SOURCE: Richards, Jennifer. “Social Decorum in The Winter's Tale.” In Shakespeare's Late Plays: New Readings, edited by Jennifer Richards and James Knowles, pp. 75-91. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999.

[In the following essay, Richards maintains that a principal motivating factor in Leontes's paranoid jealousy is his anxiety about social status. The critic examines a number of Renaissance courtesy treatises to show that Shakespeare adroitly recreated a dialectical Jacobean relationship between courtly and common attitudes in The Winter's Tale.]

One of the most difficult problems facing critics of The Winter's Tale is the source of Leontes' jealousy. At one moment in I, ii, Leontes is encouraging his wife, Hermione, to persuade Polixenes to extend his visit (‘Tongue-tied, our queen? Speak you’, I, ii, 28); a few minutes later, he is plunged into passionate doubts (‘To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods’, I, ii, 108). So unexpected is his rage that the search for motivation becomes tempting, even preoccupying. Critics alert to the dangers of character criticism either ignore this temptation, advising us to read his jealousy as a theatrical effect, or avoid the pitfalls of a psychological reading by focusing on the play's interest in the mediacy of language, and the ambiguity of Hermione's words and gestures.¹ In a contribution to this debate, I would like to use the search for motivation as a means to address a more recently identified area of neglect in current criticism: the play's concern with social distinction.² Leontes' rage is motivated by a sensitivity not just to the mediacy of language but to its inability to represent adequately distinctions in rank; and from the moment at which he descends into passionate tyranny, the play forces us to confront his unwavering belief that social distinction exists ‘in nature’.

Leontes' concern with social, as well as sexual, transgression is indicated in his depiction of Hermione as ‘As rank as any flax-wench that puts to / Before her troth-plight’ (I, i, 274-5). As Leontes' pun on ‘rank’ suggests, Hermione's imagined infidelity is socially demeaning. She has forgotten her place in the social order, and has behaved little better than an undisciplined country-girl. But Leontes is not just concerned with Hermione's manners. He also calls attention to the dangers of linguistic familiarity. ‘O thou thing’, he scornfully addresses Hermione:

Which I'll not call a creature of thy place
Lest barbarism, making me the precedent,
Should a like language use to all degrees,
And mannerly distinguishment leave out
Betwixt the prince and beggar.

(II, i, 82-7)

Leontes' sensitivity to linguistic familiarity is twofold. On the one hand, he intuits his own contribution to the collapse of ‘mannerly distinguishment’ through a careless use of language. To name Hermione a ‘whore’, to attribute to her the ‘bold'st titles’ proffered by ‘vulgars’, is to commit cacemphaton or Scurra, the rhetorical figure which George Puttenham translates in The Arte of English Poesie (1589) as ‘foule speache’ and advises the ‘courtly maker’ to ‘shunne’ at all costs if he is to speak decorously, that is, in keeping with his social station.³ On the other hand, though, Leontes is alert to the ambivalence of one linguistic marker of social distinction: he cannot call Hermione a ‘creature of [her] place’—or queen—because to do so is to acknowledge immediately that she is indeed a ‘quean’ or whore.⁴ In this respect, he identifies a new problem, that a term designating high status, rather than confidently denoting its social exclusiveness, alludes to its demeaned opposite. And he prompts a different kind of question in a play often too narrowly defined as ‘courtly’ or ‘aristocratic’: not ‘how can one secure “mannerly distinguishment”?’, but rather, ‘can it be secured at all?’.⁵

Leontes' suppressed punning on the term ‘queen’, and his paranoid interpretation of Hermione's ‘entertainment’ of Polixenes, will probably strike us as evidence first and foremost of the self-feeding and obsessive character of his anxiety. After all, it is Leontes, not Hermione, who is ultimately ‘guilty’ of speaking vulgarly.⁶ Yet, Leontes' rantings, I suggest, should be taken seriously, because they draw attention to the linguistic transgression so characteristic of this and other late plays. Indeed, it is perhaps useful to think of Leontes as a character who has been cast into the wrong play. His commitment to neoclassical standards of decorum—to the suiting of speech to character and status—and to the related ‘moralisation of status terms’ seem curiously out of place in The Winter's Tale, which displays its disrespect for the kind of ‘mannerly distinguishment’ he craves.⁷ ‘Never a man who paid much attention to the requirements of neoclassical decorum when constructing character’, writes Anne Barton, ‘the Shakespeare of the late plays seems to have abandoned even the basic convention by which, earlier, his servants and lower-class characters generally expressed themselves in homely, colloquial, if vivid, prose.’ In The Winter's Tale itself, the rustic characters of its pastoral world ‘dodge in and out of their status-defined, comic roles in ways for which there are no real parallels in earlier plays’.⁸ From the other side, Autolycus, a demoted court malcontent, slips as easily into beggar's weeds and words as he does into the aristocratic costume and ‘court-contempt’ of his erstwhile master, Prince Florizel (IV, iv, 729). Leontes' anxiety may seem to come from nowhere, but it can be explained through Hermione's ambiguous ‘courtly’ display, and even through the action of the play, which consistently confounds his neoclassical tastes.

