SOURCE: Hartwig, Joan. “The Tragicomic Perspective of The Winter's Tale.” ELH 37, no. 1 (March 1970): 12-36.

[In the following essay, Hartwig proposes that in The Winter's Tale Shakespeare used a miraculous resolution to create a sense of dislocation and wonder in his audience, using Leontes's penitence and eventual recovery of Hermione as a way to stress the benevolence of the power that controls universe.]

In The Winter's Tale, Leontes, confronted with the breathing statue which is Hermione, pleads to keep this moment which is penultimate to actual discovery. Paulina, aware of the intensity with which Leontes has responded to the apparent statue of Hermione, offers to draw the curtain.

PAUL.
                                                            I'll draw the curtain:
My lord's almost so far transported that
He'll think anon it lives.
LEON.
                                                            O sweet Paulina,
Make me to think so twenty years together!
No settled senses of the world can match
The pleasure of that madness. Let 't alone.

(V.iii.68-73)¹

Joy occurs before the factual affirmation that the world of hope and dreams coincides with the world of real experience: it occurs when the character perceives, with all his logic and rationality suspended, a tragicomic vision in which the limits of human possibility have exploded—effects no longer depend upon human causes alone.

Before Leontes can enjoy “the pleasure of that madness” which the tragicomic recognition creates, he must undergo the painful process of emotional growth; but he has to be given time to grow. Unlike those other Shakespearean heroes, Othello and Posthumus, whom jealousy also reduces to tyrannical madness, Leontes has no qualifier of his guilt. Iago goads Othello and Iachimo pushes Posthumus to ignoble wrath, but Leontes' jealousy is completely self-inflicted. By omitting an outside prompter to absorb censure, Shakespeare created a different dramatic problem: How can Leontes be protected from immediate condemnation by the audience?

One of the ways in which Shakespeare meets this problem is through Paulina as she and Leontes characterize each other throughout the play. Paulina plays the “shrew” to Leontes' “tyrant” in the first half of the play; in the last half, she plays “confessor” to Leontes' humble “penitent.” There are other roles through which they engage each other's natures in defining actions, but these two are primary and they control the other subsidiary roles.

Paulina's assumption of the shrewish role begins with her first appearance, which follows Leontes' public accusation of Hermione as an adulteress. Paulina's first lines to the Gaoler, under whose surveillance Hermione is imprisoned, are courtly enough; but when the Gaoler refuses to admit her to Hermione, Paulina reveals the shortness of her patience and the power of her lashing tongue (II.ii.9-12). Paulina's descent from “gentle lady” to a tough-tongued woman who calls herself “gentle” is an appropriate change for the circumstances of Leontes' court where gentle forms have been cast aside already as a meaningful measure of gentility: Hermione's charm and graceful actions as hostess to Polixenes have been seen as deceitful displays of vulgarity and lust by the king. Although Leontes' vision is distorted by his heated imagination, he remains the source for whatever values “form” may have in his kingdom. Paulina's biting question, “Is't lawful, pray you, / To see her women? any of them? Emilia?”, begins with the recognition that “law” has become a slippery term, and, in its questioning descent from “women,” to “any of them,” to “Emilia,” it reflects how much and how swiftly the “laws” of courtesy have vanished in Leontes' court. Paulina, therefore, immediately casts herself into the role of “shrew,” the “scolding tongue”² of moral conscience in this case rather than of self-indulgent discontent. She clothes herself in the role, verbally, when Emilia informs her of the premature birth of Hermione's baby girl.

                                                                                          I dare be sworn:
These dangerous, unsafe lunes i' th' king, beshrew them!
He must be told on't, and he shall: the office
Becomes a woman best. I'll take 't upon me:
If I prove honey-mouth'd, let my tongue blister,
And never to my red-look'd anger be
The trumpet any more.

(II.ii.29-35)

Paulina's conscious assumption of her role balances Leontes' awareness of his own role-playing in his semicomic, ominous announcement:³

Go, play, boy, play: thy 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. Go, play, boy, play. There have been,
(Or I am much deceiv'd) cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is (even at this present,
Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th' arm,
That little thinks she has been sluic'd in 's absence
And his pond fish'd by his next neighbour, by
Sir Smile, his neighbour: nay, there's comfort in't,
Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open'd,
As mine, against their will. Should all despair
That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves.

(I.ii.187-200)

In both of these announcements of their roles, there is a comic element as well as a serious threat. Leontes' speech follows the departure of Hermione and Polixenes and climaxes his growing sense of the reality of his position as cuckold. At such a moment when he sees his suspicions harden into action—the touching of hands between Hermione and Polixenes—when his suspicions seem most credible, he speaks of reality as a staged world in which the actors are playing conscious roles.⁴ One psychological comfort he gains from such an effort is the sense that something larger than human choice controls each man's ability to achieve his own identity. The staged “play,” playing “parts,” implies an external controller, and being a cuckold depends more on being cast to play the part than upon a deficiency in the individual's will or personality. The responsibility of action and of consequences to action, therefore, Leontes relegates outside himself. Such distance provides the possibility of lessening actual pain because it removes the situation from the world of humanly controlled action and consequence and becomes an unavoidable set of circumstances. Thus, at the point where Leontes' pain in recognizing what he considers to be reality becomes greater than he can bear, he shifts his vision of it to a stage artifice which protects him from the intensity of total involvement. He attempts to achieve for himself the same double sense of commitment to real experience and of safety from real threat which every theater audience knows. At the same moment that he achieves such distance for himself, he taunts the audience with the duplicity of its position.

                                                                                          There have been,
(Or I am much deceiv'd) cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is (even at this present,
Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th' arm,
That little thinks she has been sluic'd in 's absence.

(I.ii.190-194)

Leontes moves from a character in the play, involved in the reality of his own situation, to a perspective like the audience's, from which he surveys his role in the play, to a point beyond the audience, from which he can show them what they themselves are doing. This is an immense leap in points of view, and the dramatic effects it produces are complex. As the man in the audience turns to look at the woman he holds by the arm, he realizes simultaneously that the situation is improbable but that it is altogether possible in human terms. In recognizing how possible Leontes' position as cuckold is, the audience forgets for the moment that his position as cuckold is the result of his infected fancy. There is just enough truth in his generalization for the audience to see that underneath his variously harsh and tyrannical attitudes, there exists (at least at given moments) a cool and rational perception of everyday realities. The surprise of the switch to the audience's personal knowledge of his situation causes laughter—the laughter of recognition that indeed this stage play is not so far-fetched as it might have seemed, or perhaps that life is not so far removed from art as it might seem. And the laughter dispels some of the horror the audience must feel at the extremities of Leontes' assumptions and the cruelties of his actions. When he says “there's comfort in't” to know that other men have experienced what he sees his own situation to be, we agree. Human frailty and the sense of humor which alone seems capable of assimilating the results of human frailty are things we know about and respect. Leontes' speech thus wins by its comic recognitions what it loses by its harsh, potentially tragic, threats: the audience's sympathy. Emotional response is thereby held in a contradictory balance which forces a suspension of judgment despite Leontes' condemnable actions.

