SOURCE: Viswanathan, S. “Theatricality and Mimesis in The Winter's Tale: The Instance of ‘Taking One by the Hand.’” In Shakespeare in India, edited by S. Nagarajan and S. Viswanathan, pp. 42-52. Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1987.

[In the following essay, Viswanathan theorizes that in his later plays, particularly The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare was extremely experimental with his theatrical techniques, mixing “self-conscious theatricality” with “convincing verisimilitude.”]

A significant feature of the dramaturgy of the later Shakespeare which has come in for a good deal of fruitful attention in recent years is the quality of deliberate dramatic self-consciousness or ‘self-conscious theatricality’ that marks the late tragedies and the last plays, if not some of the problem comedies also. It may be described as a new flowering and pronounced manifestation of, and a further refinement on, the quality of ‘multi-consciousness’ inherent in the English dramatic tradition and this is in ample evidence in the earlier Shakespeare; this trend perhaps first arose in the boy companies at the turn of the century and came to be adopted in the public playhouses also, sooner or later. This quality of dramatic self-consciousness may be regarded as the basis for certain other characteristics which seem distinctive of the Jacobean dramatic mode. These characteristics may be listed thus—a self-reflexive and parodic use of dramatic conventions and devices, or sometimes rhetorical topoi; the use of certain ‘modes of detachment’ by which an ‘aesthetic distancing’ of characters and action is often-enough effected; the presentation of characters, especially the protagonists, in a less inward and more societal or general perspective, with ‘give-away’ asides mostly replacing the older soliloquies; the framework of commentary serving as a means of the dramatist's manipulation of response; scenic impact or a scene-for-the-scene opportunism taking precedence over the sequential or cumulative impression; the other trompe l'oeil habit of collapsing illusion and reality together; the sudden contrasts or baroque clashes of mood and tone, if not sudden changes of scene, and, lastly, the strong element of playacting and roleplaying. These general characteristics of dramatic conception and technique are in evidence in the later plays of Shakespeare in varying degrees of magnitude and importance from play to play; but they are to a greater or less extent shared by the later Shakespeare and his colleagues in the theatre of the times, both public and private, such as Marston, Jonson, Chapman, Beaumont, Tourneur, Middleton and Webster. This latter fact only confirms that Shakespeare as a Jacobean playwright, for all his being like a star, did not dwell apart from his fellow-playwrights, and was, in the ultimate sense, engaged in a collaboration, a common pursuit of true dramatic endeavour, with them.

We will do well thus to recognize the abundant experimental vigour of the later as well as the earlier Shakespeare and his remarkable response to, as well as full participation in his theatrical milieu (neither was he bored with things nor was there a decline in his powers). But perhaps it is equally if not more important for us to note the qualitative differences between Shakespeare's use of the modes of self-conscious theatre and of disengagement, and the use of the same modes by Marston (in Antonio's Revenge and The Malcontent) or by Beaumont (in The Knight of the Burning Pestle or The Maid's Tragedy) or by the trio of Marston, Chapman and Jonson (in Eastward Ho!) or Tourneur (or Middleton) (in The Revenger's Tragedy or A Chaste Maid in Cheapside). The difference, baldly stated, is simply that Shakespeare in his later plays often achieves a simultaneous effect of self-conscious theatricality and convincing verisimilitude or life-likeness, to both of which the spectator can fully respond at the same time. The self-reflexive use of dramatic conceptions and devices in the other playwrights can often detract from the essential mimesis of drama. But in Shakespeare's late plays the virtuoso-like prestidigitation of the ‘dyer's hand’ of the playwright, with all the sophistication of a certain theatrical tour de force and the juxtaposition or fusion of the naive and the ‘marvellous’—or of the realistic and the idealistic—has a way of evoking at once an attention to (and admiration for) the art of the playwright and a feeling for the human reality of the drama. I shall now go on to illustrate this co-presence of theatrical virtuosity and truth-to-life with an analysis of a recurring example from The Winter's Tale.

Shakespeare's stylized conception and rendering of the crucial second scene of the play, the scene of the sudden onset of Leontes' jealousy, have been noted by critics though not the distancing effect of the conventionalization. The part it plays in the dramatist's manipulation of our response to Leontes' jealousy has perhaps not been given its due in commentary. But a curious phenomenon of this scene, and as a matter of fact of The Winter's Tale as a whole, is the figuring in the scene and in the play of an all too commonplace stage gesture, the gesture of handclasping. More curious perhaps than the extensive and highly effective use of this gesture in the play is the critics' neglect of this visual gesture, which occurs prominently in this scene and at several other key points in the play, serving as a powerful visual punctuation or rhythm. The double impression of a self-reflexive and a mimetic use of a dramatic convention is well instanced in Shakespeare's deployment of the gesture of the handclasp in the play, and in this scene.

