[In the following essay, Laroque asserts that possible correlations exist between The Winter's Tale and the cycles of the year associated with pagan, Christian, and folk traditions.]

In traditional Christianity the religion is learned less from the Bible than from the cycle of the Christian year, which is a ritual re-living of the life of Christ. Within this cycle the events of the Old Testament are interwoven in such a way that they form, not a continuous story, but a system of oracles or prophecies.

(Alan Watts)¹

With its “solstitial title”,² its rich and syncretic religious vocabulary and its multiple allusions to ancient myths and to both Old and New Testaments, The Winter's Tale may well appear as the happy hunting ground of allegorical or ritualistic approaches. I shall not enter here the debate of whether the play is closer to a medieval Miracle play or to the initiation drama of the pagan mysteries of ancient Greece, but I shall insist on the possible correlations between the play and the cycles of the year viewed, if not necessarily reconciled, in their pagan, Christian, and popular perspectives.

In “Myth and Miracle”, his introductory essay to his study of the last plays, Wilson Knight rightly speaks of the “pseudo-Hellenistic” theology of The Winter's Tale.³ The pagan pantheon of the ancient Greeks would appear to be strangely monotheistic here as Apollo seems to reign, Jehovah-like, in the kingdoms of Sicilia and Bohemia, even though Jove or the gods are perfunctorily referred to here and there in the play. The language seems more pagan (in spite of the recurrence of such coded words as grace or faith) and the general spirit of the play more Christian, but strict orthodoxy is to be found on neither side.

In the first half of the play, Shakespeare uses pagan ritual for its rich and romantic supernatural paraphernalia. The ear-deaf'ning voice o' th' Oracle / Kin to Jove's thunder (III.1.9-10) dispells at once the paradisiac atmosphere of the fortunate isle where Cleomenes and Dion consult Apollo's great divine and it discloses the black storms that are now looming large over Sicilia. The voice of the god reduces men to nothing, as Cleomenes realizes (III.1.10-14)⁴ and the revelation which it provides is more shattering and destructive than restorative. The thunder of his voice sounds more like an echo of Lear's all-shaking thunder, more likely to crack Nature's moulds [and] spill its germains⁵ than to restore harmony and fertility to the kingdom of Leontes. The surprising intervention of this deus ex machina, with its tragic consequences in the middle of the play, is to be contrasted with the miraculous coming to life of the dea ex machina at the end. Although both episodes are borrowed from pagan myth and ritual (the anti-metamorphosis of a stone statue into a flesh and blood woman is clearly borrowed from Ovid's version of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea), the first with the connotations of the mysterious revenge wreaked by a god against a mortal (Leontes' sudden jealousy being probably part of this very revenge plot) is more decidedly Greek than the second. Even more confusing is Antigonus' monologue in III.3, when the latter, who is both frightened by the impending storm and in two minds about the meaning of the dream where the ‘dead’ Hermione has appeared to him in pure white robes (l. 22), finally makes the right choice for the wrong reason:

                                                                      Dreams are toys:
Yet for this once, yea, superstitiously,
I will be squar'd by this. I do believe
Hermione hath suffer'd death; and that
Apollo would, this being indeed the issue
Of King Polixenes, it should here be laid,
Either for life or death, upon the earth
Of its right father.

(III.3.39-46)

By choosing to follow superstition against the voice of his reason, Antigonus will save the life of Perdita and lose his own, as he is briefly to find out. The tempest-beaten coast of Bohemia is full of ambiguities and contradictions which are not wholly justified by the devious ways of Apollo to men nor by the entangled ironies of the dramatic construction.

Contrasting with the awesome and inhuman sphere of Myth, where violence and barrenness prevail in connection with the wintry nature of the first half of the play, the pastoral scenes, presided over by Perdita, present us with the seasonal ritual of rebirth in an atmosphere of festive rejoicing. Perdita's often commented invocation of Proserpina in IV.4.116-18, while it introduces a rather adequate analogy between the situations of Hermione and Perdita on the one hand and Ceres and Proserpina on the other, thus presenting the estrangement between mother and daughter in a nutshell and in a low key, also calls attention to the central question of fertility since the Ceres-Proserpina myth was in the background of the Eleusinian mysteries.

Now, one of the effects of the Perdita-Proserpina metaphor is to establish a parallel between the sacred calendar of Greek ritual and the profane calendar of agricultural activity and of seasonal rejoicing. As the May Queen is turned into Flora, the shepherds and shepherdesses into satyrs and nymphs, the celebration of the rustic sheep-shearing becomes a pagan rite of spring to praise the rebirth of greenery. If Sicilia is the land of myth, Bohemia is the place where the elements of the myth are being re-enacted.⁶ Far from the old world where the curse of jealousy has rotted the root of his [Leontes'] opinion,⁷ a fresh generation is buoyantly participating in its re-creation by celebrating the metamorphic powers of good goddess Nature.⁸ Florizel's light-hearted tone to evoke the metamorphoses of the gods in love (IV.4.25-31) stands poles apart from Leontes' initial obsession with horns and bestiality. So the blending of folk-customs and pagan myth serves to introduce a playful element in the performance of the festive ritual⁹ which is no longer felt as sinful but as restorative. Myth is tragic in its uniqueness, whereas the ritual gestures and prayers that are repeated to re-enact it bring about an effect of distance and detachment. This failure to suspend disbelief is repeatedly stated by Perdita when she says she feels prank'd up and not quite at ease in the role she is required to play.¹⁰ Such a sense of distance, reinforced by the sixteen-year gap between the two halves of the play, is here essential and quite appropriate both to the change of key introduced in the passage from winter to spring and to the nature of folk festivals. Although these seasonal customs were undoubtedly pagan in origin,¹¹ the villages where they were still observed in Shakespeare's days had lost all distinct memory of their ancestral links and they remained mostly as an occasion for the community to get together and to indulge in riotous merry-making. Ancient custom and pagan rituals degenerated into games and sport, as local historians and anthropologists have remarked.¹²

But it would be wrong to limit the religious background of those open-air games to pagan antiquity. Perdita's anachronic reference to Whitsun pastorals (IV.4.134) is one sign among others in the play that the hints at the English church year and at its annual cycle of religious festivals were almost inseparable from the more obvious pagan allusions. The jolly moments of popular rejoicing were probably intended by Shakespeare as a titbit to the groundlings in the public theatre,¹³ but they also serve as a transition between the pagan and the Christian worlds. To be sure, the educated people and the courtiers who attended the first performance of the play on one of the main festival occasions (which one it was exactly in the case of The Winter's Tale is not known) that were selected for theatrical productions at Court, would have been more attentive to the possible correlations between the rich and complex religious content of the play and the texts prescribed to be read from The Book of Common Prayer on those liturgical occasions.¹⁴

In his book on Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year, Chris Hassel establishes a distinction between two main types of correlations between the liturgical tradition and the plays and masques performed on a given festival. The first he calls ‘genetic’ to describe “each work which was clearly named or written for festival performance”. The second category, which he calls ‘affective’, simply designates the larger number of plays and masques with no specific or straightforward correlation with the festival day of their performance at Court, but which offered easily perceivable parallels with a biblical or liturgical passage.¹⁵ In the case of what this critic calls an “unusual fitness”, the Master of the Revels could put the play on the bills of the ceremonies of the day, and among other examples, the author quotes The Winter's Tale as particularly “apposite […] for Easter Tuesday”.¹⁶ The source of this correlation is the record of a Court performance on Easter Tuesday 1618 which is listed by G. E. Bentley in The Jacobean and Caroline Stage.¹⁷ Indeed one can only agree that the parallel between Christ's resurrection and the coming to life of the statue of Hermione is as apposite as it is inevitable in our Christian culture. According to The Book of Common Prayer, among the lessons prescribed to be read for Tuesday in Easter week one finds Luke 24: 1-12 for matins and I Corinthians 15 for evensong.¹⁸ Now fairly close correspondences in words, imagery, and situations may be found between the first ten verses of Luke 24 and the last act of The Winter's Tale. The word ‘stone’ is used to designate both Hermione's statue (Leontes addresses it as dear stone in V.3.24) and Christ's sepulchre, while Paulina, a Greek version of Mary Magdalene, indirectly evokes the gaping sepulchre of resurrected Christ when she declares I'll fill up your grave (V.3.101). Furthermore, the repetition of the phrase like an old tale used by the Second and Third Gentlemen to convey the mixture or surprise and doubt brought about by the unexpected news of the fulfilment of the Oracle does sound like an echo of Luke 24: 12, And their words seemed to them as idle tales and they believed them not, when the holy women reveal to the apostles that the body of the Lord Jesus was not to be found in the sepulchre and that he was risen from the dead.

If we now consider the lesson to be read on the same day for evensong prayer, I Corinthians 15, we will find another interesting parallel between the gospel and the play, particularly in verses 35-7 which run:

But some man will say, How are the dead raised up? and with what body do they come?
Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die:
And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be,
but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain

(35-7).

To convey the abstract idea of resurrection, St Paul resorts to images borrowed from the agricultural and seasonal cycles, which transform the hidden corn seed into a green stalk rising above the surface of the earth. This short passage seems quite close to Shakespeare's dramatization of the return of spring to the earth through the celebration of the shepherds' feast which is presided over by Perdita-Proserpina, the corn maiden. The conjunction of pagan and Christian symbolism at the time of the Easter liturgy is even more evident when one reads the following gloss for Easter Sunday from Robert Nelson's widely used Companion: “the consideration of things without us, the natural courses of variations in the creatures, raise the probability of our resurrection. The day dies into night and rises with the next morning; the summer dies into winter, when the earth becomes a general sepulchre; but when the spring appears, nature revives and flourishes; the corn lies buried in the ground, and being corrupted revives and multiplies”.¹⁹ This might well be considered as a general description of the essential symbolic motifs developed in The Winter's Tale.

So far, the analogies which have been suggested between the religious symbolism of the play and the liturgy of the Christian year only concern the summer half of the play and the final reconciliation scene. No correlations have yet been established between the texts of the Christian liturgy and the winter half, in spite of the similarities which can be pointed out between Christ's and Perdita's life schemes. Christ's birth in winter is followed by his death and resurrection in the spring, thirty-three years later, when he is reunited with the Father in Heaven. Perdita, also born in winter-time, spends sixteen years in another world before she is allowed to recover her true parents in the most miraculous way (an equivalent of resurrection). In that specific context, Leontes' sudden fit of jealousy and suspicions about a new-born child, leading to the death of the innocents (Mamilius dies and Perdita is abandoned on a desert shore full of wild beasts), recall Herod's tyranny and his ordering the slaughter of all the children that were in Bethlehem. The flight from Israel into Egypt and the navigation from Sicilia to Bohemia are also comparable ordeals for the infant Christ and the newly-born Perdita. The liturgical source for this is to be found in Matthew 2: 13-18, which was the reading from the Gospel prescribed for the celebration of the Innocents' Day (28 December) according to The Book of Common Prayer.²⁰

In the words of Chris Hassel, “error seems to have been the traditional hallmark of Innocents' celebrations”, as was fit for the period of licence and misrule which characterized the festivities of the twelve days of Christmas, and the same author goes on to say that “until the time of the Spectator, Innocents was considered […] ‘the most unlucky day in the calendar”’.²¹ In the first half of The Winter's Tale, Leontes' jealousy is a form of tragic error just as the confusion that follows its outbreak is a consequence of misrule, that is of his bad government and tyranny.²² Moreover, the sudden, uncanny fit of sexual insanity on his part is seen by the women as the effect of some evil astronomical conjunction. Paulina speaks of dangerous, unsafe lunes i' th' king (II.2.30), while Hermione exclaims:

                                                            There's some ill planet reigns:
I must be patient till the heavens look
With an aspect more favourable.

(II.1.105-07)

These lines, echoing the unlucky character of the day in popular prognostications, would have seemed particularly relevant for a performance on Holy Innocents' Day. On the other hand, the fact that Childermas, as this festival was also known, was normally associated with folly and rejoicing may be taken as a suggestion to the audience that comedy is not very far behind the furies of the tragic tempest. Indeed tragedy and comedy are very often side by side in this Janus-like play, which does not simply divide into a tragic and a comic half. As in the Miracle plays, laughter lies close to horror and things profane and things sacred sometimes mix to produce a grotesque atmosphere.

Another central motif of this liturgical festival of the Innocents is described by Chris Hassel as that of “the dispersal and reunion of families”.²³ One of the lessons prescribed for the day at matins was Jeremiah 31: 1-17, which, if present to the minds of those who were watching the play on this festival occasion, could have been applied to Leontes' blighted kingdom as bringing hope of its future regeneration. As it prophesies both the return of the people of Israel from the North country and the return of fertility to the earth in a merry dance of shepherds that will put an end to sorrow, it might have been used by whoever was aware of the correspondence, as a foreshadowing of the happy reconciliation of Act V:

Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the coasts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, the woman with child and her that travaileth with child together; a great company shall return thither […].

Therefore they shall come and sing in the height of Zion, and shall flow together to the goodness of the Lord, for wheat, and for wine, and for oil, and for the young of the flock and of the herd: and their soul shall be as a watered garden: and they shall not sorrow any more at all.

Then shall the virgin rejoice in the dance, both young men and old together: for I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow.²⁴

Furthermore, if we place the general situation of The Winter's Tale against Alan W. Watts' idea that “in the cycle of the Christian year […] the events of the Old Testament are interwoven in such a way that they form, not a continuous story, but a system of oracles and prophecies”,²⁵ we see that, in its own way, the oracle of Apollo (III.2.132-6) is also looking forward to the possibility of the reunion of families. As in biblical exegesis, where typological cross-references between episodes of the Old and of the New Testament have been established, similar sets of correspondences may be found between the old world of Sicilia and the new world of Bohemia (as well as of that of reconciled Sicilia). The sentences which we have underlined in Jeremiah's prophecy can be easily transposed in the situations presented in the second half of the play, although in an inverted order as the return from the north country will take place only after the virgin [has rejoiced] in the dance. Pastoral images and festivities are another link between the biblical lesson and the play. Finally, both texts resort to natural symbolism so that it is hardly pushing things too far to say that, when the lost Perdita is found and the statue of Hermione unveiled in front [of] Leontes by Paulina, Leontes' soul shall be as a watered garden after sixteen years' penitence and spiritual purgation:

No settled senses of the world can match
The pleasure of that madness.

(V.3.72-3)

The sweet madness of ecstatic revelation and mystical illumination stands poles apart from his earlier bitter fury. After the destructive passion of jealousy has calmed down, the notable passion of wonder (V.2.15-16) allows the waste land of Sicilia to be redeemed when the people from the north country return after their pastoral interlude of sixteen years.

So, the analogies between the sacred texts and The Winter's Tale point to a double, rather than a single liturgical correlation, with the Innocents' Day on the one hand and Tuesday in Easter week on the other. In the first half of the play, the lessons selected for the festival of the Innocents give scriptural reinforcement to the themes of error, confusion and of the destruction of innocence, but they also prepare the future recreation and reconciliation when placed in the perspective of Jeremiah's prophecies. In the second half, correlations with Tuesday in Easter week introduce lessons that help visualize the abstract notion of resurrection through seasonal and pastoral images. All the same, this double correlation is perfectly suited to the strongly emphasized bipartite structure of the romance.

The dual nature of The Winter's Tale is also reflected at the level of pagan allusions, which are working along a clear-cut frontier between the tragic uniqueness of myth, on the one hand, and its festive re-enactment through the ritual-like games of the sheep-shearing on the other.

As for folk customs, which were known to be the relics of paganism, they were more or less tolerated on the side of the official religious celebrations of the Church year. They were also hybrids. In the play, they serve to bridge the gap between two worlds and between the pagan and Christian levels of interpretation. Their presence in the play is as indispensable to the syncretic approach of religion developed in the romances as to the restoration of the comic mode inducive of the return of fertility and felicity.

Notes

1. Myth and Ritual in Christianity (London, 1953), p. 86.

2. The phrase is borrowed from Northrop Frye's A Natural Perspective (Columbia, 1965), p. 121.

3. In The Crown of Life (Oxford, 1947, reptd. 1958), p. 14.

4. This feeling that mortal nature is annihilated in front of the awesome voice of the Oracle, which was part of the numinous experience of the sacred for the Greeks, may also be interpreted as the god's punishment for the hubristic pretention of the tyrant to destroy the world for nothing (the word is repeated six times by Leontes in his furious tirade in I.2.284-96).

