SOURCE: Lim, Walter S. H. “Knowledge and Belief in The Winter's Tale.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 41, no. 2 (spring 2001): 317-34.

[In the following essay, Lim studies the way in which elements of The Winter's Tale, particularly the animation of Hermione's statue at the play's end, represent the conflict between Reformation and Catholic thought in Shakespeare's England.]

At the narrative moment immediately preceding the animation of Hermione's statue, Paulina exhorts Leontes, “It is requir'd / You do awake your faith.”¹ Faith in what? For Leontes, it is faith in the reality of miracles, the coming back to life of a queen who has been dead sixteen long years. For William Shakespeare's audience, it is faith tied to the willing suspension of disbelief, a readiness to accept that theater is capable of representing just about anything. But it is not only in the representational space of theater that the dead find themselves coming back to life. Scripture itself purports to offer inerrant accounts of people who have come back from the dead: the daughter of the Shunamite woman in the Old Testament book of 2 Kings, Jarius's daughter, Lazarus, and, of course, Christ himself, described typologically as “the first-fruits of them that slept.”² The animation of Hermione's statue in The Winter's Tale finds its informing source not only in the mythic account of Ovid's perennially popular Pygmalion, but also in the stories of resurrection afforded by Scripture. With regard to the Bible, one source Shakespeare appears to have had in mind when producing The Winter's Tale is the book of 2 Kings. The bear's devouring of Antigonus is Shakespeare's revision of the story found in this book, of how the prophet Elisha called up a bear to kill off some young kids who had the audacity to mock his bald pate.³ The book of 2 Kings also offers the following account of miraculous resuscitation that might have constituted a central scriptural source informing Shakespeare's representation of the enlivening statue:

And when Elisha was come into the house, behold, the child was dead, and laid upon his bed. He went in therefore, and shut the door upon them twain, and prayed unto the Lord. And he went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and he stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of the child waxed warm. Then he returned, and walked in the house to and fro; and went up, and stretched himself upon him: and the child sneezed seven times, and the child opened his eyes.

(2 Kings 4:32-5)

Any raising of the dead marks an epochal fracturing of natural law, an infringement that is also an indelible sign of the miraculous. Such miracles can heighten the experience of faith and reinforce religious conviction. So, when Shakespeare invokes the language of faith and religious conviction to attend the restoration of Hermione, is he propounding a specifically scriptural vision of faith?

Clearly Scripture offers an important context for framing the phenomena of enlivened statues and rising corpses, but, as this play reminds us, so does classical mythology. Myth announces its presence in The Winter's Tale in a self-conscious way. In addition to the informing presence of Ovid's Pygmalion that enables the resolution of Shakespeare's romance plot, The Winter's Tale also locates its setting in Sicily, where the Vale of Anna—the meadow from which Persephone is abducted by Pluto—is located. Perdita's expostulation—

                                                                                                              O Proserpina,
For the flowers now that, frighted, thou let'st fall
From Dis's waggon!

(IV.iv.116-8)

—ties Shakespeare's tale told in the winter directly to Persephone's presence in Hades and her absence from the natural world. In general, the Renaissance poet is equally at home in both the worlds of the classics and of Scripture, facilitating them with ease within the representational space of his literary production. This ease is, however, not the exclusive norm, and tensions do sometimes surface, as famously registered in Jesus' repudiation of the kingdom of classical learning and knowledge offered by Satan in Milton's Paradise Regained. Theologically grounded tensions of the kind found in a poem such as Paradise Regained are not there in The Winter's Tale, where the relationship between the classical and scriptural traditions is defined not so much in terms of ontological contestation as through the provocative proposition that classical (pagan) myth and Scripture (the inerrant Word of God) both enjoy equal status and validity. Shakespeare foregrounds classical mythology in The Winter's Tale not simply to facilitate the demands of plot but also to accentuate his interest in the status of different generic forms: the ballad, the ghost story, classical myth, and even the Bible itself. The Winter's Tale tantalizes its audience by finally raising the question of how one can know with absolute certainty and total conviction that the faith to which one adheres is indeed valid and true.

When Paulina tells Leontes to awaken his faith, her exhortation evokes resonances tied to a Reformation reading of its theological emphasis. The Reformation emphasis has always been on the indispensability of faith to the mechanism and economy of salvation.⁴ The crucial text in the formulation of this doctrinal emphasis is the book of Romans, in which St. Paul specifies distinctly that the sinner can only be saved by grace through faith. On one level at least, then, the idea that it is indeed Leontes' faith that enables the statue of Hermione to return to life makes the play appear to endorse a vision of the Christian faith through affirming the presence of miracles. But the status of miracles in The Winter's Tale is never fully clarified, for there always exists the possibility that putting one's faith in miracles entails believing events that are not, in fact, displays of divine power. If, for example, Hermione and Leontes' reconciliation was indeed enabled by Paulina's own careful scripting and stage directing—and the play never permits its audience to discount completely this possibility—then any faith that an audience is asked to exercise is, in reality, faith in the miracles of the stage or stage illusion.

