here; although one may grow restive at his identification of Caliban as the central figure of the play, against which all the other characters are measured, it nevertheless seems clear that Kermode is right in contending that the “main opposition is between the worlds of Prospero's Art and Caliban's Nature.”⁶ Hence there is little to be gained by pursuing this survey: enough has been said to establish Shakespeare's interest, early and late, in Nature and Art and to provide a context for detailed consideration of The Winter's Tale, the play that exploits most fully the relationship between the philosophical division and the pastoral genre.

Beneath the romance trappings of The Winter's Tale the critics have seen a pattern that, reduced to its essentials and stated in relatively neutral language, is based on cycles or alternations of harmony and alienation, of integration and disruption.⁷ Harmony, symbolized in the friendship of Leontes and Polixenes, receives initial emphasis in the first scene as Camillo remarks, perhaps a little ambiguously: “They were train’d together in their childhoods; and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection which cannot choose but branch now.” In the next scene Polixenes sounds the same note as he recalls for Hermione what it was like to be “boy eternal” with her husband, Leontes.

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. Had we pursu’d 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.

(I.ii.67-75)

The idea of carefree harmony and the connotations of spring and birth are in this particular passage subordinated to the theological terms. The harmony recalled by Polixenes is a vision of the integrity of man in Eden, free of the taint of original sin—an association reinforced by the wit of the following lines as he and Hermione joke about the boys having “first sinn’d with” the queens, the implication being that the innocence of former days was lost because of woman.

This is not allegory, of course, nor is The Winter's Tale a covert recapitulation of the Fall of Man. But the web of allusion in these lines provides a frame of reference within which the main events of the play can receive meaning: the speech introduces the vision of the green world, the ideal of past harmony, and associates it with birth, innocence, spring, even with the garden of Eden. To speak technically, this is the “integrity” of Nature before the Fall.

The vision of the Garden, however, is brief and not easily sustained. As Shakespeare's audience was well aware, the harmony of Eden had been lost to man so that his “stronger blood” was no longer free from the hereditary “imposition.” Consequently the Elizabethan audience was better prepared than Shakespeare's modern critics for Leontes' sudden and unmotivated jealousy, the towering excess of passion that, appearing in the same scene as Polixenes' speech of remembered bliss, obliterates the initial mood of harmony and introduces chaos and death for which Leontes is finally to do penance.

Leontes is a man, his Nature impaired by the Fall, so that he is non posse non peccare, not able not to err. The terrible consequences of Leontes' passion—alienation from Polixenes and Camillo, the death of his son, the death of Antigonus, the apparent deaths of his daughter and wife—form the main burden of the play until the Chorus of Time that introduces Act IV. Meanwhile the members of Shakespeare's audience have seen the result of an excess of passion and have been able to judge the action in the terms, moral and theological, most meaningful to them. The first phase of the cycle is complete; harmony and integration have been replaced by alienation and disruption.

The pivotal point of the play lies where it should, toward the end of Act III; as in Pericles and The Tempest it involves a storm at sea, the archetypal image of birth and death. The young shepherd (the clown) witnesses the destruction of the ship and the death of Antigonus, but at the same time the old shepherd comes across the living babe whose restoration figures in the fulfillment of the oracle. The scene thus recalls the disruption and chaos of the earlier action and at the same time anticipates the restoration of harmony in the last act. As the old shepherd puts it, saying more than he understands: “Now bless thyself! thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born” (III.iii.116-18).

Act IV includes the pastoral interlude and, as we have come to expect, the main references to the controversy over Nature and Art. Florizel, the son of Polixenes, has fallen in love with the shepherdess Perdita whom we know to be the daughter of Leontes, marooned by his order during a transport of jealousy. The child has grown up without the benefit of Art, and yet her demeanor, like that of the Princes in Cymbeline, reflects the irrefragable excellence of royal blood. Throughout the word “queen” is applied to her, for as Florizel says:

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

(IV.iv.143-46)

Both royal children are for the moment disguised as shepherds, the difference being that Florizel knows his true birth whereas Perdita does not. And while they masquerade as pastoral figures, Shakespeare takes care to have us associate the children with more than purity of blood.