Of course, to observe merely that Shakespeare transgresses neoclassical standards of decorum in one of his late plays is hardly new, as Anne Barton's work suggests. In fact, Shakespeare's indecorum is a topic well covered in two book-length studies: T. McAlindon's Shakespeare and Decorum (1973) and John D. Cox's Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (1989). These critics may disagree over the intentions of Shakespeare's distaste for decorous hierarchies, but they share a belief that Shakespeare departs from the neoclassical standards set up in the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century courtesy handbooks.⁹ As I will argue, though, these texts are helpful in interpreting the play's sensitivity to the limits of linguistic and social decorum, and also for accounting for its courtly tone. Usually understood to offer a defence of the privileges of the established aristocracy, these ‘elitist’ texts also appeal to a broader audience, and engage in a search not just for a narrow definition of nobility, but for an understanding of a shared ‘humanity’.¹⁰ Courtesy treatises understand that courtly display is already potentially transgressive, indebted as it is to the low, not the high, style of classical decorum. Against these texts, we will be able to see more clearly that The Winter's Tale affirms a dialectical, rather than a fixed, relationship between the ‘low’ and the ‘high’: it explores how the ‘low’ is implicated in the ‘high’ (just as Hermione's courteous actions can simultaneously be read as ‘common’ and ‘queanish’), and also how the ‘low’ and the ‘high’ can grow into one another (just as a ‘queen’ can become a ‘quean’, or conversely, a ‘queen of curds and cream’ can be noble indeed (IV, iv, 161).

I

Such a claim for The Winter's Tale might seem odd in view of the fact that, for many of its critics, it aims only to restore the natural superiority of the aristocracy, and to ‘replicate seventeenth-century notions of hierarchy’. Leontes' refusal to call Hermione ‘a creature of [her] place’, Martin Orkin suggests, depends ‘on a series of implied inscriptions about normative courtly behaviour that distinguishes the courtier from any “barbarous” disregard of hierarchy’, and which are dramatised in the play itself. For example, Perdita's desire ‘to tell’ the snobbish Polixenes ‘plainly’ that ‘The selfsame sun that shines upon his court / Hides not his visage from our cotage’ (IV, iv, 440-2) is received by an audience ‘secure in the knowledge … that she is an aristocrat’. For Rosalie Colie, this ‘conspicuously ill-made’ play never fulfils its offered questioning of the concept of ‘nobility’. In the famous art / nature debate at its heart, we catch a glimpse of a levelling perspective in the argument put forward by Polixenes (and challenged by Perdita) that ‘we marry / A gentler scion to the wildest stock, / And make conceive a bark of baser kind / By bud of nobler race’ (IV, iv, 92-5). But, because ‘Perdita is in fact royal’, Colie insists, ‘Polixenes’ views about grafting are not in fact relevant to his own son's union; and Perdita's hierarchical conception of rank … is confirmed, not challenged, by the ultimate arrangement of the plot’. In the course of the play, Andrew McRae adds, Perdita merely ‘demonstrates in her growth to maturity’ a motif integral to aristocratic pastoral romance—‘the predominance of regal nature over rustic nurture’—which is intended unambiguously to suppress the social aspirations of the ‘middling’ ranks.¹¹

It is difficult to argue against such a perspective when the play so insistently voices the prejudices of its noble characters, and even allows that the demand for ‘mannerly distinguishment’ should be interpreted as a mark of an aristocratic nature, a naturally refined sensibility. Leontes may figure himself as a betrayed ‘everyman’ once he is convinced of Hermione's infidelity (‘And many a man there is, even at this present, / Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by th'arm, / That little thinks she has been sluiced in's absence’ (I, ii, 190-2)), yet he also imagines his discernment as an example of his own aristocratic temper. In the same scene, Leontes perceives that Camillo shares his suspicions, and praises his conceit as above that of ‘common blocks’: ‘Not noted, is't’, he remarks, ‘But of finer natures? By some severals / Of headpiece extraordinary? Lower messes / Perchance are to this business purblind?’ (I, ii, 222-5). Quite simply, men of lower rank do not share his superior insight. For Leontes, Mamillius' illness is itself a sign of the ‘nobleness’ of his nature, a physical recoiling from ‘the dishonour of his mother’ (II, iii, 13-14).

Of course, Leontes' aristocratic insightfulness may be discredited quite early in the play—after all, what he perceives as Camillo's insight turns out to be merely an expression of bewilderment. Even so, a more sympathetic outlet for such views is offered with the character of Polixenes, king of Bohemia. Sensitive to Leontes' mood swings in Act I, Polixenes seeks insight from Camillo with an appeal to his gentility and education: ‘As you are certainly a gentleman, thereto / Clerk-like experienced, which no less adorns / Our gentry than our parents' noble names’ (I, ii, 386-8). In the later pastoral scenes Polixenes' sensibilities will be (credibly) offended at the sight of his son, ‘a sceptre's heir’, courting a mere ‘knack’, the shepherdess Perdita (IV, iv, 416, 425). Polixenes' and Leontes' shared belief in the simple-mindedness, undiscriminating taste and sexual naiveté of the ‘Lower messes’, moreover, is apparently proven by the court malcontent and disguised peddler, Autolycus: ‘My clown, who wants but something to be a reasonable man’, he reflects on his profitable sale of trifles, ‘grew so in love with the wenches' song that he would not stir his pettittoes till he had both tune and words, which so drew the rest of the herd to me that all their other senses stuck in ears—you might have pinched a placket, it was senseless’ (IV, iv, 601-6). So ‘senseless’ are the rustic ‘herd’, he suggests, that they are susceptible to his (and other disguised courtiers') commercial and sexual exploitation.

