The Winter's Tale Read Free Page B

lips respond, the ivory face flushes. Correspondingly, Leontes contrasts the warm life his queen once had with the coldness of the statue, but then he seems to see blood in the veins and warmth upon the lips. And when she descends and embraces him, she
is
warm.
    At the beginning of the play Leontes complains that Hermione’s body contact with Polixenes is “Too hot, too hot!”—he wants her to be frigidly chaste, even though she is pregnant. His jealous look is like that of the basilisk or the gorgon Medusa: he turns his wife to stone. In the final act, this metaphor becomes a metamorphosis as Paulina conjures up the illusion of Hermione’s depetrification. The transformation is triumphantly realized on stage both linguistically and visually. “Does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it?” asks Leontes, when confronted with the statue. The hardened image of his wife forces him to turn his gaze inward upon his own hard heart. The play ends with the melting of that heart and the rekindling of love, with its concordant release of Hermione back into softness, warmth, and life.
    We know in our heads that we are not really watching a statue coming to life. Yet in a good production, at the moment of awakening we feel in our hearts that we are. The magic of the drama occurs in a strange but deeply satisfying space between the two poles of reality and illusion. Metamorphosis is a kind of translation that occurs in the passage from one state to another. Ovid’s world, which is also evoked by Perdita’s comparison of herself to Proserpina, goddess of spring, shuttles between human passions and natural phenomena. Shakespeare carried the magic of that world across into the medium of theater, where everything is illusion, but somehow—as he put it in the alternative title of another of his last plays,
Henry VIII
—“All Is True.”
    When Perdita, whose name means “lost one,” is restored to her father, the oracle is fulfilled and there is some atonement for the death of Mamillius. Not, however, full restoration, for Mamillius himself will not return. The boy actor who played the part would almost certainly have doubled as Perdita in the second half of the play, visually transforming the dead son into a living daughter. Polixenes’ son Florizel also stands in for Mamillius: he grows into what Leontes’ son might have become. When he and Perdita are joined in marriage, the two kings and their kingdoms are united. Leontes has to accept that he will live on only through the female line. This is an appropriate punishment, given his earlier rejection of the female for having come between him and his “brother.”
    It will perhaps seem harsh to speak of punishment after the delights of the pastoral scene, the benign mischief of Autolycus, and the wonder of the moment when the supposed statue of Hermione is brought back to life. To do so is to resemble the Paulina who browbeats Leontes into maintaining his penance for sixteen years. When she finally softens and lets him into her art gallery, surely we, too, need to let go of our reason and our moral judgment. “It is required,” as Paulina puts it, that we awake our faith. But can so much suffering evaporate in an instant of theatrical magic? Hermione’s face is scarred with the marks of time, the wrinkles accumulated in her sixteen years’ seclusion. And not even the joys of the impending union of the two houses can bring back the child whose “smutched” nose his father has so tenderly wiped in the first act.

ABOUT THE TEXT
    Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete