The Winter’s Tale

1. The Winter’s Tale Third lecture

2. The pastoral cut short • Why exactly does Polixenes break up the two lovers? • The conventional idea that young aristocrats shouldn’t marry peasants? • Wouldn’t his argument about the gillyvors suggest otherwise? • And though he says it’s time to part them, he seems to encourage Florizel’s wooing at ll. 344ff. • In response to F’s vows, his response: “Fairly offered.” • BUT “Have you a father?” • “Methinks a father/ Is at the nuptial of his son a guest/ That best becomes the table. • And the fury between generations that characterizes comedy, but also fuels tragedy (think King Lear). • Polixenes seems as crazy, as irrational as Leontes was in his jealousy: he’ll take his fury out on the old shepherd, on Perdita (“I’ll have thy beauty scratched out with briers”), and disinherit Florizel forever. • Though Perdita was ready to deliver the real message of pastoral: “I was about to speak and tell him plainly/ The selfsame sun that shines on his court/ Hides not his visage from our cottage but/ Looks on all alike.” • But the pastoral world has been destroyed, its meanings apparently lost.

3. The thought plickens • Or the plot thickens – and gets wildly over complicated. • And Autolycus gets put to use. • Let’s briefly untangle it all: • For some reason Florizel has a ship nearby. • Camillo, wanting to get back to Sicily, tells F. that’s where ought to go with Perdita. • And makes Autolycus change clothes with Florizel (is there a reason for this?). • Autolycus can now appear a courtier and intimidate the old shepherd and his son into going to the king. • But the king is not at his palace but has gone aboard a ship, apparently urged by Camillo . . . • . . . to pursue Florizel to Sicily. • Turns out that the shepherd and his son weren’t able to explain the finding of Perdita because everyone was too busy and seasick • So all that is deferred until we get to Sicily.

4. Paulina’s discipline • As the only one who knows the truth that will be revealed in the ending, Paulina lashes Leontes. • Her female strength had been rejected by Leontes when she presented the baby. • So now Leontes realizes he must bow to her understanding, her demands. • Which is that he will never marry except with Paulina’s permission. • And that’s not until “your first wife’s again in breath. Never till then.” An apparent impossibility. • Female power now dominates and demands to be taken as authoritative. • As Florizel is announced, Paulina insists that if Mamillius had lived, “he had paired/ Well with this lord.” They were the same age. • And Leontes’ response, V.1.119ff. This fact almost makes him insane. • A compensatory insistence on Florizel’s mother’s fidelity: F. looks exactly like his father (as Paulina had insisted the newborn Perdita resembled Leontes). • A hint of the incest motif that had been part of Sh’s source: if Polixenes would grant “precious things as trifles,” Leontes would beg “your precious mistress.” • And Paulina chides him for the thought: his eye “hath too much youth in ‘t.” • And Hermione was “worth more such gazes.” • The “recognition scene” is being set up.

5. Only to be taken away . . . • The expected scene, in which Perdita is united with Leontes, is not shown! • Only narrated by Autolycus, “first gentleman,” “second gentleman,” “third gentleman.” • With the most teasing rhetoric: they seemed “to tear the cases of their eyes” etc. • It’s simply incredible – “like an old tale” – who can believe it? • The emphasis is on sight: “That which you hear, you’ll swear you see.” • Didn’t see the meeting of the two kings? • “Then have you lost the sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of.” • But that’s all we get! • “There was casting up of eyes, holding up of hands.” Weirdly melodramatic? • Antigonus? “Like an old tale still.” • “If all the world could have seen’t, the woe had been universal. • Then why aren’t we seeing this scene? • What kind of incompetent playwright would set up such a scene, then not stage it for the audience?

