SOURCE: “‘Good queen, my lord, good queen’: Sexual Slander and the Trials of Female Authority in The Winter's Tale,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. 25, 1994, pp. 89-118.

[In the following essay, Kaplan and Eggert examine The Winter's Tale's relation to questions of female sexuality and authority during Queen Elizabeth's reign.]

The legal history of early modern Englishwomen has not yet been written, though recent contributions suggest that scholars are beginning to rectify this oversight.¹ One productive point of entry into this important field is presented by defamation, generally defined in early modern England as an injury inflicted by the false and malicious imputation of a crime. The popularity of this charge and its redresses is registered in the records for both common law and ecclesiastical courts in this period, both of which evidence dramatic increases in slander cases. The value of slander for the exploration of early modern women's legal concerns is multiple. First, defamation gives us an indication—albeit more reflective, perhaps, of public opinion than actual indictment rates—of the types of crimes women were thought to commit. After all, slanderous accusations have to have some plausibility in order to be damaging. Second, defamation is an injury that women both commit and complain about in significant numbers. Finally, the form of and redress for defamation are, for the most part, gendered. Imputations of bankruptcy, for example, which could have damaged a merchant and thus were actionable for a man, would probably have had little effect if directed toward a woman. In contrast, allegations of whoredom—which, while occasionally leveled at men, were not usually thought to injure male reputations—were overwhelmingly cited by women in the slander suits they brought.²

In this essay, we would like to make a foray into a gendered legal history of early modern England through the problem of slander as experienced by contemporary women and as represented and commented upon in Shakespeare's play The Winter's Tale. Not only does the play concern itself with slanders to women's reputations, it also engages a series of other transgressions particularly associated with women: adultery, petty treason, bastardy, infanticide, scolding, and witchcraft.³ All the female offenses aired in the play thus reveal a pairing of common concerns about women in the period, their sexuality and their authority (a circumstance discussed by early modern commentators never as autonomy from men, but always as power over men). Female criminality was on the whole popularly defined in terms of either inverting gender hierarchy, as in petty treason or scolding, or transgressing sexual mores, as in bastardy or prostitution, or both, as in adultery or witchcraft. In fact, anxiety about female sexuality might be considered a displaced version of anxiety about female authority, insofar as a causative relation between these two can ever be established. Accusations of sexual impropriety often were unsubtly coded attacks on women's perceived dominance over men in a nonsexual sphere. In a period when a woman's reputation rested largely on her sexual behavior, there was insufficient language, besides that of promiscuity, to classify and to discourage the exercise of female authority. The next best category of opprobrium would be to characterize her behavior as male (Amussen 119-20).

England's ongoing concern with female dominance and female sexuality was only highlighted and exacerbated, in the second half of the sixteenth century, by the peculiar status of its monarch. Although Elizabeth Tudor preferred to promote herself as a singular woman, one whose sexual and legal autonomy was available to no one else, in fact her position as sole monarch and femme sole posed a significant challenge, as many critics have pointed out, to contemporary assumptions about the subordination of women. In her recent book on Elizabeth's multivalent presentations and representations, Carole Levin outlines Elizabeth's complex restructuring of gender hierarchies and the anxiety over an unfettered feminine sexuality she thus elicited. Far from simply categorizing the queen's monarchical persona as masculine, as some critics have tended to argue,⁴ Elizabeth and her subjects also considered her rule to be precisely that of a woman over a kingdom of men; as a result, as Levin puts it, although “[h]er people might regard her body politic as both pure and virginal, and the incarnation of the sacred principle of male monarchy, … the rumors and seditious words so carefully gathered [by Elizabeth's detractors] suggest a perception of her body natural as potentially corrupt in a manifestly female way” (147). As critics such as Levin, Susan Frye, and Leah Marcus (Puzzling 59-73) have contended and as we discuss below, Elizabeth's queenship elicited her subjects' fantasies and fears that she was, as Shakespeare's Cleopatra puts it, “no more but e’en a woman,” and that a woman ruling over men would necessarily subject her entire realm to unbridled feminine sexual desire. Those fantasies and fears were expressed and repeated in a number of different venues, including the courts of law, which during Elizabeth's reign heard cases that, had the female reputation at issue been not the queen's but a mere woman's, would have been considered under the rubric not of treason but of sexual slander.

Our discussion of a Jacobean play depends, however, on considering not what Elizabeth's sexual reputation underscored while she lived, but how her sexuality might have been remembered. Although Elizabeth's cherished virginity remained the topic of both idle curiosity and scurrilous attack well into the Stuart era (if not, indeed, into our own), the death of the queen tended to polarize the discussion of her sexual nature into clearer terms than the ones in circulation while she was alive. Elizabeth's disturbing presentation of herself as both virginal and sexual bifurcated after her death into opinion about whether she was virginal or sexual, so that on the one hand Elizabeth was apotheosized as the saint who through her refusal to marry had kept England Protestant and free,⁵ while on the other hand she was still the object of detraction by persons such as “one Sheapheard, a barrister of Lincolns Inn, [and] a base Jesuited papist,” who during James I’s reign uttered “base and scandalous” words regarding the late queen's honor.⁶ It is perhaps the case, then, that Elizabeth's passing offered a respite in which the late queen's sexuality could be named, codified, and contained. At the same time, however, Elizabeth's new status as a remembered personage gave England a neutral arena in which the debate over female sexuality and female authority, issues of increasing public anxiety as the seventeenth century wore on, could be creatively explored. That is, the threat posed by the desire and authority of real women is discussed in terms of the late queen so that it may be discussed at all. For these reasons, we contend, Shakespeare's Winter's Tale constructs its considerations of female sexuality around representations that remember and reevaluate Elizabeth. That reevaluation, we shall presently argue, in fact requires reaching back even farther in history, to Elizabeth's mother, Anne Boleyn, whose career provides a kind of prototype and a warning for all subsequent slandered women in positions of authority. Shakespeare's seventeenth-century recasting of sixteenth-century queens therefore serves as a larger commentary on the misrepresentations, if not defamations, that the law perpetrated against women in the early modern period in attempting to name and contain their behavior.

An account of how the law of defamation functioned for English women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides a necessary foundation for our argument. As we have already suggested, gender affected both the content of and the redress for defamation, due to a large extent to differences in the way male and female reputation was constructed. Susan Amussen observes:

The defamation cases [suggest] that “honesty” had one meaning for women and another for men. Women's honesty was determined and judged by their sexual behavior; men's honesty was judged in a wide variety of contexts with their neighbours, and bore a closer relation to our notion of honesty as “truthful.” Reputation was a gendered concept in early modern England.

(104)

The development of defamation law in sixteenth-century England indicates how the courts reflected and reinforced gender distinctions in rectifying damage to reputation. At the beginning of the century, the only redress for defamation was to be found at the ecclesiastical courts. The offense was defined as the malicious imputation of a crime; the punishment was excommunication, which could be revoked upon the guilty party's doing public penance (Helmholz xiv). However, as the century progressed, the common law began offering a remedy for defamation, based on the same definition of the offense, which understood its effects as financial and offered as punishment and redress damages paid by the offender to the victim. The two jurisdictions were distinguished by the content of the defamations spoken: the church courts handled imputations of “spiritual” crimes (i.e., offenses against ecclesiastical law) while the common-law courts offered redress for imputations of “temporal” crimes (offenses actionable in secular law). Hence, a defamation alleging sexual impropriety by either sex would go to ecclesiastical court while a slander imputing theft, for example, would be heard in a court of common law (Helmholz xli-xlvii).⁷

J. A. Sharpe speculates that the gendered nature of defamation reflects the differences in social roles for men and women:

… it is difficult not to see the wider types of defamation against which men litigated as a consequence of their more varied involvement in the affairs of the world. Women … were allowed free access to everyday activities, but their role within them was limited. The rarity with which they were slandered as perjurers, cheats and usurers, for example, suggests that they were not allowed to participate very fully in business or legal matters.

