SOURCE: Sokol, B. J. “Autolycus' Tale and The Winter's Tale: The Rogue in Shakespeare's Reparative Play.” In Art and Illusion in The Winter's Tale, pp. 167-82. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Sokol maintains that Autolycus's roguery lends crucial support to the “reparative structure” of The Winter's Tale. According to Sokol, Shakespeare dramatized Autolycus in a non-moralistic fashion to demonstrate how “creative activity” emanates from the darker side of human nature.]

THE DRAMATISATION OF INWARDNESS: THE DARKER SIDE

No other simply isolated element of The Winter's Tale has produced wider critical disagreement than the role of Autolycus.¹ A number of recent critics (surprisingly many) have condemned Autolycus morally; some have seen him as an abuser of ‘art’ deployed by Shakespeare to provide an ‘inverse’ to a positive role for art in the play, while others have seen his role as a savoury tonic for over-sweetness, likeable, funny, and/or dramatically very useful. It is my own view, however, that the play needs Autolycus' roguery for its reparative structure.

I will argue that the role of Autolycus highlights very clearly how, in a thoroughly non-moralistic way, The Winter's Tale traces the roots of creative activity to ‘the darker side of human nature’.² To show the importance of this, I want to discuss briefly how the darker impulses implied by the play are contributory to growth and realisation on a more serious plane, before turning to the comic role of Autolycus.

There have long been discussions of how The Winter's Tale is partly akin to tragedy, and often particular aspects of the play have been interestingly compared with Macbeth, Othello or King Lear, for instance.³ But such interesting correspondences tend to be argued structurally, or even in terms of the pattern of Shakespeare's career. I believe The Winter's Tale demands also more detailed attention to how ‘the darker side’ enters and works on a moment by moment level, and I think I can demonstrate how this can reveal some of the richest possibilities of the play.

To do that, let me review how two divergent critics have interpreted the same striking episode of the play. These critics' views may at first seem very similar, but actually are deeply different. In the brief ‘dark’ episode they approach we may sense incestuous undertones in the spectacle of a man of middle years desiring a very young woman who we are told resembles his wife, and who at least as an infant was said to resemble himself.⁴ Both of their readings derive from the ambiguous reply which Leontes makes to Paulina's rebuke of his ‘eye’ with ‘too much youth in 't’ having cast sexually admiring ‘gazes’ on Perdita: ‘I thought of [Hermione], / Even as these looks I made’ (V,i,226-7). The first of the readings I want to compare is in an article by Carol Thomas Neely which generally sanitises the play. It apparently accepts Leontes' odd reply as if it were a precisely literal description of a one-dimensional emotion, and a wholly rational explanation. So it concludes that Leontes' ‘too-youthful gazes at [Perdita] reveal, not incestuous desires as in Pandosto, but Leontes' acceptance of his own courtship and his desire to “enjoy” Hermione’.⁵ Yves Thoret, a more daring critic, offers a suggestion of a very different order, although it superficially reaches a similar conclusion:⁶

it is the reactivation of the king's sexual desire for his daughter that leads him to give up the absolute power of an archaic and exclusive love relationship and helps him accept that, even a king, may not make love with his daughter. Confronted by this recent sexual desire, the king feels himself more human when he stands in front of the queen's statue.

We may note that the two critics agree that finding Perdita attractive helps Leontes in his reunion with Hermione. Thoret is not really more speculative than the first critic in assuming an incestuous undercurrent in the Leontes/Perdita encounter, for the newly self-corrective understanding he suggests in Leontes' mind could arise after the unveiling of Perdita's identity, yet in good time to become active in the statue scene. But Thoret differs radically in another dimension. For he, and only he, gives a living—a mentally liveable—emotional meaning to the encounter between what another writer described bluntly as the ‘sexual appetite and sexual appetizer’.⁷ That is to say, of the two readings only Thoret's suggests an internal mental reality for the character Leontes in which actual thoughts and dynamic thought processes take place. In this realm of thought, gaining some grasp of archaic phantasies may bring, aside from better behaviour, increased toleration, responsibility and self-realisation: it may make a character not only more moral, but also ‘more human’. If Thoret's reading could be theatrically portrayed (it was proposed for the theatre), it would have the power to make not only the character of Leontes, and the statue scene, but also a grateful audience, ‘more human’ as well.

I would like to suggest a proposition that generalises from Thoret's reading. This would be that in The Winter's Tale we are repeatedly shown circumstances requiring a growth of inner awareness. This awareness need not be of transgression as it is Leontes' case; Perdita, for example, gradually becomes aware of her sexual maturity. Quite apart from morality, what the characters who are seen to grow in the play need is a conversion of archaic fears and/or compensatory omnipotence into a sense of the possibility of new relations to others. When this is achieved, it transforms fantasy into responsibility, and brings new life.

Such a pattern makes a very significant place for Autolycus. An important part of his role is to be a fairly pleasant but very outspoken representative of the desires to be mercurial, irresponsible and unaccountable, desires that are in all of us (in this respect he is in part like Falstaff). For want of evidence consistent with dramatic tone, it has very rarely been argued⁸ that Autolycus himself learns to accept responsibility for his feelings or actions by the end of The Winter's Tale.⁹ But he is a unique feature of the play in multiple ways, and one of these is how his sort of mischief indicates a mental realm less moral, yet more authentic, than that occupied by some purportedly more ‘honest’ characters.¹⁰ First we will view the role of Autolycus in terms of some larger patterns of the play, and then seek detailed ramifications of how it epitomises a kind of honest dishonesty.

AUTOLYCUS AND ANALOGY

It is very well known that on 15 May 1611, a date incidentally he noted to be under the sign of Mercury, a mountebank physician, quack astrologer and roguish seducer of women named Simon Forman saw Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale at the Globe theatre. He put brief notations on this play, as of others, in a manuscript (now accepted as genuine) headed The Bocke of Plaies and Notes thereof per formans for Common Pollicie.¹¹

Presumably for ‘Pollicie's’ sake, Forman culminated his notes on The Winter's Tale with a reminder to himself to ‘beware of feined beggars or fawninge fellouss’. But something other than purposes of practical ‘Pollicie’ may explain why Forman concentrated a full third of his observations on the antics of the ‘Rog’ character Autolycus. Although Forman may have denied it, his experience of the play was likely coloured by his fascination with a fellow professional con-man and seducer. If so, he was seeing in art a mirror, not of nature but of himself.

