SOURCE: “‘You speak a language that I understand not’: The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter's Tale,” in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 17-44.

[In the essay that follows, Enterline examines Shakespeare's interpretation of Ovidian and Petrarchan rhetoric as a means of discussing the role of power and the female voice in The Winter's Tale.]

Between Leontes's opening imperative, “Tongue-tied our queen? Speak you” (1.2.28), and the final act, where Hermione as living statue returns to her husband yet says nothing directly to him, The Winter's Tale traces a complex, fascinated, and uneasy relation to female speech.¹ A play much noted for interrogating the “myriad forms of human narration”²—old tales, reports, ballads, oracles—The Winter's Tale begins its investigation of language when Hermione tellingly jests to Polixenes, “Verily, / You shall not go; a lady's ‘verily’ is / As potent as a lord's” (ll. 49-51), for Leontes's swift turn to suspicion hinges on the power of his wife's speech. Unable to persuade Polixenes to stay, he first expresses annoyance when Hermione is able to do so. Polixenes has just assured his boyhood friend “There is no tongue that moves, none, none i’ th’ world, / So soon as yours could win me” (ll. 20-21). Nonetheless, it is Hermione's tongue, not her husband's, that wins Polixenes. “You, sir, / Charge him too coldly,” she chides Leontes before persuading their friend to stay (ll. 29-30). Leontes therefore shifts quickly from “Well said, Hermione” (l. 33), to churlish acknowledgment of her rhetorical power. He understands her persuasive speech not as obedience to his desire—since he is the one who commanded “Speak you”—but as a force that eclipses his own:

Leontes                                         Is
he won yet?
Hermione He’ll stay, my lord.
Leontes                                         At my
request he would not.

(ll. 86-87)

From Hermione's success, jealous deductions quickly follow. Indeed, the first hint that something is amiss in this marriage is this seemingly minor quibble over who speaks to better purpose and who is the better rhetorician. When he later broaches with Camillo Polixenes's decision to stay, Leontes confirms his suspicions on the basis of his own earlier failure to persuade:

Camillo You had much ado
to make his anchor hold,
When you cast out, it still came home.
Leontes                                         Didst
note it?
Camillo He would not stay at your
petitions, made
His business more material.
Leontes                                         Didst
perceive it?

(ll. 213-16)

Outdone in rhetorical power by his wife, Leontes makes two interpretive moves to reassert control over her language. First, he reminds Hermione of her answer to his proposal of marriage—in fact, he quotes her words of assent, “‘I am yours for ever’” (l. 105)—and calls those words a “better” speech than the one to which Polixenes has yielded. And, second, he reads as evidence of infidelity the conversation he has himself induced between Hermione and his friend: “Too hot, too hot!” (l. 108). Making himself arbiter of Hermione's language, Leontes approvingly quotes the words he prefers while giving a fixed, suspicious meaning to the ones he does not. The scene's pronounced interest in acts of persuasion, one failed and the other successful, produces an odd effect: plunging into Leontes's jealousy, the scene makes his unreasonable emotion appear to be the consequence of this rivalry between male and female speech. As the drama quickly unfolds, we watch the king turn a rhetorical anxiety—why do her words achieve the desired effect where mine do not?—into a sexual one, minimizing his wife's superior rhetorical skill by interpreting it narrowly as the consequence of her erotic power. In Act 5, however, Hermione returns as a theatrical version of Pygmalion's silent statue to the husband who was once so jealous of her tongue. Almost but not quite “tongue-tied,” she addresses herself to her lost daughter only. (I will return to her words to Perdita at the end of this essay.) After her theatrical metamorphosis, Hermione does not address the man who doubted her to the brink of annihilation. Having once triggered a terrible response with her voice, she now evades the problem by saying nothing to Leontes.³

I am tempted to say Hermione has learned her lesson. But as I hope to show, The Winter's Tale defies an intuitive understanding of the difference between speech and silence—or, for that matter, the difference between agency and impotence, male and female, often allied with it. The elaborate Pygmalion fantasy offered in the last scene as a way to resolve the problems inaugurated by Hermione's initially “potent” tongue tells us that before we can begin to hear the full resonance of her concluding silence, we must consider the relationship between, on the one hand, the trope of the female voice in the Ovidian-Petrarchan tradition that Shakespeare inherits and transforms in this play and, on the other, the quite specific rhetorical concerns through which The Winter's Tale reads that tradition, turning it into theatrical metacommentary. Any reading of the play's uneasy fascination with the female voice, that is, must take account of the complex literary legacy of Pygmalion's obsession with his mute simulacrum. As this silent figure passes from Ovid to Petrarch to Shakespeare, it criticizes even as it perpetuates a mysterious tie between love of art and hatred for women. Narratives of rape and misogyny frame the figure of the animated statue, tarnishing the luster of a story that otherwise seems to be about love for beautiful form, visual as well as verbal. The literary legacy of Pygmalion's statue asks readers, therefore, to think again about the consequences of the many kinds, and discourses, of love.

I should preface this analysis by noting that when I speak of a “female voice” in this play, I mean to designate a pervasive and seductive trope—a discursive effect, not a prediscursive fact. Through the sound of the very “female” voice that inaugurates Leontes's jealousy, I will argue, the play distances itself from the king's essentializing effort to dismiss Hermione's rhetorical power by understanding it as erotic power only. Of course the arbitrary force of Leontes's jealous interpretation of his wife's tongue raises troubling questions about the violence latent in such culturally pervasive ideas as those of “male” speech and “female” silence. Because The Winter's Tale was written for a transvestite theater, moreover, I do not presume a given—or, more important, an intelligible—phenomenon anterior to the language that gives it shape (for instance, “woman” or “the female subject”). Reading the way in which the voices of Hermione and Leontes affect and implicate each other, I hope to show, tells us that—like Echo and Narcissus or Salmacis and Hermaphroditus—female and male voices in this very Ovidian play are locked in a mutually defining, differential embrace. An analysis of the “female voice” in The Winter's Tale is important precisely because it must change our understanding of that term.

Renaissance revisers of the Metamorphoses routinely adopt such stories as Ovid's Pygmalion as a way to comment on the medium of their appearance; Shakespeare is no exception. Ovid's own generic experimentation, his rhetorical and poetic self-reflexivity, and his habit of linking oral/aural dilemmas to visual ones encouraged in Renaissance imitators a highly self-conscious practice of borrowing.⁴ Erotic stories from the Metamorphoses became highly charged reflections on the power (and dangers) of the story's very medium—whether painting, poetry, music, or drama. Such self-conscious visitations prepare us for Shakespeare's much noted—and celebrated—effort to turn Ovid's story of Pygmalion into one about the transforming powers of theatrical representation, about a theater that succeeds where even Orpheus failed: “I’ll fill your grave up” (5.3.101). Because the idea of the living statue plays a crucial role in Shakespeare's claims for the theater and in our own critical reception of those claims, it becomes vital that we understand the epistemological and ethical consequences of the rhetoric of animation. For Shakespeare's final invocation of the living statue's “magic” draws on a story that self-consciously proposes a close yet opaque alliance between aesthetics and misogyny. I will suggest that, in silence as in speech, the female voice in The Winter's Tale allows us to interrogate the terms and the limits of that alliance.

I. “SHALL I BE HEARD?”

To apprehend the burden Shakespeare assumes when he has Paulina tell Hermione to “bequeath to death” her “numbness,” we must remember the symbolic and libidinal economy that informs the Pygmalion story in the two chief texts that gave it such tenacity as a fiction about voice, masculinity, and desire: Ovid's Metamorphoses and Petrarch's Rime Sparse. As Leonard Barkan writes, Hermione's metamorphosis enacts “a kind of marriage of Pygmalion and Petrarchanism.”⁵ In the Rime Sparse, Petrarch draws on numerous Ovidian characters to represent his own situation of unfulfilled desire; and in a pair of sonnets that praise Simone Martini's portrait of Laura, he brings Ovid's story of Pygmalion into the cycle as a particularly compelling analogue for his own predicament.⁶ Two rhetorical issues are central to both Petrarch's and Shakespeare's versions of Ovid's Pygmalion: the trope of apostrophe and the language of praise or epideixis. By lamenting the picture's silence—“if only she could reply to my words!” (“se risponder savesse a’ detti miei!”)—Petrarch's apostrophe creates the fiction of his own voice; a second apostrophe accentuates the fiction of a voice and the language of epideixis at once: “Pygmalion, how much you must praise yourself for your image (“quanto lodar ti dei”) if you received a thousand times what I yearn to have just once!” (78.11, 12-14).⁷ In these concluding lines Petrarch rewrites Ovid's story according to one of the Rime Sparse's controlling signifiers: lodare. He thereby refashions Ovid's Pygmalion in his own image, reading him as an artist devoted to praising himself for the excellence of his simulacrum. Petrarch derives the name Laura from the Latin laudare and, according to the Secretum, loves the name just as much as he loves the lady herself.⁸

In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare reads the tradition Petrarch's poetry inaugurated in precise rhetorical terms—in terms, that is, of the power of address and of epideixis. Long before staging his own kinds of address to a composite Ovidian-Petrarchan statue (“Chide me, dear stone” or “descend; be stone no more; approach” [5.3.24, 99]), Shakespeare fits the representation of Hermione (and Leontes's relation to her) into a meditation on epideictic speech. Where The Rape of Lucrece explores the violent consequences of Petrarchan epideixis—because “Collatine unwisely did not let / To praise” Lucrece to other men (ll. 10-11), rape is the consequence⁹—The Winter's Tale gives us a Hermione who, in jest, offers herself as the beloved object of praise:

What? have I twice said well? When was’t before?
I prithee tell me; cram's with praise, and make's
As fat as tame things. One good deed dying tongueless
Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.
Our praises are our wages.

(1.2.90-94)

Understood in light of Shakespeare's critique of praise in The Rape of Lucrece, Hermione's pose as epideictic object for her husband while in the presence of another man should alert us that the rhetorical competition between Hermione and Leontes may already have entered the troubled world of Petrarchan verbal exchanges gone awry. Indeed, Hermione's very participation in a rhetorical competition with one man to vie for another man's ear alerts us that culturally dominant alignments of gender and rhetoric do not pertain. Her “potent” rhetoric disrupts received expectations for epideictic speech. And so in this play, terrible consequences attend Hermione's speaking, even though Leontes is the character whom her playful remarks about praise might lead us to believe will follow Collatine as ill-fated epideictic rhetorician. Instead of hearing more from Leontes, however, we hear from Hermione; and what she speaks about is her own power of speech. Her balanced syntax hints to the jealous ear that, just as they are matched in her discourse, the two men may be equivalent objects for her exchange: “I have spoke to th’ purpose twice: / The one for ever earn’d a royal husband; / Th’ other for some while a friend” (ll. 106-8). As if following her lead into the language of payment and exchange, Leontes begins to angle for proof by changing Hermione's equation of the two men into a marketplace where she is their commodity: “Hermione, / How thou lov’st us, show in our brother's welcome; / Let what is dear in Sicily be cheap” (ll. 173-75). While the rest of the play may seem to return to expected discursive convention by making Hermione (and her fidelity) the enigmatic object of others' discourse—in praise and in slander—that predicament, we should remember, is initiated in Act 1 by the unexpected power of her persuasive tongue.

The play's most striking debt to the Petrarchan tradition, of course, emerges in the final scene when a stony lady comes to life. Both Ovid and Petrarch use what Kenneth Gross aptly calls “the dream of the moving statue” as an erotic, synesthetic investigation of the status of the human voice and the consequences of rhetorical speech. In both, as in Shakespeare's play, this investigation occurs by way of a meditation on the success or failure of an address. In each of the three texts, this address draws our attention to the way that all parties present are implicated in and defined by the verbal event. Before looking more carefully at Petrarch's version of Pygmalion, however, we must first understand the complex connections between rhetoric, voice, and sexuality which he inherited from Ovid's poem.

In the Metamorphoses, Pygmalion's wishes come true because he addresses words of prayer to Venus. The story of animation, the event of the statue's motion, offers an erotic version of a rhetorician's dream. The scene's action and considerable dramatic effect (waiting for a statue to move) derives from a pun on the desired end of rhetorical speech. Drawing on the contemporary word for rhetorical power—the power, that is, to “move” (movere)—the narrator tells us that in his statue, Pygmalion believes he has an audience who “wants to be moved” (X.251).¹⁰ And because the narrator of the story is the grieving Orpheus, yet another compelling fantasy about the voice's power informs the ivory maiden's animation. Shakespeare, too, connects the stories of Orpheus and Pygmalion. After the “statue” moves, Paulina warns Leontes: “Do not shun her / Until you see her die again, for then / You kill her double” (5.3.105-7). Paulina's imperative deftly combines the story of Pygmalion's statue with that of Orpheus's Eurydice by implying two things: like the statue, Hermione has come to life; and because of this animation, she may, like Eurydice, die twice. Indeed, Golding's translation of Ovid's text may have suggested Paulina's wording. For Ovid's version of Eurydice's “twin” death—“stupuit gemina nece coniugis Orpheus” (X.69)—Golding renders, “This double dying of his wyfe set Orphye in a stound.”¹¹

The interwoven stories of Orpheus and Pygmalion seem, at first glance, to propose a familiar hierarchy between male verbal agency on the one hand and female silence and death on the other. Where the sculptor's prayer succeeds, the statue says nothing and has no name; where Orpheus's song momentarily takes over the narrative of the poem—thus predicating Book X of the Metamorphoses itself on Eurydice's absence—Eurydice utters a barely audible “vale” before “falling back again to the place whence she had come” (X.63). As Petrarch realized, the first (male verbal agency) seems to depend on the second (female silence and death). But trouble soon disturbs this too-sanguine version of male vocal power. Once able to move the inanimate world by “moving his voice in song” (“hoc vocem carmine movit” [l. 147]), Orpheus dies because Bacchic (female) noise drowns out his voice: the “huge uproar” of discordant flutes, horns, drums, “and howlings of the Bacchanals” overwhelms the sound of Orpheus's lyre (“ingens / clamor … et Bacchei ululatus” [XI.15-18]). Once-listening stones turn to weapons, stones now “reddened with the blood of the bard whose voice was unheard” (“saxa / non exauditi rubuerunt sanguine vatis” [ll. 18-19]). And where Pygmalion succeeds in animating his beloved, his narrator fails. Having won Eurydice only to lose her again through his own action, Orpheus then sings a song in which we hear the story of yet another beloved woman given life through art. Orpheus's failure underwrites the story he tells, making the fantasy of the statue's animation part of the wishful fort-da game of his impossible desire. These interwoven narratives therefore tell us that power is fleetingly, intermittently, and only phantasmatically granted the male voice. And they tell us, moreover, that his voice may not be the only sound that matters.

Still, we must acknowledge that Eurydice's death and the unnamed statue's silence in the Orpheus-Pygmalion sequence conform to a larger fantasy, first proposed in Book I of the Metamorphoses, in which male vocal triumph requires female absence or resistance. Two stories of attempted rape—Apollo's pursuit of Daphne and Pan's of Syrinx—tell the origins of epideictic and pastoral poetry by presenting a rigid sexual division of labor in the production of song. Close on Daphne's heels, the god of poetry fails to persuade and so becomes himself because she eludes his grasp.¹² And hard on the heels of that encounter follows Pan's pursuit of Syrinx, an attempted rape that repeats and intensifies the first. Where Apollo's breathing down Daphne's neck becomes the breath of poetry, Pan's breath turns into music as he sighs through the newly immobilized body of Syrinx: “the soft air stirring in the reeds gave forth a low and complaining sound” (“sonum tenuem similemque querenti” [I.708]). In the context of this violence, remember that yet other forms of misogyny underwrite the Orpheus-Pygmalion sequence. Grieving for Eurydice, Orpheus “shunned all love of womankind,” becoming the “author” in Thrace of “giving his love to tender boys” (“omnemque refugerat Orpheus / femineam Venerem … ille etiam Thracum populis fuit auctor amorem / in teneros” [X.79-84]).¹³ Pygmalion's “disgust” for female sexual behavior repeats his narrator's aversion: having seen the prostitution of the Propoetides, he creates a statue “better than any woman born” (“qua femina nasci / nulla potest” [ll. 248-49]) to eradicate the “faults that nature had so liberally given the female mind” (“vitiis, quae plurima menti / femineae natura dedit” [ll. 244-45]). For rejecting women, Orpheus will soon die at the hands of the Bacchantes. Ovid thus twice qualifies Pygmalion's seeming aesthetic triumph, suggesting that it is rooted in misogyny; aversion to women is its inaugural gesture.¹⁴ The Bacchic cry upon seeing Orpheus—“here is the man who scorns us!” (“hic est nostri contemptor!” [XI.7])—claims that revenge is the best this erotic-symbolic economy can expect.¹⁵

Such misogyny was not lost on later writers. In “The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image” (1598), John Marston summarizes his reading of Pygmalion concisely:

Pigmalion, whose hie love-hating minde
Disdain’d to yeeld servile affection,
Or amorous sute to any woman-kinde,
Knowing their wants, and mens perfection.
Yet Love at length forc’d him to know his fate,
And love the shade, whose substance he did hate.(16)

As Shakespeare's only other direct reference to the story suggests, he is more than familiar with this “love-hating” tradition. In Measure for Measure the phrase “Pygmalion's image” means “prostitute,” exactly recalling the reason for Pygmalion's creative act. “What, is there none of Pygmalion's images newly made woman to be had now, for putting the hand in the pocket and extracting [it] clutch’d?” (3.2.44-47).¹⁷ In this version of the story, the fantasy of animation is the moment of sexual penetration (i.e., “to make a woman” is to deflower a virgin). Both Shakespeare and his audience were well aware of the sexual and misogynist aspects of the story that are omitted in order to achieve closure in The Winter's Tale. If we ignore the negative aspects of the Pygmalion tradition, we foreclose the possibility of thinking about the work and effects of repression in the play's last scene—or, for that matter, about the problem that Ovid's narrative so memorably posed: what, precisely, is the relationship between misogyny and art?¹⁸

In the first three acts Leontes's skepticism places the “truth” of Hermione's body (her innocence or her guilt) beyond the reach of words—beyond the reach, even, of oracular speech. Similarly, the final scene turns to a story in which evasion of the female body is representation's foundational premise: Pygmalion's statue is not mimetic; it is “better than any woman born.” From this disquieting gap between language and the world, Shakespeare aspires to a mode of representation that can move beyond the impasse. If, as most critics agree, the spectacle of Hermione's pregnancy troubles the play's language from the start (most obviously in Polixenes's opening reference to “nine months”), this spectacle works together with her potent tongue to spark her husband's suspicions. The final scene of animation therefore works to reclaim another, “better” mode of generation than the one that so disturbs Leontes's understanding of the world. In constructing this scene, Shakespeare tries to replace the animating power of the maternal body with the language and visual spectacle of the theater.¹⁹

The play's implied claim for theatrical power, then, derives from a literary history of aversion to female flesh. But this is not the only story the play tells about its own fiction. I want to suggest not only that Hermione's concluding silence criticizes the symbolic-erotic economy inaugurated in Book I of the Metamorphoses and developed in the Orpheus-Pygmalion sequence, but that this economy itself tells us something important about why Hermione's speech is so unexpectedly powerful. It is as if the first half of The Winter's Tale were asking of this legacy, what would happen if the stony lady actually did speak back? To understand the play's question, we need only remember that Pygmalion's statue is both nameless and speechless. Or that Eurydice, lost again, says only “farewell” before finally disappearing in death. Although the first book of the Metamorphoses initially proposes a sexual division of labor in the creation of poetry and the Orpheus segment adds death to rape as one of the possible roles for women in the process of inventing poetic song, readers may have heard the murmur of a story different from the one that emerges from a focus on the activities of Apollo, Pan, or Orpheus. For in the line I quoted about Pan's music, Ovid leaves unclear exactly whose voice is audible in these pipes: “Instead of [Syrinx] he held nothing but marsh reeds … and while he sighed in disappointment, the soft air stirring in the reeds gave forth a low and complaining sound” (I.708). Ovid lets us wonder, whose sound is this? The complaint seems as much Syrinx's as Pan's. The female voice troubles the Apollo-Daphne story, too, thus disturbing one of the Metamorphoses's most prominent narratives about the origins of poetry. Where Apollo's “imperfect” rhetoric (“verba imperfecta”) fails to persuade her to stay, Daphne's prayer to lose the “figure” that provokes such violence convinces her father to change her shape. Her words possess a persuasive force that Apollo's do not; they inaugurate one of the metamorphoses that are the subject of Ovid's poem. If Book I creates the expectation that the poem will focus on male vocal power, that expectation is soon thwarted. In a series of influential stories, Ovid ventriloquizes numerous women, obliquely yet consistently hinting that these female characters are violated by the very mode of representation available to them. Echo's mimicking voice, Syrinx's complaining reed, Philomela's severed tongue, and, I would argue, Medusa's fearsome face mark female experience in the Metamorphoses as a struggle against the restrictive conditions within which they must represent themselves.²⁰ To return to the case in point: Daphne's metapoetic plea—that she lose her “figura”—tells us that the figural quality of language betrays her just as surely as her bodily form makes her vulnerable to Apollo's violence.²¹ For when Daphne prays to lose her figure and is turned into a tree, she may not have meant to lose her human form: when used to signify the body rather than language, figura designates not only general shape but also a person's beauty.²² What Daphne means to ask is to become less attractive, but what she actually says prompts her father to alter her human figure altogether. The relief brought her by the unintended power of her prayer is just as constricting as the figural language with which she must speak—language that departs “from the straightforward and obvious”²³ and whose obliquity therefore condemns her to be “immobilized” or “stuck fast” with “sluggish roots” (“pigris radicibus haeret” [l. 551]). Her voice may do more than Apollo's, her words may achieve greater effects, but their action eclipses her intention. And this sense of violation by language, I believe, forms the basis of Ovid's insistent alliance of the origin of poetry with rape.²⁴

