SOURCE: Kitch, Aaron. “Bastards and Broadsides in The Winter's Tale.” Renaissance Drama 30 (2001): 43-71.

[In the following excerpt, Kitch examines Shakespeare's representation of the print industry as a metaphor for paternity and illegitimacy in The Winter's Tale. According to Kitch, this theme touches on broader Jacobean anxieties with regard to reproduction in both the sexual sense—such as concerns about adultery and bastardy—and in the textual sense—such as the difficulty authorities had in monitoring and regulating rapidly produced printed matter. Hermione's restoration in the statue scene (V.iii) represents a triumph, the critic concludes, of live theater over the court's desire to regulate the printing press and paternal legitimacy.]

In act 2 of The Winter's Tale, Paulina boldly appears before King Leontes and his court with the newborn Perdita in her arms. Her self-appointed mission is to convince them that the infant she carries is legitimate. Imploring the assembled to observe the babe's physical features and be assured of its true paternity, she employs the language of print:

                                                                                          Behold, my lords,
Although the print be little, the whole matter
And copy [are] of the father—eye, nose, lip,
The trick of's frown, his forehead, nay the valley,
The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles,
The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger.

(2.3.97-102)¹

Although the word “print” had multiple meanings in early modern England, including handwriting, stamping an image, and imprinting a seal, its combination in this passage with “matter” and “copy”—and especially with the technical terms “mould” and “frame”—alludes to the printing press specifically.² Paulina lists the infant's body parts individually as ocular proof of the legitimacy of the royal offspring, though it requires both Apollo's oracle and the deaths of Mamillius and (supposedly) Hermione in act 3 to convince Leontes that Hermione is faithful and the “innocent babe truly begotten” (3.2.132). Leontes rejects Paulina's argument, at least initially, but he absorbs its logic. After an extended period of contrition and his eventual submission to Paulina's will, the king uses the same language in 5.1 when he tells Prince Florizel that his mother “was most true to wedlock … / For she did print your royal father off, / Conceiving you” (5.1.123-25). Both passages imagine the press as a tool for measuring the legitimacy of paternal relations. This repeated figuration, I would like to suggest, offers an important perspective from which to evaluate the central but paradoxical structure of paternity and its anxieties in the play, the threat of bastardy as a form of material debasement, the function of Autolycus and the early modern print practices he stands for, and the play's own hybrid generic status as a “mongrel” tragicomedy.

The printing press is not an obvious institution for a Jacobean playwright (and this Jacobean playwright in particular) to invest with authority and legitimacy. If technical language of the printing trade seems out of place in pre-Christian Sicilia, where ultimate judicial authority is vested in Apollo's oracle, it would also have been counterintuitive as a model of validity to early modern viewers. Shakespeare's own ambivalence toward the press perhaps reinforces what many of his contemporaries considered to be the dubious status of print as degraded and unauthorized because made common, a stigma which early modern authors frequently acknowledged and used to negotiate the category of authorship in their own printed works.³ But the model of paternal control based on print as it functions in The Winter's Tale must be understood in relation to other formulations in the play, including Leontes's misogynistic polemic against the word of women who “will say anything” (1.2.130), bastardy as a threat to the linguistic polity of Sicilia, and the dangerous ballads of Autolycus that appropriate codes of print-oriented authority in order to spread lies. These ballads also embody anxieties of uncontrolled reproduction manifested within the Stationers' Company itself, exposing the material dialectic of print and paternity as it functioned both in the drama and in society more generally.⁴ One specific broadside genre alluded to by the play, the monstrous-birth ballad, functioned for early modern print producers as a way to displace anxieties of reproduction about the press as a cultural institution.

The shared anxieties of paternity and print in the play inscribe broader cultural anxieties about printing as a shift in modes of material production. The press offers a more complex and conflicted model of paternal authority than the traditional “imprint” model traced by several contemporary critics and found, for instance, in Shakespeare's Sonnet 11: “[Nature] carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die” (lines 13-14). The print/paternity dialectic provides a cultural context from which to analyze plot, character, and generic status in a way that is unique to The Winter's Tale, with its multiple investments in forms of print—not only the source text in Robert Greene's romance Pandosto but also the broadside ballad as a competing commercial commodity. But I argue that the play ultimately resolves this dialectic in the statue scene, from which a feminine aesthetic of “living sculpture” emerges that can both accommodate the marks of time and mediate between fixed forms and diachronic change.

In an influential account of the relations between Elizabethan structures of gender and power, Louis Montrose identifies paternity as a “shaping fantasy,” an act of imprinting, drawing on Theseus's speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream depicting the father as a “god” to his malleable daughter, who should be “but as a form in wax / By him imprinted, and within his power / To leave the figure or disfigure it” (1.1.47, 49-51). The paternal relation for Montrose becomes a “fantasy of male parthenogenesis” that entails complete patriarchal control (40). Margreta de Grazia examines the “imprint” metaphor as it is used by Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Shakespeare to understand “reproductive bodies and minds … [and] the conception and generation of ideas and children” (90). She traces the cultural semantics of the imprint in sealing wax, stamping, coining, and ultimately printed texts, which she sees as an extension of the signet/wax model. While the printed press in The Winter's Tale can be situated within these accounts of paternity as acts of masculine imprinting, it also problematizes the notion of the paternal imprint because it is a more complex and collaborative form of labor that alters the structure of paternity modeled around it. The “imprint” model which Montrose finds in Midsummer constructs the father as a “demiurge or homo faber” (40), where paternity shapes formless matter like the God who breathes the first human life out of clay. The fantasy of the printing press elaborated by The Winter's Tale, however, situates the labor of parenting on a wholly different level—what Marx specifies as an early form of alienated and disembodied labor in industries that depend on machines.⁵ By linking the mechanical labor of print with the human labor of childbirth, the play demonstrates a cultural link between the fantasies of authentic paternity and identical printed copies but also stages the defeat of both models by exposing the flaw of print as an authorizing institution: the structure of authority imbedded within print as an ideal of fixity unravels through the circulation of identical copies whose appearance seems to buttress their truth value while their iterability actually transforms the authoritative structure they enact. The promise of uniformity and centralization of textual production inherent in the press succumbs in the play, through its alliance with paternity as a category, to the inability to control multiple copies and to anxieties of hybridity and illegitimate form that pervade discourses of early modern printing.

