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D A V I D SCHALKWYK

“A Lady’s ‘ Verily’ Is as Potent as a Lord’s’’: Women, Word and Witchcraj

in The Winter’s Tale

e are indebted to Jacques Derrida for the concept of the “transcendental signified.”’ It has a paradoxical status, since it was invoked by Derrida as part of a project to show that it

isn’t-that it never was and never shall be. It is a chimera, both the enabling force and the elusive quest of what Derrida has called “logo- centrism”: a sign that marks the end of interpretation, one that affirms truth, restores order, and by transcending the contingencies of place and time, regulates the play of signification.

Although the concept, as Derrida uses it, has a negative import, it is a useful analytical tool to explore signification in Shakespearean tragedy and comedy. If the tragedies owe their being to the process of semiotic displacement that, Derrida has argued, marks the nature of the sign itself,2 comedy as a genre trades on a promise that somewhere interpretation (and therefore the possibility of doubt and uncertainty) stops. This is what makes the essential moment of comic unugnorisis possible. Some revelation, cast in signs that transcend present time and place-literally outside and beyond interpretation-is necessary for the renewal that defines Shakespearean comedy.

I . This article arose out of a series of seminars on the politics of Shakespearean comedy given at the University of Cape Town. I wish to register my debt to my students, whose many remarks, critical comments, and suggestions lie imbedded, as quasi-direct discourse, in its text.

2. Thus the dramatic movement of Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet stems from contingency and equivocality of signs: the witches’ pronouncements, Macbeth‘s behavior; the declarations of love in Lear; discourse itself in both Othello and Hamlet. The plots often turn on the propensity of signs to be mistaken and misread. The handkerchief from Othello is a signal instance, but one could include the apparently transcendental figure of the ghost in Hamlet and the straying of the letter that might have restored all in Lear.

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According to a Derridean perspective, of course, the transcendental signifieds of comic resolutions can be only a device. They can be made to seem transcendental only within the framing structure of dramatic mimesis. Step outside the frame or begin to question it, and such a signified is a t once reintroduced into writing, which simply means that its meaning is once again open to doubt, uncertainty, or contest. What is more, to proclaim something as being transcenden- tally significant, as having a “proper” meaning, is an act of suppression, of violence against the other possibilities that are necessarily excluded by and in such an act: “To name, to give names . . . such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute.”3

The obvious transcendental devices in terms of which recognition is achieved-Perdita’s casket in The Winter’r Tale, the ring in All’s Well That Ends Well, the clothes that prove Viola’s identity in Twelflh Night, to cite a few examples-are pretexts, as it were, for other, more ideological processes of signification with which the comedies are closed, namely the obligatory “last words” in social and political relations expressed in and through the marriage ceremony, the be- trothal dance, or the anagnorisis of “proper” social, political, and familial positions. These gestures can be made precisely because ofthe work done by the transcendental rings, caskets, and gods of the plot, through which they proclaim their own transcendental status, as the signs of a return to, or the forging of, something all too readily referred to as “the natural order of things.” They simultaneously perpetrate and occlude, on a social and political level, precisely the sort of linguistic violence that Derrida suggests is inescapable in the very process of naming.

I1

It is a truth universally acknowledged that every newborn baby looks like its father. Not every admirer will invoke the exact terms of Paulina’s catalogue, but the sentiment is usually the same:

Behold, my lords, Although the print be little, the whole matter And copy of the father-eye, nose, lip,

3. J. Derrida, OfCrammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976). p. I 12.

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The trick ofs frown, his forehead, nay, the valley, The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek, his smiles, The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger.

(2.3.9q4

There is something quite excessive-obsessive to the point of absur- dity-about the detail and insistence of Paulina’s comparison. A neo- nate may be said to have its father’s eye, but to discern the mold of the father’s nose in its tiny and as yet undeveloped print is surely creating rather than seeing likeness. So what is Paulina doing? Probably a bit of both.5

In the context of Act 2, Scene 2 of The Winter’s Tale, this is a passionately rhetorical speech, even though Paulina may also believe that it is merely an objective description. Her aim is to persuade Leontes that this is his baby, and to do so she has to achieve two things: to turn the baby into a sign, and then to show that the sign carries the interpretation of its origin on its face. This involves the conviction that the movement from father’s frown, cheek, or finger is causal rather than semiotic, that the print of the father upon the child cannot possibly be doubted. But this is not all. The baby as sign is a pretext, pointing to a further body over which interpretations are being contested. If Leontes should be brought to read the baby as Paulina does, this would invalidate his prior reading of Hermione. If the child looks like him, then it is his. If it is his, then Hermione has not been unfaithful, and all the signs of infidelity with which her body and behavior have been marked for him require reinterpretation. And that means, paradoxically, that signs, even the ones in which one has put most faith, cannot be trusted.

This problem has a precedent earlier in the play when Leontes finds that his rereading of his wife’s behavior inevitably puts into question Mamillius’ status as his own son. In that scene the situation is in- verted, but the concerns are the same. Instead of the likeness of the child to the father being used rhetorically to show the mother’s innocence, there the perception of the mother’s infidelity casts doubt on the child’s provenance: “Mamillius, / Art thou my boy? . . . YOU

4. All references to Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, textual editor, G. Blake- more Evans (Boston, 1974).

5 . The recognition and the creation of likeness through language cannot be easily separated. For a detailed philosophical discussion of this see the discussion of “aspect-seeing’’ in L. Witt- genstein, Philosophical Investigafions, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1968). Part 11, Section xi.

