III. "BE STONE NO MORE"

The literary figure to whom Shakespeare turns to explore such a vexed relation to the world is Ovid's Pygmalion.⁴⁶ For both skepticism and projection join hands to fashion Leontes's misery (e.g., "Your actions are my dreams"). On David Ward's persuasive argument for retaining the punctuation of the First Folio and for remembering the contemporary meaning of "coactive" as "coercive" or "compulsory" (and not merely "acting in concert"), Leontes's speech about "affection" is stressing "the coercive nature of affection," its "action upon the 'nothing' it generates in the imagination" (as Ward parses it, "Affection . . . Thou . . . Communicat'st with dreams . . . With what's unreal: thou co-active art, / And fellow'st nothing" [1.2.138-42]).⁴⁷ In addition, it is through Ovid's Orpheus-Pygmalion sequence—particularly as given the influential contours of Petrarchan linguistic self-consciousness—that Shakespeare can explore the subject's missed relation to that (maternal) object not as a process of doubting alone but as a meditation on the simultaneously productive and aberrant effects of rhetoric—on language conceived not merely as a representation of the world but as a mode of action in the world. As I suggested above concerning Hermione's vain yet truthful swearing of innocence and Paulina's successful yet false swearing of death, such action, precisely by distinguishing the two halves of the play, turns the relation between the subject and the world of which it speaks into a recurrent misfiring. On the one hand, neither saying nor swearing reestablishes the faith in Leontes required for Hermione to live as herself, outside Leontes's "dreams" or beyond the "language" of male fantasy she "understands not." And on the other, when Paulina's words do have effect, they do their work through a lie. That such misfirings as these or Hermione's impossible "Not guilty" are inaugurated by the mere sight of her pregnant body or the sound of her voice I understand as the symptom of a deeply entrenched—though not necessary or inevitable—collusion between the representational and libidinal economies of patriarchal culture.

When the truth of Hermione is the object of representation, representation fails, drawing attention to the opacity of language rather than the clarity of truth.⁴⁸ And when Hermione speaks, something happens that she does not intend: though she intends to persuade Polixenes to stay, her words trigger Leontes's jealousy; though she intends to speak of her innocence, her speech about the failure of "Not guilty" in her case declares her an actor and the scene the space of the theater. That a failed performative still has power to act despite having dislocated language's action from intention becomes vividly clear when the scene ends. For this self-reflexively theatrical trial produces further unintended effects. We hear that Mamillius, "with mere conceit and fear / Of the Queen's speed" in this staged trial, has died (3.2.144-45). And the report of his death becomes, in turn, words with the power to kill: "This news is mortal to the Queen" (1. 148). Hermione's unintended act—the "Not guilty" that produces the effect of theatricality—and the lethal effects that attend the play's reflection on its own fictive enactment darkly underline Shakespeare's attempt to evoke consciously and artistically controlled theatrical effects through Paulina's staging of Pygmalion's statue. That story works through yet another woman's voice to rein in the action of a now-benign theater in which language appears to perform the act it intends: "Music! awake her! . . . descend; be stone no more" (5.3.98-99).

Paulina's imperative to the statue, we should note, is not literally a performative utterance. Rather, her command represents an idea about language as performance. Shakespeare inherits this idea from Ovid's Orpheus and calls it "magic": the dream of a voice so persuasive that it can effect the changes of which it speaks.⁴⁹ It is the dream of a language that, when it acts, "fills up" the grave, makes good our debt to time. Paulina's spectacle of Hermione-as-statue offers more than a meditation on the desire to see in the theater: it becomes a visual analogue for the play's desire for a truly performative language. The long-awaited verbal event—signaled by such performatives as "Not guilty," the incessant taking of oaths, and the search for oracular truth—finds its culminating visual icon in the event of Hermione's "animation." Drawing on verbal and visual fictions, Shakespeare nonetheless accentuates the power of the voice in Paulina's heavily weighted moment of invocation and, eventually, in the muchdesired event of Hermione's speech. Although Leontes declares himself content to be a "looker-on" (1. 85), thus inscribing the audience in the theatrical circuit of his desire, and though Paulina apologizes for the effects of the "sight of my poor image" (1. 57), what everyone waits to hear is Hermione's voice. As the doubters in Paulina's audience demand, "If she pertain to life let her speak too" (1. 113) and "Ay, and make it manifest where she has liv'd, / Or how stol'n from the dead" (11. 114-15). The scene, however, both claims and disavows the Orphic power for which it longs. Availing itself of a language at once oral and visual, this theater seems to "steal" Hermione, like Eurydice, "from the dead." At the same time, we hear a warning, through Paulina, that the Orphic story of life, were it "told . . . should be hooted at / Like an old tale" (11. 116-17).