This aspect of Ovid's poem—in which female voices such as Daphne's are betrayed by the very words they speak—helps us to understand Hermione's courtroom protest that she stands somehow outside the restrictive terms of Leontes's accusation: “Sir, / You speak a language that I understand not” (3.2.79-80). To the woman who will later be restored to life as a version of Pygmalion's statue, her husband's “language,” like his jealousy, violates her sense of herself. Hermione's ensuing remark about the deadly effects of fantasy—“My life stands in the level of your dreams, / Which I’ll lay down”—then provokes Leontes's most concise statement of his Pygmalionlike revision of womankind: “Your actions are my dreams” (ll. 81-82). As both Apollo's desire and figurative language ensnare Daphne yet give her voice an unforeseen efficacy, so the collusion between language and male fantasy frames Hermione yet does not utterly deprive her voice of power. The Winter's Tale may mark her words as insufficient to tell the truth or command belief, yet it also gives her voice the power to unhinge her husband's sense of the world itself: “Is this nothing? / Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing” (1.2.292-93).

And the corollary aspect of Ovid's poem—in which female voices suggest that male voices are not so powerful as the stories of rape or of animation might lead one to believe—illuminates why Leontes, once he has lost the rhetorical competition with his wife, spends much of the play trying (and failing) to control his own language and the language of others. For Leontes the fact that tongues other than his own can speak becomes an increasing source of irritation. When his lords voice their initial opposition to his accusation of adultery, Leontes snaps: “Hold your peaces” (2.1.139). He then dismisses their comments as an infringement of his power:

                                                            Why, what need we
Commune with you of this, but rather follow
Our forceful instigation? Our prerogative
Calls not your counsels …
We need no more of your advice. The matter,
The loss, the gain, the ord’ring on’t, is all
Properly ours.

(ll. 161-70)

Leontes always speaks as if his voice alone should be heard. When accusing Hermione, he leans on the implicit power of his own voice: “I have said / She’s an adult’ress, I have said with whom” (ll. 87-88, my emphasis). The mere existence of a king's saying, he believes, should be enough to establish facts. Where Orpheus tried and failed to use his voice to master death, Leontes tries and fails to use the power of his tongue to master truth.²⁵ In both cases women's bodies become the signifiers of that desire. Leontes, moreover, pairs his sense of his own linguistic prerogative with a declaration designed to preempt all other voices whatsoever: “He who shall speak for her is afar off guilty / But that he speak” (ll. 104-5, my emphasis). To Leontes anyone else's discourse is but a further sign of guilt. This is so, I submit, because Leontes, like an Orpheus singing alone in the woods, can bear to hear only the sound of his own tongue.

The king aspires to order all linguistic exchanges in Sicily, but Hermione's voice teaches him that any such ordering properly belongs to no one. Just as she obeys his command, “Speak you,” in Act 1 only to challenge Leontes's sense of authority over acts of persuasion, so in Act 2, scene 1, Hermione speaks in obedience to his command with words that prompt Leontes to assert that his voice has again been eclipsed. Although Leontes has just ordered “Away with her, to prison” (l. 103) and his order is obeyed, by the end of Hermione's speech, Leontes protests that he has somehow gone unheard. Hermione addresses herself to the attendant lords in words that obey the king's command and yet seem to him to undermine it:

Hermione … Beseech
you all, my lords,
With thoughts so qualified as your charities
Shall best instruct you, measure me; and so
The King's will be perform’d!
Leontes                                                             Shall I be heard?
Hermione Who is’t that goes
with me?

(ll. 112-16, my emphasis)

Hermione cedes the power of action to Leontes's word, but her token of obedience makes that word ring hollow. The act of “go[ing]”—an act that follows the letter of the king's order—begins, in her mouth, to sound like a declaration of alliance: “Who is’t that goes with me?” To counter her question, Leontes can do no more than repeat himself as he tries to reassert power over one word: “Go, do our bidding; hence!” (l. 125).

Indeed the play as a whole instructs Leontes that the linguistic marketplace he hopes to master cannot be negotiated by the careful parsing out of what he calls “the loss, the gain.” He finds that it cannot be ordered by the logic of equivalence at all: language, in this play, repeatedly exceeds Leontes's demand. Certain that the oracle will prove him right, Leontes finds himself instead proclaimed a “jealous tyrant” (3.2.133-34). Responding to the charge with “this is mere falsehood” (l. 141), Leontes is confronted with the news of Mamillius's death, a death that results from Leontes's having doubted oracular speech. Or so Leontes understands it: “Apollo's angry, and the heavens themselves / Do strike at my injustice” (ll. 146-47). And so Leontes finds himself, like Ovid's Orpheus, brought low by the clamorous noise of a crowd. In Shakespeare's interrogation of the fear of losing one's rhetorical power, however, Leontes's distrust of other voices turns into an imaginary scene in which he is encircled by “whisp’ring” gossip rather than Bacchic cries: “They’re here with me already, whisp’ring, rounding: / ‘Sicilia is a so-forth.’ ’Tis far gone, / When I shall gust it last” (1.2.217-19).

It is the tongues of Hermione and Paulina together, however, that most distinctly instruct Leontes in what I take to be the lesson of Orpheus: that power resides only fleetingly in one's voice, even if it be the voice of a poet or a king. In the scene of Hermione's arrest (2.1), the queen notifies her husband, as she did indirectly in the first act, that he cannot bring all language—even his own—under control. Though Leontes may claim that “the matter” and “the ord’ring” of his accusation of adultery is “all / Properly ours,” she teaches him otherwise. Once published, Hermione reminds him, a text will go its own way. It can be controlled by no mere speaking:

                                                            How will this grieve you,
When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that
You thus have publish’d me! Gentle my lord,
You scarce can right me thoroughly, then, to say
You did mistake.

(ll. 96-100)

Unable to master the truth by mastering other voices, Shakespeare's Orpheus/Leontes soon finds himself heavily beset by the tongue of Paulina. In her, Leontes contends with a voice that resists all ordering:

Leontes [What] noise there,
ho?
Paulina No noise, my lord, but
needful conference
About some gossips for your Highness.
Leontes                                                             How?
Away with that audacious lady! Antigonus,
I charg’d thee that she should not come about me:
I knew she would.

(2.3.39-44)

Like an Ovidian bad penny, Paulina returns to avenge her mistress. “A callat / Of boundless tongue, who,” Leontes claims, “late hath beat her husband” (ll. 91-92), Paulina plagues Leontes with her “noise.” A domestic version of the Bacchic horde, Paulina has a tongue that no man controls. Thus the harassed Leontes rebukes her husband, “What? canst not rule her?” (l. 46). Paulina, the somewhat softened spirit of a revenging Ovidian woman, goes about her work with a tongue that will, after sixteen years, cure Leontes rather than kill him.

II. “NOT GUILTY”

We have seen that when Shakespeare adopts the imagined scene of speaking to a stony lady as a way to repair the devastation caused by Leontes's jealousy, he turns the conflict between male and female verbal power into a meditation on Ovidian and Petrarchan rhetoric in general and on the role of the female voice in that literary legacy in particular. Before looking more closely at the telling role female voices play in The Winter's Tale, however, we must examine the vicissitudes of the voice in the Rime Sparse, particularly for those Ovidian characters whom Petrarch borrows as so many figures for his own situation. Like many of his literary contemporaries, Shakespeare frequently juxtaposes Ovidian rhetoric with Petrarchan in order to derive a flexible lexicon of figures for sexual experience, whether erotic or violent. Recall, for instance, that Marcus greets the mutilated Lavinia, Shakespeare's Philomela, with the conventional language of a blason in praise of her beauty and talent (Titus Andronicus, 2.4.22-47). Similarly, the narrator of The Rape of Lucrece sets his critique of Petrarchan epideixis in an explicitly Ovidian context, rewriting the story of Lucretia from the Fasti in terms of several other Ovidian characters: most notably, Philomela, Orpheus, and Hecuba. Understanding the Rime Sparse and Ovid's presence in it will help clarify why the female voice occasionally exercises such disruptive force in a play that ends with yet another version of Pygmalion's address to his statue.