David Schalkwyk 24 5

wanton calf, / Art thou my calf?” (1.2.119-27). This uncertainty causes Leontes to brood upon the horrific instability of social relations that literally depend upon something as shifting and insubstantial as a woman’s word. Babies must look like their fathers because that is the only palpable place to discern the male line. And this line, as the opening scene of the play makes clear, is of crucial political impor- tance. If such a likeness is not palpable, one has to take the mother’s word for paternity. But can paternity be shown in a way which avoids the mother’s word? As Leontes contemplates Mamillius’ physical similarity to himself, such ostensibly incorrigible and transcendent marks simply dissolve into the stuff of dissimulation and rhetoric:

Thou want’st a rough pash and the shoots that I have, To be full like me; yet they say we are Almost as like as eggs; women say so- That will say any thing. (1 .3 .128-31; emphasis mine)

It requires language to interpret physical attributes as signs of likeness, as we see in Paulina’s speech in 2 . 3 , and for Leontes this means having to stake one’s faith in the very word that is intrinsically faithless, deceptive, empty-women’s word, “that will say anything.” It is like trying to insure the value of one large note in a hyperinflation- ary currency by changing it for many small ones.

It is the argument of this essay that Leontes’ apparently unmoti- vated jealousy stems precisely from this crisis of semiosis which always lurks beneath the surface of societies as patriarchal as Sicilia and Bohemia. That the crisis should surface, mostly in the form of a jest, in so many of Shakespeare’s plays, indicates that it is not confined to the fictional world of those two kingdoms.6 Stephen Orgel has pointed to its significance in The Tempest, where the possibility of women’s faithlessness, both in word and deed, is raised at the same time as the word of a particular woman-this “piece of virtue”-is endorsed. “The legitimacy of Prospero’s heir, ” Orgel argues, “de- rives from her mother’s word. But that word is all that is required

6. See 5.1.124 for another instance from The Winter’s Tale: Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince, For she did print your royal father off, Conceiving you.

This comes from the final act, in which we are invited to see a regenerated Leontes and a more inclusive society. The old obsessions remain, however.


from her in the play; once he is assured of it Prospero turns his attention to himself and his succession” (p. 50). A woman’s word cannot be taken at face value; it needs to be justified by some harder currency, namely the man’s word that what the woman says is indeed true: “thy mother was a piece of virtue, and / She said thou wast my daughter” (1.2.56-57). The second statement is empty without the first. Unlike The Tempest, in which Prospero forges ahead secure in the assurance that Miranda’s mother’s word is true, The Winter’s Tale explores the radical instability, for patriarchy, of that word. How does the man know, to what transcendental signified does he have access, that will say, not “any thing,” but the truth when he underwrites woman’s word with his own? Especially when as much doubt can be cast on his brother’s word. As Orgel remarks, “[t]his is the other side of the assumption that all women at heart are whores-all men at heart are rapists” (p. 55). This is particularly evident in the ambivalent way in which Leontes speaks to and of Mamillius. O n the one hand, he attempts to draw him into the fraternal male circle which shares as a common lot the burden of women’s infidelity; on the other, Mamil- lius is already tainted by association with his mother’s supposedly free and bestial sensuality which has ruptured and polluted the greater body aristocratic. “How now, you wanton calf, / Art thou my calf?” Leontes asks. “Go play, boy play. Thy mother plays” (1.2.126-27, 187). “Give me the boy,” he commands, “I am glad you did not nurse him. / Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you / Have too much blood in him” (2. I. 56-57). In this light Leontes’ declaration to Polixenes (a lie) that he has been contemplating in Mamillius a pattern of himself as a boy, is particularly ironic, especially when the two men ostensibly reaffirm an exclusionary male bond of shared fatherhood and universal solace in their respective sons. In each case their attempts to force such a male bond with their sons by excluding the bewitching influence of women serves instead to sever that tie.’

That the influence of women is not only bewitching but also nefarious is revealed by what appears to be merely playful banter among Hermione, Leontes, and Polixenes in I. 2. Polixenes’ account of his early friendship with Leontes suggests that women necessarily destroy the prelapsarian innocence of boyhood, while Hermione’s ironic cross-examination of Leontes’ paradoxical compliment that, in

7. See Polixenes’ intervention in the sheep-shearing feast (4.4.417) and the opening of 2. I .

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persuading Polixenes to stay, she “never spok’st / To better purpose” (88-89), reinforces the sense that to speak well is something hardly characteristic of women. The two “good sisters” that constitute Her- mione’s pair of “graceful” utterances are in fact rendered highly am- biguous by the context. If, as Polixenes’ whimsical tale suggests, woman’s word in marriage in reality marks a fall from grace on the part of the male, then there can be no “good purpose” (89) in anything a woman says, no utterance of hers deserves the name “Grace” (99). This is of course underscored by Leontes’ perception, immediately subsequent to this exchange, that Hermione’s “winning” (86) of Pol- ixenes-the very thing that called forth his praise that she never spoke to better purpose-is an act of treachery.

Such is Leontes’ terrible dilemma, then, that he cannot trust the word of women, and yet their word inescapably underwrites the currency of his own power and its continuation in “his” progeny. It is finally resolved, not by a recognition of equality nor by the genuine discovery of love and humility through some pastoral restorative, but by the arbitrary reimposition of man’s word as the transcendental signified: by the “justification” that only “a pair of kings” can offer. The Winter’s Tale thus rehearses the double, hierarchical enunciation in Prospero’s judgment on Miranda’s legitimacy: “Thy mother was a piece ofvirtue and, / She said thou wast my daughter” (1.2.56-57). In a move constituted by pure fantasy and desire, the political problem of the mother’s word is repressed by elevating the father’s justification to a transcendental status that is nothing but an instance of political desire.

I11

The contest between man’s and woman’s word begins early in The Winter’s Tale. The first thing we notice about woman’s word (if we notice it at all) is its enforced absence. Hermione says nothing until she is enjoined by her husband to speak-“Tongue-tied, our queen? Speak you” ( I .2.27)-an injunction that renders her decorous silence as an inadequacy. Yet as she herself suggests, her reticence is entirely in accord with what contemporary books of conduct and treatises on women demanded of them. Her silence stems not from any choice or incapacity ofher own, but is rather a sign of “proper” deference to her husband and king. Furthermore, as Peter Stallybrass has shown, it


reflects a conventional Renaissance homology between chastity and silence.* Leontes’ accusation-cum-command thus catches Hermione in a double-bind that afllicts all women. It is not sufficient to say that Renaissance women were expected to be silent, for as this encounter shows, neither silence nor speech is acceptable from them. This is particularly acute in Hermione’s trial. If she remains silent she admits the charge, but if she speaks against it she proclaims her guilt:

Since what I am to say must be but that Which contradicts my accusation, and The testimony on my part no other But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me To say “Not guilty.” Mine integrity, Being counted falsehood, shall (as I express it) Be so received. (3.2.22-28)

In a similar way, while Hermione’s silence in I . 2 is perceived to betray an indifference to her husband’s concerns, her speech on his behalf, by its very forcefulness, wit, and above all its success, pronounces her a whore.

This is a structural feature of a political order. It cannot be ex- plained in terms of the psychology or morality of any individual character, so it is futile to search for a personal motivation for Leontes’ sudden jealousy. Motivation there is enough, but it resides in the suprapersonal sphere, in an ideological perception of the instability and transgressive openness-what Bakhtin terms the LLgrotesque”- of both woman’s body and her word.9

In the light of the conventional homology between woman’s transgressive sexuality and her speech-a deeply political association-it is significant that Hermione should challenge Polixenes’ ‘‘limber”10 vows with the “potency” of her own word:

8. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses ofsexual Drflerenre in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago and London, 1986), 123-44: “Similarly, Barbaro writes in his treatise On Wifely Duties: ‘It is proper. . . That not only arms but also the speech of women never be made public; for the speech of a noble woman can be no less dangerous than the nakedness of her limbs.’ Silence, the closed mouth, is made a sign of chastity. And silence and chastity are, in turn, homologous to woman’s enclosure within the house.”

9. Stallybrass is particularly illuminating in his discussion of the “natural grotesqueness” of woman’s body. See pp. 123-30.

David Schalkwyk 249

When at Bohemia You take my lord, I’ll give him my commission To let him there a month behind the gest Prefix’d for ’s parting; yet, good deed, Leontes, I love thee not a jar 0’ th’ clock behind What lady she her lord. You’ll stay?

Pol. No madam. Her. Nay, but you will? Pol. I may not, verily. Her. Verily?

You put me off with limber vows; but I, Though you would seek t’unsphere the stars with oaths, Should yet say, “Sir, no going.” Verily, You shall not go; a lady’s “verily” is As potent as a lord’s. Will you go yet? Force me to keep you as a prisoner, Not like a guest: so you shall pay tour fees When you depart, and save your thanks. How say you? My prisoner? or my guest? By your dread “verily,” One of them you shall be. (1.2.39-56)

To invoke Bakhtin once more, this contest is especially noteworthy for its dialogism, expressed as a complex interchange of direct, indirect and quasi-direct speech.” This is particularly clear in the cross- appropriations of the word “verily.” Initially the word belongs to

10. The word means “limp” or “flaccid.” 11. As Bakhtin uses it this does not refer simply to an exchange between two people or

characters, of which this passage is obviously an instance, but rather to the way in which any single person’s language is always both constituted by and a response to the language of others. Even a single utterance may therefore be dialogical:

As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the border between oneself and other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. . . . Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private territory of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated- overpopulated-with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. (“Discourse in the Novel,” The Dialogical Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Mi- chael Holquist [Austin, 19811, 293-94.)

See also Part 111 of V. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy oflanguage, tr. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik (New York and London, 1973) for a discussion of the dialogical nature of direct, indirect, and quasi-direct speech.

2SO English Literary Renaissance

Polixenes, who uses it monologically to affirm the absoluteness of his resolve to leave: it confirms, justifies, endorses his prior utterances: “no madam . . . I may not” (44-45). But Hermione appropriates it, and in her mouth the word is parodied to remind him (and us) that it is not really his, it does not originate in him. But it is not hers either. It is a clichk, and a pretty flaccid one at that. The “Verily?” of Hermione’s response is thus doubly not her own word. Having indicated that its meaning resides outside Polixenes’ consciousness, she distances herself from his particular use of it by turning it into a question. It becomes, as Bakhtin would put it, the “image” of the king’s word, hollowed out by her parodying laughter. l2

We are reminded here of Beatrice’s place, on the margins of male discourse in Much Ado About Nothing, as the constant deflation of the male word, of male ‘2ustification.” But, like Beatrice, Hermione ultimately needs to make this parodied word her own. She has to adopt the discourse of truth. What we see in this speech is thus not merely parody but the operation of what Bakhtin calls “stylization”: the “use of someone else’s discourse for his own purposes, by insert- ing a new semantic intention into a discourse which already has, and which retains, an intention of its own. Such a discourse, in keeping with its task, must be perceived as belonging to someone else.”’3 The political point is that, having deflated the force of Polixenes’ “verily,” Hermione needs nonetheless to restore some of its force in her own mouth-to use it, rather than merely mention it.