(Defamation 28-29)

The conception of women in terms of their sexuality reflects the limitations of their economic autonomy: the early modern English husband not only took control over his wife's property upon marriage, he also acquired property in her body. The children she produced belonged to him, and for middling and upper classes, the family's very continuity depended on her bearing a legitimate male heir to carry on the family name and control its financial holdings. Anxiety about female promiscuity thus fixates on the possibility that the wife's children might not be her husband's, and that his property might be transmitted to another man's son. A woman's assertion of independent sexuality in this way belies the important fiction that her husband owns her body, and the children she bears, by demonstrating that her sexual choices are beyond her husband's control. Thus sexual slander, while perceived as a problem by its victims, nevertheless performed a valuable patriarchal function: the threat of public humiliation and rejection, or even of disciplinary prosecution for the imputed behavior, served as a deterrent against sexual misbehavior both for victims of slander themselves and for either chaste or promiscuous bystanders (Ingram 305-07, 311-13). In fact, as Laura Gowing suggests, slanders against women's sexual reputations drew on directives for female chastity expressed in canonical and noncanonical sources: conduct and household manuals, sermons and ballads (9-10). Hence, defamation could function as a valuable force for policing female sexuality, not just as an action disruptive of the social order.⁸

It is, then, not surprising that Elizabeth, the self-styled Virgin Queen, repeatedly found herself the victim of sexual slander in the context of attempts either to rein her into an acceptable marriage or to unseat her. Rumors alleging Elizabeth's sexual misconduct circulated repeatedly throughout her reign, revealing that even the queen was not protected from her gender. Early in her reign, such rumors tended to emerge around discussions of the queen's marriage plans and England's concomitant fears over either foreign entanglements or subjection to a powerful domestic peer. Her affection for Robert Dudley (later earl of Leicester), for example, caused such a flurry of scandal in England and on the Continent that the representative for one of her wooers felt it necessary to inquire if Elizabeth were still a virgin (Neale 79-83). Outside of court, stories circulated to the effect that she had borne Dudley at least one illegitimate child. Such slanders regarding the queen and Dudley returned in the 1570s, 1580s, and 1590s, long after the end of her childbearing years and the earl's death (Samaha 69); as Levin explains, when Elizabeth's ability to marry and bear children was no longer an issue, “the rumors [of Elizabeth's sexual misconduct] served as a focus for discontent and fear for the succession” (67), and particularly as a focus for England's increasing desire to end female rule and institute normative male rule instead (Levin 100-20; Eggert, “Nostalgia” 524-26). In this way slanders against Elizabeth from late in her reign revived debates from early in her reign over the very possibility of a woman's public status. As a female ruler in her own right, she—like Mary Tudor and Mary Queen of Scots—contradicted the conventional wisdom that women could not rule over, and hence be superior to, men (Jordan 116-33). The general weakness and inferiority of women were cited by authors of treatises against queenship; one serious concern voiced was that once freed from male control, female lust would know no bounds.

In turn, the sexual scandals surrounding Elizabeth's own lineage also generated slander during her reign, slander that vented discontent against Elizabeth in the context of England's bitter religious controversies. In its belief that Henry VIII's divorce from Catherine of Aragon was invalid, the Roman Catholic church viewed his subsequent marriage with Anne Boleyn as adulterous and considered Henry and Anne's daughter Elizabeth a bastard. Charges against Elizabeth and Anne continued to surface well into her reign, as Catholic propaganda alluding to Elizabeth's adulterous origins and linking them with her own alleged promiscuity circulated with increasing frequency and virulence as the sixteenth century wore on. In 1588 William Allen, expatriate Catholic Cardinal of England, published in Antwerp his Admonition … Concerning the Present Warres, which not only charges Elizabeth with being the product of an incestuous union, asserting that Anne Boleyn was Henry VIII's daughter as well as his wife (Levin 80-81), but conflates that attack with vicious allegations against Elizabeth's own sexual conduct:

With [Leicester] … and diuers others she hathe abused her bodie, against Gods lawes, to the disgrace of princely maiestie & the whole nations reproche, by vnspeakable and incredible variety of luste, which modesty suffereth not to be remembred, neyther were it to chaste eares to be vttered how shamefully she hath defiled and infamed her person and cuntry, and made her Courte as a trappe, by this damnable and detestable arte, to intangle in sinne and ouerthrowe the yonger sorte of the nobilitye and gentlemen of the lande, whereby she is become notorious to the worlde, & in other cuntryes a comon fable for this her turpitude, which in so highe degre, namely in a woman and a Queene, deseruethe not onelie deposition, but all vengeaunce bothe of God and man, and cannot be tollerated without the eternal infamie of our whole cuntrie. …

(xix, B2r)⁹

The illegitimacy of her birth and of her capacity to rule merge in this diatribe, which imagines Elizabeth's nymphomania transforming her realm into an effeminate “cuntry,” emasculating and debauching its youth, and bringing infamy to England. Elizabeth's attackers hence transform the victim of slander into a source of defamation.

The treatment of Elizabeth's parentage in fact provides a paradigm for the ways in which sexual slander was used to control a woman's assertion of authority. It is now assumed by most historians of the period that Anne Boleyn was innocent of the charges that brought about her 1536 execution, a view apparently available in the Elizabethan period as well, since John Foxe styles her in his Actes and Monuments (1563) as a martyr whom he suspects was brought down by “some secret practising of the papists” (5: 136). However, popular stories of Anne as a treasonous witch and incestuous adulteress circulated from the time of her death well into the eighteenth century and are still current today (Warnicke 247). Henry VIII himself provided the basis for these slanders when, three years after his marriage to Anne, he charged her with adultery, incest, and treason, and had her executed and Elizabeth declared illegitimate. Foxe cites Anne's commitment to true religion as having provoked slander against her: “By reason whereof it may be easily considered, that this christian and devout Deborah could lack no enemies amongst such a number of Philistines, both within the realm, and without” (5: 136). Yet as the Second Act of Succession (1536) makes clear, it was Henry himself who removed the injunction against slanders of Anne and Elizabeth he had legislated earlier in the wake of criticisms over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon, in effect confirming and legalizing Catholic opinion in pardoning slanders against his second wife and her daughter:

… the kings most roiall maiestie, most gratiouslie considering, that diuers and manie of thi most louing and obedient subiects now latelie afore the begining of the present parlement, haue spoken [etc.] … against the said vnlawfull mariage, solemnized betweene his highnesse and the said ladie Anne, and to the preiudice, slander disturbance and derogation thereof, but also to the perill, slander and disherison of the ladie Elizabeth the kings daughter illegitimat borne vnder the same mariage, and to the let, disturbance and interruption of the said ladie Elizabeth to the title of the crowne. … Which words, dooings, [etc.] albeit they proceeded of no malice, but vpon true and iust grounds, … yet neuerthelesse the kings said subiects might heereafter happen to be impeached, troubled and vexed for such their words, dooings, acts, [etc.] … The kings highnesse therefore of his most bountifull mercie and benignitie is pleased and contented that it be enacted … that all and singular his louing subiects, which haue spoken, … [etc.] against [the marriage, Anne, or Elizabeth], or to anie of their slanders, perils, or disherison: … shall be freelie and cleerelie pardoned, discharged, and released by authoritie of this act, of all those and such treasons and misprisions of treasons aboue mentioned.