In Sonnet 78 Petrarch's apostrophe to Ovid's Pygmalion epitomizes the rhetorical and erotic concerns of the Rime Sparse, bequeathing strategies, tropes, and effects to one of the most influential modes of Renaissance self-representation, and allowing the poet ample room to compare the relative merits of visual and verbal figuration. Because Petrarch, as a second Pygmalion, cannot make the picture speak, the speaker's desire for words replaces Ovid's scene of desire for a new and improved woman. Words, not sex, become the focus of the poet's longing: “if only she could reply to my words!” From Petrarch's repression of Ovid's bluntly sexual scene, verbal fetishism is born.²⁶ And so, too, is an imaginary conversation—not between Petrarch and Laura but between Petrarch and Pygmalion (“Pygmalion, how much you must praise yourself for your image …”). Laura's muteness, of course, is the necessary condition for this all-male conversation about aesthetic merit. And her silence deeply influenced English Petrarchanism: Barkan recalls Daniel's figure of the “marble brest” and “stony heart” and Marston's distinctly lascivious use of the metaphor. Indeed, the power relations implicit in the convention of the poet pleading with his silent mistress fuel Marston's satire of Petrarchanism: “O that my Mistres were an Image too, / That I might blameles her perfections view.”²⁷

Despite Marston's telling barb about the erotic advantages of female silence, however, and despite Petrarch's rhetorical turn in Sonnet 78 to speak to another male artist about her silence, the distinctions of power implied by such figures as Pygmalion's statue are not absolute in the Rime Sparse. The seemingly silenced female voice does, on occasion, interrupt Petrarchan self-reflection. First, the persona who takes Apollo's story as his own also represents himself as “Echo,” exiled by the very language in which he represents his fate. Like Echo or Daphne, the poem's speaker is betrayed by his own speech; in canzone 23 his echoing song angers Laura as Diana, who imprisons the poet in stone (ll. 13, 64-66, 138-40). As with both Ovid's and Shakespeare's reflections on male and female voices, Petrarch's trope of echo implicates the fate of one voice in that of another. The male voice leans on various female voices from Ovid's text in order to define itself.²⁸ Echo's may not seem the kind of verbal power an aspiring Apollo would want to claim, since it disrupts any sure sense of intention or origin; yet it remains a kind of power nonetheless. Like Echo, the poet is never able to make his pain “resound” sweetly or softly enough so as to persuade (“né mai in sì dolci o in sì soavi tempre / risonar seppi gli amorosi guai / che ’l cor s’umiliasse aspro et feroce” [23.64-66]). But such failure finds its Apollonian solace in the aesthetic pleasures of Petrarchan autobiography: “every valley echoes to the sound of heavy sighs which prove how painful my life is” (“et quasi in ogni valle / rimbombi il suon de’ miei gravi sospiri, / ch’ acquistan fede a la penosa vita” [23.12-14]).

Second, though Laura rarely speaks in the Rime Sparse, her few words wield authority. As Diana, she utters the taboo against speaking that subtends the cycle: “make no word of this” (“‘Di ciò non far parola’” [23.74]). Her prohibition enables Petrarch to portray himself as one driven by compulsion to write about what is forbidden. Laura's sentence against his speech becomes, paradoxically, the positive condition for Petrarch's appearance as the speaking subject in exile. Like the undertone in the complaining sound that issues from Syrinx's reed, Laura's spoken taboo is that without which we would not hear Petrarch's voice. Indeed, in the Rime Sparse as a whole, Laura's voice, when heard, carries the force of prohibition or revelation. “Soft, angelic,” and “divine” (“in voce … soave, angelica, divina” [167.3-4]), it attracts her lover like “the sound of the sirens” (“di sirene al suono” [207.82]). I therefore understand the seeming polarity between male speech and female silence in Petrarch's rendition of the Pygmalion story in light of the larger fantasies about the poet's own symbolic and erotic condition, which give the female voice, though infrequently heard, an unsettling power.²⁹

This voice articulates the specific rhetorical concerns that preoccupy Shakespeare as he transforms this Ovidian-Petrarchan legacy into a figure for the theater. Act 1, scene 2, the scene of rhetorical competition, opens with a brief meditation on the power and limits of a particular speech act: Polixenes complains of the imbalance between “thank you” and the time it takes to say it.

Nine changes of the wat’ry star hath been
The shepherd's note since we have left our throne
Without a burthen. Time as long again
Would be fill’d up, my brother, with our thanks,
And yet we should, for perpetuity,
Go hence in debt. And therefore, like a cipher
(Yet standing in rich place), I multiply
With one “We thank you” many thousands moe
That go before it.

(1.2.1-9)

Leontes's reply, however, only reopens the debt that Polixenes's “I multiply” was meant to close: “Stay your thanks a while, / And pay them when you part” (ll. 9-10). Polixenes's verbal maneuvers open a rhetorically self-conscious play in which Shakespeare continues to test language's power as a mode of action rather than mere vehicle of representation, to search for a kind of voice that can effect the changes of which it speaks. Moreover, the verbal power that Polixenes desires in this scene and Paulina finally stages in the last raises the same question—the question of language's ability to transcend time. As the concluding scene's greater success suggests, Shakespeare asks this question most pointedly through the sound of the female voice—Leontes's less than “tongue-tied” queen and the “boundless tongue” of her faithful Paulina. He does so in such a way, I submit, that the (barely) suppressed undercurrent of illicit sexuality in Polixenes's opening references to nine months and “standing in rich place” comes to define the very notion of time.

Let us examine exactly how this happens. Beginning with Polixenes's desire for words that can discharge a debt—for some kind of verbal action—the play's rhetorical concern is precisely delimited by its often-repeated doublet, “to say” and “to swear.” Preoccupied with the inability of any statement to prove Hermione innocent and the concomitant failure of all speech to persuade Leontes of the truth, the first three acts of The Winter's Tale continually present us with this pair, “to say” and “to swear.” The doublet appears early: in the first scene of rhetorical and sexual competition, Hermione says of Polixenes, “To tell he longs to see his son were strong; / But let him say so then, and let him go; / But let him swear so, and he shall not stay, / We’ll thwack him hence with distaffs” (ll. 34-37). Similarly, when Leontes charges Hermione directly, “’tis Polixenes / Has made thee swell thus,” she responds: “But I’ld say he had not; / And I’ll be sworn you would believe my saying, / Howe’er you lean to th’ nayward” (2.1.61-64). This iterated pair of verbs draws a distinction similar to the one made by J. L. Austin in his theory of the difference between constative and performative utterances, between saying—words that “‘describe’ some state of affairs … either truly or falsely”—and swearing—words in which to say something is “to do it.”³⁰ In The Winter's Tale oath-taking and swearing faith take on the peculiar urgency of futility, since neither utterances that aspire to state the truth nor words conventionally designated as actions exercise any force.

Indeed we might say that this pair, saying and swearing, precisely distinguishes the two halves of the play. In Act 3, Paulina is the first woman whose spoken words command belief: “I say she’s dead; I’ll swear’t. If word nor oath / Prevail not, go and see” (3.2.203-4). Before Paulina's oath no proof or belief attended woman's word. For women, according to Leontes, “will say anything” (1.2.131). After Paulina's oath Leontes views female speaking differently: “Go on, go on,” he says to her, “Thou canst not speak too much” (3.2.214-15). But just as Leontes invokes the evidence of sight without ever having visual proof—Hermione's adultery “lack’d sight only” (2.1.177)—Paulina's imperative makes the “fact” of Hermione's death, like the “fact” of her innocence, a kind of metatheatrical crime: the one thing the audience cannot do is “go and see.” The truth of Hermione's body—its innocence and its death—is always held from view; all that remains is the evidence of “word” and “oath.” Where neither “word nor oath” allow Hermione to testify to the truth of her innocence, Paulina's oath marks the moment when a woman's words do finally work—but only to testify to a lie. Only a lie—Hermione is dead—establishes the trust in Leontes necessary for her to live as innocent. Only this lie to the audience, moreover, allows Shakespeare the surprise ending of the living statue that claims such powers for the theater.³¹ Between Hermione's vain though truthful swearing of innocence and Paulina's successful yet false swearing of death, The Winter's Tale uses the female voice to point beyond truth or falsehood, beyond a conception of language as transparent description. Instead it asks us to consider the effects of language—particularly female language but also theatrical language—in relation to the fugitive truth of the female body and the “old tale” it tells.³²

In the courtroom scene, saying and swearing come together at the moment of their failing. The oracle, for instance, is truth-telling's last chance. That telling is supposed to be secured by another performative, for the officers, swearing “upon this sword of justice” that they have been “at Delphos, and from thence have brought / This seal’d-up oracle,” open it and read: “‘Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, … Leontes a jealous tyrant,’” and so on (3.2.124, 126-27, 132-34). Leontes merely declares, “There is no truth at all i’ th’ oracle” (l. 140). But in this scene, it is Hermione's voice in particular that puts performative language on trial by stressing its failure and, at the same time, connecting that failure to the central problem of the play. For her commentary on her own speaking, like Paulina's false oath that Hermione is dead, connects the transformation of language into action with the play's two chief preoccupations: the “truth” of the female body and the effects of theatrical representation. Brought forward to testify, Hermione declares her innocence by commenting on her own lack of vocal power. She quotes the one performative for which she longs but which, in this context, will not work:

Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation, and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say, “Not guilty.”

(ll. 22-26)

Quoting the performative that in her mouth and in this place must misfire, Hermione's meditation on the inefficacy of saying “Not guilty” does two things. First, it constructs Leontes as tyrant for bringing her forth in a courtroom where no words can acquit her. Commenting on her own inability to speak, Hermione claims that her predicament, viewed by a higher, divine witness, “shall make / False accusation blush, and tyranny / Tremble at patience” (ll. 30-32). The necessary misfiring of Hermione's “Not guilty” becomes the verbal event that marks Leontes, against his hopes, as “tyrannous” (l. 5). Second, Hermione's meditation on the necessary failure of her “Not guilty” recalls an earlier “Not guilty.” This one is first spoken offstage, but it defines the time of the play as the fallen time of sexuality. In Act 1, Polixenes remembers a prelapsarian idyll of male bonding. Of his boyhood friendship with Leontes he remarks,

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.

(1.2.67-71)

Had this edenic state continued, he claims, “we should have answer’d heaven / Boldly, ‘Not guilty’; the imposition clear’d, / Hereditary ours” (ll. 73-75). In the decidedly less than innocent time of the play, “Not guilty,” though boldly declared, will not clear “the imposition.” Instead the immediate action of a prelapsarian performative is nullified by the sight of the female body:

Hermione                                         By
this we gather
You have tripp’d since.
Polixenes                                         O
my most sacred lady,
Temptations have since then been born to ’s: for
In those unfledg’d days was my wife a girl;
Your precious self had then not cross’d the eyes
Of my young playfellow.

(ll. 75-80)

Like Leontes's suspicious interpretation of her pregnancy, of course, Polixenes's comments on Leontes's fall from innocence mark Hermione's body as a sign of transgression. But the echoing of “Not guilty” across the play turns the female voice, too, into another mark of transgression. For the possibility of saying a “Not guilty” that performs the action of absolution belonged to a world without women. When young men answered to heaven, there was no human convention to be violated and so deprive these words of efficacious action. With a language so natural as that of lambs bleating, heaven automatically witnesses and ratifies all performatives; the one who enters a plea simultaneously delivers his own verdict. Between the two very different circumstances for saying “Not guilty,” Shakespeare defines the play's time as one of broken linguistic conventions—conventions broken, moreover, around the question of sexual guilt. Turning what Shoshana Felman calls the scandal of the “speaking body” into the scandal of the speaking maternal body, Shakespeare sets The Winter's Tale in a time when woman's performative “Not guilty” cannot act.³³

The failure of Hermione's “Not guilty” is implicit in Austin's definition of the performative. As Felman demonstrates of Austin's work, the performative is “defined only through the dimension of failure.”³⁴ That failure is, however, not simple; it produces further effects. If the conventional rules governing a performative utterance are not in effect—if, as Austin writes, when we say “I do” in a marriage ceremony, “we are not in a position to do the act because we are, say, married already”—that does not mean that “I do” will be “void or without effect.” Instead, “lots of things will have been done”: for instance, “we shall most interestingly have committed the act of bigamy.”³⁵ What other effects, then, follow from Hermione's meditation on the impossibility of saying “Not guilty”? As we have already seen, the inevitable misfiring of her “Not guilty” turns Leontes's court into a mockery, the ruse of a tyrant who has already determined the verdict. Within the fictions of the play and of Leontes's justice, Hermione's refusal to enter a plea defines, by rhetorical means, the extent of the king's tyranny.