Traditional accounts of paternity from Aristotle to St. Thomas Aquinas identify the masculine seed as more perfect than the female ovum, a seed that the poet Statius in Dante extols as the “perfect blood … that's never drunk / … [but] acquires, within the heart, formative powers / to build the members of the human shape.”⁶ By this model, paternity imposes spiritual form on maternal matter in reproducing the child. James I famously defined his absolutist monarchy in terms of being a father to England, and patriarchalism as the direct justification of social and political obligations also pervaded seventeenth-century institutions. In the Anglican Church, catechistical instruction drew on the Fifth Commandment to vest in fathers, magistrates, masters, and teachers the authority of the original Father, while in political discourse Robert Filmer offered the fullest example of patriarchalism as a defense of divine-right monarchy (based on God's original bequest to Adam) in his Patriarcha, a book and an argument against which Locke notoriously positioned his contractual theory of government.⁷ Yet the paternal bond as a biological function is inherently unstable, dependent for its legitimization on an external material or narrative source traditionally associated with the mother.⁸ When Leontes seizes on Paulina's metaphor of the printing press as a potential method of authentification, he supplants the word of the mother as the traditional guarantee for paternal legitimacy with a mechanical process of “labor,” replacing the woman's reproductive organs with a machine that was in Shakespeare's day overseen primarily by men.⁹

This intervention in the biological process of reproduction occurs in the context of one of Shakespeare's most sustained and complex explorations of paternal relations.¹⁰ Beyond the frequency of references to fathers and sons in the play and the importance of paternal bonds to the plot, there are moments like Antigonus's offer to spay his daughters and “glib” (emasculate) himself if the charges against Hermione prove true that register the play's obsession with models of paternity and legitimate “issue” (2.1.144-49). In the opening dialogue we learn from Archidamus and Camillo that the young prince Mamillius, a “gentleman of the greatest promise,” “physics the subject, makes old hearts fresh,” and heals “they that went on crutches ere he was born” (1.1.34, 36-37). Much like the kingdom of James, the political stability of Sicilia rests on the shoulders of a healthy male heir.¹¹ But the positive sentiment voiced here is undermined by the unequal relation between the two courtiers, who speak of the “great difference” between themselves and a corresponding inability of Bohemia to live up to the “magnificence” which Sicilia has bestowed (1.1.3, 11). The promise of the son exposes cracks in the diplomatic relations between Sicilia and Bohemia reflected eventually in the split between Leontes and Polixenes. When Hermione in 1.2 attempts to convince Polixenes to extend his stay in Sicilia, she suggests that the only excuse that would justify Polixenes's return to Bohemia is his desire to see his son: “To tell he longs to see his son were strong; / But let him say so then, and let him go; / But let him swear so and he shall not stay—/ We'll thwack him hence with distaffs” (1.2.34-37). Hermione here suggests that the paternal bond should be allowed to trump the codes of hospitality and international diplomacy that might otherwise keep Polixenes in Sicilia. But using the paternal bond as a way to justify the separation of the two kings anticipates how Leontes and Polixenes will find in paternity a sign of their deteriorating relationship. After feeling the first pangs of jealous suspicion against his wife, Leontes asks his “brother” Polixenes if he is as “fond” of his son as Leontes is of Mamillius, to which Polixenes replies:

                                                                                                              If at home, sir,
He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter;
Now my sworn friend and then mine enemy;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all.
He makes a July's day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.

(1.2.163-69)

Post-Freudian readers may recognize in this confession an element of excessive libidinal investment in the filial object. Florizel fulfills many roles at once for his father—parasite, soldier, statesman, friend, enemy—in ways that seem to preclude the healthy functioning of the state and of the king himself by concentrating all necessary actors into one person, and a person of “varying childness” at that. This element of excess in Polixenes's reply to what is on the surface a straightforward question indeed mirrors the psychological state of Leontes himself at this moment in the play, since he asks the question as a way of disguising his own “tremor cordis” that has overcome him after witnessing his queen and Polixenes arm in arm (1.2.109). The fraternal bond implied by Leontes's many references to Polixenes as a “brother” and reciprocated in Polixenes's “twinned lambs” speech (1.2.66) begins to “branch” (1.1.23) not just around the issue of the fall into sexual activity that Hermione identifies (1.2.79-85), but also around the question of paternity—that vertical relation of biological heredity within a family that puts strain on the horizontal bonds of identification between them.

Polixenes himself contributes, however subconsciously, to the onset of Leontes's jealous furor by lacing his language in the early part of the scene with words of conception and procreation. This language also introduces the conjunction of sexual reproduction and print to the play:

Nine changes of the watery star hath been
The shepherd's note since we have left our throne
Without a burden. Time as long again
Would be filled 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 more
That go before it.

(1.2.1-9)

When Polixenes describes himself as “standing in [a] rich place,” he invokes the womb, as in Titania's reference in A Midsummer Night's Dream to her pregnant serving woman, “rich with my young squire” (2.1.131). His procreative imagery continues in his use of words like “breed” (“I am questioned by my fears of what may chance / Or breed upon our absence” [1.2.11-12]) and provides a sexual subtext in his language that proves damaging to the fragile mental state of Leontes. Polixenes describes himself as a “cipher” in the sense of a character or number of no value in itself that multiplies other characters by virtue of its relative position, deriving from the Arabic word for “zero” (çifr). This is how the passage is typically glossed.¹² But another definition of the word common to early modern England was a “secret or disguised manner of writing” that required a code for interpretation (OED 5.a). This second level of meaning, with specific reference to writing, aligns procreation in the womb with making “many thousands” of copies, a process most readily associated with the printing press by Jacobean viewers. This “rich” womb has a copiousness that eclipses the capacity of biological reproduction in humans and imagines a fecundity of reproduction found only in the mechanical world of print.