Witnessing Hermione's enlivening can only prove to be an uneasy affair, especially for a Protestant. To begin with, the statue scene that takes place in a “chapel” stages, as Julia Reinhard Lupton has pointed out, the visual conditions of Catholic image worship (V.iii.86).⁵ Paulina's gallery is strikingly loaded with the signs of both Italian secular art and Catholic forms of worship: there is the reference to Julio Romano, whose name cannot be extricated from the contaminating context of papal politics; and then, of course, there are the pervasive images evocative of Marian iconography.⁶ Perdita kneels, for instance, before the statue of her mother, only to find herself beset by the Protestant awareness that such an act of adulation is akin to superstition:

                                                                      And give me leave,
And do not say 'tis superstition, that
I kneel, and then implore her blessing.

(V.iii.42-4, emphasis mine)

Shakespeare appears reluctant to let go of the discourse of (Catholic) veneration and supplication, stretching it beyond even the point of Hermione's bodily return from the dead. For, immediately following Hermione's embracing of Leontes in this scene, Paulina exhorts Perdita in distinctively liturgical diction: “Please you to interpose, fair madam, kneel / And pray your mother's blessing” (V.iii.119-20). And then she supplicates: “Turn, good lady, / Our Perdita is found” (V.iii.120-1). “Mother” and “lady” signify in two linguistic and cultural domains—the secular and the sacred. Within the context of the sacred, these two terms of address amplify in their allusion to the cult of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic Church that ratifies its mystification.

What the animation of Hermione's statue does is bring into conjunction conflicting perceptions of the icon in both Reformation and Catholic thought. The idea of the icon is not something associated exclusively with Catholic thought and practice. Significantly, the icon also occupies an important place in Reformation theology, where it is applied to a definition of the elect, “the true figurae of Protestant religion.”⁷ Opposed to this elect is the reprobate, the living image of opposition to God's living image of grace. In Calvinism especially, a powerful interpretation of what constitutes the iconic and the idolatrous emerges within the framework of a sacramental theology built upon the trope of metonymy. False idols are perceived to have the ability to simulate life just as living people are responded to as material shapes. According to the logic of this Calvinistic emphasis, the elect—those whom God, in his sovereign pleasure, had chosen for himself from all eternity—are given the means of grace outside of the capabilities of human agency and free will. Grace is God given and totally independent of the sinner who is dead in sin. This outpouring of grace from the divine prerogative, which enables regeneration itself, is a familiar motif in the English devotional lyric. In George Herbert's poem, “The Altar,” for example, it is God himself, the archetypal artist/creator, who breathes spiritual life into the otherwise dead text of the poet's creative endeavor. In Protestant poetics in general, human art, like the sinning soul, is circumscribed by limits and depends, therefore, upon divine inspiration for “life.” In The Winter's Tale, the statue of Hermione occupies the analogous position of the dead text, subsequently infused with quickening power.

At one level, the faith that Leontes is asked by Paulina to exercise before the statue can and does, in fact, return to life, may be read as affirming a Reformation understanding of things. The audience's acceptance of the coming-to-life of a statue means, by implication, that it is capable of practicing Leontes' kind of faith, albeit produced at a moment's notice. After all, faith, as the Bible puts it, has the power to move mountains. But, to accept the statue as possessing the efficacious power to bring itself to life may also mean succumbing to a system of belief associated by the Reformation with an idolatrous Catholicism. Is The Winter's Tale engaging in a critique of Catholicism in its portrayal of a dramatic moment that suggests Catholic belief and practice?⁸ Alternatively, is the play attempting to elicit from its audience pro-Catholic sympathies? By not offering a clear answer, Shakespeare makes The Winter's Tale gesture in the direction of Hamlet, another play in which a Catholic framework coexists uneasily with a Protestant one. In Hamlet, a “Catholic” ghost (the late Hamlet tells his son that he comes from a purgatorial state) reveals himself to a Protestant prince. If Hamlet is to respond to this ghost from an unswervingly Reformation perspective, the spirit can only logically be a “goblin damn'd.”⁹ Otherwise, belief in the ghost as one that has been released momentarily from purgatory must necessarily entail a turning upside down of the prince's epistemological universe. With regard to the relation between the belief structures of the Protestant and Catholic traditions, both Hamlet and The Winter's Tale raise questions more than they offer solutions.