Florizel's name—it does not appear in Shakespeare's source—is clearly allegorical, and the association with Flora receives further emphasis in the Prince's description of Perdita in her role as queen of the sheep-shearing:

These your unusual weeds to each part of you
Do give a life—no shepherdess, but Flora
Peering in April's front! This your sheep-shearing
Is as a meeting of the petty gods,
And you the queen on’t.

(IV.iv.1-5)

Despite the wide difference in (apparent) birth, Shakespeare makes it clear that there is no intention of exercising droit du seigneur; Florizel's “youth” and “blood” are as idyllic and pure as his pastoral surroundings, as Perdita herself recognizes even when his praise of her is so extravagant as to seem suspicious:

Your praises are too large. But that your youth,
And the true blood which peeps so fairly through’t,
Do plainly give you out an unstain’d shepherd,
With wisdom I might fear, my Doricles [i.e., Florizel],
You woo’d me the false way.

(IV.iv.147-51)

Florizel makes it explicit:

                                                            my desires
Run not before mine honour, nor my lusts
Burn hotter than my faith.

(IV.iv. 33-35)

In short, Shakespeare has taken care to lend Florizel and Perdita the qualities that his audience associated with pastoral figures—idyllic innocence and artless Nature.

The value of Perdita's artlessness is particularly emphasized. Her intellectual simplicity cleaves directly to the heart of a problem, a quality that leads Camillo to acknowledge that he

                                                            cannot say ’tis pity
She lacks instructions, for she seems a mistress
To most that teach.

(IV.iv.592-94)

And her modest demeanor does not prevent her from making the pastoral comparison between country and court explicit in referring to Polixenes' rage at discovering his son in love with a “shepherdess”:

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

(IV.iv.453-57)

Even this satiric cut—it is in no sense “democratic”⁸—is of the kind common in pastoral. So far in Shakespeare there is no more than what may be expected from the bucolic tradition: spring, youth, innocence, idyllic love, and the assumption that Nature is superior to Art. But when we have understood the exact function of the pastoral episode in relation to the play as a whole, in relation to its dramatic structure and to its underlying alternation of harmony and disintegration, we will be in a better position to see the individual uses to which Shakespeare has put the traditional materials of Nature and Art.

The pastoral episode immediately precedes the last act, the time of reconciliation and reintegration. The court of Sicily—where the action of the play began—is now the scene of an elaborate series of discoveries in which poetic and other justice is rendered all around. A number of exchanges between Paulina and Leontes have assured the audience that the king is truly repentant; the theological note, sounded so persistently and quietly throughout the play, once more assumes a prominent function, as in the words of Cleomenes:

Sir, you have done enough, and have perform’d
A saint like sorrow. No fault could you make
Which you have not redeem’d; indeed, paid down
More penitence than done trespass. At the last,
Do as the heavens have done: forget your evil;
With them, forgive yourself.

(V.i.1-6)

Redemption is indeed at hand.

Florizel and Perdita, fleeing Bohemia and the anger of Polixenes, appear at the Sicilian court; and Leontes, in words that recall the pastoral interlude, welcomes the lovers as a change from the winter of his discontent: “Welcome hither / As is the spring to th’ earth” (V.i.151-52). The “unstain’d” youth of Florizel and Perdita, their “true blood,” symbolizes the restoration of harmony, the coming of spring to the wasteland, and the purification of the “stronger blood” of their fathers that is impaired by the stain of original sin. Perdita, she who was lost, is found, and discovered to be the daughter of the King; Leontes and Polixenes are once more united in friendship; the way is cleared for the young lovers; Hermione is restored to Leontes during the famous (or notorious) statue scene; and the extraordinary network of repeated words and phrases—youth and age, spring and winter, Nature and Art, birth and death, innocence and sin, Nature and Grace, blood and infection, and so on—is resolved in a series of brilliant puns, in the paradoxical wit of the last scenes. The second phase of the cycle of alienation and harmony, of disruption and reintegration, has been completed.

Enough has been said so that the function of the pastoral scenes in this cycle of—to put it theologically—Fall and Redemption is perhaps obvious. Without these scenes the play would be structurally and symbolically defective, for they reflect, at the appropriate point in the action, the harmony with which the play began: the qualities that Leontes and Polixenes were said to have had as boys are those which Shakespeare gives in turn to Perdita and Florizel. And even the imagery of “twinn’d lambs,” together with the assumption of innocence unimpaired by original sin, that Shakespeare uses in describing the young princes accurately reflects pastoral conventions; Shakespeare chose appropriately if not “originally” in this respect.