Leontes's initial test of his suspicions against Hermione is to inspect Mamillius for signs of resemblance to himself. “What, hast smutched thy nose? / They say it is a copy out of mine … / yet they say we are / Almost as like as eggs—women say so, / That will say anything” (1.2.120-21, 128-30). Paternity must be secured through examination of a textual “copy” that will reveal the supposed evidence of the mother's truthfulness (or her sins), a text whose physical similarity to its originating father is a guarantee of paternal legitimacy.¹³ Though this “copy” is not explicitly printed in the context of the speech, its relation to Polixenes's earlier “cipher” speech and foreshadowing of Paulina's explicit reference to print in act 2 make its association with print consistent with the logic of the play. Leontes elevates the supposed fixity of the printed copy over the untrustworthy word of women, who will “say anything” and are as “false / As o'er-dyed blacks, as wind, as waters” (1.2.130-31), a metaphor taken from the early modern practice of mixing two or more dyes together to make colored cloth. Where print ideally fixes words on paper through punches and standardized letters that control the flow of ink, the “o'er-dyed blacks” represent uncontrolled and unstructured dissemination of vitriolic dye that makes the resulting fabric weak. Paulina appropriates the metaphor when she says with regard to Hermione's imprisonment, “Here's such ado to make no stain a stain / As passes colouring” (2.2.18-19), suggesting that it is Leontes himself who is guilty of making something out of nothing, of groundless excess in his baseless accusations. But her appropriation nevertheless subscribes to the logic of the structure of paternity as a textual mark whose uncertainties demand something like the machine of the press for standardization.

Leontes carries the figure still further when responding to Camillo's doubts about his accusations against Hermione:

Dost think I am so muddy, so unsettled,
To appoint myself in this vexation? Sully
The purity and whiteness of my sheets—
Which to preserve is sleep, which being spotted
Is goads, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps—
Give scandal to the blood o'th'prince, my son
Who I do think is mine and love as mine,
Without ripe moving to't?

(1.2.322-29)

The preservation of manly honor and peace of mind is aligned with textual imprints through the image of adulterated white sheets whose original purity is like a piece of paper before it is sullied by ink. The king's peace of mind is imagined as a clean sheet, a blank page for which the threat of adultery is a stain. Both the method of verifying the truth of paternity using textual and/or printed signs as well as the image of mental and social equilibrium imagined as a blank sheet are male qualities. The orderly impression of color or letters is equated with legitimate paternity, while the amorphous stain, the illegible excess of ink, connotes bastardy.

Leontes concludes from his examination of his son and his speculations about his wife that his newborn daughter is a bastard, a word which becomes a virtual mantra in 2.3—used five times by Leontes in the space of ninety lines (73, 139, 154, 160 [twice])—and which does a significant amount of work in the play as a register of the dangers of adulteration, hybridity, and illegitimacy. The bastard in early modern England was a cultural and political exile, a potentially subversive force connected with the failure to control discourse as well as with illicit sexual union.¹⁴ But the word also had ramifications for material production in print and cloth making, since it could mean a mixed cloth of low quality or unusual size (OED I.5.a), a print typeface, and, starting in the seventeenth century, an incomplete page before the full title page of a printed book (OED I.6.d and I.11). Richard Huloet's 1552 dictionary defines the word as a style of handwriting, the litera adulterina.¹⁵ And in printing the batârde typeface imitated cursive handwriting to combine mechanical print with the human hand.¹⁶

Bastardy, of course, also had quite tangible political consequences in early modern society, threatening not only monarchy as an institution based on authentic and pure bloodlines (Elizabeth and James were both subject to political challenges based on their heredity),¹⁷ but also primogeniture as the primary institution for transferring wealth and property—a legal institution built around paternal bonds.¹⁸The Winter's Tale frames the threat of bastardy as a threat to the legitimacy of language systems in such a way that opens up the space for a model of paternity based on print. When Leontes sees his wife holding hands with Polixenes and says “Too hot, too hot! / To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods,” his fear of mixing categories of relationship shades easily into a fear of hybridized or bastardized bloodlines (1.2.107-8). The stability and well-being of the state, not to mention Leontes's own psychological condition, depends on the purity of language and its use within a social system. In accusing Hermione of allowing Polixenes to impregnate her, Leontes draws on his wife's supposed transgression to construct a theory of linguistic polity:

                                                                                                                        O thou thing,
Which I'll not call a creature of thy place
Lest barbarism, marking me the precedent,
Should a like language use to all degrees,
And mannerly distinguishment leave out
Betwixt the prince and beggar. I have said
She's an adultress, I have said with whom.

(2.1.82-88)

Leontes imagines social order as founded on language, where words both constitute and enforce social status; he fears that his use of a vulgar word might tear down the system of social difference, leaving the distinction between “prince and beggar” no longer valid. Language for Leontes both defines the speaker's class identity and, in certain cases, undermines the structure of oppositions between classes itself. Because it lies at the very foundation of society, language must be constantly surveyed and policed in its connection to social difference. Leontes, who sees himself at the center of this order, is driven to relate sexual reproduction with this linguistic order, which includes, as we have seen, both the oral register of women's talk and the textual register of Mamillius as a “copy” of the father. This relationship anticipates the need for a machine that might regulate and fix textual production as a way to secure proper sexual reproduction and thus retain fixity and order within his linguistic polity.

But the press that might contain this disorder by extending the pen/paper or signet/wax model of paternal reproduction also alters the model of paternity it adopts. The Winter's Tale demonstrates how the printing press complicates the “imprint” model of paternity in which the father shapes the child as a signet impresses wax. That is, both the press and paternity are legitimating structures (of texts and children, respectively) whose weak link is in the reproducibility of that structure through the production of multiple copies. Shakespeare shows the double-edged capacity of printed texts to authorize the written word in the same way that a true father authorizes his child, but also to make that authenticity dependent on reproducible signs that are easily appropriated and redirected in ways that challenge the entire structure of authority itself.