The acts that words do in the courtroom scene exceed intention and, by so doing, turn the theater into the space of these unpredictable effects. The final scene attempts to control verbal action through Paulina's careful stage management, her magically effective voice. Yet such an attempt may all too easily recall Leontes's disastrous desire to master the world by controlling all language. It therefore does not go unqualified. On the one hand, when Paulina proclaims "descend; be stone no more," a woman's successful voice in The Winter's Tale appears to replace Pygmalion's successful prayer to Venus in the Metamorphoses. On the other, just as Hermione once reminded her husband that even his own language exceeds his control, so now her voice is the one to remind us that the play's seeming animation is only a fiction. Despite the ruse of death, she has "preserved" herself somewhere else (1. 127). Hermione, moreover, says nothing to the man who now longs to hear her speak. She seems poised to speak to him—"Still methinks / There is an air comes from her. What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?" (11. 77-79)—but does not. Leontes's lines should remind us that throughout the Metamorphoses "breath" is the etymological root for Ovid's interest in speaking voices and poetry as "song": Apollo's "breath," the "wind" streaming through Daphne's hair, and the Orphic "vox" telling the story of the statue's animation all derive from the narrator's fascination with the vicissitudes of speech, with the uneasy relationship between voice and mind. For the anima in animation—meaning "the mind," "consciousness," and "breath"—is derived from the Greek anemos for "wind" internal and external to the body.⁵⁰ In this image of the chisel that can "cut breath," Leontes signals his, and the play's, desire for a rhetoric of animation, for a theatrical version of the "l'aura" or "breeze" that blows through the figures of the Rime Sparse or the "breath" that Ovid asks the gods to bestow on his song (1.1-3).

What Hermione does and does not say in this scene tells us something about the cost of that desire. Given the gendered relations of power passed down through literary history as the "air" that seems to "come from her," very much indeed hangs on Hermione's voice. I take the fact of Hermione's silence toward Leontes—and the fact that, after she moves, Leontes never asks her a direct question—to be Shakespeare's way of acknowledging the problems raised by her voice in the first three acts. Nothing she says to Leontes diminishes the force of his projections; the language she "understand[s] not" limits the field of her possible responses; and any answer she makes must still be read by him, a reading she cannot control. This awareness of the limits that Leontes's fantasy places on the stony lady's possible reply stems, in part, from Shakespeare's understanding that, in Ovid as in Petrarch, the stories of Pygmalion and Narcissus are deeply intertwined.⁵¹ Leontes has, of course, always viewed others through the mediating screen of his own form. Observing his son in Act 1, he begins testing his theory about his wife's guilt according to whether or not Mamillius is his mirror: "Looking on the lines / Of my boy's face, methoughts I did recoil / Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreech'd" (1.2.153-55). Even Leontes's admission of culpability in the final scene, prompted when he gazes on the "statue," surreptitiously imports Narcissus's story into Pygmalion's. Repentant though he may be, Leontes still reads Hermione as a version of himself: "does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it?" (5.3.37-38). To Leontes even her stoniness is not "hers." If anything of the world is to return to Leontes that does not stand at the level of his dreams, it cannot do so within the reflexively binary terms proposed by Petrarchan rhetoric. Rather, Paulina's intervention tells us that if Hermione is to be restored to Leontes and not fade away again before the force of fantasy and doubt, it is on the condition that she not respond to his words only, that she not conform utterly to his language and his desire. Therefore a third party (Paulina) must manage this meeting from outside the restrictive frame of Pygmalion's desirous yet annihilating address.

