SOURCE: Bieman, Elizabeth. “‘By law and process of great nature … free'd’: The Winter's Tale.” In William Shakespeare: The Romances, pp. 66-89. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

[In the following essay, Bieman discusses The Winter's Tale's composition date and textual issues, provides an overview of its plot, language, themes, and characters, and argues that the play adapts the romance genre in order to emphasize its realism.]

Just as all of the Romances move beyond the toughness of the tragedies without leaving tragic potentialities behind, so each Romance reaches beyond its predecessor in certain ways. If we see in Pericles a skeletal paradigm of the unrealistic conventions of romance and Cymbeline fleshing the skeleton out with every narrative and dramatic trick at Shakespeare's command, we are prepared to see The Winter's Tale modifying the genre in the direction of realism.¹

The dramatic worlds of Sicilia and Bohemia, and the seas between, may seem more remote geographically than the ancient Britain of Cymbeline's main plot and may seem, like Pericles, to participate temporally in the ancient Mediterranean cultures that appealed for aid and guidance to Olympian deities. But several factors help situate this play in the England of its early audiences: a court concerned with problems of succession, a rural sheep-shearing festival at which common English flowers are distributed (to characters bearing Greek names, of course), and the rogue Autolycus (named from Homer) flaunting the tricks of a petty offender of the Elizabethan underworld.² It relates further to the audience's world in the universal evocations of its ritualistic plot and by the richly ambiguous language that lends some verisimilitude to the psychological outlines of its characters.

We find many elements shared among the first three Romances beyond the generic similarities they exhibit.³The Winter's Tale shares with Pericles a structural break in the passage of many years between those dramatic events in which problems are established and those in which they are resolved. Both, in short, are clearly tragicomedies, hinged quite obviously in the middle.

But they differ in some of their structural effects. The linear and episodic plot of Pericles divides in two readily at Gower's prologue to act 4; similarly, The Winter's Tale can be divided in two, whether at the stage direction “Exit, pursued by a bear” that presages the last death in the story; at the old shepherd's words, “Now bless thyself: thou mett'st with things dying, I with things new-born”; or at the choral speech of Time that in position (the opening of act 4) parallels precisely Gower's overarching narrative in the earlier play. But the plot of The Winter's Tale is far less linear in effect than that of Pericles. As the action of the Tale moves from Sicilia to Bohemia and back to the Sicilia, the plot folds back upon itself in ways that can be compared either to the closing up of a diptych or to a cycle reverting in mythic and Neoplatonic fashion back to its beginning.⁴

The Tale shares with Cymbeline (and with Othello) the motif of furious jealousy in a husband convinced that his innocent wife is unfaithful. With Pericles and Cymbeline it shares the motif of a lost (or absent) daughter restored to her father as an agent in his transformation; an emphasis on magic; the theme of the otherwise good subordinate commanded to perform an evil action; doubling of characters; ritualistic effects; and, overwhelmingly, the sense of some transcendent power shaping the potentially or actually tragic elements into an overarching comic design. In The Winter's Tale, however, the help that providential power derives from a human agent takes on a new coloration in Paulina, who anticipates something found later in Prospero.

DATE, TEXT, AND SOURCES

The Winter's Tale was probably written in 1611, either concurrently with final touches on Cymbeline or soon after. Certainly the first recorded performance was at the Globe theater in May of that year, a month after a performance of Cymbeline. We have only the Folio text of 1623 for The Winter's Tale. When the plays were being performed frequently by the King's Men, there was no economic reason to print them for the public and many reasons to withhold them from rival companies. The text, a good one, seems to have been transcribed and then printed from Shakespeare's own working papers. Those places where the language is most garbled (as in act 1, scene 2, 137-46) work so well dramatically that there is no reason to blame obscurity on problems of transmission, as there so often is in the text of Pericles.⁵

The main source for The Winter's Tale is Robert Greene's prose romance Pandosto, published first around 1588—one of the many pieces of prose fiction that entertained members of Shakespeare's audiences when they were not in the theaters. Although he changed the names of most of the characters (Pandosto become Leontes; Bellaria, Hermione; Egistus, Polixenes; Fawnia, Perdita; and so on), Shakespeare followed so many of the details of Greene's text that the major changes he did choose to make are often worth noting. The most striking change was to transform a tragic narrative of jealousy, remorse, and divine retribution into a tragicomic drama with a self-proclaimedly happy ending. Greene's Queen Bellaria does actually die, along with her young son; after the lost daughter, Fawnia, returns to remind Pandosto of his injustice, the king kills himself. To know this is to take Leontes' guilt and repentance seriously, as Shakespeare surely did, but to see the restoration of happiness and order in the play (however qualified by the irreversible deaths of Mamillius and Antigonus) in a very positive light. This, the third of the Romances, would convince any contemporary, who would know his Greene the way we know the best-sellers or television series of recent decades, that Shakespeare was deliberately making new and happier patterns out of old and would set them to pondering the transformations.

The story of The Winter's Tale is not as complex as that of Cymbeline. Since complexity of language does so much to carry the plot forward, it will be interesting to compare the bare story with the closer analysis of the second scene that will open further discussions.

THE STORY

ACT 1

Camillo and Archidamus, lords, respectively, of Sicilia and Bohemia, discuss the current visit of Polixenes, king of Bohemia, to the court of Leontes of Sicilia. They note the brotherly affection between the kings, forged in shared experiences in childhood. They indicate that Sicilia's hospitality is richer than that Bohemia will be able to offer in return when Leontes and his companions return the visit. In the second scene, Polixenes announces his departure after a visit of nine months, resisting repeated requests from Leontes that he stay. Leontes commands his queen, Hermione, to further his efforts. When her entreaties succeed, Leontes grows suspicious that he is being betrayed by guest and wife. He raves in innuendo to his son, Mamillius, and in direct accusation to a courtier, Camillo, who staunchly defends the queen's virtue. Leontes orders Camillo to poison Polixenes; instead Camillo warns him and flees with him to Bohemia.

ACT 2

Hermione, tired in her late pregnancy, calls for her ladies to amuse Mamillius. The boy shows precocity and a sense of royal command in banter with them. His mother soon joins in the amusement. Leontes, his rage heightened by the flight of Polixenes and Camillo, enters, accuses Hermione directly of adultery, and, dismissing her gentle but firm denials, orders her to prison. His attendant lords, including Antigonus, protest. Leontes announces that to confirm his accusations he has sent messengers to the oracle at Delphi.

Paulina, Antigonus's wife, visits the prison where Hermione has just given birth to a daughter. Seeking to soften the king, Paulina takes the child into his presence. Raging—both at Paulina, the “mankind witch” who dares thus to confront him, and at the “bastard” he takes the child to be—Leontes first threatens to burn both mother and child and then orders Antigonus to expose the babe in “some remote and desert place quite out / Of our dominions.”

ACT 3

Leontes' messengers describe the sweet climate at Delphos and pray to Apollo to “turn all to the best.”

At court, Leontes formally charges Hermione with infidelity. Denying the charge without hope that she will be believed, and ready to die, she calls on “powers divine” to defend her woman's honor—a “derivative from me to mine,” her children. The messengers arrive with the oracle's defense of Hermione's chastity and its prediction that “the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found.” Leontes rejects the message as untrue; immediately the news arrives that Mamillius has died. Leontes immediately sees this as Apollo's anger at his “injustice”; Hermione swoons and is carried offstage; Leontes plans reconciliation with those he has wronged; Paulina returns to report Hermione's death; Leontes vows prayers of repentance as his daily “recreation.”

On a far shore in Bohemia, Antigonus has landed with the baby. In a dream, Hermione has asked that he call the child Perdita, she who has been lost, and has told him that he will never see his wife again. Setting the baby down, Antigonus “exit[s], pursued by a bear.” An old shepherd and his son, a “clown,” enter describing the death of Antigonus and the loss by storm of all mariners aboard the ship that carried him. They find the babe along with much gold and rejoice in their good fortune. Her name, Perdita, is conveyed in an attached note.

ACT 4

Time, as chorus, spans the sixteen years that have passed between acts 3 and 4. Leontes has suffered overwhelming guilt, while far away Perdita has “grown in grace / Equal with wond'ring” at the comfortable rural home of her foster father, the old shepherd.

At the court of Bohemia, another scene of parting and remonstrance unfolds: Camillo tells Polixenes he has been summoned to Sicilia by the repentant Leontes but agrees to stay a little longer. They discuss rumors that the beautiful daughter of an affluent shepherd has engaged the affections of the young prince, Florizel.

Out on a footpath in Bohemia, the “rogue” Autolycus sings cheery, ribald songs. He meets the clown who has been sent to purchase supplies for the festival of sheep shearing and picks his pocket, allaying suspicion by complaining of having been robbed of his own fine clothes by a notorious rascal, “Autolycus.”

Mistress of the festivities at the sheep shearing, Perdita is wooed by Florizel, disguised as the gentle rustic, Doricles. Polixenes and Camillo, also disguised, are welcomed by Perdita. They prompt Florizel to confess that he is hiding his love for Perdita from his father. Polixenes unmasks and angrily forbids the match. Camillo suggests that Florizel and Perdita seek refuge in Sicilia with Leontes, who will assuredly welcome them. Autolycus, in the guise of a peddler, enters and sings more of his happy, ribald songs. He exchanges clothing with Florizel to aid the lovers' escape. Camillo muses that he will tell Polixenes of the flight to draw him to Sicilia and advance his own reconciliation with Leontes.

ACT 5

In Sicilia, Cleomenes pleads with Leontes to forgive himself—his long years of penance have more than “paid down” his trespasses. Leontes, remembering Hermione with longing, cannot forget his guilt. While others ask him to marry again, Paulina continues to reproach him and exacts the promise that he will not marry without her leave. Florizel and Perdita enter, closely followed by the news that Polixenes is approaching. Florizel laments that Camillo has betrayed them. Touched by the lovers' fresh beauty and mutual love, Leontes resists Polixenes' letter asking that he arrest Florizel and promises to intercede for them.

Three gentlemen in conversation describe the scene of tearful wonder that ensued when Perdita's true identity was revealed by the old shepherd and clown who, through the action of Autolycus, had followed the lovers to Sicilia. The oracle has been fulfilled. Polixenes has forgiven Leontes and blessed the union of the prince and princess. The gentlemen tell also of Paulina's mixed emotions when the prevailing joy coincided with the confirmation of her husband's death. The shepherd and his son, now enriched by royal favor, encounter Autolycus, who thinks it prudent to promise to mend his ways.

The court assembles on Paulina's invitation to view a statue of Hermione, which, she says, she has had the noted Julio Romano execute for her.⁶ Perdita kneels before the lifelike “lady” to implore a blessing. Paulina prolongs the marveling suspense, forbidding Perdita and Leontes to touch the work of art but offering to make the statue move. Before Hermione (for it is she) descends from her pedestal to harmonious music to embrace Leontes, Paulina protests that her “magic” is “lawful.” Happy reunions ensue—wife with husband, mother with child. Hermione says her oracle-based hope of seeing Perdita again preserved her life. Paulina proposes now to withdraw to grieve for her own continuing loss; instead she is matched by command of the grateful Leontes with Camillo, “an honourable husband.” Paulina leads them out, in order, to tell their several stories of events in “this wide gap of time.”

THE SLIPPERY LANGUAGE OF SCENE 2

As in life, so in this fiction, the necessity for each to tell a personal story in the hearing of others arises because the tales we tell ourselves of the events in which we participate rarely coincide with the way other participants understand the same events. One way of interpreting the fall that closed the gates of Eden to all children of Adam and Eve makes it a fall into alienation—not just from the God we cannot see again walking in the garden but also from the God we encounter in human relationship whenever we are truly united with others in love. Fallen human souls, enclosed in mortal bodies and bone-hard heads, enclosed in barriers of self, must work hard at interpreting words and events if the alienation that pushes us toward tragedy is to be overcome. But fallen human souls, and flawed minds, need help against the evil forces that prevail in the world of tragedy. The help offered by the deus ex machina in the first two Romances takes an interesting turn in this play—but that insight will be developed later.

Meanwhile, we see that the second long scene reflects “realistically” the inevitable problems raised by human language. The ease with which the lines between truth and falsity can blur is demonstrated here: as we participate imaginatively in the dramatic fiction we sense something of the dangers we all face in human communication. We sense also, through symbolic and mythic reverberations of the language, the outlines of the great changes in human life with which the play ultimately concerns itself.

When Polixenes announces his departure after “nine changes of the watery star,” his phrase signifies to us openly the span of his absence from Bohemia, but as the scene unfolds we find, in retrospect, that the words can reinforce Leontes' suspicions; the visit has been just long enough to match the span of human gestation. The language readily transfers itself to notions of the inconstancy of woman. The interplay between an innocent phrase and the guilt it can bespeak to a suspicious ear typifies the opposition between innocence and sin that runs as motif throughout the scene.

While Hermione is urging their guest to stay, Leontes is ostensibly deep in private thought. But what he can overhear, in snatches and out of context, while Hermione and Polixenes talk lightly of the past will signify to him something very different from what is intended by the speakers.

Take Polixenes' memories, for instance: “We were … two lads that thought … to be boy eternal … twinn'd lambs that chang'd innocence for innocence” and “knew not the doctrine of ill-doing” (1.2.63-70). In his memory, the innocence of youth, the high idealism of the puer aeternus, is unqualified. Hermione's lighthearted response, “By this we gather / You have tripp'd since,” does indicate awareness of the “doctrine of ill-doing” but no personal guilt on her part. This is the sort of social games playing her husband's rebuke for her silence has encouraged. Polixenes' rejoinder edges toward guilty ambiguity, especially to a listener already as prone to suspicion as Leontes:

                                                                                          O my most sacred lady,
Temptations have since then been born to's: for
In those unfledg'd days was my wife a girl;
Your precious self had not then cross'd the eyes
Of my young playfellow.

(1.2.76-80)

The image of boy twins, exchanging innocence freely, darkens when temptation is equated to the female persons of the two wives. “Exchanging” becomes in this context explosive. The fuse is lit by Hermione's still “innocent” banter:

Of this make no conclusion, lest you say
Your queen and I are devils. Yet go on;
Th'offences we have made you do we'll answer,
If you first sinn'd with us, and …
                                                                                                                        … not
With any but with us.

(1.2.81-86)

The plural pronouns lay the words wide open: as they blur the demarcations between two husbands and two wives it would be hard to prove that the syntax signifies parallels, not crossovers.