The dissemination of printed materials in the late sixteenth century to a broader and more diverse reading public than ever before produced new social arrangements that brought with them new anxieties about forms of representation and their cultural and political impact.¹⁹ The act of printing was often figured by printers and authors in early modern England in biological terms, whether in the naming of the parts of the press or in the representation of authors as fathers to their texts and printers as stepfathers to abandoned textual children.²⁰ Early modern authors themselves were often conscious of the alteration to existing structures of cultural authority that print introduced. Henry Chettle, for instance, describes in his Kind-Hartes Dreame how print produces visible signs that create a false sense of authority. Through the persona of the balladeer Anthony Now Now, Chettle complains about ballad sellers who “sweare” that their wares “are published by Authoritie: and people farre off thinke nothing is printed but what is lawfully tollerated” (60). The act of printing overcomes the distance between the central site of authorization and the periphery, but in bridging this gap, it also usurps the original proximity or immediate presence on which authority depends; its authoritative structure is weakened by the reproducibility of the signs of that authority. The broadside ballad in particular exemplifies this dual nature of the press in relation to cultural authority: on the one hand, its seeming uniformity and centralized mode of production create an aura of fixity and legitimacy, making possible the differentiation between good and bad forms of textuality, but on the other, it is part of an explosion of printed texts in which classifications and hierarchies of authority were becoming dependent on their forms of expression, rather than resting in existing nontextual sources.²¹

In The Winter's Tale, Autolycus is associated with printed ballads and bastardy alike.²² Alluding to Ovid's account of Chione's double rape by Apollo and Mercury, resulting in the birth of the twins Autolycus and Philamon (Ovid 11.345-402), Autolycus claims to be “littered under Mercury” (4.3.25) and thus aligns himself with a pagan mythology fitting for Bohemia and the play's other mythical sources in the Prosperina and Pygmalion stories. But in his connection to the printed broadside and the London print industry, he also signifies his contemporaneity with the audience. Vagabond, petty thief, con artist, impersonator, peddler, and court exile, Autolycus traffics in stolen “sheets” that echo Leontes's references to the stained purity of his marriage sheets. He also sells linens, ribbons, gloves, and other trinkets (“inkles, caddises, cambrics, lawns” [4.4.209]), “bastard” remainders of the textile industry that were sewn into other garments to complement an outfit, emphasizing his connection with a mobile marketplace and with fragments rather than wholes. His versatility and status as a “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles” (4.3.25-26) connect him with new market economies and the expansion of capitalism rather than traditional rural agricultural economies such as Bohemia.²³ His own impersonations, first as a beggar who has been robbed, then as a courtier in the borrowed garb of Florizel when the latter elopes with Perdita, align him with forces of malleability. He decenters the play, yet the play cannot do without him, in the sense that he cheats the simple peasants out of their money by fictionalizing himself but is at the center of the sheepshearing in Bohemia because his fictional ballads are a prime source of the festive energy of the country ritual.

Autolycus sells a specific form of printed broadside that was new to the sixteenth century, a type of ballad that appropriated traditional oral ballads for commercial printers. For a penny, consumers could purchase these broadsides depicting religious primers, verse libels, political “flytings,” epitaphs, and bawdy songs.²⁴ Autolycus sells ballads like the one about a “fish that appeared upon the coast on Wednesday the fourscore of April forty thousand fathom above water, and sung … against the hard hearts of maids” (4.4.273-76), and another, “how a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden” (4.4.260-62). The latter ballad refers to an actual genre of broadsides that first achieved popularity in the 1560s and feature an explicit conjunction of print and paternity in early modern culture. An examination of this genre of monstrous-birth ballads reveals how it provided a format within a nascent print marketplace for producers of print to navigate the murky waters of their own cultural authority. …

It is no coincidence that Anthony Now Now invokes the ballad specifically as a problem of the authority of print. The mobility and cheapness of the ballad as a printed sheet, part of its function as one of the earliest mass-produced commodities, was also a mark of potential degradation. Henry Fitzgeffrey, for instance, seems to have the monstrous-birth broadsides specifically in mind when he fulminates in 1617, “Let Natures causes (which are too profound / For every blockish sottish Pate to sound.) / Produce some monster: some rare spectacle … / Bee it a worke of nere so sleight a waight, / It is recorded up in Metre straight, / And counted purchase of no renowne, / To heare the Praise sung in a Market-towne” (sig. A7v). Fitzgeffrey scoffs at the lowly reduction of profound matter and denounces the association of “Nature's causes” with the marketplace, where a matter of “so sleight a waight” achieves “purchase.”

The monstrous-birth ballads can be read in the context of the nascent print industry of England that fostered their formal and generic possibility. Their obsession with aberrations of natural form represented by the figure of the monstrous child—the potentially endless deviations from the norm that the human body can take—occurs at a time when the broadside format itself became a target of reform within the Stationers' Company as a bastardized type of print commodity. A majority of the ballads were produced during an important period of increasing regulation in the printing trade, including the 1551 proclamation of Edward VI requiring all printed matter to secure approval in advance, the formal charter of the Stationers' Company in 1557, Queen Elizabeth's injunctions of 1559, and the 1566 Star Chamber decree expanding the powers of search and seizure of printers in their policing of illegally printed materials.²⁵ The commercial trade in ballads was especially hard to regulate due to its small size and quick printing time; printers of ballads were repeatedly fined in the book of records kept by the wardens of the company for “disorderly printing,” meaning either piracy or failure to register a group of ballads that they had sold. The single-sheet broadside was relatively cheap and easy to produce. It was also sold primarily in wholesale until well into the seventeenth century, mostly to itinerant chapmen. Where the English and Latin stock institutionalized entire classes of books as valuable commodities that secured financial reward for many printers, no ballad stock was ever established.²⁶

To compensate for anxiety about its form of production, the monstrous-birth ballad associates its own form with the amendment of the illegitimate birth it depicts as a way of displacing its own anxieties of inauthenticity, using the trope of uncontrolled and illegitimate sexual production. It assimilates the event of the deformed birth into a providential framework by which it is understood to be one of many wondrous natural portents that signify God's omnipotence and warnings of his forthcoming judgment against sinners. Such a gesture places the genre within the tradition of Protestant “providence” tales that documented God's presence on earth through unnatural events unexplained by natural laws and in such a way that would prove the superiority of reformed religion to Catholicism.²⁷ The genre can also be understood as a problem of knowledge in the early modern period, denoting for scholars like Jean Céard, Lorraine Daston, and Katherine Park a shift in thinking about preternatural phenomenon as religious signification (“portents”) to scientific fact (“evidence”).²⁸ Prodigies like monstrous births provide ways to transcend established systems of thought, whether classical accounts by Aristotle, Cicero, and Pliny, or Christian interpretations by Augustine and Aquinas, in favor of new disciplines of fact-based inquiry into the natural world.