Notice how obliquely she sets about her task. Instead of saying outright “You shall not go,” she sets up a hypothetical situation in which she anticipates in direct speech her ownfirture response to any further oath he may resort to. It is thus impossible for him to counter an utterance that carries considerable force, but has actually not yet been made. But this is followed at once by her own emphatic and indicative use of the discredited word: “Verily, / You shall not go” (49-50). Syntactically, it now carries a great deal of weight, and it is as close as it ever gets to being her own utterance. She has turned his “limber

12. One could say, using the terms of analytical philosophy, that this is an instance of

1 3 . M. Bakhtin, Problems of D o s t o p s k y ’ s Poetics, tr. Caryl Emerson (Manchester, 1984), mention rather than use.

p. 189.

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vow” (47) into an inescapable imperative ofher own. She has wrested the word from him, made it her own, and shown, as her next subtle appropriation of it as a quotation of her own anticipated direct speech makes clear, that “a lady’s ‘verily’ is / As potent as a lord’s’’ (49-50). But the use of direct speech distances herself from the word once more. She objectifies it and renders it ironic once again. How potent is a lord’s “verily”? we (and Polixenes) might ask, and what does that say about a lady’s? The coup de grace is delivered by a similarly adroit use of the subtle positioning of quasi-direct speech. Polixenes is invited to offer his own response-“How say you?”-but his words have already been chosen for him by Hermione (54). She is quoting, in a quasi-direct form, what he is going to say, all he can say: “my prisoner? or my guest?. . . . Your guest then, madam” (55-56). The word “verily” returns, this time restored to Polixenes in the form of direct speech, but paradoxically infused by a power that is entirely Hermione’s. Through the intervention of the woman, the man is trapped in and by his own former oath: “By your dread ‘verily,’ / One of them you shall be” (55-56).

It is important to note that Hermione’s adroit use of parody and stylization means that she never fully claims Polixenes’ word as something that belongs to or originates in herself. The prevalence of direct quotation, especially of her own speech, means that she always stands at a distance from the claim to truth, to the transcendental signified, that he would like to think originates in his will. That emptiness of that claim is revealed, and Hermione as woman does not seek to substitute her own claim to truth, which in this society is an a priori impossibility, as we see later.

The exchange is thus a microcosm of a general struggle within The Winter’s Tale over the potency of man’s and woman’s word. Her- mione is able to win this particular contest only by first exposing the hollowness of male claims to potent truth and then turning their evacuated words against men. She has no intrinsic claim to truth herself: the word “verily” is doubly not her own, but instead a property which patriarchy claims for and of itself. Like Beatrice, Hermione stands on the border of such discourse, half appropriating it in the forms of irony, parody, and stylization. But also, like Be- atrice, this position is not sufficient. Faced by her own utter power- lessness to show the innocence ofher slandered cousin, Beatrice has to


appeal to the potency of a Benedick to make her word stick.14 Her- mione is forced to use claims of verity as her own even in a society which holds that women will “say anything.” This is clear, not only in her trial, but also in the ominous declaration of her love for Leontes which prefaces this exchange with Polixenes:

yet, good deed, Leontes, I love thee not a jar 0’ th’ clock behind What lady she her lord. (42-44)

The very comparative form in which Hermione expresses her loyalty confirms her plight within the trap of gender. Expressed as a function of women’s love as a whole, her protestation of fidelity is extremely fragile in a society which renders all women dubious or grotesque both in body and word. This is particularly striking once Hermione and her women have left the stage and Leontes’ courtiers attempt to persuade him of her innocence. “If it prove / She’s other- wise,” Paulina’s husband announces with passionate recklessness, but with an absolute certainty of his power to do so,

I’ll keep my stables where I lodge my wife; I’ll go in couples with her; Than when I feel and see no further trust her; For every inch of woman in the world, Ay every dram of woman’s flesh is false, If she be. . . .

I have three daughters: the eldest is eleven; The second and the third, nine, and some five; Zfthis prove true, they’ll payfor’t . B y mine honor, I’ll geld ’em all; fourteen they shall not see To bring false generations. They are co-heirs, And I had rather glib myself than they Should not produce fair issue. (2. I. 133-50; emphasis mine)

On the face of it, this is a deeply felt plea by the “good Antigonus” on behalf of Hermione. But what does he pledge for her honor? The sexuality and humanity of his wife and daughters; indeed, were it in

Be she honour-flaw’d,

14. One should note that this is an entirely conventional potency. The arbitrary rules of the society preclude her as a woman from proving her cousin’s innocence through the arbitrarily chosen final word of the duel.

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his power to do so, he would pledge all of womanhood. Just as the newborn Perdita is offered by Paulina as a sign of Hermione’s faithful- ness, so Hermione here becomes a sign of womanly virtue as a whole. If she is unfaithful, then all women are whores, and if all women are whores, they must be made to pay for their transgressive nature. They must be made to suffer disfigurement to insure that the patriarchal line remains legitimate at all costs.

Antigonus’ concern with the production of “fair issue” reiterates the close link between women as bearers of children and bearers of an all-too-potent word. Once the integrity of that word (upon which legitimacy so precariously depends) collapses-here in the form of Hermione-as-sign-there is nothing to do but to stop them from bearing children altogether. But this means the collapse of male power too. Like Leontes, Antigonus glimpses the complicity of men in the transgressions of women. If women must be “gelded,” that is because there are men who need to be “glibbed,” men who in body and word are as dangerously potent and slippery as women are pur- ported to be.