But more radically still, the self-reflexivity that defines all performatives reminds us, suddenly, that we are not only in the mock courtroom of a tyrant. We are also in the mock courtroom of a play. Of such a fictive situation, Austin observes that “a performative utterance will … be in a peculiar way hollow or void if said by an actor on the stage.”³⁶ I do not cite Austin's observation here in order to endorse his distinction between a “non-serious” theatrical use of language and a “serious” or “ordinary” use of language. Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, and Shoshana Felman have amply demonstrated that such a distinction is untenable. But each of these critics argues, as well, that Austin's failed distinction is extremely revealing. When Austin writes that something “peculiar” is at work onstage or in a poem, his choice of words reminds us that his work is “often more fruitful in the acknowledgment of its impasses than in its positions.”³⁷ I recall Austin's unsuccessful distinction, rather, because of the considerable theoretical work on the status of the speaking subject which it has enabled. For Derrida, Austin's attempt to exclude “non-ordinary” poetic or theatrical language from his theory of performative action turns on a foundational belief in consciousness or intention: “the conscious presence of the intention of the speaking subject in the totality of his speech act.” Derrida argues that this exclusion allows Austin to avoid acknowledging the “general citationality” or “general iterability” that is the “risk” or “failure” internal to all performative intentions—their “positive condition of possibility.” It is not that the “category of intention will disappear,” only that intention will no longer “govern the entire scene and system of utterance”: “the intention animating the utterance will never be through and through present to itself and its content.”³⁸ Derrida therefore argues that an “absence of intention” is “essential” to performative utterances; and he calls such absence the performative's “structural unconscious.”³⁹ In The Literary Speech Act, Felman elaborates the full psychoanalytic resonance of such a phrase, discussing the consequences of the performative's “structural unconscious” for her understanding of the condition of the speaking subject. Reading Austin together with Lacan, she rephrases Lacan's “deliberately superficial” notion of the unconscious in terms of a poststructuralist theory of the failure necessary to performatives. “It is precisely from the breach in knowledge … that the act takes its performative power: it is the very knowledge that cannot know itself, that [in the speaking subject] acts.”⁴⁰

In order to specify what such a definition of the “structural unconscious” of performative utterances means for Hermione's courtroom speech, we must remember one further comment about what Austin finds so “peculiar” in a performative uttered onstage. As Barbara Johnson succinctly puts it, when Austin tries to distinguish between ordinary language and theatrical language for the purposes of his theory, he is “objecting not to the use of the verb but to the status of its subject.” For in a poem or on the stage, “the speaking subject is only a persona, an actor, not a person.” A theatrical performative is “peculiar” insofar as it reveals how all performatives put personae in place of persons. It reminds us that the necessity of speaking in persona—intrinsic to the conventionality of all performatives—opens up a difference within the speaker.⁴¹ Johnson evokes Hamlet to illustrate her point: “the nonseriousness of a performative utterance ‘said by an actor on the stage’ results, then, not from his fictional status but from his duality, from the spectator's consciousness that although the character in the play is swearing to avenge his dead father's ghost, the actor's own performative commitments lie elsewhere.”⁴²

In the case of the trial scene in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare presents us with an escalating succession of performatives. The series opens with the somber tones of an indictment that, because it is uttered in a play, divides its speaker from himself: “‘Hermione, queen to the worthy Leontes, … thou art here accused and arraigned of high treason, in committing adultery,’” and so on (3.2.12-14); the messengers follow suit, swearing that they have fetched the oracle and left it unopened (“All this we swear” [l. 130]). And it culminates in an oracular message that should provide the last word by enacting the verdict it announces. In the case of Hermione, who explains why she can and will not utter the words “Not guilty,” the play's rhetorical move here is pointedly and internally citational: she repeats Polixenes's phrase, thereby reminding us that he, in turn, was quoting a conventional utterance despite the fantasy of his youth as an originary moment prior to language. Hermione's quotation, then, makes us uncertain of the status of the subject who is giving her voice to these deeply conventional words by elaborately refusing to say them. The conceit of her impossible “Not guilty” tells us that “Hermione” is at once a (persuasive) character terribly wronged by her doubting husband and an actor “whose own performative commitments lie elsewhere.” Hermione evanescently evokes the action her words cannot achieve if uttered, reminding us that this is so, in part, because we are listening to an actor speak in a play. Hermione's words do pass into action but not the act she intended and certainly not the one that the character “Hermione” could know. What she knows—that these words will fail—and what she does—reveal herself through these words as an actor playing a falsely accused Hermione—do not coincide.

Hermione protests that she has been “proclaim’d a strumpet” and “hurried / Here to this place, i’ th’ open air” to proclaim innocence in vain (ll. 104-5, my emphasis). It is “here” in “this place” that Hermione puts “Not guilty” in quotation marks. Her deictics refer us, within the fiction, to Leontes's mock courtroom. As if underlining the self-reflexive nature of performative utterances, however, they also refer us to the story's frame—to the “here” and now of “this” stage on which Hermione speaks.⁴³ The disjunction or misfiring that happens in “this place” of the theater is what Felman might call the unconscious action of The Winter's Tale, a “knowledge that cannot know itself” and therefore hollows out the speaking subject, Hermione, from within her own voice. Further still, Felman's psychoanalytic view of the import of theatrical performatives suggests that we must examine the relation between the play's unsettling rhetorical performance and its story of sexuality. I have argued that Hermione's “Not guilty,” echoing Polixenes's “Not guilty,” colors the entire question of performative misfiring through Leontes's obsession with female sexual guilt; only in the prelapsarian world inhabited by male twins do plea and verdict coincide. But if we read Hermione's rhetoric in light of the material conditions of the theater for which her lines were written—the here and now of the English transvestite theater—we are confronted with a division within the speaking subject called Hermione that is peculiar indeed. We are reminded not merely that Hermione is an actor, but that the voice speaking these lines was that of a boy-actor playing a falsely accused wife and mother. Leontes's suspicions may reduce Hermione's tongue to her body; similarly, the story attached to the two versions of “Not guilty” may define Hermione's voice through a story about the necessary link between the female body and sexual guilt. But the material practice of the English Renaissance stage, to which the rhetoric of Hermione's speech also refers, would tell a far different story about Hermione's body, one in which the alleged difference between two sexes is in fact a difference within one. The hollowness or duality of “her” voice, then, mirrors a division internal to the play's representation of gender. That is, the metatheatrical echo implicit in the performative and Hermione's deictics reminds us, as I suggested at the opening of this essay, that Shakespeare's representation of a “female” voice—what it can or cannot say and what effects it achieves—is a dramatic trope. It is, quite literally, a “travesty” of womanhood, a femininity-effect rather than a revelation of anything essential to what it continues to call the “female” tongue.

We might understand the tropological status of what counts as female in this play in one further way. As we have seen, what Felman calls an unconscious “breach in knowledge” is marked by the misfiring of “Not guilty.” The precise content of this phrase will not let us forget that for Shakespeare a specific sexual story deeply informs what might otherwise seem a strictly rhetorical failure. Indeed, Felman's discussion of the affinities between Austin and Lacan suggests something further about the mysterious female body in The Winter's Tale. Through its constant meditation on the failures of its own language to reveal the truth or to act as intended, the play turns the secret of “female” sexuality—the question raised by Hermione's pregnancy—into what Lacan calls the missed encounter. Disjunction defines the subject's mediated, eccentric relation to “the real.” One might say of the play's relation to Hermione what Lacan says of the speaking subject's relation to the real: “Misfiring is the object.”⁴⁴ On such an understanding of the discursive limits to knowledge, we might comprehend what Stanley Cavell aptly calls Leontes's skeptical “annihilation of the world” in other terms—as the vanishing of the maternal body before the joint pressure of language and of fantasy. That is, Shakespeare is exploring the (Cartesian) problem of radical doubt by representing a specific body—the maternal body—as the privileged object that resists the play's knowledge and its verbal action.⁴⁵ A psychoanalytic perspective, moreover, reminds us that it is not a philosopher's idea about a deceptive, malignant deity but a husband's idea about a deceptive, pregnant wife which sets the process of skeptical annihilation in motion. Foundational to the way the play rhetorically defines the limits of knowledge, the female body remains, nonetheless, forever fugitive.

III. “BE STONE NO MORE”

The literary figure to whom Shakespeare turns to explore such a vexed relation to the world is Ovid's Pygmalion.⁴⁶ For both skepticism and projection join hands to fashion Leontes's misery (e.g., “Your actions are my dreams”). On David Ward's persuasive argument for retaining the punctuation of the First Folio and for remembering the contemporary meaning of “co-active” as “coercive” or “compulsory” (and not merely “acting in concert”), Leontes's speech about “affection” is stressing “the coercive nature of affection,” its “action upon the ‘nothing’ it generates in the imagination” (as Ward parses it, “Affection … Thou … Communicat’st with dreams … With what’s unreal: thou co-active art, / And fellow’st nothing” [1.2.138-42]).⁴⁷ In addition, it is through Ovid's Orpheus-Pygmalion sequence—particularly as given the influential contours of Petrarchan linguistic self-consciousness—that Shakespeare can explore the subject's missed relation to that (maternal) object not as a process of doubting alone but as a meditation on the simultaneously productive and aberrant effects of rhetoric—on language conceived not merely as a representation of the world but as a mode of action in the world. As I suggested above concerning Hermione's vain yet truthful swearing of innocence and Paulina's successful yet false swearing of death, such action, precisely by distinguishing the two halves of the play, turns the relation between the subject and the world of which it speaks into a recurrent misfiring. On the one hand, neither saying nor swearing reestablishes the faith in Leontes required for Hermione to live as herself, outside Leontes's “dreams” or beyond the “language” of male fantasy she “understands not.” And on the other, when Paulina's words do have effect, they do their work through a lie. That such misfirings as these or Hermione's impossible “Not guilty” are inaugurated by the mere sight of her pregnant body or the sound of her voice I understand as the symptom of a deeply entrenched—though not necessary or inevitable—collusion between the representational and libidinal economies of patriarchal culture.

