The Winter’s Tale : The Romance of Innocence

1. The Winter’s Tale:The Romance of Innocence

2. Art versus Nature: The Debate between Polixenes and Perdita In the middle of the sheep-sheering feast, just before Autolycus enters, peddling his trinkets/ballads, Perdita hands out flowers to her guests, and we enter into an extended philosophical debate between Polixenes and Perdita over whether the art of grafting is natural or unnatural (and thus a form of bastardy): pp. 68-69; 4.4.77-108.

3. The irony of this debate is that: • According to Perdita’s argument, she should not be allowed to marry Florizel. • According to Polixenes’s argument, Perdita should be allowed to marry Florizel. • According to Perdita’s argument, Florizel should marry her only for her beauty. • A and B • All of the above

4. Why do you think Shakespeare foregrounds so prominently the debate between Art and Nature? How does the insertion of the rogue Autolycus into the sheep-sheering feast, with his pack of trinkets and ballads, influence our response to this debate? So whose side is Shakespeare on: Art or Nature? A) Art  E) Nature

5. How does Autolycus help advance for the play’s audience its romance of innocence? • He exchanges clothes with Florizel (for money) so Florizel can escape undetected from Bohemia to Sicilia with Perdita. • He sells art that encourages people to believe in wondrous happenings as “true.” • He helps the shepherd and his son (for money) get onboard Florizel’s ship and thus escape threatened death in Bohemia. • He is open to chance and change, which are a part of the natural workings of Time. • All of the above.

6. Making the Romance of Innocence • After the “fall” of the first half of the play, wherein mankind’s, and especially womankind’s, “sullied” nature is rediscovered by Leontes, “innocence” (literally in the character of Mamillius) is killed off. • It can never be reborn as “pure” innocence. • It can only be much recovered when the best of nature and opportune time ally with art/craft. • The result is not a bastard innocence, but it is “mixed,” in the same way the ending of the play mixes gain with loss, joy with sorrow: Our king, being ready to leap out of himself for joy of his found daughter, as if that joy were now become a loss, cries, “Oh, thy mother, thy mother.” (p. 106, 5.2.52-55)

7. Retelling the Winter’s Tale

8. Act 5 re-invokes the idea of a “winter’s tale”: • “The oracle is fulfilled; the King’s daughter is found; such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it. . . . This news, which is called true, is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion.” (2nd Gentleman, 5.2.24-31) • “Like an old tale still.” (re: the news of Antigones being torn to pieces by a bear) (3rd Gentleman, 5.2.65) • “That she [Hermione] is living, / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale.” (Paulina, 5.3.115-118)

9. How is the notion of a “winter’s tale” different at the end of the play than in its first half?

10. Why does so much of the action of the final act (the discovery of Perdita’s identity and telling of Antigones’s death, with their accompanying “proofs”; the reconciliation between Leontes and Polixenes and Camillo; the reunion and assimilation into the Sicilian court of Perdita’s adopted father and brother, the Shepherd and his son) occur off-stage, narrated by anonymous “gentlemen”?