(28 Hen. VIII c. 7)

While Henry apparently believed the charges to be true, a sense still lingered that imputations against Anne and Elizabeth had been considered defamatory in the past and might continue to be. Foxe tries to right this score by noting Henry's later change of mind as manifested in his last will, “wherein, expressly and by name, he did accept, and by plain ratification did allow, the succession of his marriage to stand good and lawful” (5: 136). Nevertheless, the Second Act of Succession remained on the statute books throughout Elizabeth's reign, licensing critics of her rule to deploy imputations of sexual impropriety against both Elizabeth and her mother.

The case of a king who falsely charges his wife with adultery, seeks to execute her, and bastardizes his daughter resonates strongly with the plot of The Winter's Tale, and in fact suggests a reading of the play as an allegory of Anne's downfall and Elizabeth's bastardization, seventy-five years after the fact. Horace Walpole expressed this opinion in 1769 in a digression from the main topic of his essay “Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third”:

… there is another of Shakespeare's plays, that may be ranked among the historic, though not one of his numerous critics and commentators have discovered the drift of it; I mean The Winter Evening's Tale, which was certainly intended (in compliment to queen Elizabeth) as an indirect apology for her mother Anne Boleyn. … The subject was too delicate to be exhibited on the stage without a veil; and it was too recent, and touched the queen too nearly, for the bard to have ventured so home an allusion on any other ground than compliment. The unreasonable jealousy of Leontes, and his violent conduct in consequence, form a true portrait of Henry the Eighth, who generally made the law the engine of his boisterous passions. … The Winter's Evening Tale was therefore in reality a second part of Henry the Eighth.

(108-09)

Walpole's comments obviously contain inaccuracies, from the title of the play, to the date of its composition (he imagines it written during Elizabeth's lifetime), to its place in the Shakespearean chronology. Nonetheless, we find Walpole's reading of the play intriguing, and we propose to consider it at some length in the following pages. In the end, though, we mean not to suggest that Hermione's family and fatal career precisely correspond at every point to Anne Boleyn's, but to argue that The Winter's Tale entertains reminiscences both of the long-dead Anne and of her lately deceased daughter Elizabeth in order to expand consideration of the plight of the sexually slandered woman outside these defunct episodes. We are, then, precisely not making a “topical” argument regarding Anne Boleyn and The Winter's Tale; rather, we are arguing that while the historical issues the play engages are still current enough in the early seventeenth century to be familiar and thus useful, their use lies in their presenting a concluded and thus less controversial episode through which difficult contemporary problems surrounding gender might be explored.¹⁰ Charges in the play that initially seem utterly specific to Hermione, and that seem uniquely to resonate with Anne Boleyn's case, begin to attach themselves to different female characters, including women of different generations and stations than Hermione's. In this regard we find it significant that The Winter's Tale glosses its own ostentatious historical gap of sixteen years as a matter of comparison and substitution. Just as Time promises both to measure and to obliterate the distinctions between past and present—“so shall I do / To th’ freshest things now reigning, and make stale / The glistering of this present, as my tale / Now seems to it” (4.1.12-15)—so, too, do the play's female characters interchangeably occupy the slandered or slanderable positions occupied in turn by Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth Tudor, and their successors in both royal and non-royal positions: adulteress, witch, scold, virgin, bastard, bride.

One might argue, to concur for the moment with Walpole, that Leontes's apparently unmotivated jealousy begins to cohere only as a recollection of Henry VIII's rejection of Anne Boleyn. Not that Leontes is unreasonable because Henry was unreasonable (as Walpole argues), but rather that the play's bizarre accumulation of details around Leontes's suspicions recapitulates the bizarre accusations of adultery, incest, and treason through which Henry and his counselors, in the wake of Anne's failure to bear him a son, tried to make retrospective sense of Henry's wrecked lineal ambitions. For example, Leontes's reading of Hermione's hospitable reception of Polixenes—“But to be paddling palms, and pinching fingers, / As now they are, and making practis’d smiles / As in a looking-glass; and then to sigh, as ’twere / The mort o’ th’ deer” (1.2.115-18)—reiterates Henry's ex post facto conversion of Anne's Petrarchan flirtations with male courtiers into sexual, rather than social, intercourse. Although the five men charged with committing adultery with Anne represented the whole gamut of male positions at court (one musician, two grooms of the privy chamber, one former page of the king, and Anne's own brother George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford), all of them had attempted to advance their ambitions by playing the queen's courtly lovers, subscribing to what Eric Ives calls “the common currency of courtly dalliance” by claiming to love their sovereign's wife (366).¹¹ In the context of Anne's indictment, however, these interchanges became described as her “inciting … five men to have sexual relations with her by the use of touches and kisses that involved thrusting her tongue into their mouths and theirs in hers” (Warnicke 203). At issue seemed to be Anne's initiation of many of these mock flirtations as a way of consolidating her command of the royal household: Ives describes a conversation between Anne and one of the men later accused, Henry Norris, as her eliciting his political loyalty in the guise of his pledge of love (366). The same technique of the courtly lady commanding, rather than passively accepting, her lovers' pledges would later be used to great effect by Anne's daughter Elizabeth; but in Anne's case, this inversion of gender hierarchy came to be interpreted as a prelude to sexual malfeasance. As with Hermione and Leontes, it is a short step from the queen declaring “a lady's Verily's / As potent as a lord's” (1.1.50-51) to the king surmising that she “arms her with the boldness of a wife / To her allowing husband!” (1.2.184-85).

Like Anne Boleyn, Hermione is accused of adultery, treason, and conspiracy to murder the king, but hovering around those charges is another, stranger imputation that also haunted Anne: the imputation of witchcraft. Retha Warnicke has recently argued, suggestively if not conclusively, that Henry's horror of witchcraft was the primary reason he initiated proceedings to rid himself of Anne. On 29 January 1536, Anne was delivered of a stillborn male fetus whom the midwives probably thought deformed (Warnicke 201-03); witches were believed to give birth to deformed children. This circumstance, Warnicke contends, explains the care taken in the indictments of Anne to describe her as preternaturally seductive of both Henry and her adulterous lovers, initiating those “mortally sinful” tongue-thrusting kisses (Warnicke 203). Leontes is similarly disturbed by what he perceives as “[k]issing with inside lip” (1.2.286); witchcraft statutes cite “the intent to provoke any person to unlawful love” as actionable (5 Eliz. c. 16, qtd. in Rosen 56). At issue was not only the witch's provocation of men to desire, an action of course not unique to witches, but her intent to engage them thereby in unlawful, unnatural sexual acts that might in turn bring down God's punishment of a monstrous child. As well, Henry's concern that he had been bewitched might have moved him to declare himself a cuckold not only once, but five times over, since if Henry had fathered a child stillborn through witchcraft, then he himself might have been tainted through sexual contact with the witch's womb. On the other hand, sexual concourse with a witch was commonly thought to induce male impotence, a malady from which Henry evidently suffered, according to evidence given by Anne's brother George at his trial. The fact that George Boleyn's evidence was allowed to stand in the record is taken by Warnicke as evidence that Henry wanted his impotence with Anne to be made known, so that he could not possibly have fathered her monstrous son (216). Paradoxically, then, Henry's conversion of himself into a cuckold, and an impotent cuckold at that, allowed him to inoculate his patrilineage against the witch's sexual influence.