This we must all do to some extent. That extent, however, need not make for universal critical solipsism.¹² We can easily speculate that Forman had his own motives for note-taking, and, in accord with these, not mentioning the reanimation of Hermione's statue need not prove him either an unreliable witness or a witness of a wholly different version of the play than the one we know.¹³ Neither does the assured tone of Forman's abbreviated account imply that he was overly perplexed by aspects of the play's irreducible ‘vagueness and confusion’, as has been argued about other original spectators of The Winter's Tale.¹⁴ Nor does the heavy emphasis Forman placed on the ‘Rog’ mean he distorted the play, for quite possibly the role of Autolycus was very prominent in the 1611 Globe production that he saw.¹⁵

A wide range of interpretations of Autolycus results I think from his importance in a complex and rich play. Readings of his role vary so widely,¹⁶ in fact, that they may serve as a paradigm for several possible views of the whole play. The role of Autolycus has been seen as ambivalent in the extreme, or as very sharply theatrically focused:¹⁷ the play has been read as exemplary of radical indeterminacy in Shakespearian art,¹⁸ or as yielding some of the least uncertain moments in all of Shakespeare's work.¹⁹ Autolycus' mercurial trickery has been seen as an enlivening companion to the meta-theatre of the statue trick,²⁰ or as in direct opposition to the ‘true’ art in the play's conclusion:²¹ the play in its ‘obviously theatrical construction’ has been judged to yield a uniquely valuable theatrical experience,²² or to evidence a late Shakespearian dramaturgic bodge.²³ Autolycus has been viewed with benign approval, even with sentimental relish, for being ‘as light-hearted as the lark he sings about’,²⁴ or as an egregious and unforgivable villain:²⁵The Winter's Tale as a whole has been judged from more or less moralistic viewpoints to have a dire or abject outcome,²⁶ or judged to present in its triumphal conclusion the discovery of the ‘true essence, whether of life, of art, or of love’.²⁷

How, if ever, can we make these odds all even?

AUTOLYCUS IN THE STRUCTURAL PATTERN

Among its other oddities, the role of Autolycus in The Winter's Tale is a kind of icon for the structurally irregular dramaturgy of the whole play. He has his first entry just slightly short of halfway through the play,²⁸ making the latest entry of a major figure in all of Shakespeare. I say he is a major figure because during the three partial scenes in which he is ‘on’ he speaks or sings the greatest number of words of any character of the play except (by a long margin) Leontes.²⁹ Outside of these scenes he is never mentioned. Why Autolycus should be so very present when he is ‘on’, and so entirely absent when he is not, is among the conundrums of the play's construction.

Moreover, in the scene of his first entry Autolycus severely dislocates the play's narrative momentum concerning two anxious kings and their missing children. This headway, set up by old Time's acceleration of the plot followed by Polixenes' and Camillo's scheming, crashes to a halt against the seemingly flimsy obstacle of Autolycus' first heedless two songs, sung only to the road. These and his following soliloquy express a very different mood about progress, season and motive than the prevailing one. The red blood of the eternally recurring ‘sweet o' the year’ will bring him willing country doxies and gear enough to steal to excite his ‘pugging tooth’. The appetite newly ‘on edge’ in Autolycus is as seasonal³⁰ and sempiternal as his itinerant habits of sheet stealing and ‘tumbling in the hay’. In these songs and soliloquy he writes his own Theophrastian ‘character’: his simple ambition is to avoid the stocks or gallows, and his wayward motto is ‘when I wander here and there, / I then do most go right’ (IV,iii,17-18).

It is remarkable that this plot-derailing hereditary ‘snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, an artful, impudent, and brazen dissembler, becomes the unwitting agent for the play's moral, happy and truthful outcome. I will argue that there is something far beyond whimsy in this.

For one thing, what Autolycus thinks is given great prominence. He speaks or sings more than a hundred lines of soliloquies, asides and personal song lyrics, giving him more opportunity for direct self-revelation than any other character.³¹ We have noted that Camillo has important motive-revealing speeches—these comprise in total thirty lines. But Camillo, we have argued, lies to himself in his asides and glosses over selfishness in soliloquies. Autolycus, thinking aloud in these same conventions, is never for an instant dishonest about his lack of honour.

It may be a matter of more than quaint contrariness when we hear Autolycus' chagrin, or at least ruefulness, in his admission in soliloquy that he has ‘done good … against my will’ (V,ii,124-5). Similarly, when forced to choose loyalties he says in soliloquy that he selects the worse, to be ‘constant to my profession’ (IV,iv,678-83). This choice leads him to flee with Florizel, as Camillo had done with Polixenes, but of course for an opposite professed reason. Autolycus' calculation to preserve his ‘bad’ individuality is parodic of Camillo's claimed morality in his own soliloquy (I,ii,351-64) which is focused on ‘flourishing’, as we have discussed in ‘Paulina's and Camillo's Tale’.

Parodic inversion is Autolycus' stock figure. He takes his oaths against the horrible possibility of virtue: ‘if I do not make this cheat bring out another … let me be unrolled, and my name put in the book of virtue!’ (IV,iii,116-18). He is pleased that his fortune prevented an act that ‘would not have relished among my other discredits’ (V,ii,122-3). But he also repeatedly mentions, in nearly all his soliloquies and longer asides, ‘honesty’, ‘good’ or ‘virtue’.

Taken together, such contradictions suggest that Autolycus may be a ‘liminal’ figure as defined in the anthropological studies of Victor Turner. This is a figure whose inversion of norms reinforces and defines the limits of the socially acceptable (as gender distinctions are reinforced by the cross-dressing in Christmas pantomimes). Indeed Autolycus does inhabit a world of holiday/everyday contrasts, yet I would resist defining him in terms of a festival pattern of liminality. Like many other emblematic, mythic and symbolic patterns in the play, a pattern of liminality is present, but taken alone would be excessively limiting to other meanings. I will argue that the necessity of Autolycus to the play is not merely schematic,³² any more than his deeds are merely incidental.

‘WE'LL MAKE AN INSTRUMENT OF THIS; OMIT / NOTHING MAY GIVE US AID’

I would hold that, in its own way, the comic role of Autolycus is as consistent as is the tragic one of Leontes with a very serious view of Shakespeare's late drama taken by Mary Beth Rose. She finds, particularly in Two Noble Kinsmen, ‘powerful evidence to support a view of the play and its protagonists as concerned in individualistic and psychological terms; to see the play, that is, as a representation of neurotic suffering’.³³ Surely, it might be replied, Leontes suffers and Autolycus does not, but that, I think, is an assumption worth examining.

While it provides one of many self-flauntings in the strange dramaturgy of the play, there is also a presentation of a dramatised experience when Autolycus' blithely random adventures suddenly become fatal and consequential. His luckily gaining better ‘wearing’, for instance, allows him to be a crucial passenger to Sicilia. While causing this ‘accident’ Camillo is multiply deluded in his dismissive and disparaging remark on ragged Autolycus: ‘We'll make an instrument of this; omit / Nothing may give us aid’ (IV,iv,626-7). Camillo is not aware, but we are, that at this point the ‘poor fellow’ Autolycus is set quaking because he has just loaded himself with ‘booties’ at the feast. Does his pilfered wealth depart with his clothes, or does he somehow keep it hidden on his person? An analogy with the excellent stage business suggested by G. Wilson Knight for his earlier ‘shoulder-blade is out’ hustle of the Good Samaritan Clown³⁴ suggests that Autolycus has the agility to hide anything that he pleases. Likewise the tone of his boastful soliloquy immediately after the clothing exchange (IV,iv,670-86) supports the use of stage business that works to produce profit upon profit for him, or as he says, ‘boot … with … exchange’.

But loaded on the irony that Camillo falsely thinks Autolycus so impoverished as to be negligible is the double irony that Autolycus falsely thinks he has a better ‘nose’ for mischief than the courtier Camillo. Consequently there is no truth at all in the opening of Autolycus' following soliloquy, ‘I understand the business. I hear it’, etc., and more truth than he knows in his continuing remark ‘I see this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive’ (IV,iv,673-4). For when Autolycus proclaims with self-reassurance that he is not out of his depth, his remarks come on the heels of Camillo's urging flight on Florizel and Perdita with ‘The swifter speed the better’. This, I have argued, is the culmination of a deception I called Judas-like. Without doubt the aside in which the audience hears Camillo admit his treacherous plan to betray the lovers (661-67) is unheard and unguessed by Autolycus. So, exactly when Autolycus proclaims that he is in full command of the situation, the audience realises that he is wholly ignorant of a cunning subterfuge beyond his scope. Consequently, when we see Autolycus become involved in Florizel's doomed embassy, we see the duper duped. He is seen to have feet of clay—with intriguing symbolic and psychological implications.

For one thing, Autolycus' misjudgement of the situation makes us realise that, despite his obvious vitality and zest, he is not an elemental or transcendental figure. The ballad-selling and innocence-cozening rogue is not a magical trickster like Puck, Ariel or the thieving Buddhist monkey god in Wu Ch'eng-en's wonderful novel Monkey.³⁵ Nor is he even semi-divine; like his own mortal father he was only in an astrological sense ‘littered under Mercury’.³⁶

The tease is that there are some associations possible between Shakespeare's Autolycus and his namesake in legend, who was the half-mortal son of Hermes or Mercury.³⁷ In the fourth Homeric Hymn, the god Hermes, even as a baby, possesses dissembling and thieving skills similar to those of Shakespeare's rogue.³⁸ In The Odyssey book 19 Mercury's thieving and equivocating son Autolycus is identified as the maternal grandfather of that most resourceful of men of the road, Ulysses, again with some teasing relevance to the career of Shakespeare's Autolycus.³⁹ Yet the partial overlapping of the legendary Autolycus, or his father and offspring, with the rogue of The Winter's Tale chiefly highlights how Shakespeare's Autolycus is mortal to the point of the mundane. There is a lowly quality in the cozening of a Clown on a market trip ‘by the way of all [his] money’. Shakespeare's Autolycus (unlike Falstaff) does not even dare rob the highway;⁴⁰ this, paradoxically, shows him entirely unheroic.

It is open to question whether Shakespeare was again setting up contrasts for the notice of the learned, pitting a cowardly coney catcher against the god-thief of classical legend. Such potential anomalies in The Winter's Tale, as I have suggested throughout, are generally not for idle delectation but often are linked to central issues.

The issue here would be related to how Autolycus' mundane humanity allows him scope to display symptoms of anxiety. In his first soliloquy he admits that he is terrified of ‘beating and hanging’. He later reveals more complex apprehensions. Let us review the soliloquy in which he chooses to preserve a boasted constancy to self:

The prince himself is about a piece of iniquity (stealing away from his father with his clog at his heels): if I thought it were a piece of honesty to acquaint the king withal, I would not do 't: I hold it the more knavery to conceal it; and therefore I am constant to my profession.

(IV,iv,678-83)

This decision apparently in favour of individuality over gain is arguably related to Autolycus' wondering ‘Sure the gods do this year connive at us, and we may do any thing extempore’, which continues in his next soliloquy with ‘If I had a mind to be honest, I see Fortune would not suffer me: she drops booties in my mouth’ (IV,iv,832-3). Autolycus' pleasure at sensing great things afoot is crowing, but I suggest it is also anxious with an apprehension that Fortune is up to tricks beyond his ken. Perhaps his joining the party of the outcast ‘Prince my master’ is best understood as an attempt of a small-time cheat to preserve his identity as a marginal figure at a time of momentous change.

Although we might say that Autolycus declines from a ragged master rogue to a prosperous grovelling courtier, his final transformation in the play is not Falstaffian, nor even Parolles-like, because Autolycus never entertains any grandiose ambitions or illusions. He chooses to remain, up to the play's end, a play-actor of profitable minor roles. I would explain this in terms of Autolycus' wish at all costs to avoid the responsibility of being in the ‘big time’. This factor in his character-type gives poignancy, I think, to his remarks on the ongoing annus mirabilus:

Now, had I not the dash of my former life in me, would preferment drop on my head … But 'tis all one to me; for had I been the finder out of this secret, it would not have relished among my other discredits.

(V,ii,113-23)

The verbal inversion here in ‘relish among my other discredits’ is continuous with the satiric malapropisms of the following interchanges about new-made ‘gentlemen born’ whose rights are to ‘swear’ to lies. But the rationalising ‘'tis all one’ I think presents also a sense of relief in Autolycus that he has not benefited greatly from his unintended good actions.

In addition to displaying a complicated character type, I think that Autolycus parodies here a paradox central to the play: that to ‘do good’ often requires the resources of a personal ‘darker side’—as for example in Florizel's defiance,⁴¹ Paulina's trickery, Perdita's commitment to unhallowed deception—but that using these may cause a painful threat to identity. As Autolycus is a charming coward, he does not risk the dilution of an identity quite comfortably comprised of ‘discredits’.

AUTOLYCUS AND THE THEATRE

On his first stage entry Autolycus describes himself as a masterless man, a dismissed courtier who became, in turn, a showman dealing in apes and puppets, a bailiff, a cowardly petty thief, and finally a coney catcher who ‘haunts wakes, fairs and bear-baitings’. His transported urban savvy, it has been claimed, may corrupt the rustics, or perhaps it ‘shows the limitation in naivete and gullibility of the shepherd's restricted life’.⁴² It is not my view that the Shepherd's life is especially naive but rather that he is quite canny and knowing, as when speculating on Perdita's parentage. I therefore think that Autolycus' fleecing of the rustics is not meant primarily to mock country folk. After all, we see him fool the acute Camillo to obtain ‘boot’ as well. His cheating, I think, represents how all sorts of persons may be taken in by a skilful artist, regardless of their sophistication.

It may be particularly because he insists, uncomfortably, on revealing what lies behind his theatrical calling that Autolycus has so often had a ‘bad press’ from serious-minded critics. During his long appearance as a pedlar at the sheep-shearing festival (IV,iv,220-714), where Autolycus cries his ‘trumpery’ and sings and sells printed ballads as a cover for pickpocketing, the commercial and performative functions of a mountebank ironically re-echo the play's many other self-references to its own theatricality and mock-naive genre. Thus, for instance, when Autolycus claims that his outrageous ballads are reportage ‘Very true, and but a month old’, this counterpoints the play's repeated frame-breaking remarks along the lines of ‘Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale’.

What may upset some critics about the role of Autolycus, then, is how clearly he insists that the counterfeits and grotesqueries he peddles and denigrates inspire the credulity of a paying public. Who is to say that the play's own audacities do not do the same? On what terms must its audiences ‘buy’ its irregularities and ‘obviously theatrical construction’? Do we know if we are being swindled—does taking a late Shakespeare play ‘seriously’ make the whole shameful matter worse?⁴³

We do know that The Winter's Tale was popular with audiences of its age, and frequently played at court. Hints and glimpses of how it may have been taken then with a poised mixture of seriousness and fun have been afforded by our investigations of some very sophisticated references embedded in details of the theatrical text. In a last attempt to unravel one of these, we will next consider the matter of Autolycus' profitably ‘nimble hand’, and try to place this in relation to the prominence of hands in play at large.

AUTOLYCUS AND THE LANGUAGE OF HANDS

In one of the soliloquies of Shakespeare's cut-purse extraordinary we are told that the country folk were so enthralled by the song he performed with Mopsa and Dorcas that ‘you might have pinched a placket, it was senseless; 'twas nothing to geld a codpiece of a purse’ (IV,iv,610-12). This links their aesthetic appreciation with sexual victimisation (shades of Perdita on gillyvors!), for the interesting articles of clothing Autolycus names—the placket and codpiece—denote or indicate also female and male pudenda.

The actions Autolycus describes here involve hands engaged equivocally between sexually predatory and thieving activities, recalling his earlier boast ‘My traffic is sheets’. As is typical of his sort of ‘polyphonic relation’ to other aspects of the play,⁴⁴ Autolycus' claim to special manual skills chimes with a notable prominence of hand gestures in The Winter's Tale.

Simple word counting⁴⁵ shows the importance of a ‘gestural dialogue of hands throughout the play’.⁴⁶ This dialogue includes the denigrated gesture described in the fatal ‘clap thyself my love’ speech we have analysed in ‘Leontes' Tale’, the traditional handclasping to seal the marriage contract between Perdita and Florizel, and Paulina's last injunction to Leontes, ‘Nay, present your hand’, in the statue scene. In other important examples: Polixenes seems at first to redeem Leontes' ugly imagery of ‘paddling palms and pinching fingers’ with his beautifully accepting ‘How prettily the young swain seems to wash / The hand that was fair before’ (IV,iv,367-8); the Clown who in Bohemia had extended a charitable hand to aid swindling Autolycus repeats the identical gesture in Sicilia after announcing that ‘the king's son took me by the hand, and called me brother’ (V,ii,140-1, 156); domineering Paulina has the tables turned on her when Leontes orders Camillo to ‘take her by the hand’ (V,iii,144). In all these examples in The Winter's Tale, as in Shakespeare's theatre generally, the mutual action of hands signifies the sealing of social or sexual relationships.⁴⁷

However, hands can be active and effective in the play not only in dialogue. I am thinking particularly of the hand placement of Hermione's statue. Michael Baxandall explains how the hand gestures of early Renaissance statues portrayed for the individuals they represented the ‘light of inner being through outward forms’, by means of a detailed ‘theory of Signs’.⁴⁸ It may be significant for Hermione's statue as well that, in the Renaissance, lovers also had a secret code of ‘chiromancia’; John Donne's Elegie VII contains for instance the complaint ‘Foole, thou didst not understand / The mystique language of the eye nor hand’.⁴⁹

Hermione is both statue and lover in a culture with a code of gestures for both, so the disposition of her hands when she plays the statue would seem to be crucial. A guide to what might be achieved could be found in the teachings of hypocrisis, the fifth stage of classical rhetoric, or in allied traditions of acting gestures. But these concern gestures keyed to speech, while Hermione is silent. An excellent model of the complexity achievable through silent hand gestures is found in the visual arts, such as described in Edgar Wind's splendid treatment of the hands of the Graces in Botticelli's Primavera.⁵⁰

Aside from how it might be done, there is the question of what should be expressed by the gestures and stance of Hermione's ‘statue’. I would suggest that these should be as expressive as possible of the sort of intense emotional mixtures Wotton called ‘Neighbors and Consiners in Arte’, perhaps tempered by the kind of reserve seen in the Giulio Romano portrait of Isabella d'Este at Hampton Court, which we have discussed in ‘Julio's Tale’ (fig. 10).⁵¹ This would accord with how Hermione's statue, long kept ‘Lonely, apart’, must become for Leontes and others a true symbol of an individual possessing a separate ‘light of inner being’, while the statue's gestures also might express a contrary longing to restore a long-deferred relatedness to others. For, as Cynthia Marshall argues in connection with the statue scene of The Winter's Tale,⁵²

resurrection of the individual alone is unimaginable. Because we identify ourselves largely through those we love and value life because of others, the hope of resurrection is a communal hope: we do not hope for resurrection of the body, but of our world: hence the idea of paradise.