The Winter's Tale intertwines the narrative of faith and its miraculous possibilities with a discourse of doubt and radical uncertainty. If faith, as the scriptural formulation has it, involves a belief in things not seen, and this belief has the mystical efficacy of enabling the infallible certainty of salvation itself, it is also something that Leontes is certain he possesses. In a parodic version of faith, Leontes believes, even though he has not directly witnessed, Hermione's infidelity. Nothing that comes by way of council can convince him of the fallacy of that belief, and what Shakespeare's play does in portraying Leontes' obdurate blindness is foreground the gulf separating conviction from truth. Translated into the discourse of religious conviction, belief in things unseen does not necessarily add up to possessing the truth. Such belief in, for example, accounts of the dead being raised to life, or even the story of God assuming human form in the Incarnation, may be nothing more than superstition. Superstition functions as an important motif in The Winter's Tale. Antigonus invokes the idea of superstition immediately after he recounts the eerie and disturbing dream of Hermione that is experienced “like a waking” (III.iii.19):

                                                                                Dreams are toys:
Yet for this once, yea, superstitiously,
I will be squar'd by this.

(III.iii.39-41; emphasis mine)

By describing dreams as toys, Antigonus reveals he had never put stock in dreams before the appearance of Hermione's apparition; he is willing to make an exception this once, offering, however, no reason for doing so. What there is in the dream that launches him off in this different direction is far from clear: its ostensible purpose is to get Hermione to name her infant daughter and reveal the death penalty Antigonus must pay for undertaking Perdita's disposal. Antigonus agrees to be directed and regulated (“squar'd”) by Hermione's injunction to name the baby “Perdita” and to accept her pronouncement of his necessary death, but he does so “superstitiously.” The gloss on this adverb in the Arden edition of the play—“against accepted Protestant doctrine”¹⁰—captures well the uncertain and liminal status of Hermione's apparition. Is Hermione a body or a dream, and therefore insubstantial? Is this the spirit of the dead queen or a “goblin damn'd”? From which doctrinal perspective is the audience meant to respond to the precise character and nature of this apparition—Catholic or Protestant? Once again, the answer is not forthcoming, reinforcing the play's destabilization of the familiar terms of reference grounding religious conviction and theological understanding.

Antigonus's dream pressures the audience into giving some thought to the place of superstition and the supernatural in the scriptural tradition that is the play's informing context.¹¹ From the Protestant perspective, the indelible sign of Roman Catholicism's spiritual apostasy is found in the expressions of its devotional practice and in the glaring errors of its doctrinal understanding. Any person who believes that Hermione's statue is capable of reassuming life stands on dangerous doctrinal ground. As Francis Bacon glosses with reference to the errors of the Roman church, venerating the Virgin Mary and the saints involves adhering to “pleasing and sensual rites and ceremonies” and engaging in “over-great reverence of traditions.”¹² Such superstition is, in Bacon's words, “the reproach of the deity.”¹³ In his Advancement of Learning, Bacon's anti-Catholic discourse centers on the “facility of credit and accepting or admitting things weakly authorized or warranted.”¹⁴ Ecclesiastical history, he clarifies, “hath too easily received and registered reports and narrations of miracles wrought by martyrs, hermits, or monks of the desert, and other holy men, and their relics, shrines, chapels, and images.”¹⁵ The ignorance of the people and the superstitious simplicity of some have led to a belief in these reports of miracles as “divine poesies,” unveiled by the Reformation to be “old wives' fables, impostures of the clergy, illusions of spirits, and badges of Antichrist.”¹⁶

The Winter's Tale proceeds to complicate the theological discourse of faith by dramatizing the experiences of “belief” and “opinion,” two crucial terms that must be focused on in order to appreciate how watching an animating statue involves the audience in the epistemological (un)certainty underwriting the play's events. The word “opinion” is first employed by Camillo when describing Leontes' conviction that Hermione is having an affair with Polixenes, the king of Bohemia:

                                                            Good my lord, be cur'd
Of this diseas'd opinion, and betimes,
For 'tis most dangerous.

(I.ii.296-8, emphasis mine)

In II.i, Leontes himself equates verity with “opinion,” when he says:

                                                                                          How blest am I
In my just censure! in my true opinion!
Alack, for lesser knowledge!

(II.i.36-8, emphasis mine)

And, in II.iii, Paulina tells Antigonus that “The root of [Leontes'] opinion, … is rotten / As ever oak or stone was sound” (II.iii.89-90, emphasis mine).