Perdita's recovery, discussed in V, ii, seems not only to affirm an essentialist conception of ‘nobility’ but to offer a correct interpretation of gentle manners. In contrast to Leontes, who misreads Hermione's courtly ‘entertainment’ as common and unqueenlike, the Third Gentleman accepts Perdita's ‘affection of nobleness’ as a sign of her innate gentility in spite of her rural appearance (l. 36). Such a reading seems to be reinforced a moment later, through the reference of the newly ennobled Clown to his ‘preposterous estate’ (l. 142), to his new status as a ‘gentleman ‘born’ (l. 130).¹² We laugh at his naive assumption that his clothes make him a gentleman: ‘See you these clothes? Say you see them not, and think me still no gentleman born—you were best say these robes are not gentlemen born?’ (ll. 126-9). His short-sightedness appears as a poor and revealing imitation of the displayed ‘court-contempt’ of Autolycus, disguised as Florizel, when he confronts the Shepherd and Clown earlier in the play: ‘I am a courtier. Seest thou not the air of the court in these enfoldings? Hath not my gait in it the measure of the court? Receives not thy nose court odour from me?’ (IV, iv, 725-9).

The Winter's Tale, then, seems to insist on ‘mannerly distinguishment’ in aesthetic terms; it appeals to the ‘bifurcation’ of audience—which Eduardo Saccone describes as integral to aristocratic culture—into those who ‘belong’ to a courtly ‘club’ because they know how to read its signs, and those who are merely its admiring ‘victims’.¹³ Shakespeare's sensitivity to the refined tastes of an aristocratic audience is arguably present in earlier comedies, most notably A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labours Lost.¹⁴ Such rank-consciousness is marked spatially in the conclusion of The Winter's Tale. As Orkin observes, in V, ii, the newly ennobled Clown and Shepherd, and demoted Autolycus, significantly ‘are left outside, when, in the final scene, the courtiers go inside, to the home of Paulina’. ‘[W]hatever the “discoveries” or assertions of maturity attained in the home,’ he adds, ‘these are also hereby presented as implicitly possible only for the aristocratic body’, that is, the appreciation of Hermione's living ‘statue’ as ‘aristocratic, “high”, classical’ art (p. 16). In a world in which courtly status is defined partly by proximity to the body of the monarch, the Clown's and Shepherd's exclusion provocatively undermines their new kinship to Leontes. But they are also ‘outsiders’ in a different sense, for they are too simple-minded to appreciate genteel culture. Their attempt to define themselves as ‘insiders’, as ‘gentlemen-born’, is revealed to be a ‘preposterous’ miscomprehension of the natural order which insinuates their distance from the real nobility.

Even so, it is still important to consider the extent to which Shakespeare presents a glib defence of ‘natural’ nobility in this play. For alongside the self-confidence of the aristocrats, it invites us to question the quality of their insights, and the ease with which they interpret the world around them, suggesting that Alison Thorne's argument in this collection, concerning the hermeneutic complexity of Cymbeline, applies equally to The Winter's Tale. We are asked, for example, not only to discredit Leontes' superior perspicuity, but to observe the dramatised mistaken readings of other characters (for example, Antigonus' misinterpretation of Hermione in his dream in III, i). The play also cultivates in its audience an awareness of its own susceptibility to misreading. We may be puzzled by Leontes' sudden jealous passion and by the ambiguity of Hermione's playful engagement with Polixenes, and we will probably find ourselves uncomfortably uncertain of the motives of Perdita's suitor, Prince Florizel. In view of such interpretative anxieties, is it not significant that we, like Autolycus (and unlike the Shepherd and Clown), are also excluded from Perdita's discovery towards the play's conclusion? And that though in contrast to the Shepherd, Clown and Autolycus we do make our way into Paulina's home at the end, we find ourselves, like the humiliated Leontes, to be the admiring victims of Paulina's ‘trick’? The only knowledge we do possess with any certainty is that Perdita is nobly born, but this does not mean that she is innately noble. It is significant, as Orkin suggests, that the discovery of Perdita's royal identity takes place off-stage, but not for the reasons he offers. Rather than having the satisfaction of seeing the characters realise what we already know, we are invited instead to consider their responses to this revelation. How it is possible, for instance, that so self-evident a ‘queen’ could have been earlier dismissed as an ignoble, although beautiful, ‘queen of curds and cream’?