We are not qualified to assess whether Warnicke is right to hinge Anne's downfall on Henry's belief in her witchcraft. However, the rumors of witchery that sprang up against Anne and that persisted in the popular literature do bear reading in connection with The Winter's Tale's treatment of uncertain paternity. Although witchcraft is a charge leveled not against Hermione but rather against Paulina, as we will discuss below, witchcraft's presumed effects on paternity—presumptions that distill and warp a whole constellation of early modern phobias about women's sexuality and women's authority—nevertheless haunt the margins of Leontes's irrational suspicions about Mamillius's parentage. Janet Adelman has described Leontes's contradictory responses to his son as gyranting attempts to purge himself of contact with feminine sexuality; while at one moment Leontes envisions Mamillius as his duplicate, a product of fantasized parthenogenesis, at another moment Mamillius's resemblance to Hermione (“Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you / Have too much blood in him” [2.1.57-58]) causes Leontes further to recoil from Hermione's sexual desire and his own acquiescence to it (Adelman 224-28). Leontes ignores similar evidence of resemblance in the case of his baby daughter (“Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father” [2.3.98-99]) in order to declare her a bastard; one assumes that he discounts this evidence because of its source, Paulina, whose own forthrightness brings on her the charge of witchcraft that had never been elucidated against Hermione. But once the word “witch” has been uttered in connection with Paulina's refusal to keep silence, then Hermione's eloquent defense of herself, too, carries the tinge of female witchery—not solely, as Karen Newman has noted, because the witch's speech is heard in public, but because her speech coopts vehicles of hegemonic language: for early modern witches, prayers and the liturgy (66-70); for Hermione, the Oracle. But Hermione's speech, like that of the early modern witches who came to trial, and like that of Anne Boleyn at her own trial, falls on ears not prone to be seduced again. Like Anne, who pleaded her innocence with “so wise and discreet answers to all things laid against her, excusing herself with her words so clearly as though she had never been faulty to the same” (Ives 387),¹² Hermione is nonetheless ignored by her accuser, as is the Oracle that affirms her case.

Ignored, that is, until Leontes receives news that his son, “with mere conceit and fear / Of the queen's speed” (3.2.144-45), is dead. Here, then, is where Leontes begins to part company from Henry VIII, and where we have to gauge the effects of the play's slippage from a strict reproduction of 1530s events. Mamillius's resemblance to his father, along with the fact that he is a well-formed boy, not a monstrous fetus, bars Leontes from Henry's strategy of declaring that his son could not possibly be his. Thus, whereas for Henry the death of his unborn son constituted evidence for condemning the witch and her offspring, for Leontes the death of his son is, at last, convincing evidence of his own tyranny (3.2.146-47). The Winter's Tale thus airs Henry's warped reasoning only to expose it as precisely that, warped: “I have too much believ’d mine own suspicion” (3.2.151). Unlike Henry, who at the time of Anne's trial had already made preparations to further his patrilineal ambitions with a new wife, Leontes admits the Oracle's judgment that “the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found” (3.2.134-36), and accepts Paulina's stricture that he not remarry. In this way The Winter's Tale shifts its topical perspective from a Henrician era to a Jacobean stance. In a post-Elizabethan light Leontes's family seems in fact to revise and reverse Henry's, so that Mamillius begins to resemble not Anne's malformed, stillborn son, but the lamented Edward VI, cut down in his youth; and the baby, presumed dead, whose recovery saves the nation, resembles Elizabeth herself, who underwent a kind of internal exile and near-martyrdom (as Foxe reminded his readers) in her years of waiting to assume the throne from her sister Mary Tudor.

This displacement of historical judgment forward in time, called attention to by Time's own displacement of events in act 4, accounts in part for the possibility of reading the play's treatment of queenly reputation in multiple layers: Hermione's plight is replicated and redeemed in her daughter's, just as Anne Boleyn's reputation came to be absorbed and recuperated in Elizabeth's, and subsequently shadowed in the next Elizabeth, the Stuart princess. We wish briefly to consider the consequences of reading the second half of The Winter's Tale in light of Elizabethan and Jacobean reconstructions of Anne's downfall, with the aim of suggesting that the play's refracted treatments of the case of the slandered queen eventually unmoor the play from concerns specific only to royal women.

At first blush, the sixteen-year-old Perdita seems to continue to recollect Elizabeth Tudor, this time as an adult seeking to reform her mother's reputation. Perdita's concern for her chastity—to whose loss she seems to be darkly alluding when she avers that, faced with the wrath of his father, Florizel “must change this purpose” of marrying her “[o]r I my life” (4.4.39-40)—coalesces with her hatred for the grafted flowers she calls “nature's bastards” (4.4.83); and her refusal to plant these artificed and hence whorelike flowers demonstrates her desire to mend, in her own childbearing, any hint of bastardy: “No more than, were I painted, I would wish / This youth should say ’twere well, and only therefore / Desire to breed by me” (4.4.101-03). In this fashion, Perdita recalls Queen Elizabeth's steadfast maintenance of her virginity, which, many historians surmise, may have been motivated in part by her wish to expunge the nation's memory of Anne Boleyn's disastrous childbearing career as well as her own sporadic illegitimacy. As Frye describes her, Elizabeth early in her reign in fact sounded a great deal like Perdita: her coronation entry symbolically promised a queen who would be both fertile and wise, while at the same time it emphasized Elizabeth as the legitimate product of a legitimate royal marriage (33-36).¹³ Later, of course, as it became clear that Elizabeth would not marry, the prospect of her fertility was dropped in favor of her sexual purity—and that virginity became a figure, as Peter Stallybrass has argued, for an inviolable England, an island nation defending its embattled borders against all comers. In the years leading up to and following the 1588 threat of Spanish invasion, Elizabeth's chastity admonished England to preserve its Protestantism and its sovereignty; together, England's religion and England's nationhood substituted for a child of Elizabeth's body as Elizabeth's “issue” (Sandler 164). And that admonition includes reminiscences of Anne Boleyn, converted (largely by means of Foxe's widely read Actes and Monuments) into a Protestant saint.¹⁴

In this regard even a slight romance like Robert Greene's Pandosto, Shakespeare's source for the plot of The Winter's Tale, might be read as a recuperation of Anne's reputation, and in turn Elizabeth's. Indeed, Pandosto provides an interesting initial case for our suggestion that Anne's story might be revived and revised to fit changing historical circumstances. Published in 1588, the year of the Armada and one year after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, Pandosto capitalized on a historical moment in which the sexual status of queens was under intense scrutiny: even while English propagandists continued to publish accounts of Mary Queen of Scots as not only treasonous but also licentious, Catholic propagandists responded by describing Elizabeth as positively wolfish in her sexual appetities. Moreover, these Catholic accounts hurry to refer to Anne Boleyn as a means of further muddying Elizabeth's reputation.¹⁵Pandosto's plot, in this milieu, seems to gather up English anxiety about the possibility of a sexual queen only to clear the queen's name.¹⁶