I am suggesting a duality expressed in the ‘statue’ which invites passive contemplation yet promises active reunion. This rich contradiction is expressed fully in Perdita's role in the statue scene. She first asks, without ‘superstition’ she says, that the statue should ‘Give me that hand of yours to kiss’ (V,iii,46). That denied, in her own last line of the play Perdita resolves to be content to ‘Stand by, a looker on’ for a full twenty years (V,iii,85); that is, she resolves herself to contemplation of the statue. Her resolution is the immediate cue for the reanimation and human reintegration of Hermione, and Perdita receives the special reward of her mother's first words.

If Hermione's statue's static bearing, and especially its hand gestures, can suggest a hope for resurrection and renewed communal life, in a contrary way the lively hand actions of Autolycus in the cutpurse scenes may seem to represent the intrusion of furtive and grasping individualism into the gregarious, art-loving and erotic festival. Such an observation regarding the activity of Autolycus' mercantile hand in a play indeed packed with references to counting and financial exchange⁵³ may make it tempting to suppose that Autolycus' activities stand entirely in opposition to the festival's hospitable, communal and generous impulses. But in fact Autolycus' cheats are not the serpent-in-an-Edenic-countryside they sometimes have suggested to critics: they are portrayed as quite harmless and painless in comparison with Perdita's and Florizel's dilemma, or even Mopsa's versus Dorcas's competition over the Clown.⁵⁴ There is much more anxiety in the country setting than that caused by the minor depredations for which Autolycus is responsible. Yet the presence of his figure, I will finally claim, is crucial for the play at large.

AUTOLYCUS AND THE WINTER'S TALE

Rather than despising Autolycus, I am amongst those for whom he ‘secures our admiration for his expert deceptions’. I do not even agree with the author of this remark that he must at the end ‘suffer defeat’ on account of his ‘pure materiality’, so that ‘in the last analysis his failure to find redemption provides contrast for Leontes’ achievement of it’.⁵⁵ This is because I do not believe that the principle of contrast gives the full measure of Autolycus' importance.

Yet Autolycus does parody or inversely mirror many aspects of the play. I have mentioned his manner of choosing between loyalties which perfectly inverts Camillo's claimed reason for leaving Bohemia.⁵⁶ Other writers have argued that Autolycus' balladry,⁵⁷ his specific uses of language,⁵⁸ or his mirroring function as a character,⁵⁹ are deliberately made to parody or invert more central features of the play.

But, beyond parody or acting as a ‘foil’ for others, Autolycus provides positive needs of the play. Marjorie Garber holds that his arrival marks the release of ‘sexual energies [not previously] acknowledged or accepted in the world of the sheepshearing feast’.⁶⁰ In a less exhilarating way, Ruth Nevo notes that, ‘Autolycus is a figure of libido, unruly, lawless and volatile, uninhibited, cunning, subversive’. To a mention of his ‘harmless, even benign’ qualities she adds that ‘he offers a semilegitimized illicit enjoyment; but there is a self, and a wolf also, in his name’.⁶¹

The ‘self’ and the ‘wolf’ in Autolycus are preserved by the fiction of The Winter's Tale from doing evil. Unlike the lion and the bear of the play, the wolf is not predatory, or molests only where no real harm is done. This, I believe, is because Autolycus represents a factor that must be preserved: he represents one side of the necessary ‘knife edge balance’ between integration and disintegration psychodynamics has discovered in all ‘creative effort’,⁶² the ‘leaven of malice’ necessary in all human creativity.⁶³

One last antinomy before I conclude. Autolycus' role is analytical in representing a vitally necessary component of creativity, yet Autolycus' trumpery ballads are not truly creative. This is because his role in the play represents also a conservative or static principle. It is notable that he deploys his vaunted possessions of ‘an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand’ to most profit during a gullible ‘lethargy’ which his art induces: it is art not to waken but to dull sensibility.

The failure of Autolycus' art is not deserving of moral condemnation, any more than the realms of pornotopia, fetishism or obsession are necessarily wicked in themselves. Autolycus' role symbolically shares with those mental places, which we have argued to be often proximate to the emotional settings of the play, a quality of evading frustration by forgoing change, a transaction in favour of certainty and non-dependence. The paradigm of his contract with reality is, ‘Better not to have had thee than thus to want thee’. That is to say, Autolycus possesses a possibly alluring self-sufficiency which offers, beyond survival, total closure. Even as a drifter, and an anxious one, he preserves himself against change. He is not a true risk taker: his deity is Opportunity, not Kairos. And it is only against his temptations that the play's redemptions make sense.

Therefore Autolycus is a contributor to, and silent witness of, the ‘lucky’ recognition of Perdita. But he cannot be a witness to the revelation of meaning in nullity wherein Paulina risks ‘wicked powers’ in order to urge us, and those on stage, to awaken ‘faith’.

The faith in question is faith in the possibility of distilling human meaning from what may seem an endless process. One might be cheerful about the repetitive cycle of ‘blood’, as Autolycus is, or cheerfully wry about it like the Shepherd, but how can one place positive faith in repetition? Writing on the function of time in Shakespeare's plays, G. F. Waller wrote: ‘Human life is meaningless unless the human capacity for regeneration and reconciliation, for creatively taking time's chances and opportunities, is recreated and reenacted in each generation.’⁶⁴ We may ask why reconciliation and regeneration must be necessary again and again in ‘each generation’. The answer The Winter's Table offers is that ‘the darker side of human nature’ as personally experienced and acknowledged, not just as ‘known about’, must always play a crucial part in creativity and growth. Thus the play tacitly conveys the sense of one of the paradoxes a short while later articulated by Pascal, that knowledge of human wretchedness and human greatness are wholly interdependent.⁶⁵

In The Winter's Tale, the proximity of human wretchedness and greatness is seen not only in explicit confrontations of sin and forgiveness but more largely through a highly self-referential treatment of the necessary ‘knife edge’ impulses of art. With regard to this treatment, at least, I agree with Sukanta Chaudhuri that Shakespeare himself practises art of a ‘rare’ kind:⁶⁶

Only in the greatest painters of the Renaissance—Leonardo or Michelangelo—do we find the same tormented yet unquenchable vitality [as in Shakespeare]. There too the perception of evil and weakness in man does not act as a simple limitation, but is mysteriously made the basis of greater strength and nobility.