Shakespeare's invocation in The Winter's Tale of the experience of being ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ invites us to reflect more carefully on its presumed courtly elitism or exclusivity. Aristocratic culture is usually understood to be ‘exclusive’ in its dependence on ‘mannerly distinguishment’ between courtiers and clowns, and the gentle and the ungentle. It is also often presumed to be uncritically bound to the ‘hegemonic coherence of the ideology of social rank’ integral to the Elizabethan and Jacobean courts.¹⁵ The task of the modern critic, who is historically ‘outside’ its cultural discourse, then, is to expose a text's elitism, and its concomitant appropriation of theories of natural right. Derek Attridge begins his subtle reading of Puttenham's Arte, for example, with a recognition of his own critical short-sightedness and the relinquishment of the ‘illusion’ of ‘standing outside the field that provides the structures to [his] thought and writing’.¹⁶ At the same time, though, he recognises the possibility of reading between the lines—of discovering ‘much more than the writer's conscious intentions’—in an earlier text. In relation to the Arte, historical distance allows Attridge to explore the text's contradictions and to expose Puttenham's restricted and unthinking application of the adjective ‘natural’ to aristocratic taste. As he argues, in the Arte ‘Decorum is what comes “naturally” not to all humanity but to an elite; and members of that elite can be identified by their “natural” sense of decorum. What comes naturally to the majority, who are ignorant and inexperienced, is not truly natural’ (p. 269). Yet such an approach in general does not adequately recognise the critical capacity of early modern texts.¹⁷ In the case of the courtesy treatises which are seen to disseminate standards of decorum it is insufficiently attentive to the ways in which they qualify such stock notions as ‘natural’ nobility and ‘mannerly distinguishment’, or to the way in which they recognise how the outsider to aristocratic culture—the rustic clown—is, in some sense, already inside. In the case of The Winter's Tale, it is insensitive to the way in which it confounds decorous tastes and explores the gap between the language of status and the social mobility which characterised the reality of early modern England. It is also insensitive to the fact that the play already contains its own distancing tactic in its allusion to off-stage action.

II

To understand Shakespeare's exploration of the limits of ‘mannerly distinguishment’, it is helpful to turn, as McAlindon has suggested, to the ‘so-called courtesy books’, and especially to Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier (trans. 1561), Stefano Guazzo's Civile Conversation (trans. 1581) and James Cleland's The Institution of a Young Nobleman (1607) (p. 4). These courtesy treatises, McAlindon argues, inculcate in their readers a sensitivity to ‘class or office’, and to the decorous conception of ‘the relationship between man and name or title’ as it is expressed in speech and dress (p. 9). In Book V of the Institution, for example, Cleland advises the young nobleman to ensure that his ‘speech’ is not ‘popular’ since his ‘qualitie [is] above the common’, and he also urges him ‘to put a distinction betweene [his] discourses and a Scythians, a Barbarians or a Gothes’, adding that ‘it is a pitty when a Noble Man is better distinguished from a Clowne by his golden laces, then by his good language’.¹⁸ Treatises such as Cleland's, John D. Cox notes, display a revived taste for the stratification of styles according to classical decorum, and also ‘the emergence of a confident English high style’ (p. 57). Alongside the development of English to accommodate Cicero's ‘magnificent, opulent, stately and ornate’ grand style,¹⁹ we find the ‘eloquent dismissal’ of medieval and Protestant plain speech or sermo humilis (p. 52). In contrast to Hugh Latimer, who, writing in the 1550s, could proudly identify himself as the son of a ‘yeoman’, and compare preaching to husbandry, humanist writers in the 1560s such as Thomas Wilson, associated more closely with the centralised Tudor court, distance themselves from their humble backgrounds. In The Arte of Rhetorique, for example, Thomas Wilson—the son of a yeoman farmer—places ‘linguistic solecisms … in the mouths of anonymous “country fellows” who blunder about awkwardly in his anecdotes before their social betters’ (p. 52).

But what exactly is ‘courtly speech’? The examples just given imply that it is spoken by members of the aristocracy, and that it is ‘ornate’ and ‘stately’. Such an account, however, is hardly adequate. For instance, Cleland may insist that ‘[s]peech is the image of the minde, and messenger of the heart’, and invite us to imagine that a gentleman's language reflects his innate gentility (sig. Z4^v). Yet, in the same treatise, he insists that nobility is a virtue which is ‘husbanded’ through education rather than inherited, so that it is not clear whether courtly speech is spoken naturally by the well born, or whether it is a standard of English acquired artificially, alongside gentility itself, through study and practice. Any decorous understanding of courtly speech, which takes into consideration the rank of the speaker, then, is undermined by the disputed definition of ‘nobility’ in such treatises. In addition, we might note that courtiers were expected to use the full range of available styles, and were restricted partly by context and intent.²⁰

More confusingly, though, courtesy writers are unexpectedly united in their formal description of ‘courtly’ speech in the terms of the classical ‘low’ style.²¹ Cleland's description of a gentleman's language stresses its prosaic rather than stately qualities: it should be ‘plaine and perspicuous, as flowing from a natural fountaine of eloquence’, he explains, so that it can be ‘understood as wel as the common talke of the village, and pearceth and perswadeth the heart of the hearer besides’ (sig. Aa^r-v). He echoes the advice of Castiglione in his preface to the Courtier to choose words from ‘commune speach’,²² and of Guazzo's Annibale in Civile Conversation, ‘to proceede in common talke simply and plainly, according as the truth of the matter shall require’.²³ The model for gentlemen, I suggest, is not Cicero's grand, but rather his ‘restrained and plain’, orator who follows ‘ordinary usage [consuetudo]’ (Orator, xxiii. 76), and who differs from untrained speakers only to the extent that his ‘natural’ style is premeditated, and aims at a ‘careful negligence [neglegentia diligens]’ (Orator, xxiii. 78).