When the truth of Hermione is the object of representation, representation fails, drawing attention to the opacity of language rather than the clarity of truth.⁴⁸ And when Hermione speaks, something happens that she does not intend: though she intends to persuade Polixenes to stay, her words trigger Leontes's jealousy; though she intends to speak of her innocence, her speech about the failure of “Not guilty” in her case declares her an actor and the scene the space of the theater. That a failed performative still has power to act despite having dislocated language's action from intention becomes vividly clear when the scene ends. For this self-reflexively theatrical trial produces further unintended effects. We hear that Mamillius, “with mere conceit and fear / Of the Queen's speed” in this staged trial, has died (3.2.144-45). And the report of his death becomes, in turn, words with the power to kill: “This news is mortal to the Queen” (l. 148). Hermione's unintended act—the “Not guilty” that produces the effect of theatricality—and the lethal effects that attend the play's reflection on its own fictive enactment darkly underline Shakespeare's attempt to evoke consciously and artistically controlled theatrical effects through Paulina's staging of Pygmalion's statue. That story works through yet another woman's voice to rein in the action of a now-benign theater in which language appears to perform the act it intends: “Music! awake her! … descend; be stone no more” (5.3.98-99).

Paulina's imperative to the statue, we should note, is not literally a performative utterance. Rather, her command represents an idea about language as performance. Shakespeare inherits this idea from Ovid's Orpheus and calls it “magic”: the dream of a voice so persuasive that it can effect the changes of which it speaks.⁴⁹ It is the dream of a language that, when it acts, “fills up” the grave, makes good our debt to time. Paulina's spectacle of Hermione-as-statue offers more than a meditation on the desire to see in the theater: it becomes a visual analogue for the play's desire for a truly performative language. The long-awaited verbal event—signaled by such performatives as “Not guilty,” the incessant taking of oaths, and the search for oracular truth—finds its culminating visual icon in the event of Hermione's “animation.” Drawing on verbal and visual fictions, Shakespeare nonetheless accentuates the power of the voice in Paulina's heavily weighted moment of invocation and, eventually, in the much-desired event of Hermione's speech. Although Leontes declares himself content to be a “looker-on” (l. 85), thus inscribing the audience in the theatrical circuit of his desire, and though Paulina apologizes for the effects of the “sight of my poor image” (l. 57), what everyone waits to hear is Hermione's voice. As the doubters in Paulina's audience demand, “If she pertain to life let her speak too” (l. 113) and “Ay, and make it manifest where she has liv’d, / Or how stol’n from the dead” (ll. 114-15). The scene, however, both claims and disavows the Orphic power for which it longs. Availing itself of a language at once oral and visual, this theater seems to “steal” Hermione, like Eurydice, “from the dead.” At the same time, we hear a warning, through Paulina, that the Orphic story of life, were it “told … should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (ll. 116-17).

The acts that words do in the courtroom scene exceed intention and, by so doing, turn the theater into the space of these unpredictable effects. The final scene attempts to control verbal action through Paulina's careful stage management, her magically effective voice. Yet such an attempt may all too easily recall Leontes's disastrous desire to master the world by controlling all language. It therefore does not go unqualified. On the one hand, when Paulina proclaims “descend; be stone no more,” a woman's successful voice in The Winter's Tale appears to replace Pygmalion's successful prayer to Venus in the Metamorphoses. On the other, just as Hermione once reminded her husband that even his own language exceeds his control, so now her voice is the one to remind us that the play's seeming animation is only a fiction. Despite the ruse of death, she has “preserv’d” herself somewhere else (l. 127). Hermione, moreover, says nothing to the man who now longs to hear her speak. She seems poised to speak to him—“Still methinks / There is an air comes from her. What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?” (ll. 77-79)—but does not. Leontes's lines should remind us that throughout the Metamorphoses “breath” is the etymological root for Ovid's interest in speaking voices and poetry as “song”: Apollo's “breath,” the “wind” streaming through Daphne's hair, and the Orphic “vox” telling the story of the statue's animation all derive from the narrator's fascination with the vicissitudes of speech, with the uneasy relationship between voice and mind. For the anima in animation—meaning “the mind,” “consciousness,” and “breath”—is derived from the Greek anemos for “wind” internal and external to the body.⁵⁰ In this image of the chisel that can “cut breath,” Leontes signals his, and the play's, desire for a rhetoric of animation, for a theatrical version of the “l’aura” or “breeze” that blows through the figures of the Rime Sparse or the “breath” that Ovid asks the gods to bestow on his song (I. 1-3).

What Hermione does and does not say in this scene tells us something about the cost of that desire. Given the gendered relations of power passed down through literary history as the “air” that seems to “come from her,” very much indeed hangs on Hermione's voice. I take the fact of Hermione's silence toward Leontes—and the fact that, after she moves, Leontes never asks her a direct question—to be Shakespeare's way of acknowledging the problems raised by her voice in the first three acts. Nothing she says to Leontes diminishes the force of his projections; the language she “understand[s] not” limits the field of her possible responses; and any answer she makes must still be read by him, a reading she cannot control. This awareness of the limits that Leontes's fantasy places on the stony lady's possible reply stems, in part, from Shakespeare's understanding that, in Ovid as in Petrarch, the stories of Pygmalion and Narcissus are deeply intertwined.⁵¹ Leontes has, of course, always viewed others through the mediating screen of his own form. Observing his son in Act 1, he begins testing his theory about his wife's guilt according to whether or not Mamillius is his mirror: “Looking on the lines / Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil / Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech’d” (1.2.153-55). Even Leontes's admission of culpability in the final scene, prompted when he gazes on the “statue,” surreptitiously imports Narcissus's story into Pygmalion's. Repentant though he may be, Leontes still reads Hermione as a version of himself: “does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it?” (5.3.37-38). To Leontes even her stoniness is not “hers.” If anything of the world is to return to Leontes that does not stand at the level of his dreams, it cannot do so within the reflexively binary terms proposed by Petrarchan rhetoric. Rather, Paulina's intervention tells us that if Hermione is to be restored to Leontes and not fade away again before the force of fantasy and doubt, it is on the condition that she not respond to his words only, that she not conform utterly to his language and his desire. Therefore a third party (Paulina) must manage this meeting from outside the restrictive frame of Pygmalion's desirous yet annihilating address.

And finally, what Hermione does say—precisely not to Leontes but to her lost daughter—offers a telling index of how constraining have been the terms of that address. What Pygmalion loathes, what his phantasmatic love for his simulacrum pushes aside, Ovid tells us, is not simply female sexuality but “the female mind” (“menti / femineae” [X.244-45]). So one final allusion to the Metamorphoses tells us something about that mind. Hermione's allusion prompts a question that seems never to occur to Petrarch: what does she want? The shift from Petrarchan autobiography to Shakespearean ventriloquism marks a subtly but crucially different return to Ovidian narrative. In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare animates Petrarchan tropes in order to perform an ethical critique of them, particularly the animating rhetoric of address and its role in Petrarch's story of love and the self. When Shakespeare listens once more to Ovid's female voices, he shifts the emphasis away from the otherness within the self (Petrarch's “exile” of blindness, obsession, and forgetting) to pose, instead, a question: the question of the other's desire. And for a moment that “other”—the Petrarchan stony lady—has something else in mind than “responding” to the speaker whose apostrophe restricts them both (“se risponder savesse a’ detti miei!”). What “moved” Hermione, her last words tell us, were thoughts of Perdita. Turning to a daughter who has already coded herself as Proserpina at the moment of dropping her flowers, Hermione models herself on Ceres as a mother unable to forget her lost, though still living, daughter:

                                                            Tell me, mine own,
Where hast thou been preserv’d? where liv’d? how found
Thy father's court? for thou shalt hear that I,
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserv’d
Myself to see the issue.

(5.3.123-28)

Hermione's question to Perdita—“Where hast thou been preserv’d? where liv’d?”—obliquely recalls Ovid's story of violent rape and maternal grief by making her reason for living the hope of reunion with her daughter.

Where the suspicion of female sexual guilt defines the relation between time and language's action in the first half of the play, in this final scene both are redefined by another story—that of rape and maternal grief. Hermione's allusion to Book V of the Metamorphoses, of course, echoes the title, place, and time of The Winter's Tale. For Ceres's grief over Proserpina's rape brought winter into the world. Golding's translation of that grief brings the story of Ceres closer still to that of the animated statue in Act 5. When the nymph Arethusa tells Ceres why her daughter has vanished, Golding renders Ovid's lines as follows: “Hir mother stoode as starke as stone … And long she was like one that in another worlde had beene.”⁵² It is left to Shakespeare's Hermione to return from that “other world” of stone in order to be reunited with her Proserpina. Alongside Pygmalion's prayer and Orpheus's suppliant song, then, we must also remember Ceres's curse. In Ovid's text we find yet another story, often less well remembered, about a voice that can bring about the changes of which it speaks. Orpheus's mother, the muse Calliope, tells us that when Ceres saw Proserpina's girdle floating on the surface of the pool, she “reproached all the lands loudly, calling them ungrateful … but Sicily above all other lands, where she had found the traces of her loss. … She ordered the plowed fields to fail in their trust and spoiled the seed” (ll. 474-80). Setting his “old tale” of Leontes's winter in Sicily, Shakespeare invokes but finally turns attention away from the fantasy of the animated statue.⁵³ He thereby suggests that Pygmalion's self-reflexive fantasy so narrowly constricts female speech that there is, quite literally, nothing Hermione can say. Yet by recalling Proserpina's rape and Ceres's powerful reproach, he grants her voice a different authority. Her last words to Perdita fleetingly testify to the violence against the female body that subtends such “old” and “sad” tales as that of an animated statue or the first appearance of winter.

