The Winter's Tale Read Free Page A

tyranny, and the role of the wise counselor. How far can an adviser, or for that matter a playwright whose works are performed at court, go in speaking truths that their rulers might not want to hear? This was a perennial concern in the Elizabethan and Jacobean era.
    The court of King James was different from that of Queen Elizabeth, not least because there was a royal family. Negotiations to find the right husband for the king’s daughter were ongoing at the time of the play’s composition and first court performance. Like theBohemian connection discussed above, this context is in the hinterland of the play’s origin. It should not lead us to read the drama as a direct allegory of contemporary diplomacy. Leontes is in no sense a representation of King James. Besides, among the things that make the play a romance is the delightful representation of paternal informality and intimacy in the exchanges with Mamillius in the opening court scene. Real kings did not publicly mix the roles of patriarch and playmate in this way.
    In Greene’s
Pandosto
, when the Perdita figure arrives incognito at court near the climax of the story, the desiring eye of her father falls upon her, raising the specter of royal incest. One of Paulina’s roles in
The Winter’s Tale
is to divert Leontes from any thought of this kind: “Your eye hath too much youth in’t,” she remarks, reminding him that even in middle age his dead queen was more beautiful “Than what you look on now.” Earlier in the same scene, Paulina has counseled the king against remarriage, eliciting the response:
    Thou speak’st truth.
No more such wives: therefore, no wife. One worse,
And better used, would make her sainted spirit
Again possess her corpse, and on this stage —
Where we offenders now — appear soul-vexed,
And begin, ‘Why to me?’
    These lines brilliantly anticipate the moment when, thanks to the dramaturgical art of Paulina, the “sainted spirit” of Hermione really does appear to have a soul breathed back into it as she walks again on that same “stage.”
    In
Pandosto
the wronged queen does not return to life. The reanimation of what Leontes takes to be Hermione’s statue is Shakespeare’s invention. The wonder-filled final scene puts a seemingly life-giving art into the hands of Paulina. That art dramatizes the magical power of theater itself so that we in the audience, like the characters on stage, awaken our faith. The many-layered quality of the illusion—a boy actor pretending to be a female character; Hermione, who is herself pretending to be a statue—takes Shakespeare’s art to an extreme level of self-consciousness. Fittingly, thescene is also an allusion to Ovid, the most self-conscious artist among Shakespeare’s literary models.
    In book ten of the
Metamorphoses
, the artist Pygmalion carves an ivory statue so realistic that it seems to be a real girl, so beautiful that he falls in love with it. He desperately wants to believe it is real and there are moments when the perfection of the art is such that the statue does seem to be struggling into life. With a little assistance from the goddess Venus, a kiss then animates the statue in a striking reversal of the usual Ovidian metamorphic pattern in which people are turned into things or animals. At a profound level, Pygmalion is a figure of Ovid himself: the artist who transforms mere words into living forms.
    Shakespeare learned from Ovid’s Pygmalion both an idea and a style. If you want something badly enough and you believe in it hard enough, you will eventually get it: though tragedy denies this possibility, comedy affirms it. This is the illusion that theater can foster. Ovid showed Shakespeare that the way to evoke this leap of faith is through pinpricks of sensation. The progression in the animation of Pygmalion’s statue is both precise and sensuous: blood pulses through the veins, the