Few readers suspect Hermione as Leontes comes to do,⁷ but few noticing these ambiguities would agree that Leontes' malignity is as totally unmotivated as that of Iago when he insinuates a similar malignity into the hitherto trusting soul of Othello. There is no doubt that the word structures lend themselves as readily to the dark interpretation Leontes comes to favor as to the truth and fidelity we as audience and readers locate in Hermione.

“A lady's Verily's / As potent as a lord's,” Hermione protests when Polixenes says “verily” he “may not” stay. Here, too, playful language develops ambiguous reverberations. She who has just been addressed as “most sacred lady,” a phrase that elevates her almost to the status of the Virgin Mary, is suggesting a relativity in truth that enables it to be claimed by opposing forces. With three repetitions of “verily” outweighing Polixenes' one, she prevails, but the victory is one of social grace, not of ultimate truth.

I turn now to the ambiguous word grace, which Hermione first uses in the sense I have just demonstrated. With “Grace to Boot!” (1.2.80) she applauds one of Polixenes' courtly compliments. She uses it playfully again to Leontes of an as yet undefined “good deed” she has done by speaking “to th' purpose,” but when she finds that the deed was her acceptance of his offer of marriage, the tone deepens: “Tis Grace indeed.”

It deepens, that is, when we see Hermione as the very model of chaste wifehood. But Leontes? He can trivialize it easily as Hermione goes on, lightly, to compare the occasions on which she “for ever earned a royal husband” and “for some while a friend.” Shakespeare used that word, in a sense now obsolete, in Measure for Measure: “He hath got his friend with child” (1.4.29).⁸

Who is to interpret? The king, born and bred to earthly authority, never questions his own opinions—or his own lack of spousal trust—until the oracle, which he first rejects, seems confirmed by the death of a king to be, Mamillius. Royalty, proved mortal, seems also then as fallible as mortal.

AUTHORITY, COURTIERSHIP, AND SEXUAL HIERARCHY

Like the other Romances, and like any other fiction that focuses on a ruler as a major protagonist, The Winter's Tale explores the complex theme of authority. But unlike Antiochus, who is deliberately vicious, and unlike Cleon, Cymbeline, and at times Pericles, who are too passive (the first two hag-ridden, the third apathetic under the harsh power of lady Fortune), Leontes rules so vigorously as to be tyrannical, understanding his own actions as unquestionable and therefore right. In this one important dimension, the play represents Leontes' quest for a new understanding of himself as ruler, of others in the relationships they bear toward him, and of the place of ruler and ruled in a transformed system of values.

Since the dominant plot lines bear on relationships within the royal families of Sicilia and Bohemia, and most of those characters who are not royal are still defined by family structures (or, in the case of Autolycus, the lack thereof), the issue of authority in this play bears directly on sexual roles. The court becomes a large metaphor for the family in a patriarchal culture—hence my juxtaposition, in this section, of courtly and sexual politics.

Before moving on to the central family hierarchies in the plot, I consider a question that has arisen in the two earlier Romances: that of the quandaries that arise for courtiers whose rulers' decrees run counter to their own moral judgments. Of courtiers in this play, Camillo, Antigonus, and Paulina are most striking, but they have enough companions in quandary in Sicilia to support all the trust we are willing to invest in Hermione.

Camillo is first to be given a chance to remonstrate when Leontes turns his suspicions into open accusations against his queen. He sees the way the king is moving when asked, “How cam't, Camillo, / That he [Polixenes] did stay?” “At the good queen's entreaty” is one word longer than need be to answer the question, and “good” is one word too many for Leontes, who commands that it be dropped (1.2.219-22). As the accusations swell, so too do Camillo's defenses of his “most gracious mistress,” his “most sovereign mistress,” the “clouding” of whose name calls for his personal “vengeance.” Camillo's words here, with his later diagnosis of the king's “truth” as “diseas'd opinion,”⁹ demonstrate courage, fixed as Leontes is in his delusions, and powerful as he is to act upon his judgmental anger.

Camillo finally gives up open remonstrance with, “I must believe you, sir” (1.2.333): opposition to a “diseas'd” monarch must henceforth be covert. He accedes ostensibly to the king's command that he kill Polixenes, but one short soliloquy and one brief conversation hence, he and Polixenes are allied in their escape from Sicilia.

In the final two acts, Camillo demonstrates a similar resistance to the harsh commands of his new ruler, Polixenes, but not without mixed motivation. Helping Florizel and Perdita to escape to Sicilia may be less a matter of support for the rebellious lovers than a stratagem to get his homesick self, with Polixenes, to Sicilia (4.4.662-67), where he knows a warm welcome from the repentant Leontes awaits them. For that to work, he must tell Polixenes of the lovers' flight. Before the happy outcome softens the impression of Camillo's duplicity, Florizel flatly calls it betrayal (5.1.192). We remember this instance of self-serving when the otherwise exemplary Camillo is matched by Leontes to Paulina. It qualifies her “happy” ending.

Antigonus and another “Lord,” unnamed, defend Hermione against Leontes' “justice” when he sends her off to prison. The lord would lay down his life if Leontes would “accept … that the queen is spotless / I' th' eyes of heaven”; Antigonus, stirred to his masculine depths, would “by [his] honour” geld his three daughters if the queen “be honour-flaw'd” (2.1.130-47). The harsh illogicality of the threat cuts two ways. Primary is the sense that he knows such a horror would never be required of him since he trusts the queen absolutely. But a woman hearing him must flinch at a familiar consequence of masculine anger, that one “proved” instance of female misconduct will cast assumptions of guilt on all, and prompt reactions punitive for the innocent. We have already seen this instinctive masculine reaction demonstrated in Posthumus's misogyny when Iachimo has duped him.

Two scenes later, Antigonus's humane protectiveness extends to the newborn baby. To Leontes' challenge, “What will you adventure / To save this brat's life?” he responds “Anything, my lord … I'll pawn the little blood which I have left / To save the innocent.” The language will be borne out by events, sadly, but the effect is not merely of foreshadowing. The laying down of a life for another (though the other be “innocent,” not deemed guilty of that original sin “hereditary ours” [1.2.75]) has overtones the audience cannot miss. In starkest terms, we are driven to recognize that resistance to powerful evil in this world can call for total sacrifice.

Many male courtiers dare, for a time, to challenge Leontes, and, for a time, Leontes tolerates each. Paulina provokes a very different reaction when she enters to defend Hermione and intercede for the baby. “Away with that audacious lady!” the king thunders as soon as he sees Paulina enter. “Antigonus, / I charg'd thee that she should not come about me. / I knew she would.” When Antigonus pleads himself helpless to keep his wife in line, he wryly rationalizes: “When she will take the rein I let her run.” Paulina's opening speech belies her husband's insinuation that she is an unruly animal: “Good my liege, I come … your loyal servant, your physician, / Your most obedient servant … I say, I come / From your good queen.”

Paulina's words are courageous—physician and good especially—but they are measured by courtesy. When the king mocks, “Good queen!” the courage swells: “I say good queen, and would by combat make her good, so were I / A man, the worst about you.” Before she is eventually forced out, she hears herself called a “mankind witch … A most intelligencing bawd,” a “crone,” a “callat,” a “gross hag! / And lozel.” But no epithet stems the flow of words by which Paulina defends “the sacred honour of himself, his queen's / His hopeful son's, his babe's” against the king's own “slander” (2.3.61-129).¹⁰ Paulina leaves only when subject to force: “I pray you, do not push me; I'll be gone.” In the face of the verbal and physical abuse that a woman challenging masculine bastions of power must suffer,¹¹ Paulina exhibits a moral strength and tenacity more impressive than any other courtier's.

