[In the following essay, Platt examines the philosophical opposition of rationality and wonder in The Winter's Tale. ]

The Winter's Tale provides us with the purest example of a Shakespearean “dramatics” of wonder, for in it Shakespeare confronts the potential epistemological tyranny of the rational and posits the marvelous as a means of overcoming this powerful force. At the same time that he examines these philosophical issues through his dramatic art, Shakespeare raises aesthetic questions by unmasking this art as the play unfolds. Thus, while Howard Felperin is certainly correct to point out that nowhere else in Shakespeare is the power of art—which is closely linked to wonder in this play—“seen as wholly positive,”¹ Shakespeare also interrogates the role that this power plays in challenging epistemological certainty and dramatic expectation.

Structurally, the play breaks down neatly into two sections, the first more epistemological, the second more aesthetic and theatrical, in focus. Leontes' rage for knowledge, which leads him deep into the heart of a hermeneutical abyss, is the dominant concern of the first three acts; this section we could call “Part One: The Rational.” In acts 4 and 5, where Shakespeare requires readers and audiences to take non-naturalistic, nonrational leaps of space and time, we enter “Part Two: The Wondrous.”² Felperin's more recent essay on The Winter's Tale focuses solely on the poetic, linguistic, and rational elements of the play, largely neglecting “the Wondrous” and thus putting its author in danger of repeating Leontes' mistake.³ In his deconstructive reevaluation of the play (and of his earlier reading of it), then, Felperin cannot fully grapple with the wonders of the nonverbal, spatial, and spectacular elements of the second part and especially the ending. As a result he gets stuck with the “ballad-makers” who “cannot be able to express” the great “deal of wonder” (5.2.23-25) that we encounter in part 2.

The first three acts are consumed with the search for reason, logic, and univocal interpretation. Indeed, the early dialogue between Archidamus and Camillo (1.1.33-46) reveals the limitations of the search and demonstrates that speech can as easily lead to absurdity as to meaning. Archidamus admits, “I know not what to say” (13), and soon afterward Archidamus and Camillo both begin hyperbolically praising the prince, but that mode of discourse quickly disintegrates; in fact, the more they talk, the more we see the failure of language to be meaningful. Camillo suggests that the old and crippled desire to live on only to see Mamillius grow up. When Archidamus asks if this is the only reason they wish to stay alive, Camillo replies, in essence, “Yes, unless there were another reason to stay alive”; immediately, his original statement is invalidated. Archidamus furthers this point, undercutting his original praise: “If the king had no son, they would desire to live on crutches until he had one” (45-46). In other words, the old and crippled would want to live whether Mamillius existed or not; he has nothing to do with their will to endure. This extremely amusing opening anticipates Samuel Beckett in its subtle meditation on human meaning through the portrayal of human speech. Yet it is on this shifting, illogical ground that Leontes builds his fortress of reason, and the results are far from humorous.

The epitome of Terence Cave's “male epistemophilia,”⁴ Leontes seeks logically to master his world:

                                                                                                    How blest am I
In my just censure! in my true opinion!
Alack, for lesser knowledge! how accurs'd
In being so blest!

(2.1.36-39)

But even if Leontes were a good reader—and we will soon see that he is not—the discourse of the world of The Winter's Tale presents its characters with illegibility at nearly every turn, as Camillo and Archidamus reveal in the first scene; epistemological mastery can never fully be achieved in this play. Further, Hermione does present a difficult text: both Felperin and, more persuasively, William H. Matchett before him argue that the audience, too, should initially be in doubt about Hermione's innocence and that she should be obviously pregnant on stage.⁵ For, almost as if to focus on a cause of Leontes' jealousy, Hermione's pregnancy is alluded to in no uncertain terms in act 2, scene 1: the First Lady notes, “The queen your mother rounds apace” (16), the Second Lady concurs, “She is spread of late / Into a goodly bulk” (19-20), Leontes snarls, “let her sport herself / With that she's big with; for 'tis Polixenes / Has made her swell thus” (60-62), and Hermione claims she needs her women around her because “My plight requires it” (118). Thus, although the audience can never regain the innocence to doubt Hermione's innocence—they come into the play knowing her fidelity—the production can help them to understand Leontes' confusion if not his later actions.

Further uncertainty arises in performance when the audience hears a king—which king?—say the following words:

Nine changes of the wat'ry star hath been
The shepherd's note since we have left our throne
Without a burthen. Time as long again
Would be fill'd up, my brother, with our thanks,
And yet we should, for perpetuity,
Go hence in debt. And therefore, like a cipher
(Yet standing in rich place), I multiply
With one “We thank you” many thousands moe
That go before it.