The English monstrous-birth ballad was overtly concerned with theological meaning and thus justified its own representation of highly sensational and potentially transgressive content, including explicit pictures, by reinscribing this disorder within the Christian salvation myth. What seems like a breach in nature thus becomes part of God's will; the pain and suffering of the innocent child forms a necessary prelude to the reader's deliverance from the evil it represents. As one writer suggests, “Wherein the goodnesse great of God / we way and set so light: / by such examples callyng us, / from sin both day and night.”²⁹ As miraculous and unnatural signs, the ballads fulfill Christian providence, as described by an author calling himself John D.: “The heathen could forese and saye / That when suche wonders were, / It did foreshew to them alwaye / That some yll hap drew nere. / The scripture sayth, before the ende / Of all things shall appeare, / God will wounders straunge thinges sende, / as some is sene this yeare.” The specific act of printing broadsides, which could be construed as commercial exploitation of suffering on the part of printers and balladeers, becomes an act justified and even demanded by God. Indeed, printing can uniquely perform God's work, as John D. argues:

No carver can, nor paynter maye,
          The same so ougly make,
As doeth itself shewe at this day,
          A sight to make the[e] quake!
But here thou haste, by printing arte,
          a signe thereof to se;
Let eche man saye within his harte,—
          It preacheth now to me.”

The printing press performs what painting and sculpture cannot. Representing the printed ballad as a minister that “preacheth” to each reader individually, according to his or her conscience, the press invokes the authority of the church to buttress its own insecure claims to legitimacy. This appropriation of the institutional authority of the pulpit for the fledgling institution of print is one method by which to reauthorize the institution of print, one that not incidentally draws on a model of divine authority overtly invested in the metaphorics of the Father, and shows how it mediates its own uncertain cultural status by displacing its anxieties of illegitimate print production onto the topos of the monstrously deformed birth.

Shakespeare incorporates the monstrous-birth broadside in part to parody the naive association of print with truth by the peasant class,³⁰ but also, echoing the sentiments voiced by Anthony Now Now in Chettle's Kind-Harte's Dreame, to stage exactly the kind of threat to established structures of authority that print undermines through its processes of reproduction and distribution:

MOPSA:
Pray now, buy some. I love a ballad in print, a-life, for then we are sure they are true.
AUTOLYCUS:
Here's one to a very doleful tune, how a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden, and how she longed to eat adders' heads and toads carbonadoed.
MOPSA:
Is it true, think you?
AUTOLYCUS:
Very true, and but a month old.
DORCAS:
Bless me from marrying a usurer!
AUTOLYCUS:
Here's the midwife's name to't, one Mistress Taleporter, and five or six honest wives that were present. Why should I carry lies abroad?

(4.4.258-69)

The monstrous-birth ballad here conflates unnatural birth with the unnatural breeding of money in usury, both instances of reproduction out of control.³¹ Typical of many “wondrous” accounts found in broadsides that Shakespeare himself might have seen, this one has eyewitnesses who vouch for its truth value. Moreover, as Maurice Hunt notes with relation to the concept of labor in the play, the midwife's name puns on the process of birthing and publishing (“Taleporter/Tailporter,” 355). The midwife is a “tale” porter in the sense of one who spreads gossip orally, with associations again of an untrustworthy feminine oral network. Autolycus appeals to this Mistress Taleporter as an oral authorization of the truth of his printed ballad, suggesting within the logic of the play (and of course through the satire of the scene) that the printed broadside, like the child as “copy,” needs an authorizing structure but that this structure itself—the word of woman—is woefully inadequate to guarantee the truth of its printed content, figured here explicitly as the offspring brought to the print marketplace by a midwife.

The introduction of a different commercial genre like the monstrous-birth broadside into Shakespeare's play implitcitly raises questions about the play's own generic status. When these broadsides depict monstrous births and midwives in the process of making “tales,” they draw specifically on a connection between biological and mechanical modes of production, between the worlds of nature and of art. It is indeed not surprising that The Winter's Tale filters the question of its own generic status through the concepts of bastardy and hybridity during the debate between Perdita and Polixenes in act 4 about the “gillyvor” flower, or “nature's bastard.” Perdita doesn't allow the gillyvor in her rustic garden because of its dangerous hybridity, vowing that she will “not put / The dibble [spade] in the earth to set one slip of them; / No more than, were I painted, I would wish / This youth [Florizel] should say 'twere well, and only therefore / Desire to breed by me” (4.4.99-103). She equates hybridity with deceptive artifice of a sort that is inappropriate for a pure pastoral heroine like herself, though this disdain entails a certain amount of irony in the context of Perdita's and Florizel's double disguises—Perdita's ignorance of her own parentage and Florizel's disguise of his, plus their costumed impersonations of Flora and Doricles, respectively. Polixenes, however, defends the “pied” gillyvor flower, arguing that:

                              nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean; so over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race.
.....Then make your garden rich in gillyvors,
And do not call them bastards.

(4.4.89-95, 98-99)

Polixenes's language of genetic engineering celebrates what he himself will soon reject—the discovery of his own noble son's wish to “marry” Perdita, a member of that “wildest stock.” According to Polixenes, the gillyvor provides a positive model of hybridity, not one that deserves denigration as a bastard. But the language of bastardy in this exchange clearly echoes the high tragic consequences of bastardy in the first three acts, filtered here through the lens of the humanist débat tradition. The exchange between Perdita and Polixenes uses bastardy to evaluate artistic form, echoing (as Harold Wilson and others have noted) a passage from George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie (1589) that uses the gillyvor flower as a way of illustrating his version of the art/nature interaction where the artist is like a gardener.³² Polixenes becomes an apologist for the mixing of categories by deconstructing the art/nature binary.