“Opinion” resonates with all the uncertainty that does not attend the conviction of faith, because the belief that constitutes faith is, in the metonymic equation of Scripture, the position of truth itself.¹⁷ Not only does “opinion” not enjoy a categorically enviable position in this play, linked specifically to Leontes' unfounded suspicion and his destructive tyranny, it raises yet once again a central question in the development of epistemology—how does one negotiate the progression from “opinion” to “knowledge”? To Plato, for whom this question is all-important, the difference between the two is found in the indeterminacy of the former. In Plato's dialogues, the theory of ideas is to be understood as acts of knowing; knowledge is inseparable from the permanent entities, distinct from those we know through the senses. In The Winter's Tale, Hermione tells Leontes that the folly and consequences of his suspicion will grieve him when he “shall come to clearer knowledge” (II.i.97, emphasis mine). Ironically, of course, this “knowledge” that Leontes must finally obtain concerning the integrity of his wife is given within the context of a play that, consciously proclaiming itself a tale, complicates without resolution the issue of faith as it is generated within and in response to the overlapping spaces of religious conviction and theatrical representation.

In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare focuses his sustained engagement with the issues of belief and knowledge by invoking the concept of original sin and questioning the basis of the Protestant and Catholic view that this doctrine is sacrosanct and therefore cannot be controverted. Indeed, the play appears intent upon denying the inviolability of this theological doctrine, an impulse inscribed in that complex moment of Polixenes' reply to Hermione's inquiry into his childhood days with Leontes:

We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun,
And bleat the one at th' other: what we chang'd
Was innocence for innocence: we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did. Had we pursu'd that life,
And our weak spirits ne'er been higher rear'd
With stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven
Boldly “not guilty,” the imposition clear'd
Hereditary ours.

(I.ii.67-75)

The imagery evoked in this passage has affinities with conventional representations of pastoral innocence. The word “innocence” appears twice in one line, registering Polixenes' deep pre-adolescent and pre-sexual fantasy, linked to the desire never to have to grow up. Looking back at this early moment of his relationship with Leontes, the adult now declares:

                                                                                                    we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did.

In a psychoanalytical reading of the play, Janet Adelman has described this space of innocence conjured up in Polixenes' nostalgic and wistful reminiscence as his “pastoral myth”; this is the space he wishes he could have inhabited forever with Leontes, his “mirroring twin.”¹⁸ Like Leontes, Polixenes is beset by an identifiable male anxiety relating to the presence of the maternal body. He responds to his sense of vulnerability in the presence of this body as the originating site of male anxiety by figuring it as contaminated. For Polixenes specifically, sin or “ill-doing” comes into the picture when his wife is no longer “a girl,” and after Hermione had “cross'd [Leontes'] eyes” (I.ii.78, 79). Masculine anxiety in The Winter's Tale manifests itself then as a general distrust of genital sexuality, which is linked directly to sin(ning).

Invoked at the moment when the sexual(ized) presence of the woman is identified as rupturing the idealized mirroring relationship between Leontes and Polixenes, sin or “ill-doing” gives a name to the female contamination responsible for inaugurating the economy of gender(ed) differentiation. The pastoral and idyllic world whose loss is deeply lamented by Polixenes may show up as the masculine fantasy of a world sans woman, but it is also, significantly, a textual site registering the play's heretical questioning of the logic of one of the church's central doctrines. Historically, the codification of the idea of original sin—the understanding that Adam and Eve's transgression caused the fall of the entire human race—came as the result of Augustine's theological (and ideological) quarrel with Pelagius. Unlike Augustine, Pelagius denies the presence of evil in the newborn child; for him, the idea of morality cannot be extricated from the premise that personal assent always operates in the commission of a sin. The newborn infant is the site of the doctrinal battle waged by Augustine against Pelagius, for if there is one visible sign of sin's terrifying reality as it is transmitted, like some dreadful disease, it is the presence of the infant itself. Augustine underscores his point graphically and sensationally in The Confessions by giving monstrous babies to his reader. Augustine's infant is manipulative, violent, avaricious, jealous, and bitter.¹⁹ Following Augustine, Calvin will later refer to the nature of babies as the “seed-bed of sin.”²⁰