(1.2.1-9)

It should not take us long to figure out that this is Polixenes, the king of Bohemia, Leontes' best friend. But the realization is disconcerting, for the speech contains language that suggests conception and fertility.⁶ Given the ambiguity of some of Hermione's language and the obviously affectionate “paddling” (115) and “virginalling” (125) of palms, it is conceivable that the audience might wonder why it takes Leontes so long to explode.⁷ This line on the play helps account for what could otherwise be an inscrutable outburst, but it also foregrounds the difficulty of interpretation and brings us into the world of indeterminacy. We undergo the same movement from error to understanding, from dependence on rational appearances to wondrous revelations, that Leontes does.

Astute readers and viewers, though, probably realize their mistakes sooner than Leontes. Like the desperate Astrophil looking toward grammar rules for evidence “That in one speech two negatives affirm,”⁸ Leontes pounces on Camillo's use of the word “satisfy” to explain Polixenes' reason for staying in Sicilia, finding evidence for his central claim:

CAM.
To satisfy your Highness, and the entreaties
Of our most gracious mistress.
LEON.
                                                                                                                        Satisfy?
Th'entreaties of your mistress? Satisfy?
Let that suffice.

(1.2.232-35)

At this point, though, Leontes still seems to be seeking another opinion, even if it is one he ends up refuting; by the end of the scene, however, Leontes is so certain he is correct that he orders Camillo to kill Polixenes. But before he arrives at this point, he challenges Camillo to deny knowing that Hermione is “slippery” (273) and a “hobby-horse” (276), using the language of argumentation: “say't and justify't!” (278). Camillo defends Hermione's “clouded” (280) reputation, suggesting not only Leontes' sullying of her name but also the sense of the obfuscation or error that surrounds his master's interpretation. But Leontes rejects the suggestion that he is mistaken, and in the remarkable speech that follows, we see that—like Posthumus—he bases his entire system of epistemology and belief on being correct in his reading of his wife:

                                                                                Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laughter with a sigh (a note infallible
Of breaking honesty)? horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web, but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing?
Why then the world, and all that's in't is nothing,
The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing,
My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

(284-96)

Hermione's infidelity has become a central truth in Leontes' view of reality. Proving her false, paradoxically and ironically, becomes necessary to establish his fundamental philosophical truths; the alternative is nihilism, the “nothing's” that dominate the speech. In this process Hermione will become utterly dehumanized as Leontes makes her into part of a proof. Although Camillo promises to kill Polixenes, he realizes that Leontes is abused by his “diseas'd opinion” (297) and at the end of the scene flees to Bohemia with Polixenes.

Leontes' opinion is diseased, but he seems to sense, at least early in the play, that the world is hard to read, that there are forces that conspire against reason:

Affection! thy intention stabs the centre.
Thou dost make possible things not so held,
Communicat'st with dreams (how can this be?),
With what's unreal thou co-active art,
And fellow'st nothing.

(1.2.138-42)

However, like a good Aristotelian, he is confident that these “things not so held” can be understood and their wondrous nature dissipated. In order to bring reason to bear on the world, though, Leontes must make all aspects of his life conform to his philosophical image. In an important moment early in act 2, Leontes barges in on Mamillius as the latter is about to take his pregnant mother and the attendant ladies on a marvelous journey into a land of the “sad tale” with its “sprites and goblins” (2.1.25-26). Replacing his son's discourse with his own and disrupting the loving and nurturing atmosphere of the start of the scene, Leontes enters, raging over the disappearance of Polixenes and Camillo. But he brings not only univocity into a room of the complex and marvelous but also symbolic—soon to be actual—death into a setting replete with warmth, life, and imminent birth. In cutting off his son's wondrous narrative, Leontes reveals the tyrannical and eventually deadly nature of the (ir)rational.⁹

The complexities of supposedly rational language are foregrounded in some of Leontes's notoriously tortured speeches. We often find ourselves in the position of Polixenes, asking “What means Sicilia?” (1.2.146) because Shakespeare often has Leontes' speech and logic break down as Leontes tries to describe this very breakdown. But instead of arriving at a conclusion that posits ambiguity as a given, Leontes rushes to dispel it and to achieve a hard and fast conclusion. Again grounding his entire intellectual and epistemological system in the certainty of his wife's guilt, Leontes tells Hermione largely the same thing he has told Camillo:

                                                                                          No; if I mistake
In those foundations which I build upon,
The centre is not big enough to bear
A school-boy's top.