Like Leontes', Paulina's announcement of her role as “shrew” has comic effects as well as serious implications. When she swears to use her trumpet-tongue to tell Leontes of the danger of his delusions, she implies that she is at home in such a role: If I speak sweetly, she says, then let my tongue fail to serve me “any more.”⁵ The announcement of role-playing has its heroic as well as its comic heritage, but Paulina's dependence on her tongue to control situations insists on the audience's recognition of her as a “shrew” figure. In assuring Emilia that she will do her utmost to bring about a successful outcome of her interview with Leontes, she says:

                                                                                                    Tell her, Emilia,
I'll use that tongue I have.

(II.ii.51-52)

In her interview with Leontes (II.iii), Paulina is continually characterized by his comments as a “shrew,” and the comic effects of this scene rely on the oldest formulas of farce. While Paulina berates him, Leontes narrows her characterization by pointing up the comic role she is enacting. The scene of the scolding shrew berating (unjustly in the formula) a poor, exhausted man is so stock that the alteration of values in this scene cannot altogether alter the evocation of sympathy for Leontes. Paulina, in defense of Hermione's goodness and the child's innocence, speaks on the side of moral right and justice, while Leontes, defending his investment in the delusion he has constructed as reality, insists on moral wrong and injustice. Yet the roles which they play as stock characters—the shrew and her weary victim—modify the force of the moral values they are enacting.

Leontes greets Paulina's entrance with both immediate anger and ironic patience:

                                                                                          How!
Away with that audacious lady! Antigonus,
I charg'd thee that she should not come about me.
I knew she would.

(II.iii.41-44)

This formulaic response to a stock situation creates an amusing and ironic distance between Leontes and the trial he is undergoing. The scene begins by establishing itself as a comic routine and it continues to follow the pattern. Antigonus protests that he tried to stop her with threats of Leontes' displeasure and his own, but obviously with no effect. Leontes' sarcastic response insures Paulina's shrewish characterization: “What! canst not rule her?” In her response, she agrees to the role: “… in this—… trust it, / He shall not rule me” (47, 49-50). Throughout the scene Leontes counters Paulina's accusations with accusations about her role as shrew, each time, however, becoming less and less a forgiveable figure, displacing his formulaically sympathetic position in the comic routine.

Thou dotard! thou art woman-tir'd, unroosted
By thy dame Partlet here.

(II.iii.74-75)

He dreads his wife.

(79)

                                                                                          A callat
Of boundless tongue, who late hath beat her husband,
And now baits me!(6)

(90-92)

                                                                                          A gross hag!
And, lozel, thou art worthy to be hang'd,
That wilt not stay her tongue.

(107-109)

Leontes' chief means of projecting Paulina's image is, of course, through reference to her husband, Antigonus. Leontes works upon Antigonus' sense of pride and manly dignity in order to force him to banish Paulina, but Antigonus reacts with equanimity. He answers the accusation that he cannot stay his wife's tongue with a comic appeal to the universality of his situation.

                                                                                          Hang all the husbands
That cannot do that feat, you'll leave yourself
Hardly one subject.

(II.iii.109-111)

Antigonus' joke echoes Leontes' earlier remark that a tenth of mankind might hang themselves for cuckolds (I.ii.200), and it has the same effect of comic displacement in a tragically threatening situation.⁷

The stock situation diametrically opposes the narrative situation, and the complexity of emotional responses produced by the opposition is significant in several ways. It is necessary to achieve some sympathy for Leontes in order to prepare him a place in the comic resolution of the play; his guilty action must be capable of redemption. He is a self-crossed figure and the soliloquy which precedes Paulina's entrance reveals him pathetically caught in the consequences of his own erroneous action. His torment, although it causes him to contemplate the further horror of murdering Hermione to ease his pain, does for a brief moment evoke pity. Paulina's entrance at such a moment, when Leontes is most distracted by news of his son's illness and by paranoiac thoughts of having become a joke to Camillo and Polixenes, increases the possibility of compassion for Leontes. Verbal flagellation at such a time could hardly be accepted by anyone. But the comic distance achieved through establishing the characters in their stock positions—Paulina as shrew, Antigonus as her hen-pecked and ineffectual husband, and Leontes as the long-suffering victim of her tongue—works in two directions. In one, it removes Paulina from a wholly commendable position; yet in another, it dispels the pathos of Leontes' grappling with his sorrow.

Without the qualification of the stock characterization, the audience would naturally respond favorably toward the moral justice of Paulina's position and it would as unreservedly admire her honesty and psychological insights into Leontes' self-delusions. Consistently, the audience would readily condemn Leontes for his jealousy and violence toward the gentle Hermione. Yet Shakespeare has offset these natural propensities by his use of stock comic characterization. The conflict between moral evaluation and emotional sympathy requires a hesitation of commitment on the part of the audience, and the conflict delays judgment until the revelation of Apollo's oracle, which is the climax of emotional tension in the first part of the play. The audience is allowed to relax into judgment only when their vision coincides with the divine oracle. The elevation of the audience's perception to a position which exceeds merely human vision affirms the goal of tragicomic action to expand the human view. Man's powers of perception are capable of growth, and the audience is forced to this awareness when it is required to wait for the tragicomic resolution.

After the climactic revelation of Apollo's oracle and Hermione's apparent death, Leontes' reliance upon Paulina is in one sense a replacement or compensation for the loyalty he had owed Hermione and which he had held from her. Immediately after the announcement of Mamillius' death, Hermione faints, and Paulina collects the overcharged and scattered emotional atmosphere into a single awesome focus:

This news is mortal to the queen: look down
And see what death is doing.

