Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

The introduction to my copy of The Winter’s Tale says that “Shakespeare seems to sample his career in this play, replaying favorite themes and recombining reliable characters and conflicts.” This might sound like one of my standard exaggerations, but to me the play is less a sampling of his career than a story that he had always wanted to write. In the same way that Measure for Measure is the closest Shakespeare comes to a coherent artistic statement, Winter, in borrowing elements from other plays but reusing them in new and extravagant ways, feels like Shakespeare at his most free: free to end a character’s life in the most comical scene he ever wrote; free to bend the laws of nature in Hermione’s resurrection; free, perhaps most importantly, to show the coexistence of tragedy and comedy in our lives, the way one encroaches upon the other, and the way the lines between them blur.

Which isn’t to say this is his absolute best play. I find that I enjoy writing and thinking about it more than I did reading it. It wasn’t bad by any stretch, but after reading Measure, Hamlet, and Othello, I was difficult to impress. Yet the play doesn’t have to be transcendent to do a great deal of philosophical work, and I think the questions that it raises are the most interesting of all.

Othello, Redux

The obvious and longstanding comparison is with Othello. Both tragedies are examinations of men who suspect their wives of infidelity, and both do so for little to no reason. Both are, too, in a larger sense, about knowledge and belief: belief in faithfulness, belief in ourselves, belief in others. We will talk more about belief later on. Let’s first think about the Moor.

Othello and Iago had a certain uncomfortable intimacy, and Leontes and Polixenes do as well. “Leontes so idealizes their shared boyhood,” the introduction points out, that “everything since, especially marriage, seems fallen; in growing up and into relation to women, Polixenes and Leontes were expelled from paradise.” This is a very particular kind of love triangle: Leontes loves Hermione and Polixenes so much, separately, that their amicable nature toward each other is distressing to him. A man cannot serve two masters, and Leontes cannot keep them apart in his mind any more than he can in real life.

Leontes’ jealousy is as incomprehensible to us as Othello’s. Neither wife has done anything except perhaps be friendly to her husband’s friends. Both men are poisoned by their own minds, Leontes even without any help from a demon incarnate. And look at Leontes’ spider analogy:

“There may be in the cup / A spider steeped, and one may drink, depart, / And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge / Is not infected; but if one present / Th’ abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known / How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides, / With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider… All’s true that is mistrusted [i.e., suspected].”

All that is suspected is true; compare it to Othello’s “to be once in doubt is to be once resolved.” To quote William S Burroughs: “Paranoia means having all the facts.” (H/T Harold Bloom) This goes along with another statement of his:

“Affection, thy intention stabs the center! Thou dost make possible things not so held, / Communicat’st with dreams – how can this be? / With what’s unreal thou coactive art, / And fellow’st nothing. Then ‘tis very credent / Thou mayst cojoin with something; and thou dost, / And that beyond commission, and I find it, / And that to the infection of my brains / And hard’ning of my brows.”

Truly, the mind does have powers to influence one’s reality that border on the magical, but we must also acknowledge the way in which Leontes is plotting his own downfall. These powerful men have minds even more powerful.

Knowing and Coincidence

Leontes though is more than just Othello. His speeches have something of the pathos of Richard II’s; that is, a tendency toward the dramatic, toward over-acting. Where Othello’s jealousy strikes him dumb, Leontes’ allows him more eloquence than most other characters, even in Shakespeare, possess. Look at this masterful speech that also serves as the centerpiece of his skepticism:

“Is whispering nothing? / Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noses? / Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career / Of laughter with a sigh? – a note infallible / Of breaking honesty! – horsing foot on foot? / Skulking in corners? Wishing clocks more swift? / Hours, minutes? Noon, midnight? And all eyes / Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only, / That would unseen be wicked? Is this nothing? / Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, / The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, / My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, / If this be nothing.”