And finally, what Hermione does say—precisely not to Leontes but to her lost daughter—offers a telling index of how constraining have been the terms of that address. What Pygmalion loathes, what his phantasmatic love for his simulacrum pushes aside, Ovid tells us, is not simply female sexuality but "the female mind" ("menti / femineae" [X.244-45]). So one final allusion to the Metamorphoses tells us something about that mind. Hermione's allusion prompts a question that seems never to occur to Petrarch: what does she want? The shift from Petrarchan autobiography to Shakespearean ventriloquism marks a subtly but crucially different return to Ovidian narrative. In The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare animates Petrarchan tropes in order to perform an ethical critique of them, particularly the animating rhetoric of address and its role in Petrarch's story of love and the self. When Shakespeare listens once more to Ovid's female voices, he shifts the emphasis away from the otherness within the self (Petrarch's "exile" of blindness, obsession, and forgetting) to pose, instead, a question: the question of the other's desire. And for a moment that "other"—the Petrarchan stony lady—has something else in mind than "responding" to the speaker whose apostrophe restricts them both ("se risponder savesse a ' detti miei! "). What "moved" Hermione, her last words tell us, were thoughts of Perdita. Turning to a daughter who has already coded herself as Proserpina at the moment of dropping her flowers, Hermione models herself on Ceres as a mother unable to forget her lost, though still living, daughter:

Tell me, mine own,
Where hast thou been preserv'd? where liv'd?
how found
Thy father's court? for thou shalt hear that I,
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserv'd
Myself to see the issue.

(5.3.123-28)

Hermione's question to Perdita—"Where hast thou been preserv'd? where liv'd?"—obliquely recalls Ovid's story of violent rape and maternal grief by making her reason for living the hope of reunion with her daughter.

Where the suspicion of female sexual guilt defines the relation between time and language's action in the first half of the play, in this final scene both are redefined by another story—that of rape and maternal grief. Hermione's allusion to Book V of the Metamorphoses, of course, echoes the title, place, and time of The Winter's Tale. For Ceres's grief over Proserpina's rape brought winter into the world. Golding's translation of that grief brings the story of Ceres closer still to that of the animated statue in Act 5. When the nymph Arethusa tells Ceres why her daughter has vanished, Golding renders Ovid's lines as follows: "Hir mother stoode as starke as stone . . . And long she was like one that in another worlde had beene."⁵² It is left to Shakespeare's Hermione to return from that "other world" of stone in order to be reunited with her Proserpina. Alongside Pygmalion's prayer and Orpheus's suppliant song, then, we must also remember Ceres's curse. In Ovid's text we find yet another story, often less well remembered, about a voice that can bring about the changes of which it speaks. Orpheus's mother, the muse Calliope, tells us that when Ceres saw Proserpina's girdle floating on the surface of the pool, she "reproached all the lands loudly, calling them ungrateful . . . but Sicily above all other lands, where she had found the traces of her loss. . . . She ordered the plowed fields to fail in their trust and spoiled the seed" (11. 474-80). Setting his "old tale" of Leontes's winter in Sicily, Shakespeare invokes but finally turns attention away from the fantasy of the animated statue.⁵³ He thereby suggests that Pygmalion's self-reflexive fantasy so narrowly constricts female speech that there is, quite literally, nothing Hermione can say. Yet by recalling Proserpina's rape and Ceres's powerful reproach, he grants her voice a different authority. Her last words to Perdita fleetingly testify to the violence against the female body that subtends such "old" and "sad" tales as that of an animated statue or the first appearance of winter.

Female voices in The Winter's Tale acquire an oblique but telling power: the power to point out that, in the Ovidian tradition, stories about poetic authority, creativity, or "voice," however purely "poetic" their claims may seem, nonetheless entail violence against the female body. Not necessarily conscious, that violence continues to emerge in the unlikely circumstance of metapoetic or metatheatrical reflection. Challenging Ovidian-Petrarchan tropes for male vocal power when they thwart Leontes's desire to control speech, the tongues of Hermione and Paulina recall Ovid's rhetorically self-conscious narratives of rape, misogyny, and female vengeance that form the background for Orpheus's descent into the underworld. When Shakespeare returns to Ovidian narrative in this play, therefore, he reminds us that if we isolate Pygmalion's story from Orpheus's, or Proserpina's from Ceres's, we fail to notice the ethical dilemmas woven into the very fabric of Ovid's rhetorical self-consciousness in the Metamorphoses. Investigating the causes and effects of rhetorical speech through these seemingly disparate figures, and inviting reflection on the connections between language and sexuality proposed by their interwoven stories, Shakespeare reveals the cost to women of Ovid's foundational tropes for poetic authority. It is in the voices of Hermione and Paulina that we catch something of the sound of that cost. In their voices The Winter's Tale stages a cautionary story about the uncanny returns of cultural inheritance, one that attests to the often unconscious—yet no less lethal—consequences of representing such things as love, voice, and beauty in the Ovidian tradition.