Denying the doctrine of original sin renders one a heretic, a heavily charged designation describing someone who subscribes to a false belief in contravention of an orthodoxy defined as truth. This idea of adhering to a false belief or heresy informs the dramatic vision of The Winter's Tale, for it is in embracing such a belief that the play insists on locating the source and site of sin. Leontes is specifically presented as a character that sins because he falsely and wrongly believes Hermione had defiled the marriage bed. Ironically, of course, it is Leontes himself who refers to those people in the court who believe in Hermione's innocence as possessing an “ignorant credulity” that “will not / Come up to th' truth” (II.i.192-3). But he is not alone in holding to his heretical belief. The shepherds are also credulous in their simplicity, and they are portrayed as trusting and putting their faith in the rascally Autolycus. As Mopsa the shepherdess proclaims: “I love a ballad in print, a life, for then we are sure they are true” (IV.iv.261-2). What the language of theological conviction refers to as faith Autolycus calls “Honesty” and “Trust” (IV.iv.596). And, according to Autolycus, “what a fool Honesty is! And Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman!” (IV.iv.596-7, emphases mine). Where Leontes' active belief in bad things leads to paranoia and distrust, establishing a deep relation between paranoia and faith in the play, the shepherds believe good things credulously. In the response of the simple rural folk to Autolycus, Shakespeare highlights the experience of ignorant credulity. If there are people who are credulous in their ignorance, there may yet be others susceptible to believing that all benevolent things must be good, however irrational or illogical they may be—the susceptibility of positive credulity. In the play's recognizable interest in responses to generic forms that lay claim to different types of authority, the entire issue of ignorant and positive credulity extends to touch upon the topic of believing in scriptural revelation. Shakespeare's general attitude toward the credulous man and woman in this play is non-condemning; his stress on credulity is meant to interrogate even further that certitude with which truth is accepted as being accessible in the experience of faith and religious conviction. Shakespeare's tone is not the same as the harsh one adopted by Bacon who, in The Advancement of Learning, finds that “a credulous man is a deceiver” because “he that will easily believe rumours, will as easily augment rumours.”²¹

It is interesting that The Winter's Tale is a play especially open to deconstructionist readings. This is perhaps because it registers a deep interest in complicating the very strictures of faith and belief that make the apprehension of theology possible in the first place. In an influential essay written for Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Howard Felperin reads the play as a deconstructing text, innately subject to the interminable deferrals of reference.²² And more recently, Lynn Enterline has further argued that The Winter's Tale postulates that language is not a “transparent description” and that truth cannot, therefore, be present in the medium of language as its content.²³ In Enterline's effectively poststructuralist reading, Shakespeare's play makes use of the Ovidian-Petrarchan legacy to create a dramatic narrative that demands to be read metalinguistically and metatheatrically. Dealing with representation, theater communicates in a self-reflexive manner the resistance of language to efforts aimed at ordering it through the logic of equivalence. In identifying those moments of instability in the text that generate resistance to readily endorsable interpretations, both Enterline and Felperin push for the position that the deconstructive enterprise is the enabling condition as well as effect of this particular Shakespearean production. Implicit in their readings is the assumption that The Winter's Tale has an inordinate preoccupation with the subjects of truth and knowledge, and with the difficulties (or impossibility) of gaining access to both. My reading of the play argues that this assumption is rendered explicit in the theological and philosophical interests of the text, specifically where these are inscribed in the identifiable anxieties traceable to Shakespeare's and early modern England's encounter with the boundaries of the (un)knowable.

In an exchange between Autolycus and some gentlemen in V.ii, Shakespeare fleshes out the complex representation of faith and the nature of religious conviction central to the play's thematic structurings. In this scene, Autolycus asks to be given information on what transpired at the meeting of the two estranged kings Leontes and Polixenes. The account of the happy reconciliation is suggestively communicated by the First Gentleman as “a broken delivery of the business” because he happened to have been commanded out of the chamber (V.ii.9). After this account, two others follow, each of them supposedly in possession of further and more complete knowledge. The point impressed in this scene is that there is always some gap in the individual apprehension of an actual event. After the Third Gentleman offers his own contribution toward completing the story of the event, he proceeds to make use of a language that we have by now come to associate with the play's insistent and subtle interrogation of the premise that knowledge can be absolute and truth certain. He specifically likens the death of Antigonus to “an old tale still, which will have matter to rehearse, though credit be asleep and not an ear open” (V.ii.62-4).

“Wonder” appears to form the central experience of imagining what the scene of reconciliation must have been like (V.ii.16, 23). And this wonder always nudges the event ahead of the ability of language to offer an apt description. In other words, representation is defined by a gap that always exists between literary portrayal and the object portrayed. In the particular context of this scene we are considering, “wonder” refers to the remarkableness of the event, one marked by its extraordinary character; the audience is urged to bring to its reception of the play a sense of wonder so as to obtain a fuller appreciation of what is happening. The experience of wonder is independent of a narrative's subscription to the norms of realism. Indeed, it constitutes the proper response to an apprehension of the miraculous. Obviously this same sense of wonder is meant to be present when one witnesses the coming back to life of Hermione's statue, which is nothing less than a miraculous event.