(III.ii.148-149)

Her directive becomes the “still center” of the scene and, in a larger view, of the entire action of the play. The final resurrection of Hermione depends upon the conviction that Paulina's interpretation of Hermione's swoon carries. Leontes tries to modify the fatality of Paulina's reading—“Her heart is but o'ercharged: she will recover” (150)—but Paulina's calm and direct evaluation cannot be so easily resisted. In her two powerful lines, Paulina has changed her position from subject of Leontes to ruler. But even as she moves into her new role in relationship to Leontes, her harshness absorbs the censurable effects of his guilty action. While she is gone to attend Hermione, Leontes admits his sin and begins to plan how he will amend it (155-156). Paulina rushes back and for twenty-five lines torments him with tongue-lashing accusations, delaying the revelation that the queen is dead. Then she invites Leontes to “despair” rather than to repent and repair his soul (207-210), and Leontes brokenly submits to the justness of even this.

                                                                                          Go on, go on:
Thou canst not speak too much; I have deserv'd
All tongues to talk their bitt'rest.

(III.ii.214-216)

In submitting to the shrew, Leontes makes partial amends for his previous tyranny. Paulina's fury does not abate easily, however, and she extends her verbal punishment of Leontes beyond humane limits (218-232). Her intense and bitter accusations produce another important effect aside from absorbing part of the hostility that Leontes' actions have generated: they convince the audience that Hermione is, in fact, dead.

The scene ends with Leontes asking Paulina to lead him to his sorrows. When the play's action again returns to Sicilia (V.i), it is immediately evident that Leontes has allowed Paulina emotional dictatorship over him, and that for sixteen years she has been his priestess and confessor. Cleomenes attempts to soothe Leontes' guilt and sorrow, but Paulina still needles him to confess his sin.

CLEO.
Sir, you have done enough, and have perform'd
A saint-like sorrow: …
Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil;
With them, forgive yourself.
LEON.
                                                                      Whilst I remember
Her, and her virtues, I cannot forget
My blemishes in them. …
PAUL.
                                                                      True, too true, my lord:
If, one by one, you wedded all the world,
Or from the all that are took something good,
To make a perfect woman, she you kill'd
Would be unparallel'd.
LEON.
                                                                      I think so. Kill'd!
She I kill'd! I did so: but thou strik'st me
Sorely, to say I did: it is as bitter
Upon thy tongue as in my thought. Now, good now,
Say so but seldom.
CLEO.
                                                            Not at all, good lady:
You might have spoken a thousand things that would
Have done the time more benefit and grac'd
Your kindness better.

(V.i.1-23)

Despite the essential change in their relationship, Paulina still enjoys the power of her shrewish tongue. The concern is now whether Leontes should marry again. Most of his subjects want an heir and would encourage his remarriage, but Paulina exacts Leontes' promise “Never to marry, but by my free leave. … Unless another, / As like Hermione as is her picture, / Affront his eye” (V.i.70, 73-75). When Cleomenes tries to stop her bargaining with the king, she says, true to the prolixity of her stock characterization,

                                                                                                    I have done.
Yet, if my lord will marry,—if you will, sir;
No remedy but you will,—give me the office
To choose you a queen: she shall not be so young
As was your former, but she shall be such
As, walk'd your first queen's ghost, it should take joy
To see her in your arms.(8)

(V.i.75-80)

She has forced Leontes to allow her yet another role with which to rule him—now she is his procuress. When Perdita and Florizel petition Leontes to be their advocate before Polixenes, and Leontes seems to admire Perdita's beauty a little too much, Paulina quickly reminds him of their contract.

                                                                                          Sir, my liege,
Your eye hath too much youth in 't; not a month
'Fore your queen died, she was more worth such gazes
Than what you look on now.

(V.i.223-226)

Leontes assures her that he was thinking of Hermione in admiring Perdita, but at this point only the audience knows how justified he is to do so.⁹

The comic pattern of Paulina's and Leontes' relationship continues into the final scene where the living Hermione is revealed. Paulina forces Leontes into an intensely emotional state of anticipation and then threatens to draw the curtain upon the statue. Through her threats to close off the revelation, however, she builds the kind of imaginative excitement that the tragicomic recognition requires. By threats of frustration, she dispels rational skepticism that would “hoot” at the revelation of the living Hermione “like an old tale.” She achieves, with the confident skill of a good stage director, or a good playwright, the fusion of illusion and reality into joyful truth.

The discovery of that joyful truth is so exhilarating that no one worries about the trickery involved in creating it. The experience of “wonder” justifies the artifices used to make that experience possible. The “voice of moral justice” has deceived not only Leontes, but the audience as well. We experience, as he does, “the pleasure of that madness” which “no settled senses of the world can match.” And the experience is so delightful that we can forgive a little skillful trickery along the way. If, upon leaving the theater, we are at ease to ponder over the significance of that trickery, we confront once again that profound dislocation of fixed perceptions which Shakespeare's tragicomedy produces. There are more realities than meet the eye in these final plays. Or, to put it more precisely, the eye is trained to look through the artifice into a world of wonder.

The tragicomic resolution can be as powerful as it is in The Winter's Tale because of other balances which also operate throughout the play. The structural division in time has often led critics mistakenly to assume that Acts IV and V are the comic performance of the tragic action of the first three acts. Each part has a dominant impulse, it is true, but that impulse is consistently balanced throughout. The tragicomic blend created in the first half, in large part by the pairing of Leontes and Paulina, is sustained in the last half by similar means: that is, by balancing Autolycus against the pastoral figures, the Shepherd and the Clown. In Leontes' court complexities and hyperboles build to a dramatic inflation, which Apollo's direct and terse oracle punctures. In the less sophisticated world of Bohemia, however, there is an inverse need for complexity and duplicity. Autolycus, as a kind of “fallen” Apollo,¹⁰ a peddler of ballads, provides a decadent complexity to balance the pastoral simplicity of the last acts of the play.

Autolycus' complexity manifests itself most directly in his disguises. He is a Protean figure who seems to be undergoing a continuous metamorphosis, at least in his relationships with the other characters in the play. On his first appearance he announces his identity and his past connection with Prince Florizel in between snatches of song (IV.iii.13-14, 23-30). His self-conscious announcement of his role is a parodic reminder of Paulina's and Leontes' previous announcements as well as a preparation for Perdita's and Florizel's descriptions of their own disguised roles (IV.iv.1-35). Autolycus' first disguise is involved with the parodic enactment of the Good Samaritan story.¹¹ The parody itself calls attention to the artifice of disguise—Autolycus is hardly the victim of the scene. But even more emphatic of the artifice is the fact that Autolycus is disguised as his own victim. The double humor which results from his self-description is similar to that which Falstaff creates in his speech when, playing the role of Prince Hal, he praises “valiant Jack Falstaff” (1 Henry IV, II.iv.512-527). Autolycus says of his oppressor,

A fellow, sir, that I have known to go about with troll-my-dames: I knew him once a servant of the prince: I cannot tell, good sir, for which of his virtues it was, but he was certainly whipped out of the court.

(IV.iii.84-87)

The Clown's literal sensibility causes him to quibble over Autolycus' choice of words—“His vices, you would say; there's no virtue whipped out of the court” (IV.iii.88). The Clown ignores the other meanings of “virtue” (power, and the skill of manipulation), and the point makes clear the vast difference between pastoral simplicity and Autolycus' sophisticated multiplicity. The pun and the metaphor (like disguise) are his tools and with them Autolycus transforms life into an artifice which he sells back to the Clown on a literal level.

When Autolycus appears again, for example, he is once more disguised: under a false beard, he peddles his ballads. The servant announces him with great enthusiasm—Autolycus' repertoire is endless—and his entrance enhances the festive mood of the scene. Like Shrove Tuesday, Autolycus brings release from mundane realities. And, in the same way that Carnival acts as an exorciser of evil spirits, the sheep-shearing celebration purges the play of its melancholy. There is a self-conscious pointing to the nature of art and its relationship to life in both farcical action and serious debate in this scene. Mopsa and Dorcas enact on a farcical level the audience's desire for artistic illusions. Their reiterated questions about the “truth” of the ballads corresponds to the audience's demands for realism in art. Autolycus' responses, like the expert artificer he imitates, are equivocal:

MOP.
Is it true, think you?
AUT.
Very true, and but a month old.

.....

Why should I carry lies abroad?

(IV.iv.267-272)

As is so often the case in comedy, the rhetorical question does not contain its own answer. The reason for carrying lies abroad, at the level of Autolycus' thieving instincts, is to gain a “prize” from those who are gullible enough to accept his lies as truth. At the analogous level of audience and playwright, the motive is much the same. There is a demand, a need, in the life of man to experience poetic lies, and the playwright satisfies this need. Drama is not so different from the confidence-man's art that Autolycus practices.¹² Success in both requires a remarkable understanding of and sympathy with human needs. That is one of the reasons that Autolycus, like Falstaff, is such a well-loved rogue. He understands human weaknesses and he does not condemn them.¹³

Everyone at the sheep-shearing festival is disguised except for the Shepherd and the Clown, and the abundance of disguise in this simple pastoral setting calls attention to the dislocation of identities in the idyllic world. Polixenes soon explodes the artifice by demanding that Florizel return to his proper role as Prince and give over his illusions about being a rustic lover (IV.iv.418-442); but disguise remains the means to discovery. Camillo advises Florizel to exchange garments with Autolycus and to flee to Sicilia. At this point, both Autolycus and Florizel wear their former disguises: Autolycus is the bearded peddler and Florizel is like “Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain” (IV.iv.30). When Autolycus exchanges clothes with Florizel, he is assuming Florizel's pastoral disguise which he then flaunts to the Shepherd and Clown as a courtier's garments. This excessive complexity in which one disguise cancels another insists on the artificiality of the convention and points out its logical absurdities. At the same time it reiterates the Autolycus-Apollo parodic analogy and reminds us that Autolycus is a corrupt version of the dramatic force that Apollo manifests in the first half of the play. Autolycus' riddles are not oracles but ballads; yet both affirm their audience's need for assurance that truth may be found within the poetic lie.

The tragicomic balance of contradictory impulses manifests itself in aspects other than characterization. For example, the opening scene establishes the pattern of oppositions by creating an atmosphere of excess, which is dotted throughout with ironies. Archidamus' first remark is weighted with dramatic irony, as are most of the evaluations in this scene. He says that Sicilia's hospitality will be difficult to match—Bohemia is apparently a less magnificent land (I.i.1-4, 11-16). Unwittingly, Archidamus has labeled the problem: Leontes' and Polixenes' worlds differ. The rarity of Sicilian magnificence has intoxicated even the language of common conversation. Both Archidamus and Camillo speak with courtly exaggeration which contrasts sharply with the simpler expressions of Bohemia's Shepherd (III.iii.59 ff.). But Camillo's caution, that Archidamus' praise of Sicilia and fear of Bohemia's insufficiency is too great, is couched in a vocabulary that becomes symbolically significant in the following action—not only Archidamus pays “a great deal too dear” for Sicilia's “free gifts,” but so do Polixenes, Hermione, and even Camillo. The vocabulary of trade, introduced so early in an innocent way, builds gradually to an ominous significance in the barter of souls Leontes conducts in the trial scene. Hermione recognizes Leontes' superior power as tradesman, but she verbally steps beyond the marketplace.

Sir,
You speak a language that I understand not:
My life stands in the level of your dreams,
Which I'll lay down. …
                                                                                Sir, spare your threats:
The bug which you would fright me with, I seek.
To me can life be no commodity.

(III.ii.79-82, 91-93)

At this moment of withdrawal, Hermione recognizes the impossibility of existing in a world where the metaphor and its literal correlative have been severed. No longer is she the graciously insistent hostess (“Will you go yet? / Force me to keep you as a prisoner, / Not like a guest: so you shall pay your fees / When you depart, and save your thanks?” [I.ii.51-54]), nor the secure wife who expects to hear compliments from her husband (“Our praises are our wages” [I.ii.94]). Hermione understands only that Leontes has imagined an illicit bargain between her and Polixenes. Unable to combat a vision which she cannot see, she places her life at Leontes' disposal since the terms which made it valuable no longer exist. The way in which she detaches herself from her life, by viewing it as a “commodity,” creates the possibility and the meaning of her sixteen-year retreat. Until the values which make her life a true commodity can be had, she moves beyond the realm of Leontes' marketplace where life exists only in metaphor.

The vocabulary of trade is a rhetorical figure, a terrible metaphor, in the world of Leontes' mad vision, but in Bohemia it becomes a literal reality (IV.iii.36 ff.). The transition from metaphor to literality signifies the general movement of the play. Autolycus' “hot brain” (IV.iv.684) parodies Leontes' heated imagination, but with a significant difference: Autolycus' imagination does not labor over moral constructs, but only over practical matters like robbing a purse.¹⁴ The literal application of the terms of trade to the actual marketplace, whether it be the rogue's road or the produce stalls, is an appropriate use of language. But the application of such terms to human life and acts of faith signifies a breach in decorum that reaches metaphysical proportions. The rest of the play's action attempts to bring the metaphor back into an appropriate relationship with actuality.