A number of colleagues read and commented on this essay with care and acuity. I would like to thank them here: Ian Duncan, Kevin Dunn, Richard Halpern, William Jewett, Wayne Koestenbaum, Larry Manley, Jeff Nunokawa, Patricia Rosenmeyer, and Katherine Rowe. I owe the inaugural idea for this essay to a conversation several years ago with David Marshall.

Notes

¹ Quotations of Shakespeare's plays follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

² William R. Morse, "Metacriticism and Materiality: The Case of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale," ELH 58 (1991): 283-304, esp. 297.

³ How to read Hermione's silence has been an important question in much criticism of The Winter's Tale.

I am particularly indebted to Kenneth Gross, The Dream of the Moving Statue (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1992), 105-9; and Leonard Barkan, "'Living Sculptures': Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter's Tale," ELH 48 (1981): 639-67.

⁴ For an overview, see Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis & the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale UP, 1986). As Barkan comments of "Diana and Actaeon," Titian turns Ovid's story of Actaeon's visual transgression into a painting that comments on the act of looking at a painting. Actaeon, poised "on the threshold," lifts a curtain to gaze on Diana; therefore "the bath almost becomes a picture within a picture. The result is a powerful identification between the viewer and Actaeon as both participate in the visual, the voyeuristic, and the visionary" (200-201). One could make similar comments about the resonance between Petrarch's many allusions to Ovid's stories about the human voice and the characteristic fiction that a lyric poem is a spoken utterance—particularly in light of its favored trope, apostrophe. Such aesthetically self-reflexive allusions to Ovid's Metamorphoses are not a purely "Renaissance" phenomenon. On Dante's poetically self-conscious appropriations of Ovidian narrative, for example, see Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp, eds., The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante's "Commedia" (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991).

⁵ Barkan, "'Living Sculptures,'" 660.

⁶ Sonnets 77 and 78. For further discussion of the relationship between Ovid's version of Pygmalion and Petrarch's, see my "Embodied Voices: Petrarch Reading (Himself Reading) Ovid" in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz, eds. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994), 120-45.

⁷ I have here modified the translation of Robert M. Durling in Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The Rime sparse and Other Lyrics (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1976) to capture the rhetorically specific sense of the verb lodare, "to praise." Elsewhere in this essay translations of Petrarch are Durling's. Barbara Johnson distinguishes between the two apostrophes in Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" in a way that is useful for reading Petrarch's two sonnets: the first, emotive "if only" lays stress on the first person, and the second, vocative "Pygmalion" on the second person. The typography of Shelley's poem marks this difference as one between "oh" and "O," a difference Johnson allies with the one between Roman Jakobson's emotive function, or "pure presencing of the first person," and his conative function, or "the pure presencing of the second person" (Johnson, A World of Difference [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987], 187).

⁸ "[N]on minus nominis quam ipsius corporis splendore captus" (Petrarch, Prose, ed. G. Martellotti, P. G. Ricci, E. Carrara, and E. Bianchi [Milan and Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1955], 158). Petrarch's anagrams and puns on laurel derive from Ovid's own verbal wit in the story of Apollo and Daphne (Metamorphoses, 1.451ff).

⁹ On epideixis and gender in Petrarchanism, see Joel Fineman, "Shakespeare's Will: The Temporality of Rape" in The Subjectivity Effect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays Toward the Release of Shakespeare's Will (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1991), 165-221; and Nancy Vickers, "'The blazon of sweet beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 95-115.

¹⁰ Quotations of the Metamorphoses follow the text translated and edited by Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1927), though I have made a few silent emendations to Miller's translations.

¹¹The. xv. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso; entytuled Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter, by Arthur Golding Gentleman (London, 1567), 123^r.

¹² The association between the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice and Apollo and Daphne is commonplace. The most influential Renaissance commentator on Ovid's poem, Raphael Regius, claims that Orpheus is Apollo's son, adding that the singer received his lyre from Apollo as a gift (Metamorphoses [Venice, 1556], X.1). The first edition of Regius's commentary appeared in 1492.