(2.1.100-103)

But Shakespeare continues to mock this linguistic and philosophical certainty, and it is in the syntactical chaos of Leontes' speeches that we are presented with a king who is tragically misguided:¹⁰

Nor night, nor day, no rest: It is but weaknesse
To beare the matter thus: meere weaknesse, if
The cause were not in being: part o' th' cause,
She th' Adultresse: for the harlot-King
Is quite beyond mine Arme, out of the blanke
And leuell of my braine: plot-proofe: but shee,
I can hooke to me: say that she were gone,
Giuen to the fire, a moity of my rest
Might come to me againe.

(2.3.1-9)

We are invited to experience here a troubled mind pondering acts of vengeful violence. Looking at the above speech, we cannot help noting the seven colons, and each surely indicates a break in Leontes' thought—not so abrupt as a dash, but enough to indicate a breakdown of flowing rational discourse. And after each colon, Leontes tries to reformulate what has come before, producing the effect of Nina in act 4 of Chekhov's The Seagull, as she repeatedly tries to formulate a narrative of her identity: “No, that's not it.”¹¹ Speech is never really “it,” or in Felperin's words, “literature is never really ‘there’ or fully presented, but is always mediated action, action estranged by the linguistic medium in which it has its existence.”¹² Shakespeare's text reveals an awareness of this problem in The Winter's Tale, though I argue that the play goes much further than Felperin in its attempt to escape the deconstructive bind.

Leontes' misprisions become dangerous when they become creative—that is to say, when his readings of Hermione shape and alter the actual matter of events. Hermione highlights for us the extent to which Leontes has become a shaper and author of sorts when she exclaims, “How will this grieve you, / When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that / You thus have publish'd me” (2.1.96-98). Paulina, too, is aware that Leontes can fashion a perverse reality out of thin air: “Here's such ado to make no stain a stain / As passes coloring” (2.2.17-18). Indeed, one of the tragedies of The Winter's Tale—the tragedy that is unredeemable—comes about as a result of Leontes' privileging his interpretation's text and not the newly created “text” of his child; as Paulina says, “Behold, my lords, / Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father” (2.3.98-100). But Leontes is certain that the baby is “the issue of Polixenes” (94), that his reality-altering interpretation is infallible.¹³

Knowing that Paulina is right and that the “root of his [Leontes'] opinion … is rotten” (2.3.90), Hermione refers herself to the Oracle, to whom Leontes has sent two men at the end of act 1, scene 2: “I do refer me to the Oracle: Apollo be my judge!” (3.2.115-16). For here Hermione hopes to find a stable referent for truth instead of the discourse, founded on airy fictions, of Leontes: “You speak a language that I understand not: / My life stands in the level of your dreams” (80-81).

Cleomines and Dion, the two who actually go to Delphos for the oracular message, seem out of place in Sicilia as they speak about their journey in the language of the marvelous. Indeed, the scene provides a foreshadowing of the play's second half and its interest in wonder and silence. For the temple, Cleomines tells us, surpasses “the common praise it bears” (3.1.3), outstripping the human capacity to represent it. Moreover, “the burst / And the ear-deaf'ning voice of th'oracle, / Kin to Jove's thunder, so surpris'd my sense, / That I was nothing” (8-11). The experience on the island transported Cleomines out of himself in Longinian fashion, deafening and humbling him with its marvelous power. He was reduced to a marvelous, selfless “nothing,” one that contrasts neatly with the nihilistic and egotistical “nothing's” of Leontes speech in act 1. Dion, too, calls the journey “rare” (13) and senses that there is a different sort of knowledge in store for Sicilia's denizens:

                                                                                                    When the oracle
(Thus by Apollo's great divine seal'd up)
Shall the contents discover, something rare
Even then will rush to knowledge.

(18-21)

When the contents are finally discovered, we get as unambiguous an example of language as we will encounter in the play. But Felperin is right to stress that it takes a superhuman force—and an absent one at that—to establish Hermione's innocence; and even then, the words of the god are still secondhand re-presentations of Apollo's actual utterance. As Cleomines has hinted, language and reason are still deficient.¹⁴ Of course Leontes' recognition and acceptance of his error come too late: Mamillius dies, Hermione “dies,” Antigonus dies—this is the work that Leontes has wrought. And as act 3, scene 2 closes, we have reached the dead end of epistemophilia and its grounding in slippery discourse: yet there are over two acts of the play remaining.

The obvious bridge between the two realms is scene 3 of act 3, where we move from horrible death to marvelous deliverance and from naturalistic to daring, nonrepresentational drama. The verbal pivot comes in the well-known lines of the Shepherd—who has found Perdita—addressed to the Clown—who has witnessed both the deadly shipwreck and the mauling of Antigonus: “thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born” (3.3.113-14). Clearly, we are moving from the harsh, convoluted language of Leontes' verse—a synecdoche for his tortured grasping after reason—to the lighter, more playful prose of the Shepherd and Clown, who, even amidst tragedy, seek to “do good deeds on't” (138-39). And this is where I break with Felperin, for his deconstructive reading inevitably remains based in language even though Shakespeare attempts to move beyond it into the realm of the non-mimetic, nonverbal: the wondrous. In fact, Felperin tips his hand early in the essay with the following remark: “The impossibility of rendering theatrically the suggestive force of the word ‘virginalling’ must stand as a perennial caveat to those who maintain the primacy of performance over text.”¹⁵ By privileging the verbal, Felperin neglects the spectacular nature of the second half, where the notion of performance is thematized.

Moreover, the Shepherd's words carry us into the part of the play that has room for wonder, for “things new-born.” Yet wonder for Shakespeare, I have been arguing, takes a form that is not merely—or in this play, even primarily—verbal. Thus we have “Exit, pursued by a bear,” which takes us to the theatrical and spatial pivot. In a fascinating short article, Judie Newman has illuminated the presence of the bear as a transitional device by discussing the tradition of the Candelmas Bear. Drawing on Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Carnival, she notes the role of the bear, like that of the groundhog in North America, in determining how much longer winter would last: if the sky were blue when the bear emerged, there would be forty more days of cold; if the sky were cloudy, winter would soon be over. Newman points out that in act 3, scene 3, there are two references to dark and cloudy skies (3-4, 55-56): “Thus, the appearance of Shakespeare's bear, though mortal to Antigonus, signals the end of winter, and an upturn in the dramatic weather, as the dark atmosphere of the near-tragic Acts I and II yields to the regenerative world of Perdita, fresh hopes, and summer flowers.”¹⁶

Whether the bear originally was a real one from the Bear Garden outside the Blackfriars Theater or a man dressed in a bear suit is not the main point: this moment, as Matchett puts it, “is not a way of increasing the realistic effect; it is a way of making the audience aware of the medium.”¹⁷ What follows will be wondrous, Shakespeare seems to be telling us, and the main vehicle will be theatrical. Jolting us out of our complacency by ripping apart his seamless tragedy, Shakespeare—like van Gogh or even Pollock—shows us the seams, the texture, of his work and suggests that this is where the marvelous can dwell: not in concealing but in foregrounding art. Suspended between reason and affect, we experience the Patrizian potenza ammirativa, where we are neither certain nor lost but are in wonder. Shakespeare's dramatics compel us to take note of his mechanics so that we might be transported to a higher level of awareness—of art and life. Shakespeare, then, is preparing us for the consummate example of this dramatic move at the end of the play, but we must first be soothed and repaired in the pastoral air of Bohemia.

For it is easy to dissociate the death of the sailors and of Antigonus from the pastoral world that we find in act 4, largely because of the sixteen-year gap that Time explicates for us. Non-naturalistic, Time's very existence mocks the unity of time. And Shakespeare seems to know that he is asking a great deal from his audience:

                                                                                                              Of this allow,
If ever you have spent time worse ere now;
If never, yet that Time himself doth say,
He wishes earnestly you never may.

(4.1.29-32)

Autolycus, as we shall see, also adds a wrinkle to the pastoral pattern of the act. Nonetheless, as Rosalie Colie says, “Perdita is allowed to grow up a part of the natural cycle, in a natural and nature-bound family”:¹⁸ she has “grown in grace / Equal with wondering” (4.1.24-25). Perdita is natural whereas her father was unnatural, wondrous whereas her father was hyperrational. Yet she also reflects a further Shakespearean foregrounding of artistic technique and convention, as she is both the remnant of the tragic plot and the central figure in the pastoral one. However, Perdita is the one who, in the flower debate with the disguised Polixenes, argues for purity in the breeding of flowers, even though she, supposedly the daughter of a shepherd, has fallen in love with the son of the king. To Perdita, sanctioning grafted flowers is like her persuading a lover to take her in a disguised, cosmetic form:

                                                                                                                        I'll not put
The dibble in earth to set one slip of them;
No more than, were I painted I would wish
This youth should say 'twere well, and only therefore
Desire to breed by me.