The imaginative force of the paradisiacal intimacy that once existed between Polixenes and Leontes is therefore essentially similar to the pastoral harmony that is now associated with Perdita and Florizel, and it is therefore proper that the two moments in the Garden balance each other structurally, the one preceding disruption and the other preceding integration. Moreover, the two moments serve a similar moral function in the play. In the cycle of disruption and integration the moments of childhood innocence and pastoral integrity provide the audience, in essentially similar ways, with visions of ideal order in terms of which the rest of the action may be meaningfully understood. The pastoral episode is consequently not merely a decorative interlude but the structural and symbolic prelude to the restoration of harmony in the last act.

Shakespeare's use of pastoral as the expression of an ethical ideal, of a simple world by which the more complex one might be judged, is strictly traditional, and yet it is a little more complicated than my statements so far might imply. Shakespeare's idealization of shepherd life, for example, does not extend much beyond Perdita who is, like Pastorella in The Faerie Queene, of shepherd nurture but not of shepherd nature. And while the old shepherd, that “weather-bitten conduit of many kings' reigns” (V.ii.61-62), is allowed to display a certain amount of rude dignity, the Mopsas and Dorcases of Shakespeare's pastoral world are bumpkins, foils for that snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, Autolycus. Perdita's royal blood manifests itself despite her surroundings and not because of them. For Shakespeare, then, shepherds may serve as exemplars of virtue if they are royal shepherds, and Nature may do without the civilizing influence of Art if it is royal Nature. Toward ordinary shepherds Shakespeare's attitude is realistic and gently satirical; his tolerant humor recalls Theocritus but is a long way from Vergil's delicate enthusiasms.

Shakespeare's attitude toward the division between Nature and Art is at least as complicated, but analysis begins most conveniently with his knowledge of traditional materials. Certainly he was aware of the long-standing association of pastoral with Nature and Art, for his pastoral episode includes a fairly thorough debate on the subject. Camillo and Polixenes, disguised, appear at the sheepshearing to investigate the truth of the rumored liaison between Florizel and some humble shepherdess. Polixenes and Perdita discuss flowers, but matters of cultural propriety are always near the surface of what is ostensibly a horticultural argument.

These speeches are worth quoting at length because of their explicit relevance to my thesis, their complex character, and their importance as conceptual statements of the ethical concerns of the play. Perdita begins by apologizing for presenting these men of “middle age” with winter flowers; she has no fall flowers because she will not grow “nature's bastards,” and the discussion immediately turns into a highly technical debate on Nature and Art.

Per.           Sir,
the year growing ancient,
Not yet on summer's death nor on the birth
Of trembling winter, the fairest flow’rs o’ th’ season
Are our carnations and streak’d gillyvors,
Which some call nature's bastards. Of that kind
Our rustic garden's barren, and I care not
To get slips of them.
Pol.           Wherefore,
gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?
Per.           For I have
heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.
Pol.           Say there
be.
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean. So, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature—change it rather; but
The art itself is nature.
Per.           So it is.
Pol. Then make your garden rich in
gillyvors,
And do not call them bastards.
Per.           I’ll
not put
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them;
No more than, were I painted, I would wish
This youth should say ’twere well, and only therefore
Desire to breed by me.

(IV.iv.79-103)

The speeches are obviously meant to be significant in relation to the entire action of the play; they are not merely decorative commonplaces, but their function has never been fully explained.

There is a possibility that Shakespeare intended the actor portraying Polixenes to speak his lines in such a way that the audience will take the horticultural reasoning as a trap, as a device by which Polixenes hopes to expose Perdita as a scheming wench who is after that “bud of nobler race,” Florizel. But it is Perdita who first commits herself against “nature's bastards,” and Polixenes' tone, now deliberative, now authoritative, does not appear to support such an interpretation. The King seems pretty clearly to be reasoning in earnest.