In order to represent the process of transmutation of the humanly squalid to the noble, The Winter's Tale is not modishly but necessarily unconventional in form and content. Indeed it is so highly mannered as to be theatrically and intellectually precarious.⁶⁷ By exposing the play itself to chanciness, Shakespeare allows us to feel that his dramatic speaking statues are animated by the extremely hazardous forces that alone can make psychic change possible.

Notes

1. This range will be exemplified presently. It is interesting that such discrepancy has not, as far as I know, received much analysis. An exception is Nevo, 1987, which in a condensed way mentions that his role ‘has defeated most attempts at interpretation’ (p. 95), proposes him as a bearer of the ‘pleasure principle’ (p. 123), and mentions some other critics' alternatives (p. 124).

2. The phrase is used in Collins, 1982, p. 55, which interestingly approaches the function of ‘the darker side’ in the play. Gourlay, 1975, p. 394, concludes that the dark side of the play is exemplified in Paulina's magic, which ‘is also that of Venus, of femaleness itself’. But this ignores the fact that ‘Julio’ is male, and certainly Leontes' misogyny is evidence of dark impulses in the play. Shakespeare did not uniformly assign specific gender to human darkness in either behaviour or symbolism.

3. Collins, 1982, pp. 56-7, reviews a range of interpretations of how ‘the familiar elements of tragedy’ appear beneath the ‘comedic façade’ of The Winter's Tale in particular. Many writers, such as Tillyard, 1938; Siegel, 1950; Frye, 1968, have traced specific connections of The Winter's Tale with Shakespearian tragedy. Tillyard, 1938, pp. 40-8, discusses a ‘Tragic Pattern’ and finishes by declaring Autolycus ‘organic to the country scene’. For a critique of views of the play as tragic see Mowat, 1976, pp. 8-20.

4. In my view, Shakespeare makes the incestuous undertones between Leontes and Perdita far briefer but more powerful than their originals in Pandosto, while wholly suppressing the overtones. I have called this sort of minimalism ‘homoeopathic’ in Sokol, 1993c, p. 199.

5. Neely, 1978, p. 190. Neely, 1985, p. 205, revises this to claim that Leontes ‘when jolted by Paulina … explicitly acknowledges and renounces the incestuous component of his desires’ for Perdita, but still offers no dynamic of feeling behind this. The later book is filled with intriguing perceptions, as, pp. 174-5, ‘Paulina is the only mother in the romances who does not undergo a real or apparent death’, but often neglects to relate a pattern it detects, and, at one point calls the ‘stereotype’ (p. 178), to a flow of human emotions that can theatrically produced or perceived.

6. Thoret, 1991, p. 121.

7. The phrase comes from an interesting discussion in Harding, 1979, p. 59.

8. Although it has been done in Cox, 1969, especially pp. 292-8. For the usual contrary view made emphatic see Bieman, 1990, p. 83: ‘[Autolycus'] envy at “the blossoms of [the Clown and Shepherd's] fortune” … undercuts the credibility of his promise that he will seriously mend his ways. After all, any hope of further gains from this fortunate pair will depend on the trust the rascal hopes to promote by his promise of transformation.’ See Brown, 1966, pp. 115-16, on the stage tradition beginning with Garrick's version of The Winter's Tale that Autolycus carries on with a ‘renewed picking of pockets’ at the end of V,ii.

9. There is a better case for Caliban, who will ‘seek for grace’ hereafter. Frey, 1980, p. 158, has Autolycus like Caliban and Parolles ‘chastened … not really converted, but tamed’, but then oddly goes on to call his chastening a cause for ‘wonder’.

10. After Leontes', Autolycus' are the most frequent uses of the word ‘honest[y]’. The word is applied to himself twice by Camillo.

11. Forman's manuscript entry on The Winter's Tale, Ashmole 208, ff. 201v and 202r, is transcribed in Pafford, 1966, pp. xxi-xxii and Chambers, E. K., 1930, vol. 2, pp. 340-1.

12. I cannot agree with Holland, Norman N., 1989, that our own reflections are virtually all we can hope to find in the mirror-land of the hermeneutic. Long ago, as such thinking goes, Girard, 1977, pp. 131-3, offered a brilliant critique of doctrines promulgating ‘the inexistence of the individual subject’ and ‘a most scholarly burial of scholarship itself’ based on a wholly relativistic ‘current view of language’.

13. His non-mention of Hermione's faked re-animation may prove only that use of ‘magic’ for purposes of ‘Pollicie’ was more mundane to him than new twists of coney catching. It will not serve to prove that the play was altered post 1611, as held in Bergeron, 1978, p. 126.

14. Orgel, 1991, p. 437, referring to the ‘radical indeterminacy’ of Renaissance ‘symbolic imagery’ and the opacity of some of Shakespeare's dramatic language. But of course original audiences had the advantage of Shakespeare's company's dramatic interpretations.

15. It has been very prominent in more modern ones described by Brown, 1966, pp. 116-18, which argues the theatrical importance of Autolycus. Frey, 1980, p. 11, judges from Forman's account that ‘it is clear that Autolycus was, from the first, mightily impressive and quite capable of stealing the show’ but then continues, oddly, ‘at least to the didactically minded’.

16. A wide variety of readings need not confirm Valéry, 1958, p. 152, that ‘a text is like an apparatus that anyone may use as he will’, and that ‘it is not certain that the one who constructed [the apparatus/machine] can use it better than another’. This argues from the lack of ‘author's authority’ that ‘there is no true meaning to a text’, a fallacy shown up by Coleridge's observation (in a letter: Coleridge, 1980, vol. 2, p. 187) that authors cannot know as well as others the crucial overall ‘effect’ made by a work of their own, simply because they know too well irrelevant matters such as the process of its creation. The false liberality of allowing wide-open interpretation invites sentimentalism, ‘swoon readings’, ‘stock responses’, and even such tragicomic horrors as in Lionel Trilling's short story ‘Of This Time, Of That Place’ in which a student belligerently defends an essay claiming that The Ancient Mariner ‘transports us to a honey-sweet world … [in which] we can relax and enjoy ourselves’ (Trilling, 1981, pp. 102-3).

17. The plethora of contradictory critical interpretations speaks to the first point. For the second we have the authority of so exacting a critic as Samuel Johnson, who held Autolycus' characterisation to be ‘very naturally conceived and strongly represented’—this remark is considered in its context in Felperin, 1972, pp. 269-70.