Whichever way the matter is viewed, if patriarchy does not wish to extinguish itself, it has at least to pretend to take both the verbal and human issue of women at face value. Leontes very nearly commits himself to the former option. In rejecting and reviling Hermione and Perdita he destroys Mamillius, the “comfort” of the state. He enacts at a different level Antigonus’ indignant vow to castrate himself if that is the only way to insure that women “should not produce fair issue.”

I V

Critics often comment on the magical nature of the last scene of The Winter’s Tale, but much less is said about its witchcraft. These terms are not synonymous, as commentators like Frank Kermode have in- sisted. In his watershed introduction to the New Arden edition of The Tempest, Kermode makes an absolute (and for his reading of the play, crucial) distinction between the “natural” magic of the witch Sycorax, “a geotist who exploited the universal sympathies, but whose power is limited by the fact that she could command, as a rule, only devils and the lowest order of spirits,” and the supernatural powers of Prospero, “a theurgist, whose Art is to achieve supremacy over the


natural world by holy magic.”15 It is no accident that of the two magicians, it is the woman whose commands are seen to be “earthy and abhorred, ” whose issue-ostensibly a result of her mating with the devil-is the most striking example in all of Shakespeare of the grotesque body and unconstrained sexuality. Sycorax is also quite literally tongue-tied in the play, her voice being the entirely diegetic projection of Prospero’s tale. 16

Paulina is well aware of patriarchy’s readiness to project the stain of witchcraft upon the least doubtful issue of women. She is thus careful to forestall any suspicion that her restoration of Hermione stems from any complicity with “wicked powers” (5.3.91); rather, her device is to get Leontes to underwrite or justify the issue of her art through his participation in its creation:

It is requir’d You do awake your faith. Then, all stand still. On; those that think it is unlawful business I am about, let them depart.

No foot shall stir. (5.3.94-98) Leon. Proceed;

As D’Orsay W. Pearson has shown, l7 Leontes’ enraged projection of witchcraft upon Paulina when she intercedes with him on Her- mione’s behalf is in fact subtly sustained and brought to a head in the final scene. That initial accusation is precipitated precisely by the link between free speech and grotesque sexuality discussed by Stallybrass. If Hermione has to resort to parody and stylization of man’s word to display and exercise the potency of her own, Paulina speaks much more directly. From the very beginning, her claim to speak the discourse of truth and morality as her own is explicit and confident. She comes, she says, with “words as medicinal as true, / Honest as either’’ (2.3.37) and refuses to allow her “needful” conference” to be reduced to mere “noise.” Comparing her exchange with Leontes to that between Polixenes and Hermione, we see that in the former contest

15. Frank Kermode, Introduction to The Tempest (London, 1964). p. XI. 16. I here draw upon David Lodge’s extremely useful discussion of Plato’s distinction

between diegesis and mimesis as modes of representation. See “Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction,” in After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London and New York, 1990). pp. 25-

44. 17. D’Orsay W. Pearson, “Witchcraft in The Winter’s Tale: Paulina as ‘Alcahueta i vn Poquito

Hechizera’,” Shakespeare Studies IZ (1g7g), pp. 1g5--214.

David Schalkw y k 25 5

Paulina neither allows her word to be appropriated and emptied by another person, as Polixenes does, nor does she resort to Hermione’s tactic of parody:

Good my liege, I come- And I beseech you hear me, who professes Myself your loyal servant, your physician, Your most obedient counsellor; yet that dares Less appear so, in comforting your evils, Than such as most seem yours-I say, I come From your good queen.

Leon. Good queen? Paul. Good queen, my lord, good queen, I say good queen,

And would by combat make her good, so were I A man, the worst about you. (52-62)

What is most striking about this is the centrality of the first-person pronoun. Hermione seeks to speak squarely as herself, and yet, realiz- ing that that self has no independent status but is always defined and positioned relative to a wider political and social system of relation- ships, she breaks off a straightforward account of her mission with an interpolation that acknowledges, but at the same time seeks to negate, her inferior political status, her lack of power. The confident vocative and indicative of “Good my liege, I come” is replaced, first by a plea to be granted audience, to be heard on her own terms, and then by a profession of self that is offered as quasi-direct speech: a catalogue of commonplaces which seeks to justify her right to speak as she does. But, as Carolyn Asp shows, at least two of these “professed” roles are impertinent. One might expect to ingratiate oneself to a monarch by professing to be his loyal servant, but for a woman to declare herself his physician and counsellor (albeit an “obedient” one) has, as Asp puts it, “no real models in the social or political context, nor does such a figure appear in the courtesy books. . . . [I]n the many tracts on education . . . there is no mention of the possible function of women as counsellors, a function that implies moral and intellectual superi- ority.”18

In Paulina’s mouth, then, these are not simply well-worn formulas, but a transgression, an appropriation of a discourse that is wholly out