Her more important role in orchestrating the events that lead Leontes through remorse and repentance to reconciliation will be examined later. Meanwhile we turn to the scene of Hermione's trial (3.2).

A WOMAN'S VERILY

We have seen “A lady's Verily” prevail against Polixenes' intent to leave: in courtly games playing, “lords” will defer to “ladies.” But what of those more desperate situations in which a woman's reputation and very life are at stake? Once her “lord,” her master, has decided to count her “integrity … falsehood,” it “shall … scarce boot {her} / To say ‘not guilty’”: he who holds the social and political power will determine how words will be receiv'd (3.2.25-27). In situations of such dead earnest, a woman's verily means very little.

Yet, like Paulina in her eloquent courage, Hermione must say what she can. She affirms her own dignity as “a great king's daughter, / The mother to a royal prince”—both claims, we note, dependent on her relationship to male power—and then staunchly accepts her peril: “For life, I prize it / As I weigh grief (which I would spare).” But for “honour, / 'Tis a derivative from me to mine, / And only that I stand for” (3.2.42-45). That “honour,” a lady's, encompasses the correct social graces she has shown toward Polixenes—“such a kind of love as might become / A lady like me … even such … as yourself commanded.” But more, her woman's “honour” rests on the assertion that the “love” she offered Polixenes was “So, and no other” (3.2.64-67). Her words in extremity prove predictably futile. To Leontes' further accusations she responds:

Sir,
You speak a language that I understand not:
My life stands in the level of your dreams,
Which I'll lay down.

(3.2.79-82)

The silence of the metrical space after “Sir” is as eloquent as Hermione's acceptance of the nightmare that threatens her life and as the double-edged irony of Leontes' retort, “Your actions are my dreams.”

WHOSE ACTIONS? WHOSE DREAMS?

Leontes simply intends the court to understand that Hermione's guilty actions occasion his nightmares. But the copula verb, whose function is to join two syntactical elements in a structure of equality or reciprocity, reflects the “dreams” back upon the “actions”: the guilt he implies may have no more substance than the delusions of his deeply disturbed mind. Leontes' words expose the contests between falsity and truth, appearance and reality, “action” and “dream,” even tragedy and comedy, that confront us in language, theater, and life. They prompt me to step back from practical interpretation to reflect briefly on what we have been doing.¹²

We are engaged in a complex process. As we interprete the dramatic actions unfolding for us in Shakespeare's language, we are doing in the theater of our minds what the characters within the fictions do in relation to each other. Between us and the characters, in any Shakespearean production, move the actors who must choose their tones of voice and their body language according to their—and their directors'—interpretation of Shakespeare's text. Beyond the theaters, and outside the rooms and libraries in which we work over the texts, spread other “texts”: the history of Shakespeare's time, which links the family of King James to the plots of the Romances, and the history of our own time, which predisposes us to see the dangers of unquestioned power and control, whether in mushroom clouds, ecological disasters, domestic injuries—or dramatic texts.

We, interpreting texts, reconstruct them in the personal theaters of our minds and the texts we write and read. In Aristotle's phrase, interpreters imitate actions as truly as the playwright does. But the critical mimeses in which we are engaged do not merely reflect the literature we read or the “real” lives we live. In the webs of language in which we all participate, the process of imitation, of re-presentation, works to make present that which can never be wholly or unambiguously present. The process unfolds inconclusively—cutting through barriers that divide levels of interpretation from each other and those that divide skull-locked men and women from each other. Insofar as we participate with vigorous inquiry in the fictions, we change our capacities to participate with vigorous inquiry in the “real” lives of those who share our personal histories—to understand a little, to interpret with the judgment that, arising from empathy, leads to conclusions more equitable than those of unquestioning, autocratic judgment.

My argument will never prove—nor is it trying to prove—that Shakespeare understood his own linguistic-dramatic efforts in precisely this way. If it refreshes and expands our awareness as readers, it serves its primary purpose. If, further, it convinces us that art does interconnect, mysteriously and intricately, with life, that the interconnections go far beyond the resemblances of a reflection in a mirror to the object reflected, it participates in Shakespeare's lifelong preoccupation with art's bridging of the gap between illusion and reality.¹³

In The Winter's Tale the most striking moment of this bridging comes when Hermione, presented by Paulina as a statue, a work of art, steps down and presents herself in embrace to her husband—not a statue, not an impossible dream projected by the residual puer or youth in her ostensibly adult husband, but a warm and breathing woman. The art of Paulina has worked to transform Leontes' false image of perfection into his realization of an absence that calls for fulfillment not by an artifact of the imagination but by a person.

Now we move on to consider yet again the illusory world projected by a man who is possessed by the archetype of the puer aeternus and the problems real women have when subjected to his dreams.

THE PUER, THE SENEX, AND HONOR

Thus far, when speaking of the puer aeternus, I have followed the insights that Marie-Louise von Franz developed from Jung's own usages of the term. We have seen that the puer is obsessed with the image of purity in woman, an obsession justified in his inner world by the high ideals he holds before him on life's quest and by the accordingly high image he holds of his own role. The obsession is rooted in infancy. What the “boy eternal” (1.2.65) is seeking is the perfect maternal figure (or at times the parental-paternal, since the nurturing unity can include a man), lost when the puer first began to realize that his wish was no guarantee of its own fulfillment.¹⁴ Since life unfolds on a chronological continuum, experiences of infancy color youth, maturity, and age.

Several post-Jungian analysts, chief among them James Hillman, have followed an ancient and medieval convention in associating the archetype of the puer with that of the senex or old man.¹⁵ Their insights are instructive for Leontes, Polixenes, and Prospero and for the Pericles of the last two acts of his play. Surprisingly, they bear also on the figure of Autolycus and, as we shall see in the next chapter, on Ariel and Caliban.

The positive puer, we have seen, is a questing idealist, always on the move, like Pericles perambulating the Mediterranean world, searching, among other perfections, for the perfect woman. A youth driven by this archetype may marry, but his understanding of his relationship with his wife will be so narcissistic that he will see her primarily as a reflection of his own perfection. (Thinking back to the narcissism of both Posthumus and Imogen early in their story, we recognize that both males and females can be propelled by puer consciousness.) If the union with a female brings forth the recognition and assimilation of the anima archetype, the puer comes down to mother earth and progresses toward the enlarged selfhood Jung speaks of as the goal of individuation. He will be driven thereafter neither by the puer figure nor by its polar opposite, the senex, but will be able to draw on the positive elements this double archetype represents, incorporating them with elements from other archetypes into a well-rounded psyche.

But puer consciousness does not always progress along a positive path. The puer, representative of and drawn to the transcendentally spiritual, “is weak on earth because it is not at home on earth.” It is impatient, vulnerable, and, although changeable, it resists development. “When it must rest or withdraw from the scene, then it seems to be stuck in a timeless state … out of tune with time.”¹⁶ Hillman's insights seem tailored to fit the “wide gap of time” during which Leontes endlessly repeated his rituals of repentance and go some way toward explaining the otherwise inexplicable dallying of Pericles, who waits until his daughter is full grown before seeking to reclaim her.