There is another side to the experience of wonder, one that, though not foregrounded in the play, nevertheless constitutes a deeply felt reality as early modern England relates to the entanglements of faith and a distinctively emerging discourse of skepticism. Wonder does not always necessarily serve to amplify or ratify the amazing workings of divinity as these are manifested in the miraculous suspension of natural laws governing the normal operations of things. People who believe they have been privileged to witness the wondrous workings of God may, in fact, be revealing their immense gullibility and credulity. Such gullibility and credulity are, from the skeptic's point of view, especially susceptible to manipulation. They can facilitate horrifying acts of social persecution, as exemplified powerfully in the general acceptance by a credulous populace of the church's identification and destruction of witches. The victims themselves—such as those old women identified in Reginald Scot's The Discoverie of Witchcraft who believe themselves capable of performing supernatural feats because of their fond credulity or melancholy—can fuel the very persecutorial machinery seeking their annihilation.²⁴ Likewise in Samuel Harsnett's A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, a work deeply indebted to Scot's particular method and skeptical discourse, the emotive experience of wonder may very well be the product of careful scripting.²⁵ Indeed, the entire project of A Declaration is, as Stephen Greenblatt has highlighted, to unveil the “theatrical” apparatus at work in the production of an episode of demonic possession and exorcism.²⁶ Scot and Harsnett both demonstrate that there is a dark side to religious conviction, tied to ignorance, fraud, and the exercise of arbitrary power.

Compared to Scot and Harsnett, Shakespeare's treatment of the trope of wonder is much more benign, dealing not so much with the dark side of religious conviction as with the teasing and ironic destabilizations of the assumptions and premises underwriting the experience of faith. In The Winter's Tale, wonder registers itself in the language of hyperbolic expression. The First Gentleman describes the moment when Leontes and Camillo finally set eyes on one another in theologically resonant terms, referring to both salvation and the Apocalypse: “they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed” (V.ii.14-5). If the unbelievability of the events that have transpired is described with reference to theological motifs, it is also spoken of as “an old tale,” a phrase repeated, in fact, twice in one scene (V.ii.28, 62). Unlike scriptural revelation, the story or narrative that makes up a tale does not purport to be truth. The Second Gentleman says: “This news, which is called true, is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion” (V.ii.27-9, emphasis mine). This statement links wonder to unbelievability even as it is the exuberant expression of an uninhibited joy. And the word “tale” extends beyond the immediacy of the dramatic moment to encompass and engage the generic identity of the play, suggestively registered in its very title, The Winter's Tale. Indeed, it draws self-reflexive attention to the play's larger preoccupation with the identity of truth and with the (in)ability of the audience to gain access to that truth. Any text that declares itself to be in possession of truth is doing nothing more than just that—making a declaration. How one proceeds to verify the existence of truth is beyond prescription. The Third Gentleman's statement, “that which you hear you'll swear you see, there is such unity in the proofs,” complexifies the experience of proof and verification by making hearing synonymous with seeing (V.ii.32-3): it offers a false closing of the gap, interrogating further the discourse of religious conviction and its premise that truth is accessible. The point is that hearing about something is not the same as seeing it. With sight one is at least present at the occasion of an event, even if its meaning is necessarily obtained through the mediations of one's interpretive faculties and therefore subjective. What I am proposing is that the entire thematic movement of The Winter's Tale complexifies precisely the Third Gentleman's premise: that you can gather “unity in the proofs” of what you hear, and proceed from there to an affirmation of its “verity.” If there is one thing to learn from the treacherous figure of rumor in English Renaissance texts, it is that putting stock in what you hear but have not seen and verified can prove destructive.

In The Winter's Tale, performance neither kills belief nor elicits from its audience reflexive complicity in accepting the illusory and fictive status of theatrical representation. Indeed, when art draws attention to itself as art, as the statue of Hermione does, at least at one level, it opens up an entire domain of controversy that is the conflict of belief structures in Renaissance England. The conjoining of Reformation and Catholic motifs results in producing a highly uncomfortable and uneasy reader, who is then compelled to interpret and make sense of the play's apparent ideological contradictions and the meanings toward which they gesture. The experience of grappling with this destabilizing conjunction of theological and doctrinal motifs in The Winter's Tale appears not to be very different from the kind of response readers generally bring to the playfully controversial and ironic literary production of another English Renaissance poet, John Donne. In Donne's poem, “The Canonization,” for example, the conflation of sacred and profane motifs in a lyric poem that transforms two carnal lovers into the saints of love resonates with distinctly Catholic echoes. Translating the lovers into saints also confers on them iconic status; these lovers now get sought after and revered by the very same people who had begun by criticizing and castigating them. One question persists after reading Donne's “The Canonization”: Is the poem registering sympathy for the Catholic faith through the opaque structures of the lyric's ironic performance, or is the poet critiquing identifiable structures in the Catholic faith by associating these with a carnal and secular love? When framed in a slightly different way, these questions are equally applicable to engaging the specific dramatic conditions of The Winter's Tale, where theological structures are invoked not to endorse specific doctrinal positions but to facilitate consideration of the distinctions, if any, existing between knowledge and opinion, faith and gullibility. The play refuses to grant to faith a privileged position in the apprehension and interpretation of experiential reality, suggesting that the efficacy it possesses in bringing (dead) texts to life is finally no different from powers conventionally ascribed to art. Likewise, whatever mystified authority scriptural revelation is perceived to possess appears to be no different from the validity of the classical and pagan traditions themselves. By not permitting faith and theological dogma the final say on what the ultimate significance of the highly provocative enlivening of Hermione's statue may be, The Winter's Tale interrogates the very ground on which claims of access to definitive knowledge and transcendent truth are built.