Pandosto's continued popularity—it went through six editions before The Winter's Tale's first recorded performance in 1611 (Greene, Perymedes xxx-xxxii)—might be attributable, at least in part, to the continued resonance of the issue of queenly sexuality even after Elizabeth's death. As Barry Weller and Margaret Ferguson have recently argued, in the second decade of the seventeenth century Anne Boleyn's reputation was still a matter of religious and literary controversy.¹⁷ Catholic polemicist Nicholas Sander's De origine et progressu schismatis Anglicani, first published in 1585, had gone through its sixth European edition in 1610: this work promotes a perception of Anne as witchlike, detailing her prodigious promiscuity as well as her physical disfigurements (Warnicke 247). On the other hand, historian and Protestant apologist John Speed asserts in his 1611 History of Great Britaine—a work Shakespeare consulted before writing Henry VIII circa 1611-13 (Henry VIII xxxv) and thus may have had to hand as he was writing or revising The Winter's Tale—that Anne Boleyn's “adulteries,” like Hermione's, were merely a matter of misread queenly benevolence: “I haue heard it reported that [George Boleyn, Viscount] Rochford the Queenes brother comming to her bed side to solicite a suite, leaned thereupon to whisper her in the eare; which the Spials gaue forth that hee did so, to kisse the Queen” (771).¹⁸ Placing The Winter's Tale's plot in conjunction with a writer like Speed suggests a further displacement and revision of the slanderable queen in order to suit Jacobean circumstances. If the anticipated marriage of The Winter's Tale's Perdita indeed refers, as David Bergeron has argued, to the 1613 wedding of Elizabeth Stuart to the Protestant Elector Palatine (Shakespeare's Romances 157, 160), then we might see Shakespeare's play as part of a national effort to recuperate Elizabeth Tudor as a new, less threatening Elizabeth, one who safeguards her chastity so that she may eventually deliver it into her husband's keeping.¹⁹ This reading metamorphoses Perdita into James's daughter Elizabeth Stuart, and Hermione into an amalgamated and purified Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth Tudor. Hermione's reputation is so thoroughly cleared that her own sexuality, upon her revival, entirely disappears: like Elizabeth Tudor the Protestant martyr, her concern is only for the welfare of her daughter, the future of the nation.

In the end, though, The Winter's Tale's centrifugal movement away from Anne Boleyn's historically limited case also moves the play beyond merely a study of queens' susceptibility to sexual slander. A focus solely on royal women past and present would allow The Winter's Tale to be a play more like Henry VIII—that is, a play whose final emphasis is on England's unsullied national lineage and national reputation, in which “when / The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, / Her ashes new create another heir / As great in admiration as herself” (5.4.39-42). And admittedly Pandosto, which contains all of the plot elements of The Winter's Tale that we have discussed so far, would be a sufficient text for our consideration of reputation in connection to queens. However, The Winter's Tale does not restrict its representation of slander and female criminality to a creative reworking of Anne's and Elizabeth's sexual and reproductive careers. As queens, these women experienced lives quite different from those of other women in the early modern period. Yet queens were also considered exemplary, just as the accusations that Hermione, Perdita, and even Paulina suffer are versions of those which many women had to face. The Winter's Tale's two departures from Pandosto's plot—the voice of Paulina, and the revival of the queen—prove crucial to our consideration here. Particularly in the context of these two original additions to Greene, Shakespeare's play pointedly returns its female characters to circumstances familiar to slandered early modern women of all classes; in other words, the play departs from allegories of queens into fictions of law. But in the process, the play also radically reinvents early modern legal culture in order to reread positively the nexus of female sexuality and authority that is so troubling to the patriarchal order, both of the play and of early modern England.

David Underdown explores the “crisis of order” in early modern England in terms of gender strains resulting from women's economic independence, suggesting that public anxieties about scolds, witches, and physically or sexually rebellious women, increasingly expressed between 1560 and 1660, are different manifestations of a similar response to opportunities for female economic autonomy (121, 135-36). Interestingly, Underdown does not consider Elizabeth's rule as a potentially contributing factor to this phenomenon. As a woman authorized to rule over men, she is the scold par excellence, and capable of obliquely but emphatically asserting her superiority to a male Parliament, as in her 1566 speech on marriage and succession, where she twice exclaimed that “it is monstrous that the feet should direct the head” (Rice 79, 81). It was precisely this specter of female regiment that was punished when scolds were “enthroned” on cucking stools, or “cuckqueans,” and ducked in water (Boose 190, 195). Lynda Boose's remarks on the scold's nexus of verbal and sexual transgression are useful to contrast with our current discussion:

… the talkative woman is frequently imagined as synonymous with the sexually available woman, her open mouth the signifier for invited entrance elsewhere. Hence the dictum that associates “silent” with “chaste” and stigmatizes women's public speech as a behavior fraught with cultural signs resonating with a distinctly sexual kind of shame.

(196)

The Winter's Tale explicitly counters this nexus, within the context of a recuperation of Elizabeth's heritage and authority, by showing female outspokenness as compatible with and appropriate to female virtue and chastity, linking instead male speech with shame and the disruption of patriarchal succession.

Breaking the link between women's authority and their sexual malfeasance, however, requires The Winter's Tale to represent slanders against women, such as the imputation of scolding, as crimes with negative consequences for the social order, a representation that runs counter to most legal understandings of the problem in early modern England. First, it would be difficult to imagine that a king's accusations, regardless of their veracity or his motivations, could ever have been construed as constituting defamation. And even if this were possible, Leontes's words against Hermione would probably not have constituted defamation according to the ecclesiastical definition, because he believes the truth of his statements; he apparently does not speak them out of malice, and he pursues his allegations against her through legal channels (Ingram 295).²⁰ In only one limited and anomalous legal arena would sexual slanders against early modern Englishwomen have been understood as resulting in monetary loss or social unrest: the court of Star Chamber, in which a husband might complain that he, his wife, and the community at large were damaged by sexual slanders against her. Although the Star Chamber apparently takes cognizance only of a threat to a husband's reputation, it nevertheless registers that, since his reputation substantially depends on his wife's, sexual slander against her has a serious impact.²¹ Only the court of Star Chamber, then, acknowledges the dilemma sexual slander poses for the patriarchy: even while it may circumscribe a woman's sexual behavior, it may also dismantle the family name.

The Winter's Tale raises this legal exception to the status of legal commonplace. In the world of the play, the horns of this patriarchal dilemma are exposed in the king's desire to protect his own honor while exposing the queen's dishonor. He asks Camillo,

Dost think I am so muddy, so unsettled,
To appoint myself in this vexation; sully
The purity and whiteness of my sheets,
(Which to preserve is sleep, which being spotted
Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps)
Give scandal to the blood o’ th’ prince, my son,
Without ripe moving to ’t?