Similarly, Camillo's speech about the common boyhood of the two kings (I.i.21-32) suggests a metaphorical perfection which life's actions cannot match. The garden of innocence inevitably gives way to knowledge, but no one in Sicilia seems to comprehend the pattern.¹⁵ The wisdom comes in understanding how to relate the adult world of knowledge to the child's world of innocence. Leontes seems to have leapt from one to the other without any mediation. He therefore tries to match the extreme of the one—absolute innocence—with the extreme of the other—absorption in the knowledge of evil. His directive to Mamillius to “go play” and his supposition that Hermione “plays” voice these extremes (I.ii.187).¹⁶ The expectations of Archidamus and Camillo in the opening scene express the same kind of unrealistic naiveté about the human spirit. When Camillo asks that “the heavens continue their loves,” Archidamus responds, “I think there is not in the world either malice or matter to alter it” (I.i.31-34). Maintaining the absolute in human love is an expectation based upon tenuous ideals. That the expectation is not attached to actuality is immediately proved by Leontes' jealousy, and the enlightening process which all the characters undergo for the rest of the play aims toward reuniting the metaphor and the actual world which it represents.

One of the most important scenes in the first part of the play, which functions as a standard of true values against which the whole of Leontes' mad world is ironically placed, involves the return of Cleomenes and Dion from Delphos (III.i). Cleomenes opens the scene describing the “delicate climate” and “sweet air” of Apollo's isle. The degree to which he has been impressed suggests an implicit contrast to what he has been accustomed to in Sicilia: Leontes' accusations burden the air of his isle. Dion praises the ceremony of sacrifice they have witnessed at Delphos. Again the contrast is implicit. The audience has just witnessed the sacrifice of Hermione's daughter to banishment and probable death (II.iii.172-182). But Leontes' sacrifice of the babe was conducted feverishly, abruptly, and without ceremony in contrast to Dion's description: “O, the sacrifice! / How ceremonious, solemn and unearthly / It was i' th' offering!” (III.i.6-8). The implicit contrast points up the fact that Leontes has assumed the position of a god, to whom sacrifices must be made in truncated and hubristic ceremonies. Not only has Leontes sacrificed Perdita to the elements in the scene preceding this one; in the scene which follows he sacrifices Hermione as well. In so doing, he denies Apollo's superior power—“There is no truth at all i' th' Oracle” (III.ii.140)—and earns the punishment of his son's death. Leontes, like Cleomenes, is reduced to “nothing” by the “voice o' th' Oracle.” In the scene of Cleomenes and Dion's report, hyperbole is appropriately used to describe the god. This example of proper use exposes the dangerous excess of hyperbole in Leontes' world. Man is an inappropriate object for absolute praise, and through ironic contrast, this scene prepares for the deflation of Leontes' “dream” which the oracle effects. In this scene, hyperbole becomes the simple equivalent of truth, a paradox which serves as a fulcrum for the unbalanced judgments in the scenes on either side of it.

The return from Delphos also provides a bridge that compresses the time between Leontes' accusation of Hermione and her trial. A spatial, or geographical, bridge occurs in the scene which shows Antigonus depositing Perdita on the coast of Bohemia.¹⁷ In addition to this function, the scene achieves one of the clearest balances of contradictory impulses in the play. Many critics seem unwilling to accept the blend of tragic and comic effects of Antigonus' famous “exit,” however, and they insist that the action be read as either one or the other.¹⁸ The stage direction itself is simple and straightforward after slight preparation in Antigonus' lines.

                                                                                          A savage clamour!
Well may I get aboard! This is the chase:
I am gone for ever!                    Exit, pursued by a bear.

(III.iii.56-58)

Antigonus obviously hears the bear roar—either off stage or immediately after the bear enters—and in the space of half a line he himself is running off the stage, probably flinging his last line over his shoulder as he runs. Speed is part of the tragicomic effect. The surprise of the bear's appearance and the quick shift in Antigonus' prospects from life to death are the points which cause laughter, and prolonging the action between Antigonus and the bear, which some critics would do,¹⁹ violates the effect. If the scene is exploited in either direction, the audience will have too much time to reflect on the meaning of the action.²⁰ If the scene is played quickly, the immediate appearances of the Shepherd, who finds Perdita, and of the Clown, who describes in such a comic way the shipwreck and the sounds of the bear's dining on Antigonus, dictate the response the audience must make to the event. Shakespeare leaves little to chance, carefully directing audience response into the appropriate channel.

Perdita's safety is assured, and that releases anxiety about her fate. The Shepherd's speculation that “this has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work” (III.iii.73-75) places Leontes' jealous suspicions into their proper proportions. Whereas the suspicion of infidelity is a tragic problem to Leontes and to Antigonus (II.i.140-150; III.iii.41-53), it becomes a comic commonplace in the speech of the Shepherd. The extremes balance each other and delay the need to have the matter settled. The Shepherd's comment creates an emotional balance which allows the action to continue in its tragicomic way. The Clown's narrative of the storm at sea, which swallows the ship, and of the bear's swallowing Antigonus on land competes with the Shepherd's attempt to tell how he found Perdita. Each has a miraculous adventure to tell, and each is comically eager to impress the other with his experience.²¹ The Clown wins first chance, and his conscientious attempt to balance each of his “two sights” suggests his pride in his narrative skill. The exactitude of the parallel diminishes the seriousness of both events—they seem to exist in order to point up the artifice of analogous structure. The Shepherd's response to his son's story is as artificial as the story itself.

SHEP.
Would I had been by, to have helped the old man!
CLO.
I would you had been by the ship side, to have helped her: there your charity would have lacked footing.

(III.iii.106-110)

The Clown is well aware of the difference between good intentions and good actions. The Shepherd, however, wins the story-telling contest by his felicitous use of symbolism. There is a self-consciousness in his voicing of it—“Now bless thyself: thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born”—that reinforces the sense of contest in narrative skill.²² But the Clown's response when they discover the gold is a comic deflation of any symbolic pretenses the Shepherd may have had: “You're a made old man: if the sins of your youth are forgiven you, you're well to live. Gold! all gold!” (119-120). The Shepherd's cupidinous instinct is as keen as his son's, and he is in a hurry to hide the gold in hopes that it will multiply.

This is fairy gold, boy, and 'twill prove so; up with 't, keep it close: home, home, the next way. We are lucky, boy; and to be so still requires nothing but secrecy. Let my sheep go: come, good boy, the next way home.

(III.iii.121-125)

His urgency to get home and hide his treasure overrides his former concern for his strayed sheep and the line, “Let my sheep go,” insists on the parodic effect of the entire episode. This Shepherd is no saint; given a choice between duty and gold, he knows which to follow. The Clown, too, expresses more curiosity than compassion for Antigonus: “I'll go see if the bear be gone from the gentlemen, and how much he hath eaten” (127-128).

These rustics have a healthy manner of accepting the ways of the world that contrasts sharply with the overidealizations which characterized Sicilia. They are not pastoral examples of virtue, nor do we want them to be. The battle between virtue and vice in Leontes' court has been strenuous. Through the eyes of the Clown we see Antigonus as a stranger, and the distance that the Clown's impersonal perspective gains releases the audience from their sympathetic investment in Antigonus. Antigonus' death, thus, becomes impersonalized both through the artifice of the bear and through the Clown's narrative manner. In the same way, through the Shepherd's response to Perdita, the world of Leontes' infected imagination becomes remote. The new world momentarily seems closer to us than Sicilia, but lest we become too familiar with its people, Time steps out upon the stage to remind us to keep our distance: the stage is the stage, the play is the play, and we are the audience.²³

Moving in and out of the illusion is an important part of the tragicomic progress toward an ultimate recognition which requires ambivalent vision. We enter the action at the same time we retain a safe distance from its consequences. Yet, every time we “lose” ourselves in the play, Shakespeare calls our attention to what we have done. He forces us to look at our yearning for imaginative experience and to evaluate that yearning.

The last two scenes of The Winter's Tale even define the effect which Shakespeare's tragicomic mode aims toward, as if Shakespeare wanted to insure the audience's awareness of what they are experiencing as they experience it. Autolycus has missed the meeting of the two kings and he asks a gentleman for the story.

FIRST Gent.
I make a broken delivery of the business; but the changes I perceived in the king and Camillo were very notes of admiration: they seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes: there was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture; they looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed: a notable passion of wonder appeared in them; but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say if th' importance were joy or sorrow; but in the extremity of the one it must needs be.

(V.ii.9-19)

This definition of “wonder” seems as critically self-conscious as the famous “debate” between Perdita and Polixenes on “nature” and “art” in the sheep-shearing scene (IV.iv.86-103). As Harold S. Wilson points out, the use of horticultural illustrations were familiar in discussions of “nature” and “art” in the Renaissance and earlier, and the subject itself had long been a critical commonplace.²⁴ Critical concern with the definition and use of “wonder” or admiratio was likewise commonplace.²⁵ The unusual things about both of these passages are not their content, but their self-consciousness and dramatic appropriateness. The first quality is part of Shakespeare's attempt to weave the illusory and the actual into an ambivalent consciousness in the audience. The second, dramatic appropriateness, is also a conscious pleasure, based on the intellectual perception of irony.

In the sheep-shearing festival many ironies add to the pleasure of our perception of the scene as a whole. Two major ones are the fact that almost everyone at the party is disguised, and the fact that part of the scene's structure resembles the masque, a sophisticated court entertainment.²⁶ The pastoral world seems to have at least as much sophistication in form as the court, despite the simpler, more basic experiences it celebrates. The debate on nature and art comes appropriately into the focus of a scene which observes natural seasons in artificial forms. The irony which Polixenes himself enacts is more obvious, however. In his speech, he defends the marriage of

A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race. This is an art
Which does mend nature—change it rather—but
The art itself is nature.

(IV.iv.93-97)

Not long after, he condemns this very practice where his own son is concerned (IV.iv.418-442). The discrepancy between what he says and what he does—the difference between theory and action—is comic and relieves the tension that his threats to the young lovers create. Further irony exists, of course, in Perdita's actual heritage and her pastoral identity. Her insistence on keeping the stock pure is the theory which Polixenes' action supports and which the final revelation of the play defends. The liberality of Polixenes' speech, despite its ironic placement of his own actions, opens an avenue of critical awareness that qualifies somewhat the formulaically decorous matching of persons in the conclusion.

The qualification of the final scene takes place beforehand, however, so that its power is greater. All possible reservations are displaced before the reunion of Leontes and Hermione so that the pure wonder of their joy may be experienced without reservation. It is in this way that the scene of the gentlemen's report of the kings' meeting functions. Each gentleman has caught only a part of the meeting, and each gives a stylistically distinct narration: the first and second gentlemen relate with as little embellishment as possible the wonder of each event they saw, and the third gentleman elaborates, with grand hyberboles, the rest of the action (V.ii.9-91). The tripartite narrative recalls the part-song of Autolycus, Mopsa, and Dorcas (IV.iv.298-307), and the second gentleman, Rogero, emphasizes that the ballad-makers could not express the wonder of the moment, a point underlined by Autolycus' silent presence throughout this scene. The gentlemen's narrative provides an artificial modulation between the pastoral world where ballads celebrate an event and the actualized dream of the tragicomic world where wonder is enacted on stage. The narrative marks out a step in the transition from an art form which farcically abstracts events from life (Autolycus' ballads, IV.iv.270-282) to the statue scene which infuses art into life. Autolycus even admits that the wonder of events surpasses his abilities to sell their credibility (V.ii.121-123). The skepticism expressed in this narrative scene exorcises the doubt the audience is likely to feel when the ultimate miracle of Hermione's resurrection is staged.²⁷ Yet, the comic gentlemen accept the miracles they have seen and their eagerness to witness more miracles readies the audience's sense of wonder. After the gentlemen leave to augment the rejoicing at Paulina's chapel, Autolycus' admission that he could not have made credible Perdita's revelation is another preparation for the immense wonders of the final scene. Autolycus, the con-man, has been subdued by a greater power than his own for creating “amazement.” His change from a vocal, energetic rogue to a docile and taciturn inferior of the Clown brings the play's most skeptical voice to a hushed expectation of miracle.

When Paulina draws the curtain on the statue of Hermione, she notes the decorousness of the change. Whereas the three gentlemen babbled their tale of wonder, the royal party watches the consummate revelation in silence.

                                                                                                    But here it is: prepare
To see the life as lively mock'd as ever
Still sleep mock'd death: behold, and say 'tis well.
[Paulina draws a curtain, and discovers Hermione standing like a statue]
I like your silence, it the more shows off
Your wonder: but yet speak; first you, my liege.
Comes it not something near?