5. King Lear, III.1.5 and 8.

6. In this connection, see my article “Feasts and Festivity in The Winter's Tale”, Cahiers Élisabéthains 6, Oct. 1974, pp. 12-13.

7. The Winter's Tale, II.3.89. The references are taken from the New Arden edition, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London, 1963, reprtd. 1973).

8. Ibidem, II.3.103.

9. On the ambiguities of the word play in The Winter's Tale, see M. M. Mahood, “The Winter's Tale” in The Winter's Tale, Casebook Series, ed. K. Muir (London (1968), p. 227.

10. The Winter's Tale, IV.4.10 and 132-5.

11. The denunciation of the relics of paganism in the Church is found in most Puritan pamphlets of the time (Philip Stubbes and William Prynne in particular). The parallel between ‘Popery’ and ancient paganism is extensively developed in such works as T. Moresinus' Papatus, seu depravatae religionis Origo et Incrementum (Edinburgh, 1594). Thomas Hobbes also deals with the problem in chapter 45, Part IV, “Of the Kingdom of Darkness” of his Leviathan. A catalogue of precise analogies between folk customs and pagan ceremonies is to be found on p. 681 of the Penguin edition, C. B. Macpherson ed. (London, 1968, reprtd. 1979).

12. In this connection, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), p. 71 and passim; Charles Phythian-Adams, Local History and Folklore (London, 1975), p. 24.

13. Indeed Shakespeare was anxious to avoid repeating Fletcher's unfortunate experience with his pastoral tragicomedy, The Faithful Shepherdess, the production of which turned out to be a complete failure because, as Fletcher himself puts it, the people […] missing Whitsun-ales, cream, wassail, and morris-dances, began to be angry, in Select Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, G. P. Baker., Everyman (London, 1953), p. 242.

14. These main festival occasions were the following: the three days after Christmas (St Stephen's, St John's Day and The Innocents), New Year's Day, Twelfth Day, Candlemas, Shrovetide, Eastertide, St Bartholomew's, Michaelmas, and Hallowmas. See R. Chris Hassel, Renaissance Drama and the English Church Year (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1979), Chapter I, pp. 1-21. The edition of The Book of Common Prayer (1559) is that of John E. Booty, The Elizabethan Prayer Book, Charlottesville (1976). Besides the Collect, The Epistle and the Gospel prescribed to be read for each Sunday service in the year, this edition lists the Proper Lessons to be Read for the first Lessons Both at Morning Prayer on the Sundays throughout the Year, and for Some Also the Second Lessons, pp. 27-33. The Lessons for Holy Days, which were generally not Sundays, are listed on pp. 29-32. It is from this table that we derived the information used in the subsequent analyses.

15. Hassel, op. cit., p. 18.

16. Ibid., p. 19.

17. 7 vols. (Oxford, 1968), VII, p. 27. (The exact date is 7 April 1618.)

18. Tuesday in Easter Week, Second Lesson, p. 31.

19. A Companion for the Festivals and Fasts of the Church of England (London, 1846), pp. 188-9.

20. p. 88:

    The angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a sleep, saying, Arise and take the child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there till I bring thee word. For it will come to pass that Herod shall seek the child to destroy him […]. Then Herod when he saw that he was mocked of the Wise Men, he was exceeding wroth, and sent forth men of war, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts (as many as were two years old or under) according to the time which he had diligently known out of the prophet Heremiah, whereas he said, in Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, weeping, and great mourning: Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they were not.

21. Hassel, op. cit., p. 39.

22. See O.E.D. ‘misrule’, entry no. 2. Leontes looks like a tragic Lord of Misrule who introduces topsy-turvydom in the hitherto peaceful and fertile kingdom of Sicilia.

23. Hassel, op. cit., p. 41.

24. Jeremiah 31: 8 …, 12-13. Our emphasis.

25. Alan Watts, op. cit. See epigraph to this article.