(1.2.325-32)

The answer to this question, given Leontes's dislike of his wife's persuasive power over Polixenes, is yes: his accusations against her immediately defuse her influence in court. But despite his status as king and his belief in his own allegations, Leontes's imputations against Hermione are clearly marked as slander causing widespread social damage. Paulina most evidently articulates the harm caused by threats to female reputation:

                                                             … for he,
The sacred honour of himself, his queen's,
His hopeful son's, his babe's, betrays to slander,
Whose sting is sharper than the sword's. …

(2.3.83-86)

Strikingly, she focuses on the fact that his accusations harm not only his wife and children, but his own honor. The slander against Hermione transforms into a self-slander: “this most cruel usage of your queen / … will ignoble make you, / Yea, scandalous to the world” (2.3.116, 119-20). Even the king acknowledges early in the proceedings, if for the wrong reasons, that his animus against Hermione and her alleged co-conspirators only serves to damage him: “The very thought of my revenges … / Recoil upon me” (2.3.19-20). Later, Leontes is indeed shown that his slanders have serious consequences for his own reputation, his happiness, and the stability of his rule (3.2.185-202). Similarly, the false imputation of sexual impropriety that Polixenes makes against Perdita, and that threatens to replay the tragedy of her mother, is shown to wreak damage on the speaker, not the victim. Responding to his father's violent rebuke and sexual slander of Perdita, Florizel resolves to himself,

                                                             … then
Let nature crush the sides o’ th’ earth together,
And mar the seeds within! …
From my succession wipe me, father. …

(4.4.478-81)

Polixenes will face the same loss of an heir and the same uncertain succession that Leontes is grappling with; in both cases, sexual slanders against women are shown to pose dangerous national consequences. But they also endanger, if on a higher social register, the legitimacy and respectability on which even middling classes depended for credit relations and for securing property transfer through inheritance.²²

The play's rereading and transformation of the process of contemporary slander law for women is similarly employed in its representation of female criminality generally. Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita all are essentially defamed to the extent that they are falsely accused of a considerable number of transgressions; their manifest innocence serves not only to discredit the speakers of the imputations, but also to call into question the construction of commonly defined popular notions of women and crime. Paulina's role in particular broadens the play's scope to consider a number of slanders commonly directed toward women. Leontes consistently deploys the rhetoric used to describe scolds in his attempts to delegitimate and silence Paulina's speech. She is a “callat / Of boundless tongue, who late hath beat her husband, / And now baits me!” (2.3.90-92); her rebelliousness moves beyond her husband and threatens her king. He asks Antigonus, “canst not rule her?” (46), and charges he is “woman-tir’d, unroosted / By thy Dame Parlet here” (74-75), a “lozel, … worthy to be hang’d / That wilt not stay her tongue” (108-09). Antigonus, however, rejects the charges by responding in kind, but with a difference: “When she will take the rein I let her run; / But she’ll not stumble” (51-52). The punishment of “bridling” was often imagined as a fit fate for early modern scolds (see Boose); Antigonus invokes this punishment only to demonstrate its inapplicability to the current circumstances. Paulina is also called a witch (67), a bawd (either a prostitute or a purveyor of prostitutes) (68), a traitor (81), and, by implication, a heretic (113-15); these, or similar charges of sexual or hierarchical transgression (including bastardy), are also laid at the feet of Hermione and/or Perdita. But these accusations are already defused before they are spoken, since not only the play's audience but also the other characters within the play are aware of their baselessness.

The irrationality of these imputations begins to put pressure on the logic of patriarchy itself. When Leontes remarks disparagingly that Antigonus “dreads his wife,” again evoking the specter of the scold, Paulina retorts, “So I would you did; then ’twere past all doubt / You’d call your children yours” (2.3.79-81). The popular ideology that held women physically, intellectually, and morally inferior to men depends on the proposition that wives are more susceptible to sinning and cannot be trusted. In The Winter's Tale, in contrast, a husband who looks up to rather than down on his wife can trust that her integrity will keep her faithful to him. Paulina emphasizes the stupidity of Leontes's jealousy, by way of insisting on the legitimacy of his second child, in her catalogue of his similarities to his newborn daughter. She concludes:

And thou, good goddess Nature, which hast made it
So like to him that got it, if thou hast
The ordering of the mind too, ’mongst all colours
No yellow in ’t, lest she suspect, as he does,
Her children not her husband's!

(2.3.103-07)

J. H. P. Pafford, the editor of the New Arden edition of the play, brings in a Leontesian note on these lines by suggesting that Paulina says the opposite of what she means here, “i.e., that it is the deliberate expression by Shakespeare of the kind of mistake which an excited woman might easily make” (49n106-07). But the absurdity here is not Paulina's, but Leontes's: as Pafford alternatively glosses, Perdita's doubting the fatherhood of her own children would be just as irrational as her father's baseless fears.

It is interesting to note that while slanders against women were relegated to the less powerful and the less lucrative jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts, slanders by women (often against men) were given the separate category of scolding that received disproportionate attention in popular literature and vigorous initiative in the means of communal punishment (see Boose, Underdown). Strikingly, the play also departs from social and legal practice in vindicating Paulina's “scolding.” At the moment when her charges appear to cross the line dividing truth and slander, when she comes closest to fitting the stereotype of a scold, Leontes justifies her speech. “Go on, go on: / Thou canst not speak too much; I have deserv’d / All tongues to talk their bitt’rest” (3.2.214-16). In contrast to Henry VIII's licensing defamations against Anne and Elizabeth to deflect infamy from himself, here the king licenses, in effect, defamations against himself as punishment for the infamy he has brought on his wife. While a bystanding lord chastises Paulina, and she remorsefully berates herself for showing “too much / The rashness of a woman” (220-21), Leontes insists on the validity of her words: “Thou didst speak but well / When most the truth: which I receive much better / Than to be pitied of thee” (232-34). Paulina's speaking is recuperated at its most radical and potentially most criminal moment, suggesting the need to reevaluate the category of scolding and the motivations behind its punishment.

Similarly, the charges of witchcraft leveled at Paulina in act 2 are dismissed at the play's end precisely when they are most credible. Leontes invokes the dangerous discourse of witchcraft in remarking on the astonishingly lifelike figure of Hermione:

                                                             … O royal piece!
There’s magic in thy majesty, which has
My evils conjur’d to remembrance, and
From thy admiring daughter took the spirits,
Standing like stone with thee.

(5.3.38-42)

All of the statutes legislated against witchcraft in the sixteenth century particularly forbid the invocation of evil spirits; here, in contrast, the conjuration is marvelous and cathartic, reminding Leontes of his past deeds and uniting the spirits of Perdita with those of her mother. Leontes's licensing of the magic that here commences is all the more remarkable considering that Paulina, again the focus of anxiety over female authority, again expresses that anxiety herself, anticipating that others will make the charge of witchcraft against her:

I’ll make the statue move indeed; descend,
And take you by the hand: but then you’ll think
(Which I protest against) I am assisted
By wicked powers.

(5.3.88-91)

She refers twice more to the possibility that some will suspect “it is unlawful business / I am about” (96-97, 105), even while making use of language associated with witches' practices as she addresses the statue: “Come! / I’ll fill your grave up … / Bequeath to death your numbness; for from him / Dear life redeems you” (100-103). The witchcraft act passed by Parliament in 1604 forbids anyone to

use practise or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil and wicked spirit … ; or take up any dead man, woman, or child out of his, her, or their grave, or any other place where the dead body resteth, … to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm, or enchantment.

(1 Jac. I c. 12, qtd. in Rosen 57)

With the threat of female transgression once more hanging in the air, Leontes steps in to validate the transgression itself: “If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (110-11). He is still not sure if magic is behind the revivification of his wife, but even so, he insists on the legitimacy of Paulina's actions.