18. See Felperin, 1990; Orgel, 1991, on the textual level; Lande, 1986, on the psychological.

19. See Ewbank, 1983, p. 71, which is wholly convincing about the truth ‘beyond words’ of Paulina's words on the statue of Hermione.

20. Brown, 1966, pp. 118-19, argues: ‘Some implications of his role can be appreciated through particular points of contact with the rest of the play … But Autolycus' contribution to the play is greatest at its most general. The last exit for Autolycus in Act V, with its climactic and possibly silent humour, is an important device to relax the critical attention of the audience immediately before Hermione is revealed as a painted statue.’

21. Livingston, 1969, pp. 345-51, makes an extended case for the perverse, manipulative, unnatural, even castrating in his ‘art’, arguing its ‘inverse relationship’ with the statue's art.

22. For instance in Collins, 1982, p. 59.

23. For typical instances of this common earlier view see Quiller-Couch's introduction to Wilson, John Dover & Quiller-Couch, 1931, pp. xxiv-xxvi or Pettet, 1949a, p. 178.

24. Stauffer, 1968, p. 76. Typical older readings make him a ‘delightful rogue’ (Wilson, John Dover & Quiller-Couch, 1931, p. xx), ‘spring incarnate; carefree, unmoral, happy’ (Knight, 1985, p. 100), or at worst ‘a charming but disreputable confidence trickster’ (Muir, 1968, p. 16).

25. For example: Kermode, 1971, p. 243, repeats an earlier view of Kermode, but perhaps with a twinkle, in ‘Autolycus, with his courtly pretences, is the blackest rogue available’. He is ‘a human predator whose comic caperings cannot conceal the vicious thief and liar behind the pedlar's songs’ in Wickham, 1969b, p. 263, which goes on to compare the rural Bohemia he infects with ‘the Garden of Eden’; in Brissenden, 1981, p. 90, he brings ‘a whiff of corruption’ and ‘the crude coarseness of [his] songs’ to a rural scene of ‘joyful, ordered dance’ and ‘purity’; in Blake, 1983, p. 131, he is ‘Shakespeare's only duper who is a professional swindler’ showing ‘Shakespeare's final criticism of such basic qualities of duping as its heartlesness and the supreme value it puts on wit’.

26. Patriarchy wins out in Erickson, 1982, which holds, p. 828, ‘the gains in fulfillment in The Winter's Tale are achieved at a cost—the imposition of restrictive definitions of gender’. Patriarchy inordinately triumphs over a comedic outcome in a range of critics discussed in Traub, 1988, pp. 231-3 and in McCandless, 1990, pp. 78-9. Leontes' loveless narcissism prevails in Byles, 1985.

27. Barkan, 1981, p. 664. Similar triumphalist readings are in Egan, 1972; Stewart, Garrett, 1981; Iwaski, 1991, etc.

28. This is in terms of word counting; he first appears at approximately 48 per cent of the way through the text in Wells & Taylor, 1989, counted using a special program WCHASH, available from me.

29. Approximately: Leontes, 5013; Autolycus, 2459; Paulina, 2439; Camillo, 2151; Polixenes, 2007; Clown, 1675; Hermione, 1607; Florizel, 1415; Shepherd, 1123; Perdita, 914. These figures are derived from Wells & Taylor, 1989, measured by the program WCSPEAK, available as above.

30. The matter of Autolycus saying that he was ‘littered under Mercury’ will be considered in its mythological contexts slightly later. But it also may relate very complexly to his confusing mention of a springtime rising of ‘red blood’ just before the start of a late summer festival (we have made some botanical comment on that same seasonal confusion in ‘Perdita's Tale’). The connection between Mercury and seasons is very complex. Its modern discussion hinges on a problem in the interpretation of Botticelli's Primavera. (Just these problems are described as exemplary of methodological enigmas in Gombrich, 1945.) Botticelli's spring-allegory painting has seven principal figures: (probably) the three Graces, Flora, Chloris, Zephyr and Mercury. The importance of one peculiarity of the composition is emphasised in Wind, 1968, pp. 121-4, which states, p. 121, ‘the crux of any interpretation of the Primavera is to explain the part played by Mercury’ in his ‘disengaged—not to say indifferent’ attitude to the Graces who share the scene with him. Panofsky, 1970, p. 194, identifies the same problem. Mercury in this painting is equally indifferent to Flora and her companions—a peculiarity matched, we might remark by the almost total disengagement in The Winter's Tale IV, iv between littered-under-Mercury Autolycus and Flora/Perdita, at least in terms of their speaking parts. A ‘solution’ to the Primavera enigma is proposed in Dempsey, 1992, pp. 37-8. This explains that Mercury is present because according to an old ‘rustic or farmer's calendar’ he was a god of May or spring, together with Flora. This calendral connection is said to have been ‘obscured’ from scholars by the ‘Julian reform’. I do not know if this is correct, but if so it is hard to suppose that Shakespeare could have known more of classical mythology than Panofsky or Wind. Another a source of some doubt about the following complex conjectures is the fact that almost all of Shakespeare's numerous mentions of Mercury present him simply as a swift messenger. However there is an exception to this in the very last line of Love's Labour's Lost, spoken by Don Armado: ‘The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo’. There are problems with the status of this line, but if it is actually Shakespeare's it seems likely that it comments on the two immediately preceding songs. Armado would then be identifying Mercury with winter, and opposing him to Apollo and spring. This identification could be a final comic malapropism of the ridiculous Armado; because rural calendars have an oblique link with Love's Labour's Lost, as shown in Sokol, 1991b, it is not impossible that Shakespeare intended a sly reference to the pre-Julian significance of Mercury, a connection which Armado gets all wrong. Putting all this together with the mixed signs of the season in the fourth act of The Winter's Tale, we may speculate that (to a very few in his audiences) Shakespeare presented a deliberate confusion of two calendars operative at once, a rural and ‘sophisticated’ one. We may further speculate that through the image of charlatan Autolycus' instinctual response to a red-blooded season he connected the anomaly of mixed seasons with Perdita's mixed feelings about art, time, sex and nature discussed above in ‘Perdita's Tale’.

31. The count, using the Arden Edition lineation, is 121 lines; similar lines of Leontes are impossible to count because of his semi-asides spoken to Mamillius and others, noted above, but he has far fewer lines of distinct aside or soliloquy.