(V.iii.18-23)

Leontes' response, when pressed to speak, is admiring, but a human touch qualifies his awe: “But yet, Paulina, / Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems” (27-29). He looks upon the statue as an objet d'art and evaluates it as a thing. The audience, however, is a step ahead of Leontes; the possibility that the statue might actually be Hermione has been suggested in the third gentleman's report (V.ii.93-107). The anachronism of the work's having been “perfected” by a Renaissance artist, Julio Romano, is a signal for the audience to be alert for the revelation, and the second gentleman's comments about Paulina's activities in connection with the statue reinforce the clue: “she hath privately twice or thrice a day, ever since the death of Hermione, visited that removed house.” Calling attention to the artifice is by this point in the play a familiar sign that appearance and reality may be due for some dislocations. When the curtains reveal Hermione “standing like a statue” we experience the overwhelming surprise of having our still undefined expectations fulfilled. From this point, each perception of Leontes draws him nearer to the recognition that we have already experienced, and the slight distance we gain on his perception allows us the opportunity to evaluate our response by his.²⁸ In other words, we are caught in that magically double position of being involved in the action and removed from it simultaneously.

The intense beauty of the gradual resurrection of Hermione as she breathes, moves, and finally speaks is heightened by Leontes' intense joy at his growing understanding that the world of settled senses is not the final control of life's events. But the intensity of extreme joy is met with the comic inclusion of Paulina into the play's plane of action. Throughout the play, she has known and controlled the central miracle that informs the entire action. As the stage director, she has remained outside the emotional renewal of the others, carefully controlling the art of the revelation. Now that her task is successfully completed, she offers to leave the joyful party to their hard-won exultation.

PAUL.
                                                            Go together,
You precious winners all; your exultation
Partake to every one. I, an old turtle,
Will wing me to some wither'd bough, and there
My mate (that's never to be found again)
Lament, till I am lost.
LEON.
                                                            O, peace, Paulina!
Thou shouldst a husband take by my consent,
As I by thine a wife: this is a match,
And made between 's by vows. Thou hast found mine;
But how, is to be question'd; for I saw her,
As I thought, dead; and have in vain said many
A prayer upon her grave. I'll not seek far—
For him, I partly know his mind—to find thee
An honourable husband. Come, Camillo,
And take her by the hand; whose worth and honesty
Is richly noted; and here justified
By us, a pair of kings. Let's from this place.

(V.iii.130-146)

The final note of reconciliation is appropriately the resumption of Leontes' control over his most unruly subject, Paulina. She procured a wife for him and Leontes procures a husband for her—to replace the one he had sent to his death. Camillo's acquiescence may be as much of a surprise to him as to Paulina, despite Leontes' remark “I partly know his mind.” But since Antigonus had earlier been a surrogate victim for Camillo, absorbing the blame and the duty that Leontes would have cast upon Camillo, it is now the best of all comic conclusions to allow Camillo the opportunity to replace Antigonus. Paulina's tongue has a new victim and Leontes is free at last.

This comic reiteration of the stock relationship between Paulina and Leontes gives a sense of symmetrical completion which the play does not, in fact, supply. The audience does not know any more than Leontes about Hermione's sixteen-year disappearance; but we cannot follow when he says,

                                                                                          Good Paulina,
Lead us from hence, where we may leisurely
Each one demand, and answer to his part
Perform'd in this wide gap of time, since first
We were dissever'd: hastily lead away.

(V.iii.151-155)

The promised explanation of the miracle which the audience never hears is common to each of the tragicomedies, and the omission of an explanation increases our sense of wonder.²⁹ Logic is frustrated, and, in order to affirm our joyful response to the experience of the play, we are forced to suspend our rational demands for an explanation of cause and effect. Consider, in contrast, the earlier handling of a similar problem in Much Ado About Nothing. Hero is slandered, and the Friar suggests that she pretend to be dead (IV.i.212-245). Like Hermione, Hero returns to life, unexpectedly for Claudio who believed her dead. But the wonder of Hero's return is reserved for the characters of the play, since the audience is well aware of the logic behind the subterfuge when the Friar plans it. In other words, the earlier play takes great care to explain the practical cause of what would otherwise seem to be miraculous effects, but The Winter's Tale does not. Practical explanations are available for its miraculous events, but the dramatic wonder of these events is exploited for the audience to the point that causality no longer seems relevant. The Winter's Tale is the only one of Shakespeare's tragicomedies that withholds from the audience the key to the marvelous resolution of the play. This concealment intensifies our immediate experience of dislocation,³⁰ and it encourages us to alter our perspective in a significant way. We realize, along with the play's characters, that man's actions do not produce irrecoverable effects. The play makes it very clear that a benevolent power has designed and is controlling events to surpass even the hopes and dreams that the man of “settled senses” occasionally entertains. The tragicomic perspective that Shakespeare creates in The Winter's Tale forces us to suspend rational judgment so that for a special moment we may glimpse the “wonder” in the world of human action.

Notes

1. All passages from The Winter's Tale are quoted from the New Arden edition, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London, 1965).

2. Cf. The Taming of the Shrew, I.ii:

   Renown'd in Padua for her scolding tongue. … 100
   I know she is an irksome brawling scold. … 188
   And do you tell me of a woman's tongue? … 208
   The one as famous for a scolding tongue. … 254.

3. See S. L. Bethell's comments on the stage metaphor in this speech, The Winter's Tale: A Study (London, 1947), pp. 56-57.

4. Cf. Posthumus' emotional speech which opens Act V of Cymbeline, in which he also addresses the audience directly:

                                                                                                       You married ones,
   If each of you should take this course, how many
   Must murder wives much better than themselves
   For wrying but a little?

   (V.i.2-5)

5. Even Paulina's tongue plays a role, as Pafford points out in his note to this passage, Arden edition, p. 42, n. 34-5: “The ‘trumpet’ was the man who preceded the herald who was usually dressed in red and often bore an angry message.”

6. Bethell, The Winter's Tale, p. 60, comments that “the pun (‘beat’, ‘bait’) suggests a further note of comedy.”

7. Antigonus' presence in this scene acts as yet another buffer for Leontes, absorbing some of Paulina's harshness. Caught between the vitriolic accusations of both Paulina and Leontes, Antigonus' comic dilemma both mitigates and protects the seriousness of his wife and his king.

8. There is a submerged insistence in this speech and in others which Paulina makes in this scene that Hermione remains, even in death, a vital figure. This is one of the subtle ways by which the audience is prepared, against its “factual” knowledge, for the ultimate revelation that Hermione lives.