The slanders spoken against Hermione, Perdita, and Paulina in the course of The Winter's Tale give a sense of how female criminality was understood at the time, but these accusations are shown, ultimately, to be constructs of male anxiety without basis in reality. The qualities associated with female transgression in early modern society are instead presented as valuable; rather than destabilizing the social order, Paulina's “offenses” serve, ultimately, to restore order and succession to Leontes's realm. This is not to say that disruptions to the social order do not occur in the play; damage is done, however, not by the women accused but by their male accusers. All three women suffer losses as a result of masculine defamations in the play, but perhaps the biggest loser, from a patriarchal perspective, is Leontes himself. If early modern patriarchal wisdom finds value in a less than vigorous redress of slanders against women, the play insists on the severity of those slanders' damages, not only to Hermione, Paulina, and Perdita, but especially to Leontes and his entire kingdom in the loss of a male heir.²³ The danger here lies not in female criminal behavior but in criminalizing female behavior.

We are suggesting that The Winter's Tale takes a feminist stance in relation to early modern law, though by “feminist” we do not mean the kind of thoroughgoing overthrow of patriarchal principles that would be indicated in a late twentieth-century use of the term. Rather, the play proposes women as integral and morally reliable caretakers of the patriarchal project of lineal inheritance; proposes that women's sexual reputations are to be treated as equal before the law to men's economic livelihoods; and, perhaps most audaciously, proposes that women have the authority to define those sexual reputations for themselves. However, Paulina's repeated, almost anxious iteration of the lawfulness of her actions serves as a reminder of women's tenuous stance before the law in early modern English society. After all, the radical claims that we argue The Winter's Tale advances are made within a play whose title suggests its very fictionality as well as its superannuation.²⁴ This improbability is further stressed by the play's disruption of the classical unities of action, place, and, most self-consciously, time. Time's choric appearance draws attention to the artificiality of his role, but also to its legality:

I that please some, try all: both joy and terror
Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me, or my swift passage, that I slide
O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap, since it is in my power
To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
To plant and o’erwhelm custom.

(4.1.1-9)

The strange self-referentiality of this speech (3-4) intensifies its implausibility even as Time authorizes his capacity to make or break law. His ability to judge (with the pun on “trial” in line 1) is indicated, yet he also expresses the fear of slander (4). He has the power to determine or dismiss law, but he must ask permission of the audience to skip these years and apologizes for the inconvenience (15, 29-32). The ambivalence Time voices in this speech articulates the difficult project of the play. Shakespeare stages a tale “stale [to] / The glistering of this present” (4.1.13-14), the bygone gender controversies embedded in the lives and deaths of Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth Tudor, as a vehicle for the very lively and disruptive current debates over women in early seventeenth-century England. In cautiously revivifying dead queens—and Time's appearance suggests that this recuperation is dependent on the hiatus—the play opens up a space, if an uncertain space, within which to begin a critique of current gender politics. Whether this fantastical tale found fertile ground in the legal culture of the seventeenth century is a question that future scholars of women's legal history will need to explore and answer.

Notes

1. As J. A. Sharpe notes, “Female crime, except for witchcraft, perhaps, is a subject which has so far attracted surprisingly little attention, one facet of the regrettably undeveloped nature of the study of women's history in the early modern period” (Crime 108); he cites Carol Wiener's and J. M. Beattie's articles as exceptions. Since the appearance of these essays, some important inroads have been made into this field, such as the work by Boose, Cioni, Dolan, Erickson, Ingram, and Spring, to mention just a few studies pertinent to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For a consideration of defamation and gender that often parallels the views of our essay, see Jardine.

2. The content of the words spoken and their results also determined the jurisdiction for redress, as the common-law and ecclesiastical courts divided responsibility for remedying this wrong. For a rigorous account of the historical development of defamation in both the ecclesiastical and common-law courts in England, see Helmholz.

3. In her chapter “Finding What Has Been ‘Lost’: Representations of Infanticide and The Winter's Tale” Frances Dolan points out that this crime usually associated with mothers is linked in Shakespeare's play to a father, who is then excused of the crime (159-70). Because it is not explicitly linked with female criminality in the play, we omit consideration of infanticide in our essay.

4. Treatments of Elizabeth as successfully wielding a masculine persona depend upon unskeptically accepting that the legal doctrine of the King's Two Bodies served to expunge the monarch's political persona of all perceived weakness, including the weakness of being a woman. Such a belief has marred otherwise fine readings of, for example, Shakespeare's comedies (Marcus, “Shakespeare's Comic Heroines”) and Spenser's Faerie Queene (Miller); for more complex analyses, see Marcus's revised account of Elizabeth's “composite” identity (Puzzling 51-105); Eggert, “Ravishment” (3-16); Frye (12-19); and especially Levin's chapter “Elizabeth as King and Queen” (121-48).

5. Such a representation of Elizabeth as defender of the faith could be used both for and against James I and Charles I; see Woolf.

6. The Diary of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 1622-1624, ed. E. Bourcier (Paris, 1974), 142, qtd. in Woolf 179.

7. One of the defining “incidents” determining redress of defamation in an ecclesiastical court was that the suit be “merely ‘for the soul's health’: in no circumstances could cash damages be awarded” (Ingram 296). Although in special circumstances offenders could request that their penance be commuted to a fine, these monies were paid to “poor relief and other pious objects,” not to the victims (Ingram 336-37). While women were allowed to sue in common law for defamation if they could prove damages (Ingram 296; see the case of Davyes v. Gardiner, in which the competing jurisdictions are discussed [Baker and Milsom 627-28]), the vast majority of common-law slander cases list male plaintiffs. It should, however, be pointed out that most married women in the period did not have separate legal and, therefore, financial identities from those of their husbands (Baker 550-57).

8. Gowing claims that defamers “twisted [these materials] towards other ends than the original intention” (10). However, we would argue that both unauthorized and authorized commentators on female behavior, both slanderers and tract-writers, share the common aim of circumscribing female sexual behavior. See Kaplan for an exploration of slander's employment in general as a tool for punishment and humiliation. While the punishment for defamation in the ecclesiastical courts called for a humiliating public penance, it is clear from the small percentage of final sentences that many slanderers did not endure the same public embarrassment experienced by their victims (Ingram 336-37, 317-18).

9. As Bruce Boehrer explains, the charges of incest leveled against Elizabeth's parentage were by no means consistent: the same Catholic polemicist might call Elizabeth both the product of Henry's and Anne's incestuous marriage, and the product of Anne's incest with her brother George (47-48).

10. Richard Wilson also briefly notes the analogies between Hermione and Anne Boleyn in his discussion of early modern medical discourse and its shift toward male scrutiny and control of gynecological and obstetrical study and practice (134-35).

11. However, two of the five men charged were also suspected of sodomy. Buggery was also popularly implicated in early modern English discourses of incest and witchcraft, two of the charges against Anne (Warnicke 191-95). The homosexual transgression underlying accusations of the queen's “lovers” may be echoed by homoerotic tensions between Leontes and Polixenes in act 1 of The Winter's Tale.

12. The speaker is contemporary chronicler Charles Wriothesley, whose sympathy toward Anne is remarkable considering that he argued Catherine of Aragon's divorce to be unjust (Ives 387).

13. This was one emphasis made in Elizabeth's coronation procession through London; at Gracechurch, she was presented with “a stage of three tiers. … In the lowest were Henry VII and his Queen; in the next—happy sight after twenty-two years!—Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn; in the highest, Elizabeth” (Neale 61).