Attridge's comments on the aristocratic appropriation of ‘naturalness’ are best understood in this context. For upwardly mobile Elizabethan and early Jacobean writers were committed to creating in English a classical plain courtly style which would replace the native sermo humilis, and provide an elite form of discourse. There is a great difference, for instance, between the native idiom of the mid-Tudor preacher Hugh Latimer and the cultivated plain style of the courtier-poet Philip Sidney. Sidney himself wanted to ensure that we do not forget this distinction. In his pastoral romance Arcadia he roughly dismisses the rustic character Dametas, a ‘most arrant doltish clown’, who wins the admiration of the foolish King Basilius because he expresses himself ‘with such rudeness, which he interpreted plainness—though there be a great difference between them’.²⁴ Sidney might well concur with Attridge's wry comment on Elizabethan decorum that ‘[w]hat comes naturally to the majority, who are ignorant and inexperienced, is not truly natural’ (p. 269), and he might also see the relationship between courtly speech and sermo humilis as constitutive of a natural order, led by a hereditary nobility. And yet, that same relationship between courtly speech and the low style also threatens any attempt at ‘mannerly distinguishment’ and the concomitant creation of a natural order, because it evokes the quite distinct search for a general conception of ‘humanity’ which finds its roots in natural law. After all, sermo humilis, as the idiom of ordinary people, betokens not simply ‘their’ low social degree, but ‘our’ shared innate possession of the ‘seeds of virtue’, the capacity for speech, reason and judgement which distinguishes us from animals, not one another.²⁵ Even Sidney's Arcadia includes two ‘cultivated’ shepherds, Strephon and Claius, who are ‘beyond the rest by so much as learning doth add to nature’ (p. 83).

The connection between sermo humilis, courtly speech and natural law is apparent, for instance, in Guazzo's Civile Conversation. It is true that Annibale, its main speaker, insists on the observation of decorum; he recognises, for example, that a gentleman is ‘so much the more esteemed of, by howe muche our Civilitie differeth from the nature and fashions of the vulgar sorte’. Yet, a moment later, when prompted by Guazzo to explain how a gentleman can speak sincerely and eloquently, he advises that ‘a man ought to proceede in common talke simply and plainly’, and proceeds to offer a rather unexpected model:

if you consider how in Villages, Hamlets, and fields, you shall find many men, who though they leade they life farre distant from the graces and the Muses (as the proverbe is) and come stamping in with their high clouted shooes, yet are of good understanding, whereof they give sufficient testimonie by their wise and discreet talke.

(sig. G8^r-v)

‘[Y]ou cannot denie’, he adds, ‘but that nature hath given and sowed in us certaine seedes of Rhetorique and Philosophie’, which we need to develop with the help of art or study (sig. G8^r). Civility depends on the cultivation of this native gift, just as the tool of the civilised—the art of rhetoric—is a development of effects found in ordinary, unstudied and ‘natural’ speech. Annibale returns to this point a little later, when he recognises that the ‘ornaments and flowers of speache growe by chiefly in the learned, yet you see that nature maketh some of them to flourish even amongst the common sort, unknowing unto them’; ‘you shall see artificers, and others of low estate, to apply fitly to their purpose in due time and place, Sentences, pleasant Jestes, Fables, Allegories, Similitudes, Proverbes, Comptes, and other delightful Speache’ (sig. H3^r).

The contribution of the notion of the democratically distributed ‘seeds of virtue’ to the courtesy tradition has long been neglected, no doubt partly out of the need to establish a quotable and certain source for an elitist aesthetics. Its presence, though, often serves to qualify claims of aristocratic natural right, and to anticipate a more inclusive conception of ‘nobility’. In Castiglione's Courtier, for example, one interlocutor's commitment to this notion will undermine Count Lewis's carefully constructed defence of the innate nobility of the well born. In response to Lewis's insistence that noble men are predisposed to virtue, Gaspar Pallavicino sharply notes that ‘nature hath not these so subtle distinctions … we se many times in persons of most base degree, most high giftes of nature’ (p. 40). Lewis's response in turn is revealing, for he admits that ‘in men of base degree may reigne the very same vertues that are in gentlemen’, but explains that what really matters is the perception of their social status, and presumed superior virtue: ‘[f]or where there are two in a noble mans house which at the first have geven no proofe of themselves with woorkes good or bad, assoone as it is knowen that the one is a gentleman borne, and the other is not, the unnoble shall be muche lesse estemed with everye manne, then the gentleman’. The difficult discussion in Book I of the Courtier, I suggest, is designed to bring us to an acceptance not so much of the importance of heredity per se, as of its continued impact on the popular imagination. As Lewis explains, ‘howe waightye these imprintinges are every man may easily judge’ (p. 41).