If the puer on his quest toward selfhood loses his spiritual purpose and strays “through the halls of power towards the heart-hardened sick old king,” that negative senex prevents the internal development of the archetype of the wise old man—the positive senex. The chronological age of the aging puer is relatively unimportant; critics have estimated that the rigid, irascible Leontes of the early acts is about twenty-eight. But the puer-driven man who does not come to know the anima within, his internal principle of love, life, inspiration, will come under the sway of the senex years before his time. If only he could keep the dynamism and idealism of youth and assimilate them to the positive attributes of age—order, responsibility, and wisdom! When the two poles of the puer-senex archetype are both in play, all is well. But the person driven by one with the other repressed—the puer only or the senex only—becomes trouble personified, for self and others.

The negative senex, flipping into power when the puer goes underground, has a number of attributes instructive for readers of the Romances: tendencies to melancholy and depression (the counterparts to the puer's abstractions from the real world); a “hardening of consciousness”¹⁷ that produces egocentricity, rigidity, irascibility, cold judgmentalism. Some or all of these traits are recognizable in Pericles (depression), Cymbeline (irascibility), Leontes (irascibility and judgmentalism), and even in that more positive wise old man, Prospero (irascibility).

Now to Leontes, Polixenes, and Florizel. The puer, idealist that he is, always means well. If he is born and bred to rule, he will be conditioned to see himself as perfect judge, defining his own understanding of any complex matter as the truth and acting accordingly with unquestioning authority. The description defines Leontes, but it can be extended to define young men (like Posthumus) who are kings only metaphorically as rulers within a love relationship or marriage. Since the kingdoms of The Winter's Tale should be read primarily as metaphors for the more universal structures of family and friendship, we often need to interpret Leontes' actions more as those of an authoritarian husband, a puer turned senex, than as those of a king.

As puer-senex, Leontes encounters universal problems. Having married a woman as royal as himself, projecting on her the image of the Virgin who blends eternal strength and unspotted purity with the maternal solicitude of the queen of heaven, he sees her undergoing the domestic changes the “watery” moon ordains for woman—the fatigues of pregnancy, the “spot of childbed taint,”¹⁸ and, probably worse, the diversion of her attention from him by duties to her offspring. When his “virgin” becomes so palpably human, so changed—and perfection is not expected to change—deep and undefined anxieties come to the surface, ready to fasten on any plausible pretext.

Leontes' reactions to Hermione and Polixenes in the second scene are not mad in the sense of motiveless malignity; they are mad in the sense that they push to an absolute extreme, to absurdity, the self-confident “logic” that the puer turned senex substitutes for his undefined and misinterpreted anxieties. Leontes projects the frailties of the inner self he still idealizes onto the objectified scapegoats he makes of his wife and boyhood friend. The anxieties arising from “betrayal” by a mother are translated into anxieties about “betrayal” by the two figures who have formed Leontes' current circle of affection.

Polixenes is in some senses a double for Leontes. When Camillo tells their stories using third-person plural pronouns (1.1.21-32), and Polixenes extends and confirms the effect by using the first-person plural (1.2.62-75), the same verbs serve for both. As double, Polixenes is experienced by Leontes as uncanny—he reminds Leontes of oedipal and homoerotic impulses that get in the way of his loving a wife.¹⁹ There is, then, an additional impulse to anxiety welling up in Leontes. Seeing the two he has loved best since he outgrew infancy in affectionate conversation with each other, Leontes is tossed back into an infant's turmoil, feeling outpowered (he has failed where another now succeeds), abandoned, betrayed. To understand him in this way is not to make light of a senex's tyrannical injustice. But temper tantrums are more forgivable in a child than in a man. If we can forgive the child in Leontes, we will accept, a little more readily, the moment when Hermione steps silently back into his arms.

The self-absorption of the child becomes, in the adult male under the influence of the senex, a preoccupation with personal honor. Since this is a tale of love, not war, Leontes is no Hotspur. His honor is vested in his image of himself as unquestioned authority over the unspotted kingdom to which Hermione belongs. When, tormented by insecurity, he looks outward for a cause and projects one on his wife and his friend, his deepest wound, we see, is to the honor he equates to his very life:

Go play, boy, play: the mother plays. and I
Play too; but so disgrac'd a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamour
Will be my knell.

(1.2.187-90)

Hermione has been conditioned to share the patriarchal attitudes of Leontes: her long-suffering sweetness in the face of manifest injustice, like that of patient Griselda, follows the model of feminine strength held up to womanhood in any society dominated by masculine values.²⁰ She spiritedly defends her honor at her trial (humbly and subserviently in terms of reliance on the gods for vindication). She declares she does so on behalf of her family. Her own life, so painful now, she will gladly sacrifice, as a good woman should: “Sir, spare your threats: / The bug which you would fright me with, I seek … The crown and comfort of my life, your favour, / I give for lost” (3.2.91-95).

Once the action moves to Bohemia, rural and pastoral settings and characters soften the patriarchal and courtly values represented by Camillo and Polixenes, the latter at least representative of a senex when he acts the authoritarian father. At the sheep-shearing festival, Perdita, lamenting Florizel's humble disguise as Doricles worries how the king would “look, to see his work, so noble, / Vilely bound up.” Florizel refers his humble disguise to the stories of “the gods themselves” who “humbling their deities to love, have taken / The shapes of beasts” to visit mortal maidens, or (like Apollo) of a “poor humble swain / As I seem now.” Then he redefines honor in a way quite alien to men who define it in terms of possession and reputation:

                                                            Their transformations
Were never for a piece of beauty rarer,
Nor in a way so chaste, since my desires
Run not before my honour, nor my lusts
Burn hotter than my faith.

(4.4.31-35)

The syntax is ambiguous. The word chaste refers first to Perdita, the “piece of beauty,” but it then attaches itself forward to Florizel's “honour” and the “faith” that balances the urgency of his “lusts.” The ambiguity reveals that, for Florizel, self and beloved form a unity and harmony that encompasses both the flames of sexual desire and the chaste “honour” of those who restrain desire until it can be lawfully expressed. Through the love that has grown out of his desire for the forthright maiden he believes to be no more than a shepherdess, Florizel—a generation younger than Leontes—has reached a maturity Leontes has yet to know.

This redefines honor in terms neither of masculine possession nor of feminine asexuality. Although Perdita's behavior is totally chaste, her ardor is never in doubt from the moment she appears as a figure of “Flora,” a goddess who represents sexuality in most of her Renaissance manifestations. The ardor suffuses her address to Florizel at 4.4.130-32. Such a redefinition belongs to the fictive world of pastoral. Hierarchical and patriarchal societies, represented by the court, always assign the honors of war and possession (not very different from each other in feminist thinking) to men and the honor of sexual purity to women. Their highest genres are epic and tragedy. Pastoral, on the other hand, builds on the (in the male-defined genres, lower) values of retreat, receptivity, and sexual generation. Although I question any assumption that the optimism of The Winter's Tale is absolute, I find some indication of trust in the possibility of transformation in social attitudes in this representation of Florizel's advance over puer-senex thinking on “honour.”

Before proceeding to Florizel's Perdita as a richer representation of the virgin archetype than Hermione, I want to look at the strange rascal Autolycus, who, negating all forms of honor, nobility, and humane concern, nonetheless inhabits the happier acts of this play.