Admittedly, the contention that an Art that changes Nature is in fact Nature may seem at first blush sophistical, calculated to make a young girl betray her desires for the “gentler scion.” Yet Polixenes' stand is perhaps the most dignified and carefully argued in the whole history of possible opposition between Nature and Art. Like Aristotle and Plato, Polixenes points out that the “art itself is nature.” Aristotle had argued in the Physics that when we claim that Art perfects Nature we do in fact mean in the last analysis that Nature perfects herself: “The best illustration is a doctor doctoring himself: nature is like that.”⁹ And Plato in the tenth book of the Laws had maintained that the good legislator “ought to support the law and also art, and acknowledge that both alike exist by nature, and no less than nature.”¹⁰ Although Polixenes' argument may appear sophistical, it is in fact an orthodox statement of the “real” significance of the ancient opposition.

There is of course nothing new in the mixture of horticultural and social vocabularies either, but the implications of the mixture in Polixenes' argument are shockingly unorthodox:

                                                            You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race.

Translated into purely social terms—Shakespeare's equivocal vocabulary forces the audience to consider the social implications—the argument of Polixenes seems to call for a program of egalitarian eugenics, a program equally shocking, one suspects, to Polixenes and to the Elizabethan audience. Especially in the given dramatic situation, for the King is at this moment disguised as a shepherd expressly to prevent his “gentler scion” from marrying a “bark of baser kind.”

Perdita has throughout revealed a Spenserian appreciation of “degree,” and now her reply to Polixenes rejects his (implied) social radicalism along with his horticultural orthodoxy:

                                                            I’ll not put
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them;
No more than, were I painted, I would wish
This youth [Florizel] should say ’twere well, and only therefore
Desire to breed by me.

Perdita's uneasiness in her “borrowed flaunts” (IV.iv.23), her modest conviction that she is, “poor lowly maid, / Most goddess-like prank’d up” (IV.iv.9-10), has culminated in her final identification of Art with deceit, with false imitation, with “painted” womanhood—a kind of Art morally and otherwise inferior to Nature. Her position is, indeed, as venerable as that of Polixenes, appearing in such diverse places as Plato's concept of imitation in the fine arts, in Castiglione's view of cosmetics,¹¹ and in virtually the whole of the pastoral tradition. Yet neither Polixenes nor Perdita may be taken to represent Shakespeare's final word on the division between Nature and Art.¹² The two traditions are both philosophically “respectable”; dramatic propriety alone requires that Polixenes maintain the court position and Perdita hold to the pastoral belief in the absolute dichotomy between the two terms.

If Shakespeare's “own” position must remain for the moment conjectural, it is at least possible to understand what he is doing with the ancient division between Nature and Art. Clearly he is using it dramatically, as an oblique commentary on the action of the play. Less obvious is his use of the conceptual terms of the division to reflect the major ethical concerns of the play, using them to sum up with dramatic irony the ethical and social questions of The Winter's Tale.

With Perdita, for example, the debate becomes a comment on the way Shakespeare has characterized her. She is given to us as the creation of Nature who, despite her lack of Art, is “mistress / To most that teach”; she is completely incapable of deceit, and her charming sensuousness is tempered by a clear perception of decorum, of her proper place in the order of things. At the same time her role in the sheepshearing is the creation of Art; her “unusual weeds” make her a “goddess,” a “queen,” but since these “borrowed flaunts” are deceitful, she resolves finally to “queen it no inch farther” (IV.iv.460). Thus Perdita's stand on the ancient debate accurately reflects her character; it is perfectly consistent with the manner in which she is dramatized. It is this and more. In addition it anticipates ironically the discoveries of the last act, for although Perdita at this point appears to be arguing (in horticultural terms) against a marriage with Florizel, her words describe unwittingly but exactly the final situation of the two lovers: in the last act it will be revealed that Perdita is a “queen” by Nature rather than by Art, that her “borrowed flaunts” are hers by right. At the time when she takes her stand on the question of Nature versus Art, she is by Nature what she conceives herself to be by Art.

Her speech to Polixenes is therefore effective in two main ways: on the one hand it accents her pastoral status as a figure of Nature, free of the corruption and taint of Art, suggesting the Nature of Eden; on the other hand the speech anticipates obliquely the last act of the play in which she and the other characters (the spectator is of course already aware of the dramatic irony of her speech) will understand that Florizel's metaphorical praise—“all your acts are queens”—represents truth on the literal as well as the figurative level.