14. The 1587 edition of Holinshed's Chronicles, for example, after referring the reader to Foxe for a refutation of “the sinister iudgements, opinions and obiections of backebiters against that vertuous queene,” digresses into Christopher Ocland's 1582 poem Eιρηναρχια Siue Elizabetha (miscited as another 1580s poem by Ocland, Anglorum prælia), which describes Anne as having a prophetic vision of her death and its ultimately triumphant Elizabethan consequences:

    Anglorum prælia saith, that this good queene was forwarned of hir death in a dreame, wherein Morpheus the god of sleepe (in the likenesse of hir grandfather) appeered vnto hir, and after a long narration of the vanities of this world (how enuie reigneth in the courts of princes, maligning the fortunate estate of the vertuous, how king Henrie the eight and his issue should be the vtter ouerthrow and expulsion of poperie out of England, and that the gouernment of queene Elizabeth should be established in tranquillitie & peace) he saith vnto hir in conclusion by waie of prophesie, as our poet hath recorded:

    Forti sis animo, tristis si nuncius adsum,
    Insperata tuæ velox necis aduenit hora,
    Intra triginta spacium moriere dierum:
    Hoc magnum mortis solamen habeto futuræ,
    Elizabetha suis praeclarè filia gestis
    Nomen ad astra feret patris, matrísque, suúmque.

    (3: 797)

    J. Sharrock's 1585 translation of Ocland's poem renders these lines as follows:

    Be not in minde dismayde, though mestiue message I foreshow,
    The houre vnlookt for of thine end, with swift course on doth draw,
    For within thirtie dayes, thou shalt outgasp thys vitall breath.
    Howbeit this solace great, of me receaue, before thy death:
    Elizabeth through wondrous actes,
    to starrs shall lift the name,
    Both of her selfe, and mightie Sier, and most renowmed dame.

    (B4v-C1r)

    Anne's vision of Elizabeth's stellification of her parentage helps to carry out, in the 1580s, the cultural work of national self-defense: even as the Armada approaches England, Elizabeth's reign is imagined as one of “tranquillitie & peace.” Small wonder that Ocland's poem was reprinted in 1589, just after the Armada year.

15. Adam Blackwood, in his 1587 Martyre de la Royne d’Escosse, declared that Anne “had buck teeth, six fingers on her left hand, and a large lump under her double chin; she was used as a whore by the principal courtiers of England and France, and was a Lutheran” (Phillips 174).

16. To our knowledge, Pandosto has not been given a topical reading in regard to events of the late 1580s, even though Greene was more than capable of capitalizing upon current events for the plots of his fiction: his Spanish Masquerado, for example, published the year after the Armada defeat, issues broadsides against the entire Spanish monarchy and military command, finally to conclude that England and its queen have been blest among nations. For Greene's canny expansion of his audience base for Pandosto via its combination of elite and popular literary forms, see Newcomb.

17. In their recent edition of Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam, a play published in 1613 and probably composed at some time in the preceding decade, Weller and Ferguson argue that Anne Boleyn's story is a subtext both for Salome, the lascivious female villain of the piece, and Mariam, the virtuous and martyred second wife of the tyrant Herod (Cary 30-35); this refraction of the slandered queen into several personae is similar to the one we are describing in The Winter's Tale. The fact that a Jacobean writer like Cary, who eventually converted to Catholicism, might be ambivalent about Anne's moral status indicates, we think, the urgency of England's continuing cultural need to fix the queen's sexual reputation, even in the aftermath of queenship.

18. Suggestively, Speed marginally cites “Robert Greene” for his account of Anne's scaffold speech; however, we have been unable to discover a work in which Greene described Anne's death, or a speech from one of Greene's fictional imperiled women that would match the words Speed gives to Anne.

19. Katherine Eggert has argued the point of Hermione's desexualization of Elizabeth in an unpublished paper, “‘The Statue Is But Newly Fix’d’: Remembering Queenship in The Winter's Tale (Or, the Queen's No Body).” Glynne Wickham suggests that Hermione's statue would have reminded the play's original audience of Elizabeth's and Mary Queen of Scots's recently installed effigies in Westminster Abbey; Bergeron further postulates that the statue would have evoked memories of both Elizabeth's funeral effigy of 1603 and Henry Stuart's of 1612 (“Restoration” 132).

20. It should be emphasized here that, in all likelihood, Henry VIII also believed the charges he leveled against Anne (Warnicke 235), and like Leontes, pursued his accusations through a court proceeding. But although Henry won his case, the sense of the potential similarity of his claims and the slanders spoken against Anne earlier in her marriage to him registers obliquely in the Second Succession Act quoted above.

21. A definition of criminal defamation or libel, usually a written detraction either of a prominent figure or of someone else whose slandering led to a breach of the peace, developed in Star Chamber in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the court meted out damages and punishments in passing sentence (Holdsworth 5: 201-12; Baker 137). In a sampling of Star Chamber defamation cases litigated around the turn of the sixteenth century, five of the twenty-four cases Lindsay Kaplan examined included men complaining about sexual slanders against wives: P.R.O. STAC 243/26, STAC 172/6, STAC 88/11, STAC 304/36, and STAC 5/18.

22. According to common law, a bastard could not inherit property from his parents (Baker 558). David Harris Sacks has remarked in conversation with Lindsay Kaplan that in early modern England, a man's reputation for controlling his wife was taken in the community as a measure of his ability to manage his household economy. If this reputation or credit suffered, it was difficult for him to convince tradespeople to extend the credit necessary to run that household.

23. For the intense love the people bear toward Mamillius, see Camillo's conversation with Archidamus (1.1.33-45). Oddly, the death of Mamillius suggests the enduring life of his subjects, who would desire to live until the king has another son, something that the conclusion of the play suggests is unlikely to happen.

24. Coleridge remarks that “on the whole, this play is exquisitely respondent to its title” (217). Several other uses of the phrase in Shakespeare's works help piece together a definition of the winter's tale. In Macbeth it is synonymous with an old wives' tale: “O! these flaws and starts / (Impostors to true fear), would well become / A woman's story at a winter's fire, / Authoris’d by her grandam” (3.4.62-65). Richard II sees it as a tragic story of bygone times: “In winter's tedious nights sit by the fire / With good old folks, and let them tell thee tales / Of woeful ages long ago betid; / And ere thou bid good night, to quite their griefs / Tell thou the lamentable tale of me, / And send the hearers weeping to their beds” (5.1.40-45). In 3 Henry VI, Prince Edward dismisses the validity of Richard's taunting remarks about his parents by retorting: “Let Aesop fable in a winter's night; / His currish riddles sorts not with this place” (5.5.25-26). Mamillius offers his view on the matter in The Winter's Tale: “A sad tale's best for winter: I have one / Of sprites and goblins” (2.1.25-26). He proceeds to tell what promises to be a classic ghost story: “There was a man … / Dwelt by a churchyard” (29-30). The play itself incorporates all these elements in its tragedy, its suggestions of raising the dead, and its radical improbability.

The authors wish to thank Frances Dolan for her comments on an earlier draft of this essay; the members of Lindsay Kaplan's graduate and honors seminars in Women in Renaissance Law and Drama for their stimulating discussions of the essay's issues; and Laura Deal, Margaret Ferguson, Ralph Hexter, and Marjorie McIntosh for crucial scholarly advice.

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