The “gillyvor” speech is a self-conscious attempt in the play to question the purity or impurity of art. The “pied” mixing of categories here reverses the paradigm in Hamlet where art holds up a mirror to nature, suggesting that Shakespeare is conscious of occupying a different aesthetic register in this later play. Within contemporary debates on the subject, Philip Sidney provides the most useful terms for understanding the relation of mixed categories to generic form in his Apology, where he downgrades drama that takes abundant liberties with conventions of representational reality. Sidney scorns a play that can stage “three ladies walk[ing] to gather flowers and then [asks us to] believe the stage to be a garden” before abruptly representing a “shipwreck in the same place.” His criticism of drama engaged in the “mingling of clowns and kings” would perhaps extend to most of Shakespeare's plays, but he singles out for criticism the genre of “mongrel tragicomedies” that “match hornpipes and funerals,” interestingly using the same language of crossbreeding that Shakespeare uses in act 4 to discuss the hybridity or bastardy of artistic form.³³ The logic of the “gillyvor” analogy in Shakespeare, then, equates tragedy with the “bud of nobler race” and more mixed comedy with the “wildest stock.” The pastoral mode of the sheepshearing festival, highlighted by the presence of the shepherd and the costumed youths Flora and Doricles, is the genre of mediation between the two, an appropriate role for a genre regarded by Renaissance theorists as the earliest literary type from which its “offspring” tragedy and comedy emerged.³⁴

But if the pastoral mode at the heart of The Winter's Tale cites the Edenic origins of drama itself, this space is haunted by the figure of Autolycus as a figure of contamination of the pastoral, not least through his printed broadsides. He is aligned with the new potential of print to undermine existing authoritative structures, and the printed broadside he introduces troubles the authenticity of pastoral as the original father of the genre and challenges the ideology of closure offered by Leontes and Paulina in proposing the press as an instrument of regulation of sexual reproduction. This highlights the importance of print and the question of its status as labor—whether it can be considered as an artistic technique or merely a machine. The presence of the dialectical model of print and paternity in the play depends, that is, on historically determined conditions of seventeenth-century England, including the increased circulation of printed matter in everyday life, technological innovation that makes possible new kinds of knowledge, and the role of mechanized labor as a mode of production associated by Marx with the increasing reification and rationalization of the external world.

The play's generic status as a tragicomedy, perhaps the only true tragicomedy in Shakespeare's plays,³⁵ can be seen in part as a function of the intersection of print and paternity we have been tracing. This relation might be understood as a change in modes of production (the printing press) that reifies natural relations (sexual procreation) in a process that Fredric Jameson describes as the “analytical dismantling of the various traditional” unities into their constituent parts in order to reorganize them “into more efficient systems which function according to an instrumental” logic (227). The press itself, considered as a social force of reification, not only opens up the possibility for imagining biological reproduction through the lens of the mechanical labor of print, but also anticipates the divisions and structural fragmentation of the play. The structure of mutual anxiety in the relationship between print and paternity, in this sense, exposes the ideal of technological rationalization of natural reproductive relations as a newly available cultural fantasy of Jacobean society that demands new forms of cultural expression.

At the time when Shakespeare composed The Winter's Tale, tragicomedy was the dominant genre on the London stage, spurred by John Fletcher's rewriting of Guarini's Il Pastor Fido in The Faithful Shepherdess. Fletcher's English defense of the genre picks up the classical definition of depicting both “familiar people” and the gods, adding that “tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy.”³⁶ In staging two real deaths, The Winter's Tale perhaps favors Sidney's definition over Fletcher's, by emphasizing a “mongrel” form of construction as a tragicomedy through the appearance of figures like Time and the bear that eats Antigonus, as well as in the relative autonomy of its constituent parts.³⁷ The multiple genres of the play appear as a series of separate and relatively distinct modes, so that the tragic ethos of Sicilia, for instance, contains only one brief exchange that could be considered tangential comic relief (2.1.1-32), and the spectacle of Hermione's reanimation achieves the status of an autonomous theatrical set piece, a status emphasized by nineteenth-century directors who staged it separately as an interlude.

The final two scenes exemplify this fragmentation in modes of representation, contrasting the highly mediated narrative mode of 5.2 with the direct revelation of the play's final, visual-oriented interlude. Shakespeare in 5.2 stages the recognition scene between Leontes and Perdita indirectly as a mediated narration by Autolycus and a series of courtiers who rush in and out with breathless excitement about the scene they have been privileged enough to witness. Their language is peppered with words like “amazedness” and “wonder,” and they deliberately construct their “news” of the paternal reunion between Perdita and Leontes in relation to the generic mode of the broadside ballad, explaining the otherwise inexplicable presence of Autolycus in the scene: “such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it” (5.2.23-25). “This news, which is called true, is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion,” another courtier adds (5.2.27-29). Shakespeare acknowledges the affinities of his own “tale” in The Winter's Tale with the “old tales” of yore and as more “wondrous” than the very ballads that Autolycus has just offered for sale several scenes earlier.³⁸ But the mode of narration depicts, as the Third Gentleman says, something that “cannot be spoken of” (5.2.43)—that is, a scene beyond the powers of language to describe even though description remains the only means of expression available. With the introduction of the commercialized and exaggerated pathos of the printed ballads, which Shakespeare simultaneously acknowledges and distances himself from in the play, the most emotionally charged scene of human interaction must be staged as inaccessible. The numerous references by the narrators in the scene to the world of “wonder” and the ballad also remind the audience that what they are witnessing is a highly mediated form of representation.

Scene 5.2 achieves the most important reunions of the play: Leontes discovers that the strange but beautiful girl who has arrived in Sicilia is actually his daughter; Polixenes and Leontes heal their sixteen-year rift; Florizel is reconciled to his father as well as to Leontes; Camillo is welcomed back to Sicilia; and missing details of events, such as the story of Antigonus and the storm, are discovered. Even more than the final scene of the play, which actually leaves certain threads unraveled (Leontes and Hermione, for instance, never actually speak to each other), 5.2 provides the comic reunion and recuperation from the potential tragic loss introduced in the first three acts. Most importantly for our purposes, it is the moment of the recuperation and reunion of father with child. Because Shakespeare stages the scene in such a highly mediated fashion, however, he ironizes the paternal fantasy of authenticity based on print by using a print-related frame to represent the return to paternal fullness. Where Mamillius in act 2 provides a means of direct examination of the “copy” under the lens of paternal authentication and legitimization, here the father-and-child relation can be realized only through mediated stage narration by hitherto unknown characters and one (Autolycus) whose authority and legitimacy are tainted by print. The genre of the broadside challenges the dramatic representative mode at the moment that the play successfully reunites father and daughter and brings unity to its central plotline.