(4.4.99-103)

Of course, there is a double irony here, and Perdita is aware of only half of it: for the festival, she is pretending to be a queen; she does not know that she is a princess living the life of a shepherdess playing the role of a queen. Adding even more irony to this part of the play, Shakespeare has the disguised Polixenes argue—in the flower debate—that the mixture of flower types is really part of the larger plan of Nature (“an art / That nature makes” [91-92]), even while the king is disapprovingly spying on his son, who he has heard is in love with the daughter of “a most homely shepherd” (4.2.38). Clearly, there is a chasm between theory and practice for both Perdita and Polixenes. Colie claims that nothing eventually comes of the issues raised in this debate, for “its insights [are] rejected as the plot turns out to have no use for them. … [Shakespeare makes] us see that, under all the conventional metaphorical prattle about nature-and-art, nature-and-nurture, what we must consider are questions of intrinsic human personality.”¹⁹ Perhaps, though, Shakespeare is suggesting the inescapability of “metaphorical prattle”—of art, fiction, roles. Although Perdita resists grafted flowers and cosmetics, she comes to realize by the end of the act that even she must engage in the world of the fictive and theatrical. After hearing of Florizel and Camillo's plot for the escape to Sicilia, she concedes, “I see the play so lies / That I must bear a part” (4.4.655-56). This metadramatic statement reveals Perdita's recognition of the theatricality of human experience and begins preparing us for the marvelous events of act 5.

Shakespeare readies us further for the wonder of Hermione's transformation in his presentation of Autolycus, focusing on the ballad, the poem, so that he can eventually distinguish between it and the spectacle of theater in the final scene. The emblem of fraud in this pastoral world, Autolycus attempts to sell ballads to Mopsa, the Clown, and Dorcas, and they are obsessed with whether these ballads—a fictive form—are real. Mopsa asserts, “I love a ballad in print, a-life, for then we are sure they are true” (4.4.260-61). The humor and irony are rich here, for the entire play has exposed the potential falsehood of language. That Autolycus is associated with ballads comically underscores the illusory truth of poetry.²⁰

And yet Florizel, although warned by Camillo of the danger in both the hot-tempered Polixenes and the treachery of the world, asserts his belief in the power of wonder, inspired by Perdita:

I am [advised]—and by my fancy. If my reason
Will thereto be obedient, I have reason;
If not, my senses, better pleas'd with madness,
Do bid it welcome

(482-85)

Embracing the marvelous, Florizel, in Janet Adelman's words, also “embraces the female” and “founds his identity in his relation to her [Perdita]. … And in return, Perdita promises him not the static eternity of Polixenes's pastoral but an aliveness that springs out of the very conditions of his mortality.”²¹ With this connection between wonder and woman—and the concomitant life springing from death—the stage is set for the play's final act.

Act 5 opens with the profoundly repentant Leontes, chastened by both knowledge and Paulina, as if his penitence and her scolding have been a daily ritual for sixteen years. Florizel and Perdita enter soon after, and Leontes is wonder-struck by the similarity of Florizel both to Polixenes and to Mamillius, as well as by the relationship between his lost children and the couple that stands before him. Again Leontes' speech breaks down, but this time in wonder instead of in fiendish reaching for epistemological order:

                                                  Were I but twenty-one,
Your father's image is so hit in you,
(His very air) that I should call you brother,
As I did him, and speak of something wildly
By us perform'd before. Most dearly welcome!
And your fair princess—goddess! O! alas,
I lost a couple, that 'twixt heaven and earth
Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as
You, gracious couple, do; and then I lost
(All mine own folly) the society,
Amity too, of your brave father, whom
(Though bearing misery) I desire my life
Once more to look on him.

(5.1.126-38)

In a tragedy these new insights into life and time would be paid for brutally with the unredeemed suffering that Leontes has brought on himself and others by his earlier grasping after total knowledge. But this play has room for forgiveness and healing largely because it has room for wonder—that which lies, like Perdita and Florizel, “'twixt heaven and earth,” in the theatrical experience.

Withholding the reunion of both Leontes and Perdita and Leontes and Polixenes initially seems a rather cruel move on Shakespeare's part, especially because of the elaborate descriptions of the Gentlemen. I believe, however, that in act 5, scenes 2 and 3, Shakespeare is juxtaposing the conflict he has developed throughout the play: reason and wonder, language and dramatic spectacle. In these two scenes Shakespeare lays out for us the two aesthetic visions that Barbara Mowat calls “life as tale” and “life as drama.” The former presents experience as “mediated by the teller, distanced, fixed in past time,” while the latter presents us life that is “immediate, active, present.” This double perspective “results from the juxtaposition of narrative and dramatic modes.”²² In order to crown his play with the quintessential moment of “life as drama,” Shakespeare sets up the ultimate scene with a mediated penultimate one.²³ Yet even the mediators know that the “life as tale” vision is not going to be sufficient for this play. Reprising the ideas and language of Cleomines and Dion, the Gentlemen emphasize both the wonder and the inefficacy of speech in the reunion scenes that we miss. As the First Gentleman explains, “after a little amazedness, we were all commanded out of the chamber … ; the changes I perceiv'd in the King and Camillo were very notes of admiration. … A notable passion of wonder appear'd 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.” “Such a deal of wonder,” the Second Gentleman continues, “is broken out this hour, that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it.” And the Third Gentleman responds: “Then have you lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of. … I never heard of such another encounter, which lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it” (5.2.5-58).

A deconstructive reader would have the Third Gentleman's words be the last statement on the play, but Shakespeare offers an alternative to the description that undoes itself in the describing: Hermione's wondrous resurrection. For it is this spectacle that can come far closer to representing the marvelous than the “old tale” that both the Second and the Third Gentlemen disparage (see 5.2.28, 62). Indeed, after attempting to convince the others of the hard evidence behind the revelations—the “unity in the proofs” (32)—the Third Gentleman joins the First Gentleman in submitting to wonder: “Every wink of an eye some new grace will be born. Our absence makes us unthrifty to our knowledge” (110-12). Here we see the Gentlemen seeking knowledge in the wondrous, not because, like Aristotle, they think they can do away with wonder, but because, like Patrizi, they sense that this is where a more significant meaning lies.

In the bridge to the ultimate scene, the Third Gentleman refers to the statue of Hermione “newly performed by the rare Italian master, Julio Romano” (96-97); it is to this statue that family and friends move for act 5, scene 3. But Shakespeare's choice of Julio Romano as his artist is worth commenting on, for if Shakespeare had firsthand exposure to the real Giulio Romano at all, he probably knew him only as a mannerist and trompe l'oeil painter, even though Romano did do some sculpture.²⁴ John Greenwood suggests it was possible that Shakespeare's knowledge of mannerist art could have included the seven paintings by Romano that were among those “listed in the Charles I inventory (and therefore acquired earlier) for Hampton Court.”²⁵ We cannot know whether Shakespeare actually saw Romano's work. But it is highly significant that he invokes an artist who self-consciously played with the forms of his art. Though they may ultimately have had different goals, their foregrounding—indeed, flaunting—of technique is similar and mutually illuminating.²⁶

The nonmimetic theatrical spectacle is ultimately the source of wonder for Shakespeare in this play. It is here that the miraculous can take place, that wounds can be healed, that wonder can leave us at once without speech and with recognition of the inefficacy of language.²⁷ If we have had any doubts that the culmination of The Winter's Tale would present the triumph of wondrous spectacle over reasoned speech, the opening of act 5, scene 3, puts them to rest. For, as Leontes tells us, Paulina has just shown the group her “gallery” of “many singularities” (10, 12), a room that sounds very much like a wonder cabinet. And the marvelous is at the heart of Paulina's project: “I like your silence, it the more shows off / Your wonder” (21-22). Until the scene foregrounds this marveling silence, however, it is marked by an abundance of wonder-related diction that gives us a sense of Shakespeare's project: “wonder” (22), “fancy” (60), “transported” (69), “madness” (73), “amazement” (87), “faith” (95), and “marvel” (100).

Thus, although the scene is inevitably concerned with wordless wondering, Paulina must prepare the audience both in and out of the play for what they are about to witness:

                                                                                                    It is requir'd
You do awake your faith. Then, all stand still.
On; those that think it is unlawful business
I am about, let them depart.

(94-97)

Janet Adelman is surely right in identifying “the gendering of doubt and faith” in this play, where “faith means willingness to submit to unknown processes outside the self, processes registered as female”:²⁸ in short, masculine epistemophilia has been replaced by feminine thaumaphilia. Once the wonder is revealed, Leontes embraces the statue-come-to-life that is Hermione, and we hear nothing from this former slave to reason and speech until many lines later. Matchett has noted that “Silence, then, becomes the final language, the language of love and forgiveness which all can understand, the wordless communion in which the exchange is most complete.”²⁹ The other characters give simple responses, and Paulina again underscores the power of spectacle in the experience of this wonder: “That she is living, / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (115-17). Through his “statue,” Shakespeare has made certain that “it” has not been “but told” us.