18. Carolyn Asp, “Shakespeare’s Paulina and the Consolatio Tradition,” Shakespeare Studies 21 (19801, 14s.


of bounds and which, in its transgressive inversion, is enough to brand her as a witch.19 In saying that she comes from Leontes’ “good queen, ” she proclaims herself both Hermione’s emissary and Leontes’ counsellor. As the emissary of a traitor who presumes to teach the King, she enacts a form of misrule that finally provokes Leontes’ threat to visit the punishment reserved for heretics and witches upon her: “I’ll ha’ thee burnt” (3.2. I 14). The conventional epithet, “good queen,” in Paulina’s mouth thus evokes two clashing senses that resonate with the antitheses contained in the world-turned-upside- down of both the carnival and the witch’s sabbat. Paulina uses it on Hermione’s behalf as a defiant moral judgment, while to patriarchal ears it rings of treachery and the demonic.Z0 When Leontes attempts to parody this judgment by objectifying it as direct speech and turning it back at her as an incredulous question-“Good queen?”- Paulina simply reclaims it as her own. She not only retains but amplifies the force of the initial epithet by repeating it as her own word: “Good queen, my lord, good queen, I say good queen I . . . The good queen / (For she is good) hath brought you forth a daughter” (2.3.60, 65-66). Leontes’ technique is similar to that used by Hermione when she renders Polixenes’ “verily” ironic by quoting it back to him in the form of a question. It fails, however, owing to Paulina’s unfailing confidence in her own speech, which at the same time marks her as an impudent, disruptive threat to perceived domes- tic and social order.21 It is thus the freedom and confidence of her speech, the only weapon available to a woman, that prompts Leontes to brand her as a “mankind witch” and “a most intelligencing bawd” (68-69). To an increasingly vexed Leontes her “lewd” tongue is a sign of treachery, heresy, and the corruption not only of his Queen’s body, but also of the body of the state. Thus the progression from comical scorn heaped on Antigonus for allowing himself to be intimidated

19. See Stuart Clark, “Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft,” in Past and Present,

20. See William Perkins, Discourse ofthe Damned ArtofWitchrrafi (1616-1618) iii, 651; quoted

William Perkins, for instance, recommended that the natural law enjoining the death penalty for all the enemies of the state be extended to “the most notorious traytor and rebel1 that can be. . . . For [the witch] renounceth God himselfe, the King of Kings, she leaves the societie of his Church and people, she bindeth herself in league with the devil.”

21. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the A g e o/ Shakespeare (Brighton, Sussex, 1983). pp. 103-40.

No. 87 (May 1980), 98-127.

in Clark (198o), p. 119.

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and ruled by his wife, to the accusations contained in “a cluster of epithets more fitting for an urban witch than an honored lady of the court”22 indicates a continuous perception of Paulina as a threat to the political order headed by Leontes.

Despite her remarkable impudence, Paulina is herself aware that she is excluded by her gender from the semiotic systems that would indeed enable her to “make [Hermione] good.” Given the patriarchal phobia about the power of woman’s speech, she is systematically deprived of any access to extant social power systems in terms of which “truth” may be constituted, whether in word or deed. Only through the intervention of external and more drastic signs, in the form of Leontes’ blasphemy against the oracle and his son and wife’s consequent deaths, is Paulina’s word indeed vindicated, and that in itself has political, and not merely moral, implications.

It is particularly significant that such vindication should be accom- plished by the loss of both prince and queen, plunging the patriarchal state into a crisis over the continuity of its power and blood. As I have argued, it is Leontes’ pathological anxiety about this very continuity that precipitates the crisis in the first place. Apart from questions of morality, which of course loom extremely large in 3.2, but which have been dealt with extensively by critics, the political question is how to restore the continuity of power and blood through the remar- riage of the King and the procreation of another heir. This means that the mother’s word in general, upon which that continuity hangs, must be rehabilitated and endorsed in some way. The intensity of this desire as a social or communal one, affecting the whole body politic, is deftly conveyed by Archidamus’ parting line in I . I , that “If the King had no son, they would desire to live on crutches till he had one” (45). It prepares u s for the political import of patriarchy’s anxiety concerning women as bearers of both words and heirs. Mamillius is an “unspeakable comfort” (34), not because he is a likeable boy, but because he promises an unbroken line of patriarchal power. It is therefore politically significant that the very voice which is perceived to offer the greatest threat to that “fair issue”-a woman’s, Pau- lina’s-should indeed become the King’s counsellor after Mamillius’ death, controlling precisely the restoration of the patriarchal line by

22. Pearson, p. 201. See “crone” (77). “a callat of boundless tongue” (91), “gross hag” ( I O ~ ) , “midwife,” all of which culminate in the deftly deflected threat to have Paulina burnt: “I care not, / I t is an heretic that makes the fire, / Not she which burns in’t” ( I 14-15).


determining the marriage of the monarch. This is not merely an ironic embodiment of Leontes’ earlier suggestion that she is a “bawd,” as Pearson suggests,23 nor simply the unusual adoption of the role of official counsellor or female consolatio f i g ~ r e , ~ 4 but the assumption of a royal and patriarchal prerogative. Hence one of the most important instances of power in the management of the patriarchal state, control over marriage and the bloodline, passes into the hands of a woman who, at one time branded as a “mankind witch” by the superficially transcendental word of patriarchy, now not only holds sway over whom the King should marry, but is also the self-proclaimed spokes- person for “the heavens” (45). Lest we forget the political pressures that inform these issues, the opening lines of Act 5 recall the anxiety alluded to by Camillo and Archidamus in I . I:

Paul.

Dion.

You are one of those

If you would not so, Would have him wed again.

You pity not the state, nor the remembrance Of his most sovereign name; consider little What dangers, by his Highness’ fail of issue, May drop upon his kingdom, and devour Incertain lookers on. What were more holy Than to rejoice the former queen is well? What holier than, for royalty’s repair, For present comfort, and for future good, To bless the bed of majesty again With a sweet fellow to’t? (5.1.23-34)

Dion is a clear spokesman for patriarchal assumptions, especially in the suggestion that for “royalty’s repair” one substitute is as good as any other, that what matters is simply the provision of a body that will fulfill a predetermined political function which is defined relative to the king. Any queen will do, as long as she fulfills her proper role: “What were more holy / Than to rejoice the former queen were well?” But the “former queen,” in Paulina’s sense, is dead.