The final scene, in which the statue of Hermione is awakened through the reanimation of Leontes's faith (and a touch of music), moves in exactly the opposite direction of 5.2, as if to reexamine the potential of unmediated dramatic representation in the wake of the disturbance to the play by the printed broadside at the level of genre. Shakespeare returns to a directly visual theater, though the scene also announces itself as a source of “marvel” and “wonder” (5.3.68). Here, however, it is “silence” as opposed to forms of print that expresses such wonder (5.3.21). Paulina, as if in direct response to the previous scene, explains why she chooses to stage the statue scene in the way she does: “That she is living, / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (5.3.115-17). The fictional spectacle of the statue coming to life again, staged through the visual mode of sculpture, allows for apprehension as truth in a way that narratives—specifically those of Autolycus—cannot. But, of course, the play is an old tale, and Paulina's comments draw attention to the need for a specific mode of visual dramatic representation in order to ring true and to achieve authority.

The statue scene defines this authority against the inauthentic wonder of the broadside ballad by retelling the Pygmalion myth, as Leonard Barkan has masterfully explained. But where Ovid depicts a masterful sculptor who can tap into the potential life of stone and thus animate his creation, here the sculpture of Hermione is nonidealized and “wrinkled” (5.3.28). Paulina justifies the wrinkles as products of the “carver's excellence” (5.3.30), redefining artistic value in terms of mimetic authenticity rather than, as in Ovid, as an idealized form that is so unspoiled in its purity that Pygmalion fears that “sum blacke or broosed print / Should come by touching over hard.”³⁹ Such a gesture says something about the fantasy of print-based paternity that Paulina herself introduces into the play, since Hermione's statue is a fixed form that can accommodate change over time and that “rebuke[s]” Leontes as “more stone than it” (5.3.37-38). The scene's focus on the feminine aspects of reanimation that resemble a new birth, overseen by the midwife figure of Paulina and allowing the reunion of mother and daughter, emphasizes what Janet Adelman and others have noted as the maternal force of recuperation in the play.⁴⁰

But the feminine forces of recuperation still depend on Leontes as the representative of law to legitimize the “spell” of Paulina, whose defense of her magic raises the specter of its illegitimacy (5.3.104-106). By proclaiming, “If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating,” Leontes legitimizes the spectacle of the statue's awakening (5.3.110-11). This “lawful magic” is also the space of generic negotiation between the illegitimate and the formal which pushes the play finally beyond the fantasy of printing as a legitimating device for paternal production. Its feminine strength reappropriates the positive valences of motherhood from the inhuman printing press itself, but the model of the wrinkled statue also accommodates the fixed form of representation (whose highest art is sculpture) with the synchronic change that can register the deformative hand of time. Hermione's rebirth is not monstrous, but it is a birth in which youthful features have been stretched and marked up. As sculpted by the Italian sculptor Giuilo Romano (one of the few contemporary persons named in Shakespeare), she is also an imported artifact from that most cutting-edge nation of formal literary innovation, Italy. Her youthful/aged hybridity and defiance of theatrical conventions (where characters who die stay dead) justify the hybridity of tragicomedy as a mode of theater, gesturing beyond the anxiety-producing dialectic of print and paternity associated with Leontes and the court's attempt to regulate both sexual and textual reproduction. Hermione represents the triumph of live theater, present and in the flesh on stage, over the cheap miracles of the popular broadsides. In this triumph, the court's misplaced desire to use the printing press as a guarantee of paternal legitimacy is safely returned to the institution of the theater itself.

Notes

1. Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, ed. Orgel. All subsequent citations are to this edition. Citations of other texts by Shakespeare refer to Shakespeare, Complete Works.

2. The “mould” was an iron device into which molten lead was poured to make letters. The “frame” was a wooden storage unit for sets of matrices (pieces of type) and punches (steel dies) which the compositor used in setting pages of typeface. Both terms are explained in Moxon 134-42 and 30-33, 401, respectively. Moxon cites “matter” as a technical printing term (347), and the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives examples of “copy” (s.v. 9a) as related to print practices in the sixteenth century.

3. See, for example, Saunders 139-64. For an account of how authors “reproduced this stigma in published works as a way of safeguarding class distinctions and at the same time displaced it onto sexual ideologies that reinforced the writers' masculine authority,” see Wall 17.

4. Jeffrey Masten provides an influential account of this dialectic in tracing the emergence of authorship as inextricably bound with discourses of paternity and political authority in early modern England; see Masten.

5. The printing industry exemplifies for Marx the problem of the division of labor, since in gradually dissolving the guild trade in which apprentices advanced through the ranks to higher positions, the printing machine creates positions for young boys who are largely illiterate to spread sheets of paper under the machine, never progressing to a better-paying job. See Marx 615.

6. Dante, The Divine Comedy, Vol. 2, Purgatory, trans. Mark Musa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 270. Quoted in Andréoli 17.

7. For James I's statements about paternity as a principle of government, see James I 65. The domestication of absolutist claims through the family in Stuart England is discussed in Goldberg. On Filmer and patriarchalism within the context of seventeenth-century English political theory, see Schochet.

8. See, for example, Kahn.

9. According to Cyprian Blagden, the first female wasn't apprenticed to the printers' guild until 1666, though it was a common practice for women to inherit print shops from their husbands. See Blagden 162. On the gendered division of labor in the printing shop, see de Grazia 87-90. For accounts of women's participation in the print trade before the Restoration, see Orgel 72-73 and Bell.

10. B. J. Sokol has found, for instance, that the word “father” appears 57 times and is the most common substantive in the play, excluding pronouns and proper names, followed in rank by “time” (49), “son” (40), “daughter” (32), “brother” (20), and “mother” (13) (Sokol 42). Peter Erickson devotes an essay to “patriarchal structures” in The Winter's Tale, arguing that the play refashions a “brutal, crude, tyrannical” concept of patriarchy into a more “benign” one modeled on feminine nurture and natural bounty (819). His reading is accurate, up to a point, but it depends on a model of paternity as a cohesive force that is disrupted and then revived by an essentializing feminine nature (based on ideas of nature, harmony, and nurturing motherhood), rather than one that employs specific strategies in order to define paternal relations from the start. See Erickson.