This stands for one of the great problems in Shakespeare, the problem of knowing. It seems that characters in Shakespeare strive to know, to know beyond what they are or should be capable of knowing, and it is through this forbidden knowledge that they are forever lost. They want, of course, to know one thing in particular: the truth. Yet in their attempts to dig down deep into the truth, we see that they find nothing but contradiction, haziness, and, perhaps worst of all, no opportunities for either verification or refutation. “Skepticism’s own sense,” Cavell writes, “of what recovery would consist in dictates efforts to refute it; yet refutation can only extend it, as Othello notably found out. True recovery lies in reconceiving it, in finding skepticism’s source (its origin, say, if you can say it without supposing its origin is past).” Skepticism is a constantly moving target, a treacherous pit of quicksand. Or, to put it another way, skepticism is “the human disappointment in human knowledge.” What counts? Who’s to say? Must one say?

Indeed, the notion of rejecting knowledge that one ought to accept seems to recur again and again in this play, as well as in the rest of Shakespeare. Here I wish to turn from a close discussion of knowing and not-knowing to a more general idea of coinciding opposites, of things which seem to be set apart but are in fact intertwined. As an example, consider Perdita’s debate with Polixenes, wherein she holds art and nature to be separate. But here is Polixenes’ masterful reply:

“Yet nature is made better by no mean / But nature makes that mean. So, over that art / Which you say adds to nature, is an art / That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry / A gentler scion to the wildest stock, / And make conceive a bark of baser kind / By bud of nobler race. This is an art / Which does mend nature – change it rather – but / The art itself is nature.”

Consider, too, auxiliary instances of this theme, such as the fact that the play begins as a tragedy and turns to comedy, or that a child, lost forever, is returned.

Take act 5, scene 2, as another example. We learn about the statue of Hermione, but the information is relayed completely by three gentlemen whom we’ve never seen before. We don’t see or hear for ourselves or from characters we trust but depend on word of mouth. One of the men says, “This news which is called true is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion.” Strange, aye, but true, as well.

Autolycus, the rogue, makes a similar observation: “For had I been the finder-out of this secret, it would not have relished among my other discredits” i.e., it would not have fit in with what people know about me and therefore people wouldn’t have believed this truth because it came from me.

These things are unbelievable, yet they are true. (Of course, not literally true, but, as they say, stranger things have happened.) We cannot judge what is true or false by our own powers, as Montaigne wisely advises us.

Grace Under Pressure

“Were it but told you,” Paulina says where Hermione’s statue comes to life, it “should be hooted at / Like an old tale; but it appears she lives.” We are reminded of the end of Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Theseus gives his speech denouncing fantasy and elevating reason, unaware of the magic that had happened during the night. Indeed, the difference here seems to be that Leontes is aware of his transgressions: “Does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it.” It does indeed, yet why then does the play end happily instead of allowing Leontes to suffer in his skepticism?

Perhaps it is due to a word that is used often by Hermione: grace. There is a sense in which Leontes was an underserving schmuck, but was saved by grace, that is, through free and unearned love, because grace, as the introduction says, “lifts the doom and opens up the horizons of a dark, cramped, cold, tragic world.” Yet such an understanding of grace ignores the more Christian aspect which, I believe, plays an important role in this play. For why should Leontes be blessed with the return of his wife at all? Certainly the cosmos can do whatever it wants to, but why would Shakespeare return Hermione to him? The only reason is that she is freely given. Leontes is undeserving, as we all are, yet grace illuminates his life regardless. Though we scoff at Leontes’ petty and odd jealousy, we are “in our best behavior really just like him,” as Sufjan Stevens would say.

The Remains of the Day

Is it a happy ending? Sure it is. Hermione is back, Perdita and Florizel are married, Polixenes and Leontes have made up. Just like a sitcom, everything’s back to normal.

Yet there are two people missing: Maumillius, Leontes’ and Hermione’s son, and Antigonus, who was eaten by the bear. Cavell writes that they “cast the shadow of finitude or doubt over the general air of reunion… to emblematize that no human reconciliation is uncompromised… [the] idea of the adult’s world as ‘remains’… adult human life struggling toward happiness from within its own ‘debris.’”