One perspective on the experience of faith in the play is offered in an unlikely place: Autolycus's successful sale of the ballads he had been advertising. After this resounding success, Autolycus enjoys a hearty laugh at the expense of the rustic folk he had just gulled: “Ha, ha! what a fool Honesty is! and Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman! I have sold all my trumpery: not a counterfeit stone, not a ribbon, glass, pomander, brooch, table-book, ballad, knife, tape, glove, shoe-tie, bracelet, horn-ring, to keep my pack from fasting: they throng who should buy first, as if my trinkets had been hallowed and brought a benediction to the buyer” (IV.iv.596-603, emphasis mine). When Autolycus looks at the credulity of the rustic folk, he imagines a crowd moved by religious fervor. Autolycus offers a comment linking faith directly to superstitious belief and ignorance. His “hallowed” trinket and the “benediction” it brings to the buyer and seeker provide terms of reference directly relevant to reading the reconciliation scene at the end of The Winter's Tale. The exercise of Leontes' faith, we recall, takes place at a narrative moment redolent of the superstition embedding Roman Catholic practice and thought. If we, like Leontes, must exercise our faith in relating to the play, and this faith cannot be extricated from superstition, then it may be that the foundation of our sure knowledge is perhaps nothing more than ignorant or fond credulity—the acceptance of events that the play suggests are even more ridiculous than a tale told in the winter.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (1963; rprt., London and New York: Methuen, 1984), V.iii.94-5. All subsequent citations of this work will be to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.

2. The Holy Bible: Old and New Testaments in the King James Version (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1976), 1 Cor. 15:20.

3. For an interesting account of the connection of the (Candlemas) bear to a range of practices and observations marking the end of Christmastide leisure and the beginning of the agricultural work year, see Michael D. Bristol, “In Search of the Bear: Spatiotemporal Form and the Heterogeneity of Economies in The Winter's Tale,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly] 42, 2 (Summer 1991): 145-67, especially pp. 158-62.

4. I depart here from Stanley Cavell's conclusion that central to the scene in which Hermione returns to life is Shakespeare's interest in theater's competition with religion: see the chapter, “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses: Reading The Winter's Tale,” in Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 193-221. For Cavell, Hermione's resurrection obtains its primary significance not in relation to a theological framework, but to the power of the dramatist to bring words to life through art.

5. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1996), especially pp. 216-7.

6. Lupton, especially pp. 206-18. Many books have been written on the subject of idolatry in the literary production of early modern England. For a more recent and important study of the relation between idolatry and “ceremonialist” ideology, and of the violent conflict between this ideology and Puritanism, see Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998).

7. For a useful and exciting treatment of the subject, see Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), especially pp. 58 and 102.

8. For the argument that The Winter's Tale is a play sustaining an anti-Catholic satire, see David Kaula, “Autolycus' Trumpery,” SEL 16, 2 (Spring 1976): 287-303. In his reading, Kaula focuses on the figure of Autolycus that, as the merchant of popish wares, becomes an important vehicle for facilitating and enabling this satire. While Kaula draws attention to Catholic resonances tied to Shakespeare's characterization of Autolycus and his craft(s), he ends up being overly deterministic in his allegorized reading of Autolycus's significance. For a more nuanced reading of the place of the Catholic discourse on idolatry in relation to Jewish, Greco-Roman, and Protestant ones, see Lupton, pp. 175-218. With regard to Perdita, a character that Kaula's reading transforms into an allegory of Christ's bride, Lupton finds a Catholic saint “debunked by the Reformation”; Perdita is, for Lupton, “both icon and idol, both pure image and material relic” (p. 205).

9. Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (1982; rprt., London and New York: Methuen, 1984), I.iv.40.

10. Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, p. 68 n. 40.

11. Interestingly, superstition occupies an important place in the pre-Christian world of Shakespeare's plays. In Julius Caesar, for example, Cassius speaks of Caesar as one who

                                            is superstitious grown of late,
    Quite from the main opinion he held once
    Of fantasy, of dreams, and ceremonies.