The emphasis on sermo humilis will also help us to recognise a second gesture of ‘inclusiveness’, though, by reminding us that courtesy treatises are indebted not just to neoclassical standards of decorum, but to alternative Christian rhetorical tastes, in which the ‘low’ is valued more than the ‘high’. As Erich Auerbach reminds us in a commentary on Augustine's De doctrina christiana, ‘in the Christian context the highest mysteries of the faith may be set forth in the simple words of the lowly style which everyone can understand’, while Christ ‘the King’ chose ‘voluntary humiliation’ by living ‘on earth in the lowest social class’.²⁶ Christian humility may appear to have little in common with courtly modesty, and the kind of disguised artfulness or sprezzatura (aptly translated by Thomas Hoby as ‘disgracing’) promoted by Castiglione, but its influence is felt more readily in other treatises which are indebted to the Courtier. ‘[T]ruely I knowe many men of meane calling’, offers Guazzo's Annibale, ‘who in Gentlemanlike and curteous conditions, in good bringing up, and in all their talke and behaviour excell many Gentlemen. And contrariwise, I am sure you know many Gentlemen more uncivill than are Clownes themselves’ (Book. I, sig. B5^v). Such a doctrine informs Guazzo's insistence on courtly familiarity, or civil behaviour towards others. The second interlocutor, William, may insist that ‘everyone [should] keepe that maiestie and state whiche is due to his estate’, but he simultaneously insists that contempt for others is ‘intollerable’:

for that there is no man that thinketh so vilely and abjectly of himselfe, that he deserveth to be scorned … And if it be a fault to floute such as one knoweth, it is a greater fault to deride those he knoweth not, whiche some rash and insolent fellowes use to doe, who (as the saying is) judging the horses by the stables and furnitures, consider not that oft times under a clownishe coate is hidden a noble and lively understanding.

(Book II, sigs. K2^v-K4^v)

Similar advice can be found in Cleland's treatise, in which biblical echoes are glossed in the margins. Noblemen should be ‘lowly and humble to al men’, he declares in a chapter in Book V entitled ‘Of common behaviour towards all sortes of men’ (sigs Y^v-Y2^r). It ‘is great wisdom for a man to accommodate himselfe and to frame his manners apt and meete for al honest companie, and societie of men’, he explains, and ‘a most rare quality in a Noble man to be common, that maketh him imitate Gods goodnes’ (sigs X4^v-Y^r). Such advice accords with the early modern law of hospitality, ‘a clearly formulated series of conventions’, Felicity Heal explains, ‘that dictated particular behaviour towards outsiders’, and which derives from the Roman ius hospitii and the Stoic tradition of natural law.²⁷

III

Rosalie Colie's somewhat harsh judgement of The Winter's Tale, that it is a play ‘conspicuously ill-made’, is fuelled partly by what she sees as its ‘contradictions and ambivalences’, and partly too by its refusal to pry into motivation (pp. 266, 275). In particular, she observes that in the gillyvor dispute Perdita and Polixenes take views against their own interests: the socially aspiring Perdita argues against intermarriage while the narrow-minded and snobbish Polixenes identifies its virtues. As she adds, no matter how enlightening this debate seems to be, its questioning of social hierarchy ‘is not pursued to its final conclusion’ and it is ‘Perdita's hierarchical conception of rank’ which ‘is confirmed … by the ultimate arrangement of the plot’ (p. 277). I want to suggest, however, that the play does continue its early exploration of social decorum, and that it endorses the very ‘familiar courtesy’²⁸ which Leontes found so disturbing when practised by Hermione, and on two different accounts.

First, the play presents us with one compelling—and easily recognisable—example of ‘familiar courtesy’ in its low pastoral world. ‘Fie daughter,’ the Shepherd reprimands the tardy Perdita, ‘queen’ of the feast, ‘when my old wife lived, upon / This day she was both pantler, butler, cook; / Both dame and servant; welcomed all, served all’, and then in a gesture which makes clear that ‘mannerly distinguishment’ has no place in the practice of proper hospitality, he bids her cease her blushing and introduce their uninvited guests, the disguised Polixenes and Camillo: ‘Pray you bid / These unknown friends to's welcome, for it is / A way to make us better friends, more known’ (IV, iv, 55-66). Secondly, it invites us to pry into motivation, questioning the gap between what we expect from characters, given their social status, and their self-expression, and to inquire into the ideological basis of their assumptions. Rather than affirming the ‘naturalness’ (and rightness) of aristocratic tastes, the play encourages us to explore the impact of perceived status on judgement, and leads us to understand just ‘how waightye [are] these imprintinges’ of social status.

The weight of these ‘imprintinges’ is unexpectedly apparent, I suggest, in The Winter's Tale's troublesome penultimate scene, in which we learn from the conversation of three gentlemen of the Sicilian court that Perdita has been rightly identified as Leontes' lost daughter. ‘That which you hear you'll swear you see, there is such unity in the proofs’, the Third Gentleman begins:

The mantle of Queen Hermione's; her jewel about her neck of it; the letters of Antigonus found with it, which they know to be his character; the majesty of the creature in resemblance of the mother; the affection of nobleness which nature shows above her breeding; and many other evidences proclaim her with all certainty to be the King's daughter.

(V, ii, 31-9)

Most critics seem to ‘see’ what they ‘hear’, concurring in the ‘unity’ of these proofs which confirm not just Perdita's identity, but the natural right of the nobly born. Thus, in this scene we seem to share the characters' attainment of the knowledge we already possess: that Perdita is a princess. But, in contrast to both Pericles and Cymbeline, the long-awaited family reunion takes places off-stage, so that what we are actually experiencing is not the moment of acknowledgement itself, but only its telling. In fact, we do not ‘see’ at all, and this distance from the action should prompt us to reflect on the attitudes of the gentlemen, and, indeed, on our own unwavering perception of Perdita's nobility. The question I want to raise here is not whether Perdita is nobly born, but rather whether she is always apparently innately noble, or whether her innate nobility only becomes apparent once her true status is known. Quite simply, I want to question the basis on which the Third Gentleman is convinced of Perdita's status. For there is something undiscriminating in the parity he assumes between quite distinct kinds of proof, the external witnesses—the mantle, the jewels and the letters—and his impression of her disposition to nobleness. Perdita's ‘nobility’, I suggest, is only fully apparent (or fully registered) once the fact of her royal birth has been uncovered. In effect, the Third Gentleman is akin to the blinkered nobleman Belarius in Cymbeline, whose recognition of the ‘invisible instinct’ which ‘frame[s]’ the two ‘lost’ princes ‘To royalty unlearn'd’ is juxtaposed to his respect for the vicious but high ranking Cloten (IV, ii, 177-9).²⁹

The elevation of Perdita, a ‘queen of curds and cream’, to the status of a queen, should recall, rather than resolve, the problems of decorum we first associated with Leontes' suppressed pun on queen / quean. In I, ii, Leontes' fastidiousness alerts us to the threat posed to ‘mannerly distinguishment’, and to the integrity of noble families, by Hermione's familiar bearing. In a sense, though, Leontes misunderstands the nature of ‘courtly’ entertainment, which, as the Shepherd demonstrates, depends on a degree of ‘familiar courtesy’. In V, ii, his misreading appears to be set right when Perdita is made ‘familiar’, and reintegrated into the royal family. In this instance, her native nobility is recognised in spite of her lowly appearance. Such a reading, however, assumes that Perdita's birthright is consonant with an innate nobility when the play does not clearly affirm this relationship. It may be possible to establish that Perdita is Leontes' daughter from the external witnesses, and even—at a push—from her physical traits, which recall those of Hermione (V, i, 225-6), but this does not establish her innate nobility. As the example of the courteous Shepherd suggests, Perdita may seem noble to the Third Gentleman because of—not in spite of—her lowly demeanour. I suggest that the Third Gentleman is no less prejudiced than Leontes; it is just that the consequences of his ‘reading’ contribute to the comic resolution of the play.

Ultimately, it is the courtly ‘outsiders’, the preposterous Clown and Shepherd, who are the real insiders at the end of the play. Their exclusion from Paulina's home in V, iii, has been seen to imply their outsider status. But it is possible, too, that they do not need to share in ‘our’ final humiliation at the hands of Paulina. Rather than being excluded from an appreciation of Hermione's living statue as ‘aristocratic, “high”, classical’ art, they leave us with an insight into the unreadability of the ‘artificial’ signs of nobleness. In V, ii, when asked by Autolycus to act as his patron at court, and to give a ‘good report’ of him ‘to the prince my master’ (l. 145), the Clown promises to ‘swear … thou art as honest a true fellow as any is in Bohemia’ (l. 152). And then in response to the insistence of his father, who now understands Autolycus' dishonesty, that ‘You may say it, but not swear it’, the Clown offers his newly acquired insight into courtly speech: ‘If it be ne'er so false, a true gentleman may swear it in the behalf of his friend.’ ‘I'll swear to the prince thou art a tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt not be drunk—but I know thou art no tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt be drunk’ (V, ii, 153-61). In contrast to their first, awe-inspired response to Autolycus, their final naiveté indicates rather that they have become ‘insiders’. For they understand that a courtier is also a natural ‘outsider’, one whose outward show is unlikely to be (in Cleland's words) the ‘messenger’ of his ‘heart’.

Notes

1. The Winter's Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford, p. lxxii; Felperin, “‘Tongue-tied”,’ p. 9. See also the discussion of motivation in The Winter's Tale, ed. Orgel, pp. 22-8; cf. Sokol, who argues that Leontes' ‘breakdown closely resembles a real psychological development’, Art and Illusion, p. 32.