THE ROLE OF AUTOLYCUS

What is Autolycus, named for the thieving son of Mercury and ancestor to the wily Ulysses, doing here in the pastoral world of love, with the noble Perdita and Florizel, with the trustworthy old shepherd and his honest but clownish son? What is he doing in Sicilia, the place of refuge and the birth of reconciliation?

Literal answers are easy enough to offer. Autolycus is singing dirty songs, playing confidence games at the expense of the unwary, peddling ribbons and other trifles to tempt an innocent eye, delivering in the end an absurd promise to reform. His antics entertain Shakespeare's audiences, just as within the fiction he entertains the decent rustics at the festival of the wool harvest. He serves the plot directly twice: he shifts clothing with Florizel, enabling him to escape a father's wrath with his beloved, and he directs the old shepherd and his son to Sicilia where they are able to reveal Perdita's true identity. The latter incident holds the clues to the deeper significance we sense but must struggle to define. This son of Mercury is as hard to pin down as his mercurial father, but he calls us to fathom his meaning: Mercury-Hermes is guide of souls and father of hermeneusis or interpretation.²¹

In asides, Autolycus confesses that “though I am not naturally honest, I am sometimes so by chance” (4.4.712-13) and that the good he has done to shepherd and clown has been “against his will” (5.2.124-5). His envy at “the blossoms of their fortune” prompts the second aside and undercuts the credibility of his promise that he will seriously mend his ways. After all, any hope of further gain from this fortunate pair will depend on the trust the rascal hopes to promote by his promise of transformation.

His very presence, untrustworthy as he continues to be, helps bridge the boundaries between fictive art and life. This story in which all seems to come together happily is not set in a true Eden, we see, but in a world realistically harboring a devil, calling yet for vigilant interpretation of others' language. This said, its converse also emerges: a world where the power of evil is represented by an entertaining rascal whose actions turn to good, whatever his motivation, is one we need not fear too seriously. The greater evil of a tyrannous king has been transmuted, in part through the actions of the rascal.

The shift of clothing by which Autolycus enables Florizel to escape is superficially simple to understand. Autolycus enjoys the advantage, clearly, of trading a peddler's rags for the relative riches of the prince's rural but festive guise. But a shift of clothing in Shakespeare is always worth pondering. As Cloten was tied in uncanny ways by clothing to Posthumus, so here we sense some mystery. Hillman, a mercurial writer on the mercurial aspects of the puer, once more can be our guide.

“When we stand in the image [of the trickster and soul guide] and view hermetically, the problem of black and white becomes irrelevant … Hermes son Autolykos … changes them back and forth opportunistically in accordance with the situation.” The linkage between Autolycus and Florizel need not signify evil in the latter: garment shifts are not doctrine and do not require moralizing. What we do see is that as the puer moves toward selfhood (and Florizel is boyish and idealistic, even though we find he does not share the puer's dehumanizing projection of self onto a virgin figure), he will meet situations in which good and evil are inextricably mixed. Sons owe allegiance to fathers; lovers owe allegiance to each other. Situations that in tragedy will tear an Antigone or an Othello apart can have different issue in the story of a clever youth. Florizel turns trickster to escape and buy time without incurring any but a senex's adverse judgment. “Puer opportunism is … an instinctual adaptation to psychic realities,” a stage in growth toward the fuller psychic being that can contend with worldly evils without disaster.²²

THE FEMALE PRINCIPLE: MAMILLIUS, HERMIONE, AND PERDITA

Let us start this discussion with names, first with the name of the young prince, son to Hermione and brother to Perdita, whose death is the darkest of the irreversible evils in this tragicomedy. “Mamillius” is Shakespeare's name: the parallel character in Pandosto is Garinter. For a prince whose character is extolled as the epitome of youthful masculinity, the name is strange. Only its suffix sounds masculine; the first two syllables link it to a group of words denoting the female nipple or breast.²³ Mamillius's name works against the interpretation of his fatal illness that Leontes proposes: “To see his nobleness, / Conceiving the dishonor of his mother! / He straight declin'd … and fix'd the shame on't in himself.” Mamillius is no young Hamlet, sickened by female sexuality. Were he so, his very name would have been the death of him long before he is forced to observe his father's cruelty and injustice toward his mother. He has accorded her a playful affection in their brief conversation together (2.1.21-32) and, earlier, a bemused defense against his father's raving accusations (1.2.208).

The death of Mamillius signifies more than the victimization of innocence under evil,²⁴ although the death of the son of a king often means that, in myth and scripture as in history. It signifies also the death in Leontes' Sicilia of those softer and nourishing virtues that are often regarded as feminine, although males too may be marked by “the milk of human kindness,” to their detriment in a world that values power more than love.²⁵

Although the particular child's death is irreversible, what he represents thematically is restored to Sicilia in Florizel. Leontes doubly regains a son in this son of his double, this husband to his daughter. Florizel's name, even more than that of Mamillius, suggests the union of male and female: “zell” is an archaic form of zeal, ardent love, and “Flora,” goddess of the springing flowers, is the love name he himself gives Perdita, the “queen of curds and cream” (4.4.2, 161).

Hermione's name rarely attracts attention: Shakespeare's queen is so much more memorable than the classical character for whom she is named that “Hermione” now signifies to most a chaste and long-suffering wife whose closest sisters in literary typology are Desdemona and Chaucer's Griselda.

The Greek compound means “pillar-queen.”²⁶ For the “herm” syllable, a glance at a Greek lexicon adds to “pillar” the suggestions of “prop,” “rock,” “bedpost.” “Herm” as an English word signifies a pillar-supported statue of a male head, often used in ancient times as a boundary marker.²⁷ All of these variants open possibilities as we consider Hermione's role. She is certainly treated by Leontes like a bedroom thing, a “bedpost”; her integrity and passive strength under assault are “rock” hard; and Leontes' encouragement of her conversation with Polixenes, taken with his possessiveness, puts the unfortunate queen out on an exposed boundary. As a prop she supports the rigid male head that represents, in its turn, the senex who sees his spouse in utterly conventional and servile terms. When Leontes' perspective of Hermione as directly under him, supporting only him, is shaken by her friendly banter with his double (and unconscious rival) Polixenes and by the advanced pregnancy that will divert her support to a life newer and more fragile, the senex loses his balance and his head.

Etymology may be enough in itself to account for Shakespeare's name for the queen who in Pandosto is called Bellaria. But when we look at the sad tales of the ancient Hermione, evocative patterns emerge. Homer's Hermione was the daughter of Helen and Menelaus, abandoned by Helen when Paris carried her off to Troy. Thus Hermione's name was closely associated with an adultery of which she herself was innocent. Homer's Hermione endured the threat of an unjust death and marriage to a violent man, Orestes, who, when tried for the murder of his mother, escaped penalty. Orestes was defended by Apollo's denial that a mother is in any sense more important “than the inert furrow in which the husbandman casts his seed” and by the deciding vote of that most masculine of female Olympians, Athena-Diana.²⁸

The analogies need not be labored. Shakespeare's Hermione is witty, intelligent, and chaste, but in pregnancy clearly touched by sexuality. She is so strong in adversity that women as well as men cannot fail to admire her. But this strong good woman's forbearance—with her willingness to embrace the husband who has grievously wronged her, caused the death of her firstborn, and exposed her second born—reflects a masculine dream of femininity, not the self-sufficiency of the pagan virgin archetype we see more clearly in Perdita than in her mother.