This speech furthermore revives suspicions about the necessary perversion of power in a woman’s hands or tongue. In a veiled

23. See “Witchcraft in the Winter’s Tale,” 204: “In accepting Paulina’s condition-that only she can procure a wife for him-Leontes himself prepares the way for the role [as necroman- tic urban witch] she assumes in the final scene.” 24. Carolyn Asp, “Shakespeare’s Paulina and the Consolario Tradition.”

David Schalkwyk 2s9

accusation, Paulina is charged with political irresponsibility at best, treachery and heresy at worst. It is important, therefore, that she be seen to dismiss the accusation with an assertion of the unique qualities of Hermione as queen (not simply a “sweet bedfellow”) and to assert very powerfully her own transcendental role as the carrier of the “holy” Delphic word. We see here, in a different form, what Leonard Tennenhouse has described as an essential feature of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, namely “the manner in which the well-born lady, and only the well-born lady, becomes invested with certain powers to make a more inclusive and flexible political world.”25 Paulina’s power goes far beyond that of any of the romantic heroines, which is perhaps why witchcraft continues to be invoked to the very end; and it is perhaps her dramatic and confident appropriation of prerogatives normally withheld from women that has led to The Wirzter’s Tale being celebrated as a proto-feminist text. We should certainly not un- derestimate the dramatic and ideological import of Paulina’s transformation from the grotesque figure on the margins of power and legitimacy-whether as the comic “Dame yartlett” or the more ominous “mankind witch”-to the King’s counsellor, physician, marriage-broker, and restorer of the Queen. In the romantic comedies the transfer of power into the hands of women is temporary; it is always restored to patriarchy but, Tennenhouse would suggest, in a changed form. It is important to wait until the very end of the play before passing judgment on the real power of women, even a woman such as Paulina, to insure the potency of their own word and the regenerated power of their sex.

V

We need to turn briefly now to the second half of the play, which is almost universally regarded as the antithesis of the first. Here, it seems, winter turns to spring, festivity replaces mourning, the lim- iting politics of the court are transcended in a pastoral idyll. As Greenblatt puts it, the second half “reverses the ritual pattern that we glimpse in Latimer: the tainting of the female, her exclusion from social contracts that normally govern her sex, and her ultimate re-

25. Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare’s Genres (London and New York, 1986). p. 45.


integration into a renewed community.”2“ There is no doubt that Greenblatt’s synopsis is, broadly speaking, true. The problem lies with the vague concept of a “renewed community.” To what extent and in what precise ways is Bohemia renewed at the end of the play, and does the reintegration of women mean any change of political role for them? To put it slightly differently, has the potency of woman’s word been recognized in any way other than as the ground of phobic, patriarchal repression? Who speaks at the end, whose word finally “justifies” the “renewed community”?

Before attempting to answer these questions, let us look at Perdita, who offers a number of significant parallels with Paulina in the first half. Unlike Miranda, who generally conforms to the patriarchal ideals of silence and submissiveness, Perdita cuts a strikingly independent figure, especially in speech, during the sheep-shearing feast. If we view Act 4 as an instance (attenuated to be sure) of Bakhtinean carnival rather than a conventional evocation of a pastoral utopia, the multiple instances of role-switching and hierarchical inversion-not to speak of the delight provoked by Autolycus-take on a political significance which is both continuous with Polixenes’ disruption of the feast at the end of the act in the name of patriarchal exclusivity, and makes greater political sense of Perdita’s designation as a witch.27

Scene 3 opens with Autolycus’ brazen invitation to us to share his pleasure in his transformation from servant at court to masterless rogue:

I have served Prince Florizel, and in my time wore three-pile, but now I am out of Service.

But shall I go mourn for that, my dear? The pale moon shines by night; And when I wander here and there, I then do most go right. (4.3.13-18)

Autolycus as self-confessed vagabond, who inverts the political code by extolling his idle wanderings on the margins of legitimate society, is not an object of fear and derision as one might expect in terms of usual ideological representation, but of delight. Carrying the carnivalesque “marketplace” into the world of agricultural festival, haun-

26. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation ofSocial Energy in Renais- sance England (Berkeley, 1988). 132-33. 27. See Clark, “Inversion, Misrule and the Meaning of Witchcraft,” for an indication ofthe close relationship between carnivalesque inversion and Jacobean conceptions of demonic practice.

David Shalkwyk 26 I

ter of “wakes, fairs and bair-baitings” (IOI), he sets the tone for the gay inversion of hierarchies and roles that the feast promises to initiate until the unmasking of Polixenes reimposes officially sanctioned rela- tionships and hierarchies.

Florizel and Perdita draw our attention to the festive effacement of differences that in the official world would keep them apart. Not only is Sicilia’s prince and heir to the throne reduced to the rank of a swain, but the festive occasion also allows Perdita to adopt the roles of queen and goddess:

Flo. These your unusual weeds to each part of you Does give a life; no shepherdess, but Flora Peering in April’s front. This your sheep-shearing Is as a meeting of the petty gods, And you the queen on’t.