    In that play, the motif of superstition and use of supernatural machinery—“the strange impatience of the heavens,” Calphurnia's dream of the statue spouting blood, and the appearance of Caesar's ghost—serve to enhance dramatic effect by creating mood, tone, and atmosphere. See Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, ed. T. S. Dorsch (1955; rprt., London and New York: Methuen, 1983), II.i.195-7, I.iii.61. And, in King Lear, Edmund, the new political man, refers to society's habit of turning to superstition to explain unfortunate occurrences that have their true source in “the surfeits of our own behaviour.” In experiencing Lear, the audience does not find itself responding to the dramatization of the supernatural in these two plays by questioning its validity with reference to a theological understanding. See Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (1964; rprt., London and New York: Methuen, 1982), I.ii.116-7.

12. Francis Bacon, The Essays, ed. John Pitcher (London: Penguin Books, 1985), p. 112.

13. Bacon, p. 111.

14. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. G. W. Kitchin (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1973), p. 28.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. “Opinion” also has a political dimension. For contesting accounts of how the Genesis story of Babel functions as an allegory for the subversive, destabilizing, and destructive force of opinions, see Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 83-8. In The Winter's Tale itself, a striking feature is Shakespeare's specific portrayal of the king who mistakes opinion for truth as a tyrant. The resultant fracture in the relationship between the king and his queen possesses political meanings and resonances. Referring to how the representation of the family in early modern England, and specifically in Shakespeare's romances, is ideologically coded and possesses political significations, Constance Jordan has recently argued that Leontes' refusal to accept the ability of his subjects, indeed even his wife, to articulate themselves and have agency, points to an aspect of absolutist authority that poses great danger to the health of the body politic. In the portrait of the life of the royal family, one can indeed decipher the conditions governing the relationship between ruler and subject, between state and citizenry: see Jordan's Shakespeare's Monarchies: Ruler and Subject in the Romances (Ithaca and New York: Cornell Univ. Press, 1997), especially pp. 1-33 and 107-46. For a reading of how the motifs of resistance and disobedience found in The Winter's Tale may be read in conjunction with the matrix of radical political thought, see Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), pp. 200-2.

18. Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, “Hamlet” to “The Tempest” (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 221 and 223. Interestingly, the phase that Adelman identifies with the fantasy of a masculine “pastoral” uncontaminated by female presence corresponds culturally with the “androgynous” phase in the raising of children in early modern England. Covering the first seven years of a child's life, both boys and girls were dressed in skirts. At about seven years or so, boys were formally breeched in a literal and symbolic enactment of their movement out of this phase in which the mother is primary caretaker. Citing Stephen Orgel on the subject, Louis Montrose has this practice in mind when discussing Shakespeare's treatment of the yielding of the changeling boy to Oberon by Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the play's articulation of its culture's “man-made system of sex and gender” (Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 167; see especially chap. 9 and p. 126.

19. See St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 6-10.

20. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1981), 1:217.

21. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, p. 28.

22. For a sustained reading of The Winter's Tale as a deconstructing text, see Howard Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied Our Queen?’: The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter's Tale,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 3-18.

23. Lynn Enterline, “‘You speak a language that I understand not’: The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter's Tale,” SQ 48, 1 (Spring 1997): 17-44, 33.

24. Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Wherein the Lewde Dealing of Witches and Witchmongers is Notablie Detected, the Knaverie of Conjurors, the Impietie of Inchantors, the Follie of Soothsaiers, the Impudent Falshood of Cousenors, the Infidelitie of Atheists, the Pestilent Practises of Pythonists, the Curiositie of Figurecasters, the Vanitie of Dreamers, the Beggerlie Art of Alcumystrie (1584). Remarkably, Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft is marked by numerous outbursts of deep compassion for the “witches,” who are, in reality, merely poor, old, and helpless women. For a study of the presence of the discourse of witchcraft in the practice of Shakespearean theater, see Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare Bewitched,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 108-35.

25. Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, to Withdraw the Harts of Her Majesties Subjects from Their Allegeance, and from the Truth of Christian Religion Professed in England, under the Pretence of Casting Out Devils (London: James Roberts, 1603).

26. For a reading of the relationship between exorcism and theatricality in both Harsnett and Shakespeare, see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1988), especially chap. 4, pp. 94-128.

For the initial conception of this essay, I must express my debt to Richard Strier who first pointed out to me the importance of “opinion” and “knowledge” to the theological interests of The Winter's Tale. I have also enjoyed the benefit of vibrant responses to early versions of this paper presented publicly at the invaluable forum provided by the “Departmental Staff Seminar” at my university and also at the Kent Medieval Colloquium in Ohio.