Polixenes' argument similarly sets up reverberations far beyond the limits of his speech and the immediate context. Polixenes, like Perdita, seemingly argues against his own best interests, for his resolution of the opposition between Nature and Art apparently sanctions the marriage of a noble to a commoner, the “bud of nobler race” to a “bark of baser kind.” Thus, as far as Shakespeare and the audience are concerned, it is still another opportunity for dramatic irony; again the spectator is aware of more in a character's words than the character himself. Polixenes appears conscious only of the horticultural application of his words while the spectator is in a position to see that, in the case of Perdita, the “art itself is nature.” Thus, Polixenes is also “right,” even in the social sense of his words, though he cannot yet see the queenliness of Perdita's “nature is made better by no mean / But nature makes that mean.” It is only in the last act that the disagreement between Perdita and Polixenes is transcended and resolved in the general restoration of harmony.

The last act is worth looking at in connection with Nature and Art because Shakespeare returns to the subject, this time in the sphere of the fine arts, in an attempt to resolve the paradoxical contrarieties generated out of the debate between Perdita and Polixenes. That which was lost has been found in the person of Perdita, and the two kings are reunited. All that remains is for the dead to rise as in Pericles: the “dead” Hermione is still lost to Leontes. Her improbable restoration in the statue scene has been condemned as a vulgar concession to popular taste and cited as an example of the triviality of the romance form. Such criticism quite misses the point, for it ignores the ground swell of harmony and alienation that informs the play and, even more pertinently, it neglects Shakespeare's preoccupation with Nature and Art.

Properly assessed, the “unrealistic” quality of the statue scene is beside the point. Here as elsewhere in the last romances Shakespeare's respect for “truth” lies in the intensity of his verse and in the underlying pattern of the plays. If the statue scene is improbable, it nevertheless conforms with fidelity to the cycle of alienation and harmony, and the verse of this scene possesses a rare imaginative integrity. All the crucial words of the play—summer and winter, “infancy and grace,” Nature and Art, life and death—come together in the last scenes in a series of reckless paradoxes. Paulina speaks to the statue:

Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you.

(V.iii.102-3)

The time of Hermione's “better grace” has arrived; her stepping down from the pedestal means harmony, forgiveness, restoration, redemption.

The role played by Nature and Art in this larger resolution is perhaps obvious. Clearly a statue represents Art, and in this case the statue represents living Art,¹³ or Nature. Such distinctions were equally clear to Shakespeare, and his language shows that he also expected his audience to have in mind the traditional opposition between the terms. We first hear of the statue from the Third Gentleman, whose description is marked by the ancient division and avails itself of the ancient analogy:

… a piece many years in doing, and now newly perform’d, by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.

(V.ii.103-8)

The artist is the ape of Nature, his imitation practiced so perfectly that he almost outdoes Nature, his final aim being naturam vincere. We have already seen the same notion in Venus and Adonis, the Rape of Lucrece, and Timon; it is the cliché of iconic poetry of the period, summed up in Cardinal Bembo's epitaph on Raphael: “Nature feared that she would be conquered while he lived, and would die when he died.”¹⁴ It is in this tradition of friendly contest between Art and Nature that Paulina invites praise of her “statue”:

                                                            Prepare
To see the life as lively mock’d as ever
Still sleep mock’d death,

(V.iii.18-20)

and it is in this tradition that Leontes praises it:

The fixture of her eye has motion in’t,
As we are mock’d with art.

(V.iii.67-68)

Art has successfully imitated Nature, or so it seems to those who do not know that Paulina has preserved Hermione alive.

The symbolic value of the scene is clear: as with Perdita, the imitation or “mock” of Nature turns out finally to be Nature after all. What seems to be Art is in fact Nature, fulfilling Polixenes' assertion that the “art itself is nature” and confirming Perdita's belief in the supremacy of “great creating nature.” The statue scene is with all its improbability a dramatic embodiment of Shakespeare's preoccupation with Nature and Art; it transcends the earlier disagreement between Perdita and Polixenes, for the opposition between Nature and Art dissolves in the pageantry of the statue's descent.