2. Orkin, ‘A sad tale’, p. 5.

3. Puttenham, Arte, pp. 253-4.

4. See also Henry VIII, II, iii, 24, and Foakes's discussion in his introduction to this edition, pp. xlviii-xlix. Commented on by Briggs in this collection, p. 217.

5. The Winter's Tale dramatises a question posed in its source, Robert Greene's Pandosto: when does ‘familiar courtesy’ become a ‘too private familiarity’ (Pandosto, ed. Stanley Wells, in The Winter's Tale, ed. Orgel, Appendix B, pp. 235-6)? For a discussion of this see Holderness et al., Shakespeare Out of Court, pp. 205-6.

6. On Leontes' vulgar language see Smith, ‘The language of Leontes’; Barton, ‘Leontes and the spider’; cf. Neely, ‘The Winter's Tale’. See also Evans, ‘Elizabethan spoken English’, and Crane on As You Like It in ‘Linguistic change’.

7. On the ‘moralisation of status terms’ see Lewis, Studies in Words, pp. 21-3. Hall's description of ‘decorum’ as ‘a class concept’ is useful here: ‘a king should speak as a king is expected to, while a commoner should use idioms common to the people.’ (Hall, Renaissance Literary Criticism, pp. 181-2).

8. Barton, ‘Leontes and the spider’, pp. 140-1. (For instances of social mobility see IV, ii, 38-40; IV, iii, 13-14; IV, iv, 9-10; IV, iv, 21-2, 415-17.)

9. McAlindon, Shakespeare and Decorum, p. 16; Cox, Dramaturgy of Power, esp. preface, Ch. 3, and Ch. 10. Cox has an excellent discussion of the ‘popular dramaturgy’ of The Winter's Tale, pp. 207-21. For more recent attention to Shakespeare's indecorum see Palfrey, Late Shakespeare, esp. pp. 14ff.

10. See Whigham, Ambition and Privilege, esp. Ch. 1. For Whigham, courtesy treatises are intended for an elite audience, but are often appropriated by the upwardly mobile. See also Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness.

11. Orkin, ‘A sad tale’, p. 9; Colie, Shakespeare's Living Art, pp. 266, 277; McRae, God Speed, p. 269.

12. See Parker, ‘Preposterous estates’, for discussion of the ‘preposterous’ in Shakespeare.

13. Saccone, ‘Grazia, sprezzatura’, p. 60; see also Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, and Schmidgall, Shakespeare and the Courtly Aesthetic.

14. See esp. the play-within-the-play in Midsummer Night's Dream, V, i, and Love's Labours Lost, V, ii.

15. Wrightson, ‘Estates, degrees, and sorts’, p. 20. On social mobility see Wrightson, English Society, and on changing perceptions of ‘nobility’, James, Society, Politics and Culture.

16. Attridge, ‘Puttenham's perplexity’, p. 257.

17. Patterson, Reading Between the Lines, p. 6; cf. Morse, ‘Metacriticism and materiality’. Shakespeare was himself an ‘outsider’. On his aspirations to gentle status see Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, Ch. 13, and on his low status as a ‘player’ see Barroll, Politics, Plague, Ch. 1.

18. Cleland, The Institution, sig. Aa^v.

19. Cicero, Orator, xxviii, 97.

20. I am grateful to Alison Thorne for reminding me of this point. See Puttenham's discussion of Andrew Flamock's experiments in decorum, Arte, pp. 268-9.

21. See also Trimpi, Ben Jonson's Poems, p. 281 n. 18.

22. Castiglione, Courtier, p. 15.

23. Guazzo, Civile Conversation, sig. G8^r.

24. Sidney, Arcadia, pp. 77-8.

25. See Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, III, i, 2: ‘The seeds of virtue are inborn in our dispositions and, if they were allowed to ripen, nature's own hand would lead us to happiness of life [Sunt enim ingeniis nostris semina innata virtutum …]’. This idea governs Cicero's attitude to rhetoric and civil society: see esp. De Re Publica, De Legibus, I, xxv, 40; II, iii, 8; II, xlii 69. See White, Natural Law, and McCabe, Incest, Drama and Nature's Law.

    I am aware that such an emphasis might be seen by post-structuralist and new historicist critics to imply an essentialist conception of human ‘nature’ (see esp. Dollimore, Radical Tragedy). In response, I would suggest that this criticism springs from a misguided perception of the close association between a nineteenth-century Christian idealism and early modern humanism. For an alternative perspective see Norbrook on ‘the strong critical element’ of ‘rationalistic theories of natural law’: ‘[a] sceptical relativism about claims to an unproblematic “human nature” is placed against a searching, universalizing quest for a more general notion of humanity’ (Norbrook, “‘What cares these roarers for the name of king?’”, pp. 124-5). The place of natural law in the courtesy tradition is discussed in my forthcoming monograph, ‘Courtliness and Rhetoric in Early Modern Writing’.

26. Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 37, 41.

27. Heal, Hospitality, p. 4.

28. I have borrowed the term ‘familiar courtesy’ from Greene's Pandosto; see n. 5 above.

29. See also Cymbeline, IV, ii, 245-52.

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