The one moment of the play that works best to justify the problematic embrace of reconciliation is that in which Leontes tells Paulina that the “dear stone” is much more “wrinkled” and “aged” than the beautiful wife he remembers. “Because eternity is changeless, that which is governed only by the puer does not age,” Hillman notes. But Leontes, face to face with the changes of many watery moons and years, accepts the imperfections with no diminishment of his longing for the wife who would, living, look like this. The puer-senex powers that have been fueling his actions drop away in his recognition of longing for a specific, time-flawed, woman. The moment is like that in which Pericles confronts his memories of Thaisa in her name. Not the projected dream and adjunct but the particular woman draws the husband's love. Hermione, hearing all this as (true to her name) she stands motionless on her pedestal, may find in it the justification she needs for belief in Leontes' transformation.

Perdita's name—“the lost one” in the female inflection—is man given in several senses. Leontes has imposed on her innocence the exposure that “loses” her to Sicilia²⁹; Antigonus has attached the name to her swaddling clothes; and the fostering shepherd has used it in her upbringing. Her name—chosen by the mother who knows male power all too well—suits all too well any girl-child born into a patriarchy ruled by the puer-senex polarity. Though her name is tied to her victimization as infant, Perdita represents also, like Mamillius, the loss to the court of Sicilia of those gentle, loving, and relating motives in the psyche that are symbolically feminine.

In pastoral Bohemia, Perdita wears her name proudly, and more honestly and independently than most men wear theirs. At her festival, the men from the court are disguised by name as well as attire; Autolycus is also disguised; and even the old shepherd and his son wear a social dignity that comes from the gold Antigonus left with the abandoned child, a dignity in this sense not their own. But Perdita is Perdita,³⁰ in her own mind no more or less than she seems—beautiful and witty by nature, modestly well dressed by good fortune, warm and commanding as mistress of the feast, ardently in love but fully concerned lest her noble lover fall into trouble because of her modest circumstances.

Perdita is in the most obvious sense a virgin—fully virtuous, innocent of sexual trespass though not of sexual desire. But her purity is not that of a votaress of Diana: it is neither tantalizingly unreceptive to male approach nor secluded from it as Thaisa and Hermione are when sequestered from their husbands. This forthrightly nubile girl is defined by her amatory relationship to Florizel and by her daughterly relationship to the old shepherd, Leontes, and Polixenes. She lives on the very boundary between daughterhood and wifehood, in both instances in close relationship to the masculine principle.

All the more remarkable then is the decisive intelligence and moral aplomb in her dialogues with both Florizel and Polixenes, lover and future father-in-law, respectively.³¹ These mark her as virginal in the most ancient sense of all, the self-sufficiency in the face of masculine strength that links her back to Marina.

But unlike Marina's, Perdita's female strength grows with her love. We have already noted her concern that her lover may fall under his father's censure for his masquerade in the festive dress that Autolycus will find such an improvement over his peddler's rags (4.4.18-22). She also feels abashed at the very thought that the king might surprise her in her “borrowed flaunts,” a festive finery above her station; although she straightforwardly accepts her current status in the social hierarchy, she knows that discovery will threaten “this purpose” of their love and may do so with special force if her garments seem presumptuous. But on stage she and “Doricles” are matched in the costumes that are for her above, for him below, the proper social station. Their moral equality, thus emblematically established, is reinforced by Florizel's words: “Or I'll be thine, my fair, / Or not my father's. For I cannot be / Mine own, nor anything to any, if / I be not thine” (4.4.42-45). Strengthened in her own self-assertiveness by Florizel's declaration of his selfhood in the mutuality of love, Perdita can match Polixenes gracefully in the ironic debate on the breeding of flowers. Within the fiction, she does not know who this aristocrat may be, but she stands her ground against him on matters of both intellect and morality. The audience, knowing her identity, sees her vindicated yet again as fit consort to a prince.

The debate starts with the simple social gesture of a gift of flowers from the mistress of the feast to two newcomers and embraces as it unfolds many of the major themes of the Romances, and of romance as genre. Perdita dismisses, from her offerings, “carnations and streak'd gillyvors, / Which some call nature's bastards,” propagated by grafting, “an art which, in their piedness, shares / With great creating nature.” She prefers natural over artistic creation as befits the pastoral occasion and her own rural nurture. But Polixenes counters with a conventional argument based in Neoplatonic philosophy: since all creation flows down through the various strata of the cosmos from the One source, “nature is made better by no mean / But nature makes that mean.” “Over that art, which you say adds to nature, is an art / That nature makes.” Polixenes goes on to praise the husbandman's art that “marr[ies] / A gentle scion to the wildest stock” to “make conceive a … baser kind / By bud of nobler race.” Such art, mending nature, “itself is nature.”

Perdita gracefully concedes his principle (which Polixenes fails to recognize as applicable to the marriage he will soon oppose, thinking the girl's nature and nurture both deficient) but she still refuses to have anything to do with the flowers of bastardizing art. “No more than, were I painted, I would wish / This youth should say ’twere well, and only therefore / Desire to breed by me.” Her final sally, whether she guesses her antagonist's identity or not, affirms her natural worth against all that “artful” nurture might have done to improve her. It also shows a virginal vigor insisting, not shrewishly, on the last word and the loving fervor from which she draws her strength.

That commonplace of Renaissance pastoral, the nature-nurture debate, introduced here pointedly and enigmatically, will arise again in The Tempest. But we turn now from it to matters related to the larger questions of nature and art raised by Paulina's “magic.”

PAULINA: NO DEUS EX MACHINA, “MANKIND WITCH”

We have seen Paulina's courage in the face of tyranny provoking a misogynistic tirade from Leontes, embedded in which was the epithet “mankind witch.” The phrase labeled her by two major and conventionally related offenses, sexual perversity and the practice of forbidden arts. In a rigid patriarchy, any female strength that contradicts the imposed norms of unthreatening femininity automatically provokes such taunts. A woman is held to be no woman if she fails to conform to the masculine dream.³² Moreover, she will be suspected of links to devilish powers to support her usurping strength. History demonstrates that independent women, acting out of strength and wisdom in the cause of good,³³ have been frequently persecuted as witches for the knowledge and behavior that is seen as far less dangerous in a man like Prospero.

Mamillius's death, confirming the oracle's support for Paulina's position, alters Leontes' responses. Self-accused, he welcomes the power of this strong woman to punish his tyranny. Her very name suggests the epistles of Paul, which define and condemn human sin in the context of a hope for redemption that hinges on repentance. I warn again that explicit doctrine need not be preached, by Shakespeare or any reader, for us to hear reverberations in Paulina's name that link her to a male model of unquestionable authority. Those who find such reverberations powerful will find in the “resurrection” and the gracious forgiveness offered by Paulina's mistress a representation, however incomplete, of Paul's lord and master. In Hermione, Paulina serves not the devil, lord of witches, but a human channel of divine love. As we shall see, though, that human channel offers links to more than one divine myth.

In the final scene, years after the accuser's anger has cooled, Paulina recalls the charge of witchcraft when she declares that the “spell” by which she brings Hermione to life “is lawful.” We know, of course, that the “art” that enables the statue to move into Leontes' arms is that of “great creating nature,” the art of God sustaining Hermione through the trials that have deepened the marks of time in her face.