The note of graceful idealism and of the Arcadian idyllic sounded in the opening scene, and carried on into the second scene upto a point, registers its sudden and apparently disastrous change the moment Hermione ‘gives her hand to Polixenes’ (I.ii.107), signalling the pact of his acceptance of her plea to him to extend his visit. The dramatically self-conscious technique of the whole scene is such that the rise of the jealous fit on Leontes' part as set out in his utterances (I.ii.108-18; 125-6) has for its visual correlative in the stage picture the figures of Hermione and Polixenes holding each other's hands, the two as it were remaining arrested in that posture, albeit in interesting inset, silent (their mimed words if any are not to be heard), for the space of the long outburst of Leontes. It is in many ways a stage underlining of an obvious gesture. Much like the emphasizing and repetition of the Biblical word, ‘verily,’ first spoken in the opening scene by Archidamus (I.i.11) and in the second scene by Hermione (I.ii.46-55), the bizarre verbal motif of Camillo's ‘though absent, [the two kings] shook hands, as over a vast, and embrac'd as it were from the ends of oppos'd winds’ is picked up in Leontes' congratulation of Hermione on her successful persuasion of Polixenes to stay on:

                                        that was when
Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to death,
Ere I could make thee open thy white hand,
(And) clap thyself my love …

(I.ii.101-4)

However, we need not assume that at this point the action of Leontes now putting his hand into Hermione ought to suit the words. Incidentally, the rhythms of the alternating spells of silence and speech on the part of Hermione, Leontes, Polixenes and Mamilius contribute to the dynamics of the scene through an alternation of stage presence and utterance. Added to this is the stage reality of the visibly pregnant condition of Hermione. It is the sight of Hermione and Polixenes sitting hand in hand that whips up Leontes' feelings. The deliberate calling of attention to the onstage tableau

… to be paddling palms and pinching fingers,
As now they are,

(I.ii.115-16)

and

                                        Still virginalling
Upon his palm?

(I.ii.125-6)

(this latter for the moment breaking off his by-play with Mamilius) in the context of the cumulation of references to handshaking does serve to theatricalize Leontes' jealousy. So do the rhetorical excesses of his speeches and their overplus of dislocated energy, as well as the extravagant concern he shows with the all too down-to-earth details of Mamilius' personal hygiene, which contrasts with the ‘fury’ in the words and the situation. Out of the ‘nothing’ of a single detail of the handclasp Leontes' mind could soon call up a chain of hallucinatory evidence for his jealousy in his indictment of Hermione addressed to Camillo

                                                  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?

(I.ii.284-290)

… he, that wears her like her medal hanging
About his neck, Bohemia …

(I.ii.307-8)

In terms of theatrical impact the situation does get aesthetically distanced among other factors through the use of the handclasp. We see Leontes as in a condition or a fit of disease. Yet as its victim he does undergo real throes and pangs. For all their ultimate tragicomic happy resolution the events that are the outcome of this jealousy involve the sad death of the prince (as sad as that of Prince Henry in the view of some scholars), the loss—though perhaps not so sad—of the boldly commonsensical Antigonus with his fitting ripostes, and the privations of the Queen. The ‘unreality’ of Leontes' jealousy and its real, existential force are simultaneously brought home to us. The visual rhythm of the handclasp punctuates the close of the long scene when Polixenes takes Camillo's advice that he should flee from Sicily taking him by the hand.

                                                  Give me thy hand,
Be pilot to me, and thy places shall
Still neighbour mine …

(I.ii.447-9)

This in turn is to be the beginning or anticipation of Camillo's role in the play of ‘piloting’ and of joining hands.

When Leontes, now far gone in his state of jealousy—which to him is confirmed by Camillo's flight—banishes the Queen from his company, Antigonus speaks up and speaks out most vocally among the lords on behalf of the Queen. In answer Leontes employs a gesture to convince Antigonus of the materiality of his ‘cause’ in a manner not dissimilar to the Johnsonian, anti-Berkelean stamp. Saying,

                                        I do see't, and feel't,
As you feel doing thus

(II.i.152-3)

he grasps his arm (s.d.).

The use of the handclasping gesture in the second, Bohemian half of the play matches its counterpart in the Sicilian, first half in its tellingness, particularly in its double effect of reality and theatricality, and the motif is easily one of the most outstanding of the many correspondences between the two parts of the diptych that the play is.

In the scene of the sheep-shearing feast, masque-like structure and details are employed to bring us a sense of the paradoxical interweave of ‘performance’ and genuineness, of art and nature, and nature and grace, the popular and the courtly. The artifice of the dramatic action of the taking of hands, simple as it is, forms an important part of the natural beauty of the art and life of the scene. To start with, the festival dance entails a joining of hands between Florizel and Perdita, the dance which is referred to first by the Shepherd in terms of no more than a domestic, true-hostess-like efficiency and nimbleness (hic et ubique) (IV.iv.58-60), and later by Florizel in terms of an ideal cosmic dance (like the dance of Siva) apprehended as a warm, felt, living reality in Perdita

                                                  When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' th' sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so,
And own no other function.