¹³ Despite the frequent representation of polymorphous desires in the Metamorphoses, Ovid's narrative almost always brings homoerotic moments such as this one back into the orbit of a controlling heterosexual imperative. Thus Iphis's love for Ianthe, which immediately precedes the story of Orpheus, is refracted through a missing penis; the phallus becomes the sign, therefore, that the love of one woman for another is "more mad" than the love of a woman for a bull (IX.668-797). Similarly, although Orpheus may be the "author" of love for boys, that love is represented as the effect of, and only in relation to, his love for his dead wife; the jury of avenging Bacchic women in Book XI then judge his love again as merely the sign of his feelings about women. Because of this frame (and its repetition in the hands of Pygmalion, Orpheus's surrogate), the song in Book X about the many kinds of transgressive love has little to say about male-male eroticism on its own terms.

¹⁴ Harry Berger Jr. recently argued that a gynophobic and misogynist discourse informs Book X ("Actaeon at the Hinder Gate: The Stag Party in Spenser's Gardens of Adonis" in Finucci and Schwartz, eds., 91-119).

¹⁵ Leontes signals an awareness of this punitive possibility. But he does so in the domestic register, containing the threat no sooner than uttered: "Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed / Thou art Hermione; or rather, thou art she / In thy not chiding; for she was as tender / As infancy and grace" (5.3.24-27).

¹⁶ John Marston, "The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image" in Elizabethan Minor Epics, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 244-52, esp. 244. Citations of Marston follow this edition. On Marston's satire of the language of erotic idealism, particularly in the Petrarchan mode, see William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Their Contemporaries (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1977), 134-61.

¹⁷ For a history of this misogynist tradition, see Barbara Rico's "From 'Speechless Dialect' to 'Prosperous Art': Shakespeare's Recasting of the Pygmalion Image," Huntington Library Quarterly 48 (1985): 285-95. Except for the two works I discuss here—the last act of The Winter's Tale and Petrarch's paired sonnets (77 and 78)—the Pygmalion story is generally not a positive one in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Misogynist diatribes inform it, and the story of prostitution, too, clings to it: John Marston uses Pygmalion to adjudicate between the "wanton" and the "obsceane" (252), and George Pettie's A Petite Pallace (London, 1586) alludes to the story of the statue in overtly misogynist ways. Jonathan Bate, in a book otherwise dedicated to tracing the minutiae of Ovid's presence in Shakespeare's poetry, oddly dismisses the relevance to The Winter's Tale of the misogynist genealogy in Ovid (Shakespeare and Ovid [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993]).

¹⁸ It seems to me no accident that the artist Shakespeare chose for his Pygmalion, Giulio Romano, was known not only as a painter but as a pornographer. The nature of Shakespeare's reference to Romano has been much debated. For a useful summary of the debate as well as an account of a contemporary English conduct book for young women which refers to the excellent work of "Iules Romain," see Georgianna Ziegler, "Parents, Daughters, and 'That Rare Italian Master': A New Source for The Winter's Tale, " Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 204-12. For Romano's notorious, if rarely seen, collaboration with Aretino (the so-called posizioni), see David O. Frantz, Festum Voluptatis: A Study of Renaissance Erotica (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1989), 46-48 and 119-23; and Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1958), 29. As Hartt points out, Romano's prints, though suppressed, were also widely copied and widely destroyed; Frantz notes that when Perino del Vaga and Agostino Carracci imitated Romano, they did so in an Ovidian vein, calling their own versions of the "posizioni" the "loves of the gods" (123). It is the rumor of Romano's work, rather than an actual copy in England, that seems to me important to Shakespeare's reference.

¹⁹ See Janet Adelman's account of dreams of male parthenogenesis and the problem of the maternal body in this play in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (New York and London: Routledge, 1992).

²⁰ For a persuasive reading of the way language violates Philomela as surely as her rape—particularly Ovid's meditation on the severed "lingua" (both tongue and language more generally)—see Elissa Marder's recent "Disarticulated Voices: Feminism and Philomela," Hypatia 7 (Spring 1992): 148-66. My claim about Medusa lies outside the scope of this essay; I take up her story in greater detail in my next book, The Rhetoric of the Body in Renaissance Ovidian Poetry.

²¹Figura signifies in both grammatical and rhetorical registers and designates the material aspects of writing as well. It can specify a written symbol or character or refer to the form, spelling, or grammatical inflection of a Latin word; it is also a rhetorical term for trope.

²²[F]igura, definition 3; see Oxford Latin Dictionary, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1:700.

²³[F]igura, definition 11, OLD, 1:700.