What are we to make of these two deaths? The answer is, very much indeed.

In a way, the ending has the odd sense of the end of the book of Job. Recall that Job’s family, friends, and livestock all die, but are later returned to him, except they are all brand new. It is said that Job loved his new family as much as his old one, which Dostoevsky in the Brothers Karamazov took issue with; for how is it possible that we can love a new family as much as our old one? If we are to analyze it, it seems impossible, nonsensical. It seems, at its very core, contradictory.

Yet how many loves have we all lost that are replaced? Leontes gains so much in the play, and much can be “counted”, and although his wife is returned to him, others are not. He wins some, and he loses some. He cannot regain his dead son, and his wife is only back through grace. Perhaps the happiest ending of all is that he, like Job, does not bring up his son; he has moved on.

It may seem unjust that Hermione comes back but not Maumillius, yet true justice (call it cosmic justice, or karma, or nature) would have neither returned, for they were both lost. In fact, Perdita would not be returned either. So much comes back to Leontes, and it is a mystery, in the Orthodox sense of the word, that he is able to love again. (We think of Donne’s poem “Love’s Infinity” which wonders about whether love is finite.)

It is not so important, the introduction notes, that the bear turns up out of nowhere to eat Antigonus, although it does indicate to us that we are in a comedy. Rather, it is important that the baby is somehow spared; “not that one is betrayed or aggrieved, but that one goes on; not that we grow wrinkled, but that love can be renewed and sustained, and that forgiveness can attend a process of loss.”

“Time does not heal all wounds,” it goes on to say, “but rather makes it possible to understand fully the nature of the wounds, the extent of the loss and the harm.” There are many parts of this play that seem strange. I think this can only be the point. Why does the play contain a bear, a statue come to life, an undeserved jealousy, a miraculous return? Because it is beholden to a different logic, one that is neither human justice nor natural justice, but something much stranger and much truer.

Stray Observations

• This is the last post I’ll be making on an individual Shakespeare play. Tune in next…week?...for a summary post on Shakespeare.
• Leontes suspects his subordinates are “a nest of traitors,” which sounds suspiciously like a brood of vipers.
• Leontes is eloquent, certainly, but he has the same kind of schizophrenic tics that we found in Othello. Consider this passage and how it jumps from interruption to interruption. “Ha’ not you seen, Camillo -- / But that’s past doubt, you have, or your eyeglass / Is thicker than a cuckold’s horn – or heard -- / for to a vision so apparent rumor / Cannot be mute – or thought – for cogitation / Resides not in that man that does not think – / My wife is slippery? If thou wilt confess / Or else be impudently negative, / To have nor eyes nor ears nor thought, then say / My wife’s a hobbyhorse, deserves a name / As rank as any flax wench that puts to / Before her trothplight. Say’t and justify’t.”
• Leontes: “You smell this business with a sense as cold / As is a dead man’s nose; but I do see’t and feel’t.”
• Leontes: “I am a feather for each wind that blows.”
• Does anyone else think the trial scene in act 3 resembles the scene in The Eumenides from Aeschylus? It’s been a long time since I’ve read the play, but I can’t shake the feeling.
• Florizel’s beautiful speech to Perdita: “What you do / Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet, / I’d have you do it ever. When you sing, / I’d have you buy and sell so, so give alms, / Pray so, and for the ord’ring your affairs, / To sing them too. When you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’ th’ sea, that you might ever do / Nothing but that, move still, still so, / And own no other function. Each your doing, / So singular in each particular, / Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, / That all your acts are queens.”
• Mopsa: “I love a ballad in print, alife, for then we are sure they are true.”
• Paulina: “As every present time doth boast itself / Above a better gone, so must thy grave / Give way to what’s seen now.”
• Leontes: “What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?”