32. For instance as a ‘foil’ for good Camillo, as in Peterson, 1973, or as a challenge to good art as in Livingston, 1969.

33. Rose, 1988, p. 224.

34. Knight, 1985, p. 101.

35. Written c. 1580, translated by Arthur Waley, 1944.

36. For a complex Jungian discussion of the birth sign Mercury in relation to The Winter's Tale see Bieman, 1990, p. 83.

37. The son of Mercury and the mortal Chione, he is an archetypal master thief, getting away with daring exploits thanks to transformative gifts given by his father. Pafford, 1966, p. 165 and Wilson, John Dover & Quiller-Couch, 1931, pp. xxi and 162, discuss Shakespeare's possible sources of the name in Plutarch, Lucian, Ovid and Homer.

38. Hermes is also a patron of the highway, music, assemblies and merchants, but practises trick wrestling, while Shakespeare's Autolycus professes himself a physical coward. A more obscure connection of Hermes with The Winter's Tale is suggested in Gasper & Williams, 1986, which derives the name ‘Hermione’ from obituaries and statues of saints called ‘herms’, a term originally related to phallic pillar statues of Hermes.

39. The relevant passage in Chapman's translation, Homer, 1906, vol. 2, p. 157, reads: ‘Autolycus; who th' art / Of theft and swearing (not out of the heart, / But by equivocation) first adorn'd / Your witty man withall, and was suborn'd / By Jove's descent, ingenious Mercury, / Who did bestow it, since so many a thigh / Of lambs and kids he had on him bestow'd / In sacred flames; who therefore when he vow'd / Was ever with him’. The quality of this passage, which constitutes a leisurely interruption of the ‘recognition scene’ of the Odyssey, is brilliantly discussed in Auerbach, 1957, pp. 1-3.

40. IV,iii,28-9; Autolycus studiously avoids physical danger, unlike Falstaff, who at least fights longer than his companions at Gads Hill. An opposite view of their relative bravery is asserted without proof in White, 1939, p. 165.

41. Of which Weinsten, 1971, p. 105, says rather finely: ‘Florizel attains his heroism and makes his mistake at one and the same moment.’

42. The quotation is from Colie, 1974, p. 272. A similar idea is taken further in Studing, 1987, p. 144, which presses the notion of The Winter's Tale as an antipastoral and Autolycus as a corrupt ‘linking character between court and country’.

43. Empson, 1986, is a semi-serious essay claiming, p. 237, that self-deluded critics do not see the late Shakespeare's ‘glaring eye … through the mask’ and conjecturing, pp. 237-8, that Shakespeare tired by writing great tragedies first fobbed off his public with his crude last plays, but then began to enjoy their money-spinning success.

44. Nevo, 1987, p. 124, uses this phrase to link his ballads and Leontes' ‘fancies’.

45. Bradley, 1990, in combination with Wells & Taylor, 1989, shows 37 instances of ‘hand[s]’, 8 spoken by the clown and 7 by Paulina, with a heavy frequency bias in the festival and statue scenes.

46. Commented on in Frey, 1980, pp. 134-8.

47. See Slater, 1982, pp. 49-62 and especially pp. 52 and 54, on The Winter's Tale, where ‘Talking by the Hand’ is found to be ‘a gesture of relationship’.

48. This theory from Paracelsus is discussed in relation to German wood carving in Baxandall, 1980, pp. 160-3.

49. Donne, 1960, p. 80. On chiromancia in relation to sexual envy in Othello II,i,167-79 and II,i,251-9, see McAlindon, 1973, p. 128.

50. The traditional postures of the Graces is treated in Wind, 1968, pp. 26-35, and their hand gestures in Botticelli's Primavera are analysed pp. 118-19. A further treatment of the same complex hand gestures is found in Dempsey, 1992, pp. 34-5.

51. Not the hands but the entire static bearing of Hermione's statue might well be imitated from the stance of the main figure in this portrait of Isabella d'Este.

52. Marshall, 1986, p. 305.

53. See Cavell, 1987, pp. 200-1. Bateson, 1978, p. 67, claims that number words ‘serve the theme, indeed almost embody the theme’ of the play.

54. Although Autolycus' lyric ‘two maids wooing a man’ provides ‘the mirror of art’ to this trouble, as noted in Proudfoot, 1976, p. 71, he has no part in causing it.

55. McCandless, 1990, pp. 74-5.

56. Because Camillo and Autolycus are similar in both commenting directly on the action, Greenwood, 1988, includes them in its extended discussion of Jacobean dramatic Sprecher figures, while they are opposed in a moralistic way in Peterson, 1973.

57. See Livingston, 1969, pp. 350-1, on the style and content of these as inverse to Paulina's ‘art’. For interesting specifics see: Cavell, 1987, p. 215; and Proudfoot, 1976, p. 71, on ‘two maids wooing a man’.

58. See Brown, 1966, p. 118.

59. See Frey, 1980, pp. 148-9. McCandless, 1990, p. 74, claims: ‘throughout the Bohemian idyll, Autolycus stands in for Leontes himself, removing, by means of comic parody, much of the sting from the crazed king's depredations’. Very similar ideas are expounded in Felperin, 1972, p. 234, Hartwig, 1978, pp. 98-101 and Neely, 1985, pp. 203-4. Proudfoot, 1976, p. 73, offers a different mirroring by suggesting doubling of the roles of Autolycus and Antigonus.

60. Garber, 1981, p. 158. His influence over courting couples (but not his boasted behaviour with ‘aunts’) accords with our previous distinctions between bawdry and sexual energy, pornotopia and passion. Hartwig, 1978, p. 103, concludes on a tangent to this that ‘with Autolycus … we can consider “behind-door-work” as normal and tolerable human behavior’.

61. Nevo, 1987, p. 124.

62. Meltzer, 1979, pp. 177-8.

63. See especially Klein, 1986c. Very astute on the theme of creativity and malice is Pascal, 1966, p. 47: ‘The children of Port Royal who are not spurred on by envy and glory become indifferent’.

64. Waller, 1976, p. 162.

65. Pascal, 1966, p. 59: ‘Man's greatness comes from knowing he is wretched: a tree does not know it is wretched.’

66. Chaudhuri, 1981, p. 210.

67. Stewart, Garrett, 1981, p. 44, claims, ‘Art, raised to self-consciousness, can reroute its themes into life at an even deeper level’.

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