Hermione utters no words to Leontes in their embrace or to Camillo, who challenges her to prove she lives by speaking. Only when Paulina leads Perdita to seek a blessing does the mother finally speak: “You gods look down, / And from your sacred vials pour your graces / Upon my daughter's head!” Her maternal love, sustained by the hope the oracle gave, has “preserv'd” her “to see the issue.” Hermione's last word in the play can be paraphrased as “outcome,” but to do so impoverishes its meaning. This play is about the saving grace of the Nature the Renaissance philosophers saw in the earthly Venus, the medieval philosophers deified as Natura Naturans, and the ancients celebrated in the mother-daughter mysteries of Demeter and Persephone. In the upturn of Nature's annual cycle, figured as transparently in the reunion of Hermione with Perdita as in the older myths, a “sad tale” yields to merry spring, and all the happy tales the persons of the play will tell each other after “good Paulina / Lead[s them] hence.” In this final ritualistic scene, three women—maiden, mother, and crone—dominate, three avatars of the ancients' triple goddess. Through her, the great creating Nature, the love that issues from nature redresses wrongs and restores social and spiritual balance.

One wry observation demands concluding space. Only after all has been ceremoniously resolved under Paulina's apparent control do we realize that Leontes, again in command, is denying her wish to escape the happiness she cannot share. Without a word of courtship or permission, he is matching her to Camillo and telling her what she must direct others to do. For a male playwright, a happy ending sees all power reinvested in those to whom it traditionally has belonged. Paulina's manifest power must be governed by another husband—however ineffectual in this sense Antigonus once proved to be.

Notes

1. Robert W. Uphaus draws distinctions similar to these in Beyond Tragedy: Structure and Experience in Shakespeare's Romances (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1981). J. H. P. Pafford, editor of the Arden edition of The Winter's Tale (London: Methuen, 1963), finds a high degree of realism in Leontes' mad jealousy and other points of characterization—more than I do. (All quotations from the play are from this edition.) Howard Felperin in “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: Methuen, 1985), 3-18, discusses the contribution of intricate language to the lifelike slipperiness we encounter in the play.

2. The probable contribution of Greene's “cony-catching” pamphlets to the character of Autolycus is discussed by Pafford in his Introduction, xxxiv-v.

3. Pafford, in section 4 of his Introduction (lxiii-lxvii), discusses the interrelationships at length as they have been defined by critics over the years.

4. Pafford's introduction deals with the “structural mare's nests … [as] nonexistent problems” throughout, but especially li-lv.

5. In the absence of firm proof for any speculation on text and date, the summaries of textual issues given in the Arden introductions for each of these plays give acceptable guidance—although bibliographical debates continue in the literature.

6. Romano was an actual Renaissance sculptor. This notorious “anachronism,” of course, is one of many devices in this play blurring the boundaries between art and life.

7. Felperin, “Tongue-Tied Our Queen?” finds, as I do, that Hermione is probably innocent but that Leontes' suspicions have more than a little foundation in the ambiguities of the text.

8. Measure for Measure, ed. W. Lever, the Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1965), 1.4.29.

9. Camillo's word recalls the Platonic distinction between truth, which accords with the eternal patterns, and opinion, which is precariously based on the evidences of fallible human sense.

10. We note a contrast here to Cymbeline wherein slander attacks the royal Imogen from outside the family.

11. Jardine, [Lisa] Still Harping on Daughters [Brighton: Harvester Press, 1983], notes the equation of a talkative woman with witchery, shrewishness, and other evils in the Renaissance. See especially chaps. 2 and 4.

12. The broader theoretical premises for this book have been sketched in my introductory chapter, but here it is important to review them.

13. See Righter, [Ann.] Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, [London: Chatto and Windus, 1962] passim.

14. Although I have begun by using the Jungian and post-Jungian terminology of the puer, since so much that Marie von Franz and Hillman have observed is applicable, the insights of Freud are basic to the same psychological mechanisms, and those of the post-Freudian Lacan about a “fall” into ambiguous language are particularly applicable to the occasions of Leontes' judgments. For elaboration, see, in addition to works cited in chapter 2, Stephen Frosh, The Politics of Pychoanalysis: An Introduction to Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), chaps. 6, 7.

15. The ensuing discussion is prompted by [James] Hillman's Puer Papers [Irving, TX: Spring Publications, 1987]. For the late-ancient and medieval currency of the puer-senex topos—and thus its availability to Shakespeare—see E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 98-101.

16. This paragraph and the next quote and paraphrase James Hillman's “Senex and Puer” in Puer Papers, 24, 25.

17. The phrase is from ibid., 19. The whole paragraph is indebted to “Senex and Puer.”

18. Milton's phrase (Sonnet 23), expresses the age-old patriarchal taboos upon the blood mysteries of womanhood. Such taboos gave rise to the Levitical law prescribing purification after childbirth and persisted in Milton's day in the Anglican ritual of “churching” a new mother. The other quotation is adapted from Polixenes' opening speech (1.2.1).

19. Many of the insights here run parallel to those of Coppélia Kahn in “The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family” in Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Kahn's chosen terminology is more Freudian than mine: my choice of the “puer” archetype, codified by Jungians, was suggested, of course, by Shakespeare's own phrase, “boy eternal.”

20. Again Lisa Jardine in Still Harping on Daughters, 181-94, is instructive. She traces the “nobility in adversity” Renaissance writers habitually located in figures like Griselda and Lucrece.

21. The Oxford English Dictionary derives “hermeneut” or interpreter from the name of Hermes, whom the Romans called Mercury. Other attributes of this young god, messenger of the greater gods—trickiness, speed in constant journeying, inconsistency—signal his importance in any exploration of puer psychology like this play.

22. See “Notes on Opportunism” in Hillman, Puer Papers, esp. 159, 161, 163.

23. The male nipple, “mamma,” takes a different vowel in the second syllable.

24. See Pafford's Introduction, lxxxii.

25. I am thinking here, of course, of the dark and bloody atmosphere of Macbeth's Scotland. Kahn, “The Providential Tempest and the Shakespearean Family,” sees the death of Mamillius in much the same way as I do.

26. According to Robert Graves' commentary on the Homeric character in The Greek Myths (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), 5.2, 64-70, 274, 348.

27. In addition to Graves, I have consulted a Greek lexicon and the Oxford English Dictionary for this paragraph.

28. The quotation and many of the details in the paragraph come from Graves.

29. Hillman, “Puer and Senex,” 17-18, notes that the puer archetype is often linked to child exposure.

30. In this she is like that serpent of old Nile who, obliquely reflected in the dialogue of a drunkard at another feast in Antony and Cleopatra, “is shap'd, sir, like itself … moves with it own organs … [and] lives by that which nourisheth it” (in the Arden Shakespeare, ed. M. R. Ridley, [(London: Methuen, 1965)] 2.7.41-45).

31. Here I differ decisively from the opinion of J. H. P. Pafford (lxxvii) that Perdita is less intelligent in the “debate” with Polixenes than stubborn in a peasant way.

32. Spenser's admirable female knight, Britomart, has often fallen under the censure of male readers who do not seem to see that her “irritability” results from the need to exercise vigilance over a “virtue”—chastity—that will be lost forever in male eyes if it is once defeated.

33. Mary Daly in Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon, 1978) gives an outline, informed by passionate outrage, of the injustices imposed on women by men in many cultures under the rationale of witchcraft.