6. The anti-theatrical context • Anti-theatrical writers had criticized the stage for being “idolatrous.” • The Reformation had insisted that religious scenes were not to be painted or sculpted because the second commandment had forbidden “graven images.” • The literal iconoclasm of the English Reformation: beginning in the 1540s the churches were cleared of statues, paintings, anything visual. • England became an iconoclast culture. • Theater was objectionable because of the fulness of its sensual appeal, especially to sight. • In 1583 Philip Stubbes had declared that all stage plays are “sucked out of the Devil’s tits to nourish us in idolatry, heathenry, and sin.” • Anti-theatrical writers had declared that the visual character of theater is what makes it so dangerous. • Anthony Munday (who would later become a playwright!): “There commeth much evil in at the ears, but more at the eyes; by these two open windows death breaketh into the soul.” • Some had called the theaters the “school-house” or “chapel” of Satan. • The Puritans especially were adamantly opposed to theater. • Which continued right up until 1642; when they took control of the government, they finally closed the theaters. • In a way, all this a backhanded compliment to the power of theater. • The phenomenology of theater: physical, visual, sensual, requiring human bodies.

7. The statue • The “statue” is the work of “that rare Italian master” Giulio Romano, an actual painter of the 16th century (though not known as a sculptor). • Again: Art and Nature – “who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile Nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.” • But Leontes notes that he has carved Hermione as she would be now: “Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing/ So aged as this seems.” • “So much the more our carver’s excellence,” Paulina retorts. • Theater, of course, is the “sculpture” that can put breath into its work, can make inanimate, dead things live. • The real carver is the playwright – and also the theater company – that can make Hermione live. • How much is “art,” how much is “nature”? Their “marble,” “paint” are human bodies, human voices. • Think Polixenes and the gillyvors: “the art itself is nature.” • Theater as the site where art and nature collaborate to create something more. • Imagining life as it should be, or as even as it really is? • Hence the high degree of self-reflexivity in Shakespeare’s art, especially here: yes, this is art, but also yes, this is life. • And this is a response to the anti-theatrical writers, who would see theater as false, as idolatrous.

8. Paulina’s gallery • The real reason we didn’t get the scene between Leontes, Perdita, Polixenes. • And of course it’s fantastic, also “like an old tale still” (as romances were). • But in being so, it’s highly self-aware about imagination, artfulness, reality. • (As Leontes was not in his fantasy life.) • A part of the point of the statue scene is its fantastic character. • Could someone really stay hidden for 16 years, then return in this spectacular (or hokey?) way? • But we’re also challenged by the terms of the spectacle to understand other things. • The metaphorical/symbolic nature of the spectacle. • What does it mean that Hermione “died”? That she has been turned to “stone”? • What human acts, human attitudes can cause the “death” of love, affection, friendship, family? • Or maybe even real death? • And can love, affection, friendship, family ever be regenerated? • Can what is, what seems, “stone” come alive? • If so, how? • Can Leontes really ever redeem what he once did? • Can Nature regenerate what was lost?

9. The scene • The stage of the Globe had a “discovery” space upstage. • The curtain of which Paulina opens at l. 20. • Statue imitators. • Leontes confronts the past: “warm life” where “now it coldly stands.” The stone rebukes him. • Perdita’s response: veneration. • “Do not say ‘tis superstition, that/ I kneel and then implore her blessing.” • The worst fears of the anti-theatricalists realized! • Does Leontes collapse at this point: the responses of Camillo, Polixenes, Paulina? • And he seems to impart life to the statue. • Paulina could “afflict” him further – affliction has been her business for 16 years. • And the choice she offers: leave or accept something really strange. • Is she assisted by “wicked powers” – as the Puritans claimed about theater.

10. “It is required/ You do awake your faith” • Paulina says this to Leontes, then to all the characters on stage. • But does it spill over to the audience? • Leontes’ command. • And music: what was it? • The slowness of the “awakening” – requires Paulina’s insistence. “I’ll fill your grave up.” • “Bequeath to death your numbness.” • Again, the story of her preservation is “like an old tale.” • Hermione’s words – to the gods, but also to the theater? • And Paulina’s fate? Well, this is a comedy after all, and Camillo is the honest, faithful courtier. • The restoration of the “holy looks” between Hermione and Polixenes. • And in “son-in-law” a recognition that Mamillius is only symbolically restored?