²⁴ Here we should remember that, according to Ovid, Medusa became the Gorgon because she was raped, and her beheading produced the fountain of poetry. Pegasus arose from the Gorgon's blood, and the Heliconian fountain, in turn, arose from the "beating of his feet" (both the horse's feet and the feet of poetic meter). The origin of poetry's fountain is therefore "the blood of the mother," the raped Medusa ( "vidi ipsum materno sanguine nasci. . . est Pegasus huius origo / fontis" [V.259-63]).

²⁵ For an analysis of the role that bodies—especially female bodies—play in the relationship between desire and "the drive to know" in modern narrative, see Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard UP, 1993). Leontes's devotion to speaking about the fantasized "truth" of Hermione's body might usefully be considered part of what Brooks calls "epistemophilia," a project in which we tell stories "about the body in the effort to know and to have it" and which results "in making the body a site of signification—the place for the inscription of stories—and itself a signifier, a prime agent in narrative plot and meaning" (5-6).

²⁶ I adapt the phrase "verbal fetishism" from John Freccero ("The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch's Poetics" in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, Patricia Parker and David Quint, eds. [Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986], 20-32, esp. 22). My understanding of the nature of fetishism in Petrarch and the literary filiation from which it derives differs from Freccero's and is outlined in my "Embodied Voices."

²⁷ Marston, 246.

²⁸ Petrarch uses both female and male Ovidian characters to suggest that he is alienated from his own tongue; the story of Actaeon, as well as of Echo and Daphne, appears in canzone 23 for this purpose. For further comment on Actaeon, see my "Embodied Voices." As we have seen, Ovid no sooner proposes the story of male poetic control over language than he dissolves it; this dissolution subtends Petrarch's poetic self-portrait. Although Ovid and Petrarch after him suggest that alienation from one's own tongue is the condition of having a voice—male or female—in both poets the trope of a female voice appears strategically, as the place in the text where one can hear the greatest strain on such cherished illusions about artistic vocal power as those proposed by Apollo, Pan, Pygmalion, and Orpheus. It is the diacritical function of the female voice, its ironic juxtaposition to such ostensibly "male" fantasies, that is important for understanding Shakespeare's representation of the tongues of Hermione and Paulina.

²⁹ Heather Dubrow has recently argued that we must attend carefully to the complex and often contradictory role of Laura's voice if we are to understand the "relationship among speech, power, and gender" in the Rime Sparse and beyond; see her Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1995), 40-48, esp. 42.

³⁰ J. L. Austin, How to do things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 1 and 6. Austin lists swear (along with such other verbs as promise, give my word, pledge myself) as part of a class of "commissive" performatives in which conventional phrases are deployed to "commit the speaker to a certain course of action" (156-57). Over the course of his lectures, Austin renders problematic his "provisional" performative/constative distinction; he eventually rejects any absolute dichotomy between the two, finding that constatives may well have a performative aspect (91). My point here is simply to note that in The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare is exploring a distinction analogous to Austin's provisional one—between statements that report some state of affairs truly or falsely (in this case, the "state of affairs" in question being Hermione's fidelity) and other, conventional statements (such as "I swear") in which saying and doing explicitly converge. For a study of performatives in Shakespeare with an emphasis on cultural and institutional authority, see Susanne L. Wofford, "To You I Give Myself, For I Am Yours': Erotic Performance and Theatrical Performatives in As You Like If in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, Russ McDonald, ed. (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell UP, 1994), 147-69.

³¹ Since, unlike the audience, the characters in the story can "go and see" the dead body of Hermione, Paulina's lie is dramaturgically more complicated than my presentation of it. Leontes describes scenes that the audience does not observe, and his words give playgoers every reason to believe that he will verify for us the fact of Hermione's death: "Prithee bring me / To the dead bodies of my queen and son. / One grave shall be for both. . . . Once a day I'll visit / The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there / Shall be my recreation. . . . Come, and lead me / To these sorrows" (3.2.234-43). Critics have argued that these lines, coupled with Antigonus's report in 3.3 of the appearance of Hermione's spirit, suggest that when Shakespeare wrote Act 3, he still intended to follow his source, in which the dead wife does not return. Whatever Shakespeare's intentions, the play's refusal to clear up ambiguities about Hermione's possible death and resurrection provides a compelling link between the play and the Orpheus/Eurydice story.

