Many of Shakespeare’s later plays
broke with customs of genre. The Merchant of Venice has all the elements
of a comedy, but deals with very grave matters and ends ambiguously. Pericles foreshadows the novel in its romantic plot
and use of narration. Such plays challenged prevalent Renaissance literary
theory which demanded fairly strict adherence to classical values of realism
and unity. The Winter’s Tale is a self-conscious violation of these
expectations, and a jibe at the assumptions behind them. Shakespeare uses the
play itself to present his argument against what may be termed, “the mimetic theory
of art.” It was the established opinion of Elizabethan literati that art ought
to imitate life (Kiernan 8). Shakespeare not only rejects this “ought,”[1]
but shows the absurdity of what it entails.
The categories available to a
dramatist are laid out by young Mamillius when he is
asked to tell a tale, “Merry or sad shall’t be?” (II.i.22). The dramatist is
presented with the options of tragedy or comedy. This bifurcation is repeated
throughout the play, which itself is cleft in two between a predominately
tragic section and a predominantly comical pastoral section. For this act,
tragedy is chosen, “A sad tale’s best for winter,” (24) and the story begins,
“There was a man… dwelt by the churchyard” (28-29). Here is where the play’s
self-consciousness starts to appear. It is the play which is a sad tale about a
man who dwells by the churchyard, namely Leontes, who
mourns at the grave of the wife and son he damned. It is also at this moment
that the tragedy of the play begins, when Mamillius’ tale
is interrupted by the arrival of Leontes to accuse
Hermione of adultery.
The tragedy progresses to a climax
by Act III, Scene iii, when Antigonus arrives on
The mauling of Antigonus
is unusual on several levels. First of all, it is very
unexpected. The tension builds with the storm and the dastardliness of the act
of abandoning a child, but that it would culminate in
a man in a furry suit chasing the actor off the stage could not be foreseen. It
is too bizarre not to laugh at, but it is such a horrible event, that laughter
seems inappropriate. The situation from here becomes increasingly comical. The
remainder of the fate of Antigonus and the
storm-wracked sailors is related by a clown:
O, the most piteous cry of the pour souls! sometimes
to see ‘em, and not to see ‘em;
now the ship boring the moon with her main-mast, and anon swallow’d
with yest and froth, as you’ld
thrust a cork into a hogshead. And then for the land-service,--to see how the
bear tore out his shoulder-bone; how he cried to me for help, and said his name
was Antigonus, a nobleman:--but to make an end of the
ship… (III.iii.90-99)
The language
is clownish. The events of this disaster sound funny coming
from the clown. This is not only a breach of genre,
it is a demonstration of the power of the artist. In life, these events could
not be laughed at;[2] in art, they can provoke
any reaction the artist chooses.
This collision of moods closes the
first half of the play and Time appears as chorus to introduce the second half,
as well as to say a few words on the power of art. Everything that time says
could be spoken by the dramatist himself. Time can “please some, try all,”
(IV.i.1) like the experimenting artist. He brings “both joy and terror / Of good and bad,” (1-2) just as The Winter’s Tale
stirs mixed feelings. “[I]t is in my power / To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour / To plant and o’erwhelm custom,” (7-9) as it is in Shakespeare’s power,
both in ability and in right, to defy laws of nature in his fiction and to
break with literary conventions.
By granting Time, a force of nature,
a voice, Shakespeare is displaying one of art’s unrealistic abilities:
personification. This is just one of the wonderful things that art can do. What
it cannot do is perfectly imitate nature. Nothing could imitate time. The
debate about whether it is right to tamper with nature, as one supposedly does
in telling hyperbolic tales, is allegorised in Perdita’s
and Polixenes’ discussion of flowers. Perdita disapproves of streaked gillyvors
because, “There is an art which, in their piedness,
shares / With great creating nature” (IV.iv.87-88). Polixenes responds:
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. (IV.iv.89-92)
In other
words, fancy is just as natural as the apes who engage in it, and the creation
of things never before seen, such as streaked gillyvors,
dark humour, or magic realism, cannot be objected to on the grounds of
tampering with nature. There’s more to nature than reality, namely imagination.