The traditional division lies at the center of The Winter's Tale. It is used conceptually and as an instrument of dramatic irony in the pastoral episode, and it appears symbolically as part of the total resolution of Act V. Nevertheless, Shakespeare does not seem to be as far committed to the division as Spenser. Although both poets take full advantage of the association of the literary genre with the philosophical division and although both use the pastoral as “an element in the harmonious solution of a longer story”¹⁵ about the court, in Shakespeare the division lacks much of the didactic immediacy it possesses in Spenser. The virtue of courtesy must be placed properly in the order of nature, and Spenser uses Nature and Art to achieve this didactic end; he is thinking with the established terms more than he is about them. Perhaps because The Winter's Tale is less obtrusively didactic, Shakespeare thinks about the terms more than he does with them, finding in Nature and Art opportunities for witty debate and verbal paradox; perhaps because of his lack of absolute commitment he can afford to extract from various and conflicting interpretations the full dramatic value of the philosophical division. In The Winter's Tale the traditional terms represent, through dramatic irony, a conceptual summation of the ethical and social interests of the play, and in the last act they form a main part of the elaborate series of paradoxes culminating in the statue scene—the pun made flesh.

Notes

1. References will be to the accessible one-volume Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, 1936).

2. “The Last Plays,” An Approach to Shakespeare (2d ed., rev.; Doubleday Anchor Books; New York, 1956), p. 261.

3. This is particularly true of the more obviously experimental romances, Pericles and Cymbeline.

4. See F. C. Tinkler's ingenious article on The Winter's Tale, Scrutiny, V (1937), 344-64.

5. See S. L. Bethell, The Winter's Tale: A Study (New York, 1947).

6. Since Kermode has discussed the matter so thoroughly and admirably in his introduction to the play (Arden Shakespeare; 5th ed., rev.; Cambridge, Mass., 1954), I merely allude to his work here. The quotation appears on p. xxiv.

7. I am aware that my language is not entirely neutral. “Harmony and alienation” may, as a pair, have for some readers theological associations, and “harmony,” in particular, has musical connotations. My main effort is simply to avoid forcing the reader to choose between, say, the theological interpretation of S. L. Bethell and the anthropological interpretation of F. C. Tinkler; my own argument does not require the acceptance of either.

8. It seems appropriate to remark that Shakespeare, like Spenser, satirizes the “art o’ th’ court” without actually questioning the status quo: Nature that is admirable without benefit of Art almost invariably turns out to be royal or at least noble Nature.

9. Physics 199b.30-31, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941), p. 251.

10. Laws x.890, The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York, 1937), II, 632. See also John of Salisbury's Metalogicon i.8, ed. Clement C. J. Webb (Oxford, 1929), pp. 29ff.

11. See The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Anchor Books; New York, 1959), pp. 65f.

12. There is no warrant in the play for ascribing either position to Shakespeare. But despite the uncertainties arising from the dramatic form, it seems possible to determine Shakespeare's “own” position by seeking what he assumed rather than gave to characters, and by correlating generalizations about Nature and Art with his own artistic practice and with the conduct of “normative” characters. This, however, demands a thorough study of all the plays and is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter.

13. Generally Shakespeare associates Nature with life, Art with death; see the citations from Venus and Adonis and the Rape of Lucrece at the beginning of this chapter.

14. As quoted by Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958), in his discussion of Nature and Art in the Renaissance, pp. 81-88. Hagstrum emphasizes the idea of contest or competition between the artist and nature, seeing The Winter's Tale as the “negation of one element in the pictorialist and iconic tradition.”

15. C. H. Herford, Introduction to The Winter's Tale, The Works of William Shakespeare (Eversley Shakespeare; 10 vols.; New York, 1899), IV, 268; the phrase is used without the specific application it has in my argument. Cf. Samuel L. Wolff, The Greek Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York, 1912), p. 432. Wolff associates this use of pastoral, perhaps a little vaguely, with the long tradition of “escapes” from the “life active” to the “life contemplative” of the Lower World or the Fortunate Islands. He also points out that pastoral is not so used in Sannazaro, Tasso, or Guarini, all of whom lack the “urban enveloping action,” which leads him to hazard, I believe correctly, that “this employment of pastoral is distinctive of Elizabethan fiction.” There is some precedent, however slight, in Longus, but it seems that the Elizabethans were the only ones to exploit fully this social use of pastoral.