For a discussion of critical responses to the problem of Hermione's death and unexpected revival, see Barbara A. Mowat, The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1976), 77ff and 145, n. 18.

³² In thinking about the relationship between performativity and sexuality, I have drawn on several important discussions: Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex " (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1983); Lynne Huffer, "Luce et Veritas: Toward an Ethics of Performance," Yale French Studies (1995): 20-41; and Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980).

³³ Felman, 94-96, esp. 94. Analyzing performative language in relation to the stories of Don Juan and of Oedipus, Felman's work is equally telling for the central dilemma of The Winter's Tale: the relationship between theatrical representation and the female body or, more generally in Ovidian narrative, between body and voice. Felman writes that "the problem of the human act," in psychoanalysis as well as performative analysis, "consists in the relation between language and body . . . because the act is conceived . . . as that which problematizes at one and the same time the separation and the opposition between the two. The act, an enigmatic and problematic production of the speaking body . . . , breaks down the opposition between body and spirit, between matter and language" (94). She reminds us of Austin's comment that "in the last analysis, doing an action must come down to the making of physical movements with parts of the body; but this is about as true as . . . saying something must . . . come down to making movements of the tongue" (as quoted in Felman, 94).

³⁴ Felman, 82. Austin explores the contingent and context-bound nature of any speech act in "the doctrine of Infelicities" (14-24). Jacques Derrida's critique of Austin constitutes a sustained analysis of "the failure" that is an "essential" risk of performative utterances; see Derrida, "Signature Event Context," first published in Glyph 1 (1977) and translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman in Limited Inc (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988), 1-24.

³⁵ Austin, 16-17.

³⁶ Austin, 22.

³⁷ Derrida, 10.

³⁸ Derrida, 14 and 17.

³⁹ Derrida, 18.

⁴⁰ Felman, 96.

⁴¹ "If one considers the conventionality of all performative utterances (on which Austin often insists), can it really be said that the chairman who opens a discussion or the priest who baptizes a baby or the judge who pronounces a verdict are persons rather than personae? . . . The performative utterance thus automatically fictionalizes its utterer when it makes him the mouthpiece of a conventionalized authority" (Johnson, The Critical Difference, 60). Or one could say, as well, that read rhetorically, the performative utterance may uncover the theatrical nature of such "ordinary" social actions.

⁴² Johnson, The Critical Difference, 60 (my emphasis).

⁴³ In light of the duality of Hermione's deictics, we might read the specification "i' th' open air" within historical context as well. The stage in London's earliest commercial theaters projected into a yard and therefore placed actors "i' th' open air." On the physical conditions of London's public amphitheaters and private halls, see Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 13-48. Most critics believe the play to have been written for the closed theater of Blackfriars. But a note on the play by Simon Forman tells us that at least one contemporary remembers having seen The Winter's Tale performed at the Globe (on 15 May 1611).

⁴⁴ Jacques Lacan, Encore (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 55. On the important difference between the usual misprision of the Lacanian "lack" and the productive process of misfiring, see Felman, 82-84.

⁴⁵ Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987), 193-221, esp. 214. Cavell is, of course, most concerned with Leontes's doubts about his son and his paternity. But in light of Janet Adelman's work on the play, one is led to wonder, when poised between these two powerful essays, why it is the maternal body that sparks Leontes's radical doubt. I would add to Adelman's analysis only that it is Hermione's language—the effects of her voice—as well as her body that unsettle her husband's sense of himself. To Cavell's approach, similarly, I would add only that the play explores the action of Leontes's doubt through the action of both language and thought. For the scandal of what cannot be known—the truth about Hermione—turns, as we have seen, into an interrogation of the power and the limits of theatrical representation as well as of two kinds of discourse: saying and swearing.

⁴⁶ It is perhaps worth remembering, as Jonathan Bate points out, that Shakespeare's contemporaries understood him to be the inheritor of Ovid. Drawing on the very rhetoric of animation at issue here, Francis Meres observed that "the sweete wittie soule of Ouid liues in mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare" (Palladis Tamia [1598], as quoted in Elizabethan Critical Essays, G. Gregory Smith, ed. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904], 317). For further comment on Renaissance Ovidianism, see Bate, 1-47; and Ovid Renewed: Ovidian influences on literature and art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, Charles Martindale, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988).