9. Besides in The Winter's Tale, in Pericles and in Cymbeline the father finds the “unknown” features of his daughter not only familiar, but love-inspiring. Finding one's own image renewed in youth and innocence regenerates the father in each case, although he is at a loss to explain the cause. Despite the similarities of these scenes in each play, each father-daughter recognition receives different dramatic handling. In Pericles, it is the climactic moment in the play. In Cymbeline, Imogen is disguised as a boy when her familiar features move her father to love. Leontes' admiration of Perdita ironically complies with Paulina's prescription that a new wife should closely resemble Hermione. Paulina, of course, quickly emphasizes her other stricture, “she shall not be so young / As was your former” (V.i.78-79), when she reminds Leontes that his “eye hath too much youth in 't.”

10. Autolycus' classical lineage to which he refers (IV.iii.24-26) is found in Ovid's Metamorphoses, XI.298-317 (and in Homer's Odyssey, XIX). As he says, Autolycus was “littered under Mercury,” but Apollo was also involved. According to Ovid, both Apollo and Mercury wanted Chione, Autolycus' mother, but Apollo waited to approach her until evening, according to his sense of decorum, while Mercury seduced her in the afternoon. Chione's offspring, fraternal twins, were Philammon by Apollo and Autolycus by Mercury. Shakespeare's Autolycus seems to embody characteristics of both twins, in his singing and in his thieving.

11. This parody has been noted by several critics; but see G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London, 1965), p. 101.

12. Cf. Bethell's comments on Autolycus, The Winter's Tale, p. 46.

13. In contrast, Perdita displays a stern resistance to artificiality in her famous debate with Polixenes on the relationship of art and nature (IV.iv.79-103).

14. Pafford, Arden edition, p. lxxx, says that Autolycus “serves as a faint rhythmic parallel to the evil of Leontes in the first part of the play.” Autolycus is also a parodic figure who links the Leontes of the first half of the play to the Leontes of the last act. Autolycus has changed garments with Florizel, and he tells the Shepherd and the Clown of the punishment in store for them at the hands of Polixenes. They hire him to be their advocate to the king (IV.iv.808-809). In the very next scene, Florizel asks Leontes to be his advocate to Polixenes (V.i.220).

15. The pastoral innocence of Bohemia likewise succumbs to knowledge when Polixenes demands that his son divorce himself from his illusions.

16. M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London, 1957), pp. 153-155, makes some interesting suggestions about Leontes' speech, especially concerning his failure to “recapture the non-moral vision of childhood” in which “play” can refresh. Leontes' “bawdy use of play,” Miss Mahood says, “suggests the moral rigidity born of a moral uncertainty.”

17. Shakespeare's use of a “coast” for Bohemia which is inland is a long-standing topic for critical debate. I would question Pafford's assertion, Arden edition, p. 66, n. 2, that “the explanation surely is that Shakespeare was simply following Pandosto which mentions the coast of Bohemia.” In a play where other anomalies and anachronisms figure so clearly in the methods of self-conscious artistry, surely this error has a similar effect of drawing the audience's attention to a “fact” which is “fiction.”

18. Critics who emphasize the “serious” reading of the scene usually stress the symbolic meaning of the bear. See G. Wilson Knight, The Crown of Life (London, 1965), p. 98; Dennis Biggins, “‘Exit pursued by a Beare’: A Problem in The Winter's Tale,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], XIII (1962), 3-13; and J. H. P. Pafford, Arden edition, pp. lix and 69. For the comic reading, see E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Last Plays (London, 1938), pp. 77-78; S. L. Bethell, The Winter's Tale, pp. 64-65; and Nevill Coghill, “Six Points of Stage-Craft in The Winter's Tale,” ShS [Shakespeare Survey], XI (1958), 34-35.

19. Coghill, “Six Points of Stage-Craft,” p. 34, suggests that a “well-timed knock-about routine” is “needed” between Antigonus and the bear. Biggins, “A Problem in The Winter's Tale,” pp. 12-13, errs in the opposite direction by trying to give a graceful dignity to one of the clumsiest of creatures: the child “could naturally be supposed to lie motionless, thus lending plausibility at once to the ‘child’ and to the ‘bear's’ actions in treating it with respect, the animal perhaps sniffing gently at it before pursuing Antigonus off the stage.”

20. I am not suggesting that the symbolic force of the bear as an emblem of wrath does not operate in this scene. But the audience is not given time to “ponder” intricate symbolic relationships; the response is automatic rather than contemplative. For the tradition of the bear as an emblem of wrath, see Lawrence J. Ross, “Shakespeare's ‘Dull Clown’ and Symbolic Music,” SQ, XVII (1966), 126.

21. It is possible that Shakespeare was creating a conscious parody here of the traditional singing matches between shepherds in the pastoral eclogues.

22. Bethell, The Winter's Tale, pp. 66, 89, perhaps overstresses the religious symbolism in these lines. Although he is generally cognizant of the mixture of tragic and comic impulses, he does not notice the comic effect of self-consciousness in these lines.

23. Cf. Bethell's discussion, pp. 52-55, of the deliberate emphasis on the duality of the play world and the real world.

24. “‘Nature and Art’ in Winter's Tale IV.iv.86 ff.,” SAB [Shakespeare Association Bulletin], XVIII (1943), 114-120.

25. See Marvin T. Herrick, “Some Neglected Sources of Admiratio,” MLN, [Modern Language Notes] LXII (1947), 222-226; and J. V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy (Denver, 1951), pp. 22-23.

26. For some interesting comments on the use of the masque in this scene, see J. M. Nosworthy, “Music and Its Function in the Romances of Shakespeare,” ShS, XI (1958), 67.

27. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedies (Princeton, 1959), p. 232, makes this point about Touchstone in As You Like It: “The result of including in Touchstone a representative of what in love is unromantic is not, however, to undercut the play's romance: on the contrary, the fool's cynicism, or one-sided realism, forestalls the cynicism with which the audience might greet a play where his sort of realism has been ignored. … The net effect of the fool's part is thus to consolidate the hold of the serious themes by exorcising opposition.”

28. Cf. Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford, 1960), pp. 314-315.

29. Cf. G. Wilson Knight's comment (The Crown of Life, p. 69) on this effect in Pericles and The Winter's Tale.

30. As Evans (Shakespeare's Comedies, pp. 314-315) points out, however, the audience is prepared in advance of the characters to know that Hermione still lives.