11. Interestingly, both James's England and Sicilia experience the death of the first-born male. Shakespeare wrote his play before Prince Henry died of typhoid fever in 1612, but it was performed as part of the celebration of Princess Elizabeth's betrothal to Frederick in late 1612 or 1613.

12. See Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, ed. Orgel, 95; Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, ed. Greenblatt, 2884; and Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, ed. Schanazer, 162. For more on the relationship between the history of arabic numerals, accounting practices, printing, and bookmaking in early modern Europe, see Jaffe.

13. For other accounts of the copy metaphor in the play, see Barkan's analysis of the play's investment in the rivalry between the arts and Hunt's allusion to “copy” as a means of aligning the labor of childbirth with that of writing.

14. See, for instance, Findlay.

15. Huloet [unpaginated], “bastarde hande” entry.

16. The batârde typeface elicited criticism even in the twentieth century for its “extremely untidy” appearance (Isaac 29). See also Isaac xii-xiii, 10, 29, and 31, and plates 13, 22, 24, 29, 30, and 58.

17. Elizabeth was technically considered a bastard, according to Henry VIII's 1536 Succession Act, and James I was subject to the rumors that he was son to his mother's secretary, David Riccio, rather than Mary's husband.

18. Stephen Orgel provides commentary on the political allegory of Hermione's trial in Shakespeare, Winter's Tale, ed. Orgel, 29-31.

19. One account of these changes in the material conditions of authorship (including print) with relation to the legitimacy of the theater itself as an institution is Murray, esp. 16, 35-37, 57-63, and 147-53.

20. For a discussion of the gender connotations of the naming of the parts of the press by Moxon, see de Grazia 82-86. An example of representing printed texts as abandoned children is given by the printer Walter Burre, who describes the text of Beaumont and Fletcher's The Knight of the Burning Pestle as an “unfortunate child … begot and born, soon after was by his parents … exposed to the wide world, who … utterly rejected it” (Beaumont and Fletcher 3). For a discussion of this passage in the context of collaborative authorship, see Masten 21-26.

21. The evolution of authority as a function of representation itself, rather than of classical tradition, is traced in Weimann; Müller argues that numerous institutions were required with the advent of print for the selection and maintenance of texts to ensure their endurance and cultural effectiveness (32-44).

22. Subsequent collections of ballads, such as Rollins, associate the name Autolycus with the printed ballad and with the specific kind of topic with which he is associated.

23. See Agnew 21.

24. See Livingston for a catalog of extant sixteenth-century printed ballads.

25. Reprints of the 1557, 1559, and 1566 documents can be found in Arber 1:xxvii-xxxii, 1:xxxviii-xxxix, and 1:322, respectively. For the 1551 document and an account of the development of the Stationers' Company in the sixteenth century, see Clegg 14-65. See also Blagden 38-46.

26. For a discussion of the ballad partners and the failure of the regulation of trade in ballads, see Jackson xii-xiv.

27. Popular examples of these providence tales include Anthony Munday's A View of Sundry Examples (1580) and Phillip Stubbes's Anatomie of Abuses (1583), as well as parts of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563). For a historical account of the providence tale genre, see Hartman 1-3, 18-25, 39-63.

28. Céard; Daston and Park; and Daston. See also D. Wilson. For a discussion of the monstrous-birth genre as a problem of truth, see Cressy.

29. Mellys. The same sentiment can be found in other examples, including Fulwood; Elderton; and three anonymous accounts: “True Description,” “True Discription,” and “Forme and Shape.”

30. Achinstein discusses the exclusion of the ballads in the Elizabethan and Jacobean process of defining literature and discusses the scene of Autolycus and the peasants as a “dramatization of fears about authors of unacceptable literature” (314).

31. For more on the association between breeding and usury, see Fisher.

32. H. Wilson. Frank Kermode discusses the horticultural analogy of gardens and nature, with reference to The Winter's Tale, in his introduction to the Arden Tempest (xxxv-xxxvi).

33. Sidney 174-75. For an analysis of the play as a response to Sidney, see Frye 56-57.

34. J. C. Scaliger in his Poetices libri septem (1581) describes pastoral as the “most ancient” form of dramatic art, compared with the most recent forms “comedy and its offspring, tragedy” (emphasis added). Quoted in Herrick 125.

35. For consideration of The Winter's Tale as the only authentic tragicomedy of Shakespeare, see Herrick 258-60.

36. Fletcher, preface. On Plautus's influence, see Herrick 1-15.

37. For accounts of the association of the bear with generic classification, see Clubb; Bristol.

38. For examinations of Robert Greene's Pandosto as a popular printed wonder book of the day, of mass production of print as a form of abstraction of human labor to make the printed commodity a “social thing,” and of The Winter's Tale as a rejection of its own origins in popular fiction “but with an insistence that tends to emphasize its own fictiveness,” see Newcomb 753-81, quotation at 772.

39. Ovid 256 [10.278-79]. Leonard Barkan reads the statue scene as a triumph of Renaissance artistry and the fulfillment of Pygmalion's art of releasing the potential life from stone, though he acknowledges in the final paragraph of his essay that the wrinkled statue suggests the victory of Nature over Art in its power of verisimilitude. Nevertheless, he concludes by observing how the scene represents the “ability to crystallize a true essence.” See Barkan 664.

40. The feminine source of positive transformation and recuperation in the play is noted in Barber and Erickson. Carol Thomas Neely argues that the play concludes with “an extended acknowledgement of [women's] power and centrality” (182). Janet Adelman suggests that the play dramatizes the “return of a masculine authority grounded in a benignly generative maternal presence” (194).

For their helpful criticism on earlier versions of this essay, I would like to thank David Bevington, Douglas Brooks, Zachary Cannon, Janel Mueller, Michael Murrin, Sarah Rivett, Josh Scodel, Richard Strier, and the members of the 1999 Renaissance Workshop at the University of Chicago. The two anonymous readers at Renaissance Drama also offered valuable observations and suggestions.

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