⁴⁷ David Ward, "Affection, Intention, and Dreams in The Winter's Tale," Modern Language Review 82 (1987): 545-54, esp. 552. Ward offers a precise discussion of Leontes's "affection" in relation to sixteenth-century faculty psychology, particularly in medical discourse. Looking at discussions in Hooker and Burton, Ward suggests that with this word Leontes is designating a "disease of the mind" linked to the faculty of the appetite rather than to the will or to reason; for Hooker, affection is both involuntary ("Wherefore it is not altogether in our power") and a desire for the impossible, for "any thing which seemeth good, be it never so impossible" (as quoted in Ward, 546). For Shakespeare, Ovid's combined stories of Pygmalion and Orpheus give a distinctive mythographic and erotic turn to the involuntary aspect of affection (revulsion from womankind out of grief or disgust) and its connotation of a desire for the impossible (for art to conquer death).

⁴⁸ See Howard Felperin, "'Tongue-tied our queen?': the deconstruction of presence in The Winter's Tale" in Parker and Hartman, eds., 3-18. Although I clearly agree with Felperin's emphasis on the play's consciousness of its own failure to refer, it seems to me that, by framing the question in terms of the possibility that Hermione may be guilty, Felperin participates in the very logic he critiques; his reading repeats what it might otherwise analyze—the question of why language's misfiring should be represented in cognitive terms as the truth or falsity of the maternal body.

⁴⁹ Ovid, of course, shared this dream: the final lines of the Metamorphoses claim that the poet will live ("vivant"), his name survive the "gnawing tooth of time" though his body does not ("ne cedax abolere vetustas"), if his poem is "read on the lips of the people" (quot;perque omnia saeculafama" [XV 871-79]). For my understanding of this scene, I am indebted to conversations with Thomas M. Greene on the relationship between poetry and magic. See his essays "The Balance of Power in Marvell's 'Horatian Ode,'" ELH 60 (1993): 379-96; and "Poetry as Invocation," New Literary History 24 (1993): 495-517.

⁵⁰ Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott cite Hippocrates for the sense of wind in the body: derived from "αψε-, 'blow, breathe', cf. [Sanskrit], áni-ti, 'breathes'" (Greek-English Lexicon, 2 vols. [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951], 1:132). The primary meaning of anima is "breath" or "breathing as the characteristic manifestation of life," and it thus connotes "the characteristic or quality whose loss constitutes death" (OLD, 1:132-34). It can also designate "a disembodied spirit, soul, ghost" (132), a hint of which meaning appears, perhaps, when Polixenes asks Paulina to "make it manifest where she has liv'd, / Or how stol'n from the dead" (5.3.114-15). For interesting comments on the ghostly undertone here and at other moments in this scene, see Gross.

⁵¹ Since Ovid handled the scene, the link became one of the mainstays of the tradition. The subjective and objective genitive in Marston's title, "The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image," for instance, derives its power from this connection. Thus his Pygmalion is enamored less of the statue than of his own reflection in that statue: "Hee was amazed at the wondrous rarenesse / Of his owne workmanships perfection. . . . And thus admiring, was enamored / On that fayre Image himself e portraied" (245, my emphasis). Pygmalion's resemblance to Narcissus was also central to the representation of the lover in the Roman de la Rose; for an overview, see Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature up to the Early 19th Century (Lund: Gleerups, 1967). I learned to attend to the crucial role that Pygmalion and Narcissus play in the Rime Sparse from Giuseppe Mazzotta (The Worlds of Petrarch [Durham, NC, and London: Duke UP, 1993]).

⁵² Golding, 64^v. Ovid uses the simile of turning to stone but says nothing of "another worlde": "Mater ad auditas stupuit ceu saxea voces / attonitaeque diu similis fuit, utque dolore / pulsa gravi gravis est amentia" (V.509-11). For another reading of the import of Ceres's grief for the play, see T. G. Bishop, Shakespeare and the theatre of wonder (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 125-75.

⁵³ Golding, too, preserves the detail of Sicily in his translation: "But bitterly aboue the rest she banned Sicilie, / In which the mention of hir losse she plainely did espie" (64^r). Understanding Hermione as a second Ceres may tell us why Shakespeare makes an otherwise puzzling change of location. Where Greene begins Pandosto in Bohemia and later moves to Sicily, Shakespeare opens the story of winter in Sicily only to move, in Act 4, to Bohemia's pastoral landscape.

Source: '"You speak a language that I understand not': The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter 's Tale," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1, Spring, 1997, pp. 17-44.