But unlike Giulio Romano's, Shakespeare's artistic goal is not to dupe us into believing that what we have witnessed is real. Leontes, still relying on ocular proof, mistakes the actual Hermione for what he thinks is a lifelike representation of her. By showing us yet another of Leontes' misinterpretations, Shakespeare warns us how not to view art. Colie takes Hermione's coming to life as a critique of illusionism, as an example of Shakespeare's taking art to its limits and bringing it back to what, Colie thinks, is the most important issue—the lives of human beings: “At this highest point of illusionism, illusion itself is abandoned, in the claim that reality is more startling, more miraculous than any contrivance of art … in the statue-episode, as in the debate of kind, the artifice of the artifice forces us back upon the human resources such artifices symbolize.”³⁰ Yet Colie's conclusion has vestiges of Aristotelian wonder-taming: we can make sense of the inscrutable spectacle if we can anchor it to human themes, can make it “real.” Shakespeare does not repudiate art or wonder here, but shows us that only an art that admits its artifice—that is, as Frye would have it, “presented to us, not explained”—is an art capable at once of teaching, delighting, and moving.³¹ As Nicholas Brooke writes, “Hermione's statue coming to life works by being in actuality the opposite of what it seems: the actor must hold the pose until it can be held no longer, so that inevitable lapses are transformed into miracle. … The result is a concentration on the technique of illusion that makes the miracle more natural than impossible.”³² In a more completely realized fashion than that of the epilogue to As You Like It, Shakespeare provides wonder and then deconstructively shows us how it came about. The wonder, ultimately, is in the form and texture of his art: the art of theater—one in which, uniquely, the artist's creations can move and speak.³³

Shakespeare's theater is not, however, a cold, technical one. I now turn to one more example of his foregrounding of technique, to see that it is the sophisticated dynamic between life and art, reason and wonder that allows us to be amazed and moved—and not dazzled but alienated—by Shakespeare's work. Initially, the marriage arranged between Camillo and Paulina appears stilted. Yes, they have both been faithful advisors, but the pairing seems gratuitous unless we see a designed oversimplification to their union, one that provides a “strangely bridgeable chasm between art and life.”³⁴ This strangely, wondrously bridgeable chasm is a model preferable to Colie's because it recognizes that there is a gulf and also that there is a dynamic relationship, a Patrizian marea—a “tide running back and forth from reason to emotion.”³⁵ This tide between the naturalistic and marvelous does not allow one to be privileged over the other but instead requires constant exchange between the two.

This exchange can perhaps best be seen in the interplay among Paulina, Hermione, and their internal audience. Leontes suggests he is “more stone than it [the statue],” and addressing the figure of Hermione, he notes that Perdita is “standing like stone with thee” (5.3.38, 42). Astonished—astonied—with wonder, the living onlookers watch a stone come to life. Thus the mira is artistic but still not a solipsistic game, for Shakespeare—like Paulina in act 5, scene 3—has become increasingly aware of the necessity of an audience to make his spectacle work its wonders.³⁶

It would be wrong, I think, to see the end of the play as reinstating a kind of epistemological order because there is, after all, some explanation for the wondrous resurrection. At least part of the point is that—unlike the audience of other plays of the period (and even those of the early Shakespeare) where, it can be argued, the offstage resolution occurs to spare us from hearing what we already know—those who witness The Winter's Tale are ignorant of many of the play's crucial details and share the astonishment at Hermione's being alive with most of the characters. The audience, then, must attempt to fill in a great many narrative lacunae: why did Mamillius die? what made Leontes convinced that he had seen his dead wife? what did Hermione do for sixteen years? The Winter's Tale concludes both with unanswered questions and with conflicting emotions, and Shakespeare does not resolve these problems and uncertainties, for these are inquiries that are truly endless.³⁷ Instead, Shakespeare allows reason and wonder both to diminish and to sustain each other, putting tremendous faith in the ability of the audience to reckon with these paradoxes in their own hearts and minds.³⁸

Notes

1. Felperin, Shakespearean Romance, 275.

2. See Frye, “Recognition in The Winter's Tale,” in Fables of Identity, for his distinction between “the ‘winter's tale’ proper” and “tragi-comedy” (107).

3. Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied Our Queen?’” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Parker and Hartman, 3-18.

4. Cave, Recognitions, 284.

5. Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied Our Queen?’” 5. Matchett makes a convincing claim for Hermione's appearing noticeably pregnant the first time we see her, and he cites Doll Tearsheet in 2 Henry IV and Thaisa in Pericles at the opening of act 3 as Shakespearean dramaturgical precedents (“Some Dramatic Techniques in The Winter's Tale,” 96 and 107n.

6. See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 220 and 353 nn. 48-49.

7. See Matchett, “Some Dramatic Techniques,” 96-97.

8. Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella 63, in Selected Poems, ed. Duncan-Jones, 148.

9. Adelman sees this healthy, feminine space ruptured by Leontes in act 2, scene 1, and restored in Paulina's haven in Act 5, scene 3 (Suffocating Mothers, 233).

10. Because I am discussing the punctuation of this speech, I am using the Norton Facsimile of the First Folio, ed. Hinman, 302. Interestingly, there is one more colon here than in the Arden text (ed. Pafford). The Riverside text has no colons.

11. Chekhov, The Seagull, trans. Fen, 180-81.

12. Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied Our Queen?’”

13. See Adelman, “Suffocating Mothers,” 223-24.

14. See Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied Our Queen?’” 8. See also Cave, Recognitions, 285.

15. Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied Our Queen?’” 7.

16. Newman, “‘Exit, Pursued by a Bear,’” 484.

17. Matchett, “Some Dramatic Techniques,” 99. See also Gurr, “The Bear, The Statue, and Hysteria,” 420-25.

18. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art, 272.

19. Shakespeare's Living Art, 278.

20. But see Frye, “Recognition in The Winter's Tale”: his point that “the kind of art manifested by the play itself is in some respects closer to these ‘trumpery’ ballads than to the sophisticated idealism and realism of Polixenes and Romano” (114) strikes me as very plausible. In his “The Bear, the Statue,” Andrew Gurr takes a similar stance, claiming that the deception practiced by Autolycus—a “display of histronic virtuosity”—“more than the debate between the innocently-disguised Perdita and the knowingly-disguised Polixenes, characterizes the art of the second half of the play. It is art used to deceive by disguising nature” (424).

21. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 229. See also Bradbrook, Living Monument, 211.

22. Mowat, Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances, 111.

23. Barkan makes a similar point in The Gods Made Flesh, 286.

24. Greenwood, Shifting Perspectives, 13.

25. Shifting Perspectives, 12.

26. On Giulio Romano and Shakespeare, see Barkan, “‘Living Sculptures,’” 655-58; 667 n.26.

27. For a theoretical assertion of the need for spectacle to predominate over text in the theater, see Artaud in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Bass, 232-50.

28. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 232.

29. Matchett, “Some Dramatic Techniques,” 104. James Biester has connected silence and wonder by exploring the Neoplatonic, negative theology tradition, which “encouraged hieroglyphics in the visual arts and their written or spoken equivalent, enigma. Just as the impulse to conceal that motivates hieroglyphs reaches its vanishing point in the complete avoidance of visual images, so in speech brevity ends silence” (“Strange and Admirable,” 113).

30. Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art, 280-81.

31. Frye, “Recognition in The Winter's Tale,” 113. See also the significant distinction between “counterfeit,” “lie,” and “fiction” in Donatus's commentary on Terence's Eunuch 1.2.104: “To utter a counterfeit is deceptive, a fiction clever, a falsehood stupid. To utter a counterfeit is a fault, a fiction an ingenuity, a lie a folly. We are deceived by counterfeits, we are delighted by fictions, we despise lies” (cited in Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century, 65). In the Donatian scheme, then, Shakespeare's art would be fiction, Romano's a counterfeit.

32. Brooke, “Shakespeare and Baroque Art,” 67.

33. See Barton, “‘Enter Mariners Wet,’” in Essays, 182-203, esp. 193. For compelling readings of the statue scene, see Barkan, “‘Living Sculptures,’” esp. 658-64, and Gods Made Flesh, 283-88; Blum, “‘Strike All That Look Upon with Mar[b]le,’” in Renaissance Englishwoman in Print, ed. Haselkorn and Travitsky, 99-118; Carroll, Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy, 218-25; and Siemon, Shakespearean Iconoclasm, 283-98.

34. Matchett, “Some Dramatic Techniques,” 106. Matchett continues: “It is … the very inappropriateness of this literary neatness to the living experience of the preceding moments which serves to bring us back to the stage. The usual device for enabling a comedy to conclude, this tidy arrangement serves here to reveal the chasm” (106).

35. Patrizi, La deca ammirabile, in Della poetica, ed. Aguzzi-Barbagli, 2:362; my translation.

36. It is worth noting that Arthur F. Kinney attributes the seminal achievement of this intersection between the work of art and the audience to Greene, the author of the source for The Winter's Tale: “The antique sense of epiphany becomes in the hands of Robert Greene, a whole new sense of art that, by inspiring the artist, inspires us” (Humanist Poetics, 229). Whether one agrees with this claim—and I am not sure that I do—one would have to agree that this type of epiphanic sharing would be all the greater given the interaction intrinsic to the theatrical experience.

37. See Kay, Shakespeare, 314. See also Semon, “Fantasy and Wonder in Shakespeare's Late Plays,” esp. 99.

38. For a related theoretical position, see Altman, “‘Prophetic Fury.’”

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