(IV.iii.140-3)

Florizel takes Perdita's hand, and as they ‘dance featly’ a dance of shepherds and shepherdesses it turns out to be a sort of masque-dance in a sort of courtly-pastoral masque, to be followed later by the antimasque of the dance of the Twelve Saltyrs or Saltiers. The multifacetedness of the illusion-reality intercommunication in the dance and the situation as a whole are something which resemble the unified-field awareness and simultaneity of pattern-recognition characteristic of ‘electronic circuitry’ indeed.

But Florizel's handfasting with Perdita, interrupted as it is by Polixenes, is the centrepiece of the action of the scene. Here again there is a theatrical underscoring of the holding of hands, as in the second scene of the play, as well as a sudden manifestation of anger on Polixenes' part, involving a sudden, masque-like change of tone and mood in the scene, answering to the sudden outbreak of Leontes' jealousy. Florizel makes, rightly, a ceremony of it.

                                                  I take thy hand, this hand,
As soft as dove's down and as white as it,
Or Ethiopian tooth, or the fann'd snow that's bolted
By th' northern blasts twice o'er.

(IV.iii.361-4)

The mutual clasping of hands is, again, called attention to in the not unadmiring words of the soon-to-be angry Polixenes

How prettily th' young swain seems to wash
The hand was fair before! …

(IV.iii.366-7)

But when the Shepherd is about to solemnize the ‘handfast’, with

                                        Come, your hand,
And, daughter, yours

(IV.iii.390-1)

Polixenes makes an interruption, first raising the question of the father's consent to the son's choice and subsequently by all but parting their hands, ‘discovering himself’ with his ‘mark your divorce’ in answer to Florizel's ‘mark our contract’. Yet in spite of its turning out to be a broken ceremony (and the sheep-shearing feast a broken feast also, as most Shakespearean feasts are) the two are united till ‘… death do [them] part’, though ‘the heavens will not have their contract celebrated’, as Perdita puts it later (V.i.202-3).

It is in the ‘marvellous’ final scene of the play that the stage device of handclasping is employed by Shakespeare to the finest, most characteristically subtle double effect of a coup de theatre and a moving communication of reality in the play. The paradoxical interfusion of art and nature and of nature and grace suggested throughout the play crystallizes itself into an impressive stage-reality in the scene, with the ‘figures-in-words’ so far materializing themselves into the ‘figures-in-action’. But in the preceding mood-setting scene of reporting (V.ii), a number of gestures are enthusiastically reported by the three Gentlemen who vie with one another in their effort to communicate the vividness of their impressions of the events witnessed. Yet the handclasping gesture is referred to and indulged in by the Clown in his stocktaking of the recently passed incredible developments with his father the Shepherd. His ‘preposterous’ declaration to his father is

But I was a gentleman born before my father; for the King's son took me by the hand, and call'd me brother; and then the two kings call'd my father brother …

(IV.ii.139-42)

In what one may call in this context an antimasque-like or, better still, an antemasque-like use of giving somebody one's hand, the Clown on getting an ‘ay’ in reply to his question to Autolycus if he would amend his life gives him, in his new-fangled gentlemanliness, his hand and agrees to commend Autolycus to the Prince. In this comic use of the gesture it is its overt staginess which is to the fore, yet it should be noted that all this immediately precedes the great final scene, and the Clown announces at the end of his scene that they all like ‘the king and the princes, our kindred’ should go to see ‘the Queen's picture’.

As with Hermione's ‘wrinkles-and-all’ statue, the art of ‘taking one by the hand’, as it is in evidence in the finale of the play, is ‘an art which does mend Nature but the art itself is Nature’. Perdita's response to the statue of the Queen is to kneel (another gesture used meaningfully at various points in the play, incidentally) and ‘to implore her blessing’. Shakespeare does prepare his audience, though, through half-hints and faint-enough suggestions for the final surprise (which he exceptionally holds for them in this play), but it is a preparation which takes the form of Paulina-the-stage-manager's provision of hints of possibilities of the Queen's coming back from the dead to Leontes and the others (as early as the opening of Act V). An important stage in the course of this process in the final scene occurs when Perdita, taken in by the ‘life’ of the statue in one sense, but rightly grasping it in another more important sense, is about to take the statuesque Queen by the hand.