Female voices in The Winter's Tale acquire an oblique but telling power: the power to point out that, in the Ovidian tradition, stories about poetic authority, creativity, or “voice,” however purely “poetic” their claims may seem, nonetheless entail violence against the female body. Not necessarily conscious, that violence continues to emerge in the unlikely circumstance of metapoetic or metatheatrical reflection. Challenging Ovidian-Petrarchan tropes for male vocal power when they thwart Leontes's desire to control speech, the tongues of Hermione and Paulina recall Ovid's rhetorically self-conscious narratives of rape, misogyny, and female vengeance that form the background for Orpheus's descent into the underworld. When Shakespeare returns to Ovidian narrative in this play, therefore, he reminds us that if we isolate Pygmalion's story from Orpheus's, or Proserpina's from Ceres's, we fail to notice the ethical dilemmas woven into the very fabric of Ovid's rhetorical self-consciousness in the Metamorphoses. Investigating the causes and effects of rhetorical speech through these seemingly disparate figures, and inviting reflection on the connections between language and sexuality proposed by their interwoven stories, Shakespeare reveals the cost to women of Ovid's foundational tropes for poetic authority. It is in the voices of Hermione and Paulina that we catch something of the sound of that cost. In their voices The Winter's Tale stages a cautionary story about the uncanny returns of cultural inheritance, one that attests to the often unconscious—yet no less lethal—consequences of representing such things as love, voice, and beauty in the Ovidian tradition.

Notes

1. Quotations of Shakespeare's plays follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. William R. Morse, “Metacriticism and Materiality: The Case of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale,” ELH 58 (1991): 283-304, esp. 297.

3. How to read Hermione's silence has been an important question in much criticism of The Winter's Tale. I am particularly indebted to Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1992), 105-9; and Leonard Barkan, “‘Living Sculptures’: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter's Tale,” ELH 48 (1981): 639-67.

4. For an overview, see Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis & the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1986). As Barkan comments of “Diana and Actaeon,” Titian turns Ovid's story of Actaeon's visual transgression into a painting that comments on the act of looking at a painting. Actaeon, poised “on the threshold,” lifts a curtain to gaze on Diana; therefore “the bath almost becomes a picture within a picture. The result is a powerful identification between the viewer and Actaeon as both participate in the visual, the voyeuristic, and the visionary” (200-201). One could make similar comments about the resonance between Petrarch's many allusions to Ovid's stories about the human voice and the characteristic fiction that a lyric poem is a spoken utterance—particularly in light of its favored trope, apostrophe. Such aesthetically self-reflexive allusions to Ovid's Metamorphoses are not a purely “Renaissance” phenomenon. On Dante's poetically self-conscious appropriations of Ovidian narrative, for example, see Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, eds., The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante's “Commedia” (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991).

5. Barkan, “‘Living Sculptures,’” 660.

6. Sonnets 77 and 78. For further discussion of the relationship between Ovid's version of Pygmalion and Petrarch's, see my “Embodied Voices: Petrarch Reading (Himself Reading) Ovid” in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994), 120-45.

7. I have here modified the translation of Robert M. Durling in Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1976) to capture the rhetorically specific sense of the verb lodare, “to praise.” Elsewhere in this essay translations of Petrarch are Durling's. Barbara Johnson distinguishes between the two apostrophes in Shelley's “Ode to the West Wind” in a way that is useful for reading Petrarch's two sonnets: the first, emotive “if only” lays stress on the first person, and the second, vocative “Pygmalion” on the second person. The typography of Shelley's poem marks this difference as one between “oh” and “O,” a difference Johnson allies with the one between Roman Jakobson's emotive function, or “pure presencing of the first person,” and his conative function, or “the pure presencing of the second person” (Johnson, A World of Difference [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987], 187).

8. “[N]on minus nominis quam ipsius corporis splendore captus” (Petrarch, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, E. Carrara, and E. Bianchi [Milan and Naples: Riccardo Riccardi Editore, 1955], 158). Petrarch's anagrams and puns on laurel derive from Ovid's own verbal wit in the story of Apollo and Daphne (Metamorphoses, I.451ff).

9. On epideixis and gender in Petrarchanism, see Joel Fineman, “Shakespeare's Will: The Temporality of Rape” in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1991), 165-221; and Nancy Vickers, “‘The blazon of sweet beauty's best’: Shakespeare's Lucrece” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 95-115.

10. Quotations of the Metamorphoses follow the text translated and edited by Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1927), though I have made a few silent emendations to Miller's translations.

11. The. xv. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso; entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman (London, 1567), 123^r.

12. The association between the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice and Apollo and Daphne is commonplace. The most influential Renaissance commentator on Ovid's poem, Raphael Regius, claims that Orpheus is Apollo's son, adding that the singer received his lyre from Apollo as a gift (Metamorphoses [Venice, 1556], X.1). The first edition of Regius's commentary appeared in 1492.

13. Despite the frequent representation of polymorphous desires in the Metamorphoses, Ovid's narrative almost always brings homoerotic moments such as this one back into the orbit of a controlling heterosexual imperative. Thus Iphis's love for Ianthe, which immediately precedes the story of Orpheus, is refracted through a missing penis; the phallus becomes the sign, therefore, that the love of one woman for another is “more mad” than the love of a woman for a bull (IX.668-797). Similarly, although Orpheus may be the “author” of love for boys, that love is represented as the effect of, and only in relation to, his love for his dead wife; the jury of avenging Bacchic women in Book XI then judge his love again as merely the sign of his feelings about women. Because of this frame (and its repetition in the hands of Pygmalion, Orpheus's surrogate), the song in Book X about the many kinds of transgressive love has little to say about male-male eroticism on its own terms.

14. Harry Berger Jr. recently argued that a gynophobic and misogynist discourse informs Book X (“Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser's Gardens of Adonis” in Finucci and Schwartz, eds., 91-119).

15. Leontes signals an awareness of this punitive possibility. But he does so in the domestic register, containing the threat no sooner than uttered: “Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed / Thou art Hermione; or rather, thou art she / In thy not chiding; for she was as tender / As infancy and grace” (5.3.24-27).

16. John Marston, “The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image” in Elizabethan Minor Epics, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 244-52, esp. 244. Citations of Marston follow this edition. On Marston's satire of the language of erotic idealism, particularly in the Petrarchan mode, see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1977), 134-61.

17. For a history of this misogynist tradition, see Barbara Rico's “From ‘Speechless Dialect’ to ‘Prosperous Art’: Shakespeare's Recasting of the Pygmalion Image,” Huntington Library Quarterly 48 (1985): 285-95. Except for the two works I discuss here—the last act of The Winter's Tale and Petrarch's paired sonnets (77 and 78)—the Pygmalion story is generally not a positive one in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Misogynist diatribes inform it, and the story of prostitution, too, clings to it: John Marston uses Pygmalion to adjudicate between the “wanton” and the “obsceane” (252), and George Pettie's A Petite Pallace (London, 1586) alludes to the story of the statue in overtly misogynist ways. Jonathan Bate, in a book otherwise dedicated to tracing the minutiae of Ovid's presence in Shakespeare's poetry, oddly dismisses the relevance to The Winter's Tale of the misogynist genealogy in Ovid (Shakespeare and Ovid [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993]).

18. It seems to me no accident that the artist Shakespeare chose for his Pygmalion, Giulio Romano, was known not only as a painter but as a pornographer. The nature of Shakespeare's reference to Romano has been much debated. For a useful summary of the debate as well as an account of a contemporary English conduct book for young women which refers to the excellent work of “Iules Romain,” see Georgianna Ziegler, “Parents, Daughters, and ‘That Rare Italian Master’: A New Source for The Winter's Tale,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 204-12. For Romano's notorious, if rarely seen, collaboration with Aretino (the so-called posizioni), see David O. Frantz, Festum Voluptatis: A Study of Renaissance Erotica (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989), 46-48 and 119-23; and Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1958), 29. As Hartt points out, Romano's prints, though suppressed, were also widely copied and widely destroyed; Frantz notes that when Perino del Vaga and Agostino Carracci imitated Romano, they did so in an Ovidian vein, calling their own versions of the “posizioni” the “loves of the gods” (123). It is the rumor of Romano's work, rather than an actual copy in England, that seems to me important to Shakespeare's reference.

19. See Janet Adelman's account of dreams of male parthenogenesis and the problem of the maternal body in this play in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

20. For a persuasive reading of the way language violates Philomela as surely as her rape—particularly Ovid's meditation on the severed “lingua” (both tongue and language more generally)—see Elissa Marder's recent “Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela,” Hypatia 7 (Spring 1992): 148-66. My claim about Medusa lies outside the scope of this essay; I take up her story in greater detail in my next book, The Rhetoric of the Body in Renaissance Ovidian Poetry.

21. Figura signifies in both grammatical and rhetorical registers and designates the material aspects of writing as well. It can specify a written symbol or character or refer to the form, spelling, or grammatical inflection of a Latin word; it is also a rhetorical term for trope.

22. [F]igura, definition 3; see Oxford Latin Dictionary, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1:700.

23. [F]igura, definition 11, OLD, 1:700.

24. Here we should remember that, according to Ovid, Medusa became the Gorgon because she was raped, and her beheading produced the fountain of poetry. Pegasus arose from the Gorgon's blood, and the Heliconian fountain, in turn, arose from the “beating of his feet” (both the horse's feet and the feet of poetic meter). The origin of poetry's fountain is therefore “the blood of the mother,” the raped Medusa (“vidi ipsum materno sanguine nasci … est Pegasus huius origo / fontis” [V.259-63]).

25. For an analysis of the role that bodies—especially female bodies—play in the relationship between desire and “the drive to know” in modern narrative, see Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1993). Leontes's devotion to speaking about the fantasized “truth” of Hermione's body might usefully be considered part of what Brooks calls “epistemophilia,” a project in which we tell stories “about the body in the effort to know and to have it” and which results “in making the body a site of signification—the place for the inscription of stories—and itself a signifier, a prime agent in narrative plot and meaning” (5-6).

26. I adapt the phrase “verbal fetishism” from John Freccero (“The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds. [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986], 20-32, esp. 22). My understanding of the nature of fetishism in Petrarch and the literary filiation from which it derives differs from Freccero's and is outlined in my “Embodied Voices.”

27. Marston, 246.

28. Petrarch uses both female and male Ovidian characters to suggest that he is alienated from his own tongue; the story of Actaeon, as well as of Echo and Daphne, appears in canzone 23 for this purpose. For further comment on Actaeon, see my “Embodied Voices.” As we have seen, Ovid no sooner proposes the story of male poetic control over language than he dissolves it; this dissolution subtends Petrarch's poetic self-portrait. Although Ovid and Petrarch after him suggest that alienation from one's own tongue is the condition of having a voice—male or female—in both poets the trope of a female voice appears strategically, as the place in the text where one can hear the greatest strain on such cherished illusions about artistic vocal power as those proposed by Apollo, Pan, Pygmalion, and Orpheus. It is the diacritical function of the female voice, its ironic juxtaposition to such ostensibly “male” fantasies, that is important for understanding Shakespeare's representation of the tongues of Hermione and Paulina.