In fact, it is the attempt to
reproduce nature in art which is the greatest sacrilege. There is a
double-entendre at work in the passage, “prepare / To
see the life as lively mockt as ever / Still sleep mockt death” (V.iii.18-20). The attempt to mock (mimic)
life makes a mockery of it (Kiernan 68). It is presumptuous (and arguably
blasphemous) to attempt to create life on one’s own. This neither should be the
goal of art, nor could it be an attainable one: “what fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?” (77-78).
The statue in the play does in fact
come to life, but this is precisely the unrealistic sort of thing the memetic dogmatist would object to. In so objecting, she
would reveal her own awareness that perfect imitation is an impossible ideal.
To bring the issue into a contemporary
context, Shakespeare drops a contemporary name, that of sculptor Julio Romano.
In the play, Romano is so good a sculptor that his work is not just lifelike,
but comes alive. The idea is absurd. Achievement in a field that sets goals is
measured in terms of approximation to that goal. If the goal of art is to
imitate life, then the perfect work would achieve perfect imitation. But
perfect imitation is reproduction, which is impossible through any but
biological means. If the impossible were achieved and art became life, it would
no longer be art. Once it is shown that the memesis theory
of art entails that the highest aim of art is to destroy itself (which,
fortunately, is impossible) its fundamental error becomes obvious.
Art instead impresses on life. Life
imitates art. Throughout the play we are led on an emotional rollercoaster at
the hands of a master artist. Through the text, using language, traditional
associations, environment, timing/placement of elements, the work is causing
physical changes in the temporal world: heart rate increases, laughter, tear
production, etc. The psychological impression left by a well-written drama will
also influence the future behaviour choices of an audience member. The success
of a work is not to be measured in terms of its resemblance to nature, but in
its power to move. The shepherd’s son stumbles on to the point: “I love a
ballad but even too well, if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very
pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably” (IV.iv.190-191). To be moved is the
goal of the audience member, sadly, or happily, or both, by means sensible or
fantastic.
As things come together in the final
act, and all the living characters are reconciled, there is much made of the
mixed tragic and comic elements, “the wisest beholder…could not say if the
importance were joy or sorrow” (V.ii.17-19); “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, ‘O, thy mother, thy mother!’” (50-53). It is made clear that
neither element is to dominate the play. The ending restores some losses and
leaves others. Antigonus and Mamillius
remain dead, but Paulina gets a new husband, and Leontes is joined with his daughter and wife.
The final scene commits the play’s
ultimate act of naturalistic treason: it resurrects the dead through art. As Antigonus prophesies the bear in reference to tales, so
also he speaks of resurrection, “I have heard,--but not believed,--the spirits o’the dead / May walk again” (III.iii.16-17). Antigonus places such events in the realm of fable, and the
stuff of fables is ambrosia for lovers of tales and ballads, “such a deal of
wonder is broken out within this hour, that ballad-makers cannot be able to
express it” (V.ii.24-26).
It is only in art that such a thing could occur as the animation of a
statue and that is precisely why the artist should portray it. Were someone to
claim to have witnessed a resurrection in real life, their report, “should be
hooted at / Like an old tale,” (V.iii.115-116) but in fiction such an event can
be witnessed and delighted in. The delight is precisely in seeing the
impossible, and “Our part, as audience, is not to ‘pretend’ that a fiction is
reality, but to believe in the fiction as fiction” (Kiernan 108). To enjoy the
illusion as illusion one must suspend reason and prejudice: “It is required / You do awake your faith. Then all stand still; / Or those that think it is unlawful business / I am about,
let them depart” (V.iii.93-96). This could have been included in a prologue to
the play, addressed directly to the audience, whose response, if the play is
successful, will be as Leontes’: “If this be magic,
let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (109-110).
To criticise A Winter’s Tale for geographical errors, such as
Delphos on an “isle” (III.i.2), or the “shores” of
Works Cited / Consulted
Kiernan, Pauline. Shakespeare’s
Theory of Drama.
Mackinnon,
Shakespeare, William. Complete
Works. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1996.