The Winter's Tale Read Free

who became one of the most famous poets in all Europe, Elizabeth Jane Weston. There were also striking resemblances between the two monarchs, especially their interest in magic and their desire for European peacemaking through interdenominational matchmaking. These two preoccupations were closely related: Rudolf’s obsession with alchemy, natural magic, and Rosicrucianism was not some eccentric aberration of his melancholy personality, but rather—as was also the case with the magical interests of King James—a way to a deeper religious vision and unity beyond the confessional divisions that racked his empire. Magic and royal matchmaking were also, of course, distinctly late Shakespearean subjects. Paulina’s awakening of Hermione’s statue places an invocation of benign magical arts in the service of the restoration of harmony within and between the play’s two ruling families.
    Conversely, despite the Catholicism of James’ queen and the king’s various attempts to match his children to clients of Spain, the residual English hostility to all things Spanish, dating back to the Armada and beyond, had not gone away. In these circumstances, it seems eminently plausible that on deciding to dramatize a story about the kings of Sicilia and Bohemia, and knowing that the play would at some point go into the court repertoire, Shakespeare thought it would be politic to make the monarch with Spanish as opposed to Rudolfine associations the one who is irrational, cruel, and blasphemous. It is not that Leontes is in any sense a representation of Philip or Polixenes of Rudolf, but rather that extreme tact was required in the invocation of the names of European kingdoms.
    Shakespeare’s tact toward Bohemia, a synecdoche for the Austro-Germanic Habsburg territories, was indeed such that
The Winter’s Tale
could be played at court without embarrassment during the 1612–13 festivities in celebration of the wedding of King James’ daughter Elizabeth to the Habsburg princeling Frederick the Elector Palatine—who, as it happens, would later become King of Bohemia. Life imitates art: like Perdita, Elizabeth would become known as the “winter queen” in Bohemia.
    Whether or not geopolitical sensitivity lay behind Shakespeare’s transposition of Sicilia and Bohemia,
The Winter’s Tale
can still be thought of as a play that works on a north–south axis. The weird temporal syncretism of the play enacts the early modern rebirth of classical civilization: Apollo thunders and Ovid’s Pygmalion is reborn as Giulio Romano; the setting moves between the temple of the Delphic oracle on a balmy Greek island, a very English-seeming sheep-shearing feast, and a private chapel reached via a picture gallery and housing a Madonna-like statue. The essential geographical structure, meanwhile, is an opposition between a hot-blooded, court-dominated—and perhaps implicitly Catholic—south, and a more relaxed, temperate north in which ordinary people (shepherd and clown) have a voice, as they do in the Protestant world where the Bible is available in the vernacular.
LIVING ART
    One of the best ways of discovering Shakespeare’s core concerns in a play is to consider his major additions to his sources: it is a fair assumption that he is most himself when he departs from his originals. As one would expect from
Pandosto
, Leontes is easily the largest role in the play, twice as long as any other. But the next two most sizable parts—added together, they equal that of Leontes in length—are Camillo and Paulina. The figure of Leontes’ honest counselor greatly expands the role of the king’s cupbearer in
Pandosto
, while Paulina, Hermione’s preserver and Leontes’ conscience, has no equivalent in the source. The prominence of these roles suggests that the play is especially interested in the relationship between absolute power, with its potential to turn to