                                        Lady,
Dear queen, that ended when I began,
Give me that hand of yours to kiss

(V.iii.44-6)

and Paulina in effect warns her of ‘wet paint’. A still more important stage in the movement of the scene is reached when Paulina promises the onlookers the magic of art, rather art as magic, the trompe l'oeil phenomenon by which

I'll make the statue move indeed, descend
And take you by the hand …

(V.iii.88-9)

(Paulina's or rather Shakespeare's trompe l'oeil here far outdoes whatever the artist Julian Romano was capable of.) Leontes is ‘content’ to submit himself and to consider it legitimate magic. As in The Tempest, at this point in The Winter's Tale music does it as much as magic, and it is to music as well as to Paulina's command that Hermione awakes and starts moving. As Paulina exhorts the spellbound Leontes, ‘Nay, present your hand’ (V.iii.107), he readily takes Hermione by the hand, a second hand-fasting echoing the echo in I.ii of the pre-dramatic first; the handfasting now makes the reunion a true re-marriage. The quiet but deeply felt energies of drama, released in the moment of the handclasp—as Leontes says

                                                  O, she's warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating

(V.iii.109-11)

—are limitless. As Camillo's running commentary indicates, ‘she hangs about his neck’, a transformed stage-realization of the gesture attributed to Hermione and Polixenes by Leontes in his jealous fit—

                    he, that wears her like her medal hanging
About his neck, Bohemia

(I.ii.307-8)

And Hermione finding her tongue for the first time takes by her hand the kneeling Perdita after pronouncing the best blessings on her head.

The mellowest of the instances of the handclasp is reserved to the very end. For Paulina who has rediscovered and restored his Queen to him Leontes finds a husband in Camillo by way of fitting repayment. There is the further ‘fit’ of the two stage-managers who have in the play been ‘fitting’ others (in Elizabethan theatre terminology) taking each other's hand in marriage, as King Leontes with his newly-gained masterfulness over the situation commands

                                        Come, Camillo
And take her by the hand …

(V.iii.143-4)

The repetition and underscoring of the gesture do make for the gesture showing itself up in all its obviousness; yet the old turtle (as she calls herself) and the old dove join hands in marriage, which is a marriage of true minds. Coming in the wake of the reunion, as good as a new or second marriage, of Leontes and Hermione, the idea (and the fact) of the wedding of Paulina and Camillo evokes the same kind of response as the golden wedding of a happily married elderly couple would evoke. There is a reunion of Hermione and Polixenes, ‘my brother’ too. Florizel, as the King reminds Hermione (and us), is, ‘heavens directing troth-plight to your daughter’. The reader or spectator with a good memory will not forget at this point the three daughters of himself and Paulina that Antigonus mentions earlier—the eldest at the end of the play is twenty-seven years old. But Shakespeare can afford to forget them.

Metadramatic as Shakespeare's complex manipulation of the simple dramatic gesture of handclasping may be, it is in his hands one of the means of representing reality. Similarly, Shakespeare seems to use in this play the scenic form of the Mystery-cycle plays of the Slaughter of the Innocents (with Herod at the centre) in ironic or palimpsest form in the scene (II.iii) in which Leontes rages like Herod as Paulina brings his new-born infant, reprimands him and, at the end of a slanging match, leaves the child, only to be ordered by Leontes that it be killed or abandoned. But while the scenic reminiscence of Mystery drama, and the implicit supersession of the mode suggested in its ironic use, make for a disengagement or disorientation of the spectator, the analogy lends the scene, at the same time, an extra-dimensionality and an impact which strangely combine disturbance and reassurance. The suggestions of the Mystery-cycle play on Herod's Massacre of the Innocents in the configuration of the scene are confirmed by the verbal echo in the scene (II.iii.110) of the Middle-English term of abuse ‘lozel’, which occurs in the Mystery plays but whose sole occurrence in Shakespeare is to be found in this scene. Similar to Shakespeare's use of the tableau of the handclasp in this play is his use of the kneeling tableaux in it. Also, as he exploits the scenic form of a Mystery-cycle play in II.iii, and also perhaps in the scene of Hermione's trial (echoing the trial scenes of the Mystery plays, especially those of Christ's trial), so he employs the masque structure and masque elements in the scenic configuration of the scene of the sheep-shearing feast as well as the final scene to double effect. These latter instances of scenic motifs and dramatic devices in the play, of course, will have to be considered separately. Our brief study of the dramatic functions of the device of ‘taking one by the hand’ in The Winter's Tale should serve to reassure us that Shakespeare's later plays, as his middle and early ones, more than most of the plays of his Jacobean colleagues, are for all their self-reflexive qualities no ‘self-consuming artifacts’. They are not solipsistic contrivances, nor entirely or mainly plays about playmaking and playmaking devices; there is ‘an appeal always open (in them) from art to nature’, and, again in Johnson's words, ‘they are just representations of general nature’.