29. Heather Dubrow has recently argued that we must attend carefully to the complex and often contradictory role of Laura's voice if we are to understand the “relationship among speech, power, and gender” in the Rime Sparse and beyond; see her Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1995), 40-48, esp. 42.

30. J. L. Austin, How to do things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 1 and 6. Austin lists swear (along with such other verbs as promise, give my word, pledge myself) as part of a class of “commissive” performatives in which conventional phrases are deployed to “commit the speaker to a certain course of action” (156-57). Over the course of his lectures, Austin renders problematic his “provisional” performative/constative distinction; he eventually rejects any absolute dichotomy between the two, finding that constatives may well have a performative aspect (91). My point here is simply to note that in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare is exploring a distinction analogous to Austin's provisional one—between statements that report some state of affairs truly or falsely (in this case, the “state of affairs” in question being Hermione's fidelity) and other, conventional statements (such as “I swear”) in which saying and doing explicitly converge. For a study of performatives in Shakespeare with an emphasis on cultural and institutional authority, see Susanne L. Wofford, “‘To You I Give Myself, For I Am Yours’: Erotic Performance and Theatrical Performatives in As You Like It” in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, Russ McDonald, ed. (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1994), 147-69.

31. Since, unlike the audience, the characters in the story can “go and see” the dead body of Hermione, Paulina's lie is dramaturgically more complicated than my presentation of it. Leontes describes scenes that the audience does not observe, and his words give playgoers every reason to believe that he will verify for us the fact of Hermione's death: “Prithee bring me / To the dead bodies of my queen and son. / One grave shall be for both. … Once a day I’ll visit / The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there / Shall be my recreation. … Come, and lead me / To these sorrows” (3.2.234-43). Critics have argued that these lines, coupled with Antigonus's report in 3.3 of the appearance of Hermione's spirit, suggest that when Shakespeare wrote Act 3, he still intended to follow his source, in which the dead wife does not return. Whatever Shakespeare's intentions, the play's refusal to clear up ambiguities about Hermione's possible death and resurrection provides a compelling link between the play and the Orpheus/Eurydice story.

    For a discussion of critical responses to the problem of Hermione's death and unexpected revival, see Barbara A. Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1976), 77ff and 145, n. 18.

32. In thinking about the relationship between performativity and sexuality, I have drawn on several important discussions: Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1983); Lynne Huffer, “Luce et veritas: Toward an Ethics of Performance,” Yale French Studies (1995): 20-41; and Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980).

33. Felman, 94-96, esp. 94. Analyzing performative language in relation to the stories of Don Juan and of Oedipus, Felman's work is equally telling for the central dilemma of The Winter's Tale: the relationship between theatrical representation and the female body or, more generally in Ovidian narrative, between body and voice. Felman writes that “the problem of the human act,” in psychoanalysis as well as performative analysis, “consists in the relation between language and body … because the act is conceived … as that which problematizes at one and the same time the separation and the opposition between the two. The act, an enigmatic and problematic production of the speaking body …, breaks down the opposition between body and spirit, between matter and language” (94). She reminds us of Austin's comment that “in the last analysis, doing an action must come down to the making of physical movements with parts of the body; but this is about as true as … saying something must … come down to making movements of the tongue” (as quoted in Felman, 94).

34. Felman, 82. Austin explores the contingent and context-bound nature of any speech act in “the doctrine of Infelicities” (14-24). Jacques Derrida's critique of Austin constitutes a sustained analysis of “the failure” that is an “essential” risk of performative utterances; see Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” first published in Glyph 1 (1977) and translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman in Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988), 1-24.

35. Austin, 16-17.

36. Austin, 22.

37. Derrida, 10.

38. Derrida, 14 and 17.

39. Derrida, 18.

40. Felman, 96.

41. “If one considers the conventionality of all performative utterances (on which Austin often insists), can it really be said that the chairman who opens a discussion or the priest who baptizes a baby or the judge who pronounces a verdict are persons rather than personae? … The performative utterance thus automatically fictionalizes its utterer when it makes him the mouthpiece of a conventionalized authority” (Johnson, The Critical Difference, 60). Or one could say, as well, that read rhetorically, the performative utterance may uncover the theatrical nature of such “ordinary” social actions.

42. Johnson, The Critical Difference, 60 (my emphasis).

43. In light of the duality of Hermione's deictics, we might read the specification “i’ th’ open air” within historical context as well. The stage in London's earliest commercial theaters projected into a yard and therefore placed actors “i’ th’ open air.” On the physical conditions of London's public amphitheaters and private halls, see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 13-48. Most critics believe the play to have been written for the closed theater of Blackfriars. But a note on the play by Simon Forman tells us that at least one contemporary remembers having seen The Winter's Tale performed at the Globe (on 15 May 1611).

44. Jacques Lacan, Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 55. On the important difference between the usual misprision of the Lacanian “lack” and the productive process of misfiring, see Felman, 82-84.

45. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 193-221, esp. 214. Cavell is, of course, most concerned with Leontes's doubts about his son and his paternity. But in light of Janet Adelman's work on the play, one is led to wonder, when poised between these two powerful essays, why it is the maternal body that sparks Leontes's radical doubt. I would add to Adelman's analysis only that it is Hermione's language—the effects of her voice—as well as her body that unsettle her husband's sense of himself. To Cavell's approach, similarly, I would add only that the play explores the action of Leontes's doubt through the action of both language and thought. For the scandal of what cannot be known—the truth about Hermione—turns, as we have seen, into an interrogation of the power and the limits of theatrical representation as well as of two kinds of discourse: saying and swearing.

46. It is perhaps worth remembering, as Jonathan Bate points out, that Shakespeare's contemporaries understood him to be the inheritor of Ovid. Drawing on the very rhetoric of animation at issue here, Francis Meres observed that “the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare” (Palladis Tamia [1598], as quoted in Elizabethan Critical Essays, G. Gregory Smith, ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904], 317). For further comment on Renaissance Ovidianism, see Bate, 1-47; and Ovid Renewed: Ovidian influences on literature and art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, Charles Martindale, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988).

47. David Ward, “Affection, Intention, and Dreams in The Winter's Tale,” Modern Language Review 82 (1987): 545-54, esp. 552. Ward offers a precise discussion of Leontes's “affection” in relation to sixteenth-century faculty psychology, particularly in medical discourse. Looking at discussions in Hooker and Burton, Ward suggests that with this word Leontes is designating a “disease of the mind” linked to the faculty of the appetite rather than to the will or to reason; for Hooker, affection is both involuntary (“Wherefore it is not altogether in our power”) and a desire for the impossible, for “any thing which seemeth good, be it never so impossible” (as quoted in Ward, 546). For Shakespeare, Ovid's combined stories of Pygmalion and Orpheus give a distinctive mythographic and erotic turn to the involuntary aspect of affection (revulsion from womankind out of grief or disgust) and its connotation of a desire for the impossible (for art to conquer death).

48. See Howard Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied our queen?’: the deconstruction of presence in The Winter's Tale” in Parker and Hartman, eds., 3-18. Although I clearly agree with Felperin's emphasis on the play's consciousness of its own failure to refer, it seems to me that, by framing the question in terms of the possibility that Hermione may be guilty, Felperin participates in the very logic he critiques; his reading repeats what it might otherwise analyze—the question of why language's misfiring should be represented in cognitive terms as the truth or falsity of the maternal body.

49. Ovid, of course, shared this dream: the final lines of the Metamorphoses claim that the poet will live (“vivam”), his name survive the “gnawing tooth of time” though his body does not (“nec edax abolere vetustas”), if his poem is “read on the lips of the people” (“perque omnia saecula fama” [XV.871-79]). For my understanding of this scene, I am indebted to conversations with Thomas M. Greene on the relationship between poetry and magic. See his essays “The Balance of Power in Marvell's ‘Horatian Ode,’” ELH 60 (1993): 379-96; and “Poetry as Invocation,” New Literary History 24 (1993): 495-517.

50. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott cite Hippocrates for the sense of wind in the body: derived from “ανε-, ‘blow, breathe’, cf. [Sanskrit], áni-ti, ‘breathes’” (Greek-English Lexicon, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951], 1:132). The primary meaning of anima is “breath” or “breathing as the characteristic manifestation of life,” and it thus connotes “the characteristic or quality whose loss constitutes death” (OLD, 1:132-34). It can also designate “a disembodied spirit, soul, ghost” (132), a hint of which meaning appears, perhaps, when Polixenes asks Paulina to “make it manifest where she has liv’d, / Or how stol’n from the dead” (5.3.114-15). For interesting comments on the ghostly undertone here and at other moments in this scene, see Gross.

51. Since Ovid handled the scene, the link became one of the mainstays of the tradition. The subjective and objective genitive in Marston's title, “The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image,” for instance, derives its power from this connection. Thus his Pygmalion is enamored less of the statue than of his own reflection in that statue: “Hee was amazed at the wondrous rarenesse / Of his owne workmanships perfection. … And thus admiring, was enamored / On that fayre Image himselfe portraied” (245, my emphasis). Pygmalion's resemblance to Narcissus was also central to the representation of the lover in the Roman de la Rose; for an overview, see Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century (Lund: Gleerups, 1967). I learned to attend to the crucial role that Pygmalion and Narcissus play in the Rime Sparse from Giuseppe Mazzotta (The Worlds of Petrarch [Durham, NC, and London: Duke UP, 1993]).

52. Golding, 64^v. Ovid uses the simile of turning to stone but says nothing of “another worlde”: “Mater ad auditas stupuit ceu saxea voces / attonitaeque diu similis fuit, utque dolore / pulsa gravi gravis est amentia” (V.509-11). For another reading of the import of Ceres's grief for the play, see T. G. Bishop, Shakespeare and the theatre of wonder (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 125-75.

53. Golding, too, preserves the detail of Sicily in his translation: “But bitterly aboue the rest she banned Sicilie, / In which the mention of hir losse she plainely did espie” (64^r). Understanding Hermione as a second Ceres may tell us why Shakespeare makes an otherwise puzzling change of location. Where Greene begins Pandosto in Bohemia and later moves to Sicily, Shakespeare opens the story of winter in Sicily only to move, in Act 4, to Bohemia's pastoral landscape.

A number of colleagues read and commented on this essay with care and acuity. I would like to thank them here: Ian Duncan, Kevin Dunn, Richard Halpern, William Jewett, Wayne Koestenbaum, Larry Manley, Jeff Nunokawa, Patricia Rosenmeyer, and Katherine Rowe. I owe the inaugural idea for this essay to a conversation several years ago with David Marshall.