Per. Sir, my gracious lord, To chide at your extremes it becomes not me. 0 pardon that 1 name them! Your high self, The gracious mark 0’ th’ land, you have obscur’d With a swain’s wearing, and me, poor lowly maid, Most goddess-like prank’d up. (4.4.1-10)

If Perdita still displays a sense of deference to Florizel as her “lord,” both in rank and gender, here she abandons it once she has given herself fully to her carnivalesque role. Her speech is marked by a frank in- dependence that has often been noted. She refuses to demur to Polix- enes in the argument about Nature and Art (79-85), puts Camillo deftly and wittily in his place when he makes a sexual pass at her ( I IO-

IZ), and speaks so frankly of her own sexuality that she is herself taken by surprise and consciously attributes it to the release offered by the occasion and role that carnival allows her:

Come, take your flowers. Methinks I play as I have seen them do In Whitsun pastorals. Sure this robe of mine Does change my disposition. ( I 32-3 5 )

One of the crucial characteristics of carnival, however, is that it knows no footlights. “Footlights,” as Bakhtin puts it, “would destroy a For its spirit of free relativity and gay, renewing laugh-

28. See M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984), P. 7.


ter to prevail, everyone should participate, no one should occupy the role of detached spectator, as Polixenes and Camillo do. The carnivalesque character of the festival is thus undermined by the presence of these two, masked, whose business it is precisely to prevent the levelling and inversion represented by Florizel and Perdita acting as Doracles and Flora, and to contain the political hubris that prompts the Prince to claim the prerogative of “the gods themselves” to “[humble] their deities for love” (25) . Fear, which it is the business of carnival to annul through its grotesque impudence and familiar laughter, stalks the festival in the name and office of the father-of both the body of the prince and body aristocratic.

This complete negation of the carnival spirit (however tenuous it may be), in the name of propriety, hierarchy, and patriarchy calls to mind the struggle between Paulina and Leontes discussed above. Far from being the representative of a more flexible and inclusive Sicilian political order symbolized by the festival, Polixenes annuls such a symbolic promise by invoking precisely the same anxiety about the continuation of the bloodline, by threatening the perpetrators with similar charges of treason and promises of unbridled political violence, and by resorting to the same pathological fear of and loathing for the potency of the female body and word that we see exemplified in Leontes. The tyranny of which Paulina accuses Leontes is no less evident in Polixenes’ readiness to invoke his immense powers of life, death, and physical disfigurement in a tirade that recalls the stock discourse of the Renaissance stage tyrant:

Pol. Mark your divorce, young sir, [Discovering himselfl

Whom son I dare not call. Thou art too base To be acknowledg’d: Thou, a sceptre’s heir, That thus affects a sheep-hook! Thou, old traitor, I am sorry that by hanging thee I can But shorten thy life one week. And thou, fresh piece O f excellent witchcraft, whom of force must know The royal fool thou cop’st with-

Pol. I’ll have thy beauty scratch’d with briers and made More homely than thy state. For thee, fond boy, If ever I may know thou dost but sigh That thou no more shall see this knack (as never I mean thou shalt), we’ll bar thee from succession,

Shep. 0, my heart!

David Srhalkwyk 263

Not hold thee of our blood, no not our kin, Farre than Deucallion off. . . . . . . . And you, enchantment-

-if ever, henceforth, thou These rural latches to his entrance open, O r hoop his body more with thy embraces, I will devise a death as cruel for thee As thou art tender to’t. (417-41)

. . .

The vision of female sexuality as a trap for the unwary male, the desire to disfigure Perdita’s beauty, the relish taken in perpetrating a cruel death upon the “tender” figure of the woman, and the automatic transformation of freely expressed sexuality into the evil seductions of enchanting witchcraft, both rehearse and extend Leontes’ earlier obsessions. For all their psychological intensity, they do so in the name of the same political order. Like Leontes, Polixenes’ efforts to preserve the “fair issue” of his blood lead to the loss of the kingdom’s heir.

Polixenes’ intervention means that Perdita is deposed as Queen of the festival (“I’ll queen it no inch farther, / But milk m y ewes and weep” (448-49)’ but not before the inversions initiated by the folk- rite find further expression. Perdita significantly speaks out against the King’s reimposition of the “Law of the Father”:

I was not much afeard; for once or twice I was about to speak, and tell him plainly The self-same sun that shines upon his court Hides not his visage from our cottage, but Looks on all alike. (442-46)

This fearless impulse not only to speak plainly, but also with the voice of “barbarism’”29 suggests a close affinity with Paulina, even though Perdita does not manage to deliver her challenge (the general egalitari- anism of which carries a far more radical political import than anything Paulina does actually say).30 The misrule that is suggested in the early part of the festival comes to a head after Polixenes’ exit. Instead of shaping his fancy to his father’s will and the will of the patriarchal state, Florizel persists in his devotion to Perdita, thereby embodying

29. Seen. 3 1 . 30 . In theatrical terms it is another example of the effective use of quasi-direct discourse. While Perdita is precluded from a politically disastrous criticism of the King, her radical opposition is nonetheless registered as a wholly other political voice.


the upside down world of disobedience. Just as Hermione and Perdita were expelled from the body politic, Florizel’s “desperate” madness (484-85) promises a similarly “wild dedication . . . / To unpath’d waters, undream’d shores” (566-67). Perdita’s enchantment is thus not merely an illicit sexual allure; her witchcraft threatens the estab- lished degree and health of the patriarchal state itself. It therefore comes as no surprise that both Paulina and Perdita should be reviled as witches for the potency of their word and their perceived conspiracy against the maintenance of “fair issue.”31 Our ironic knowledge that Perdita is in fact “something greater than herself, / Too noble for this place” renders her critique ambivalent, however, and promises a resolution, once everything is revealed, that will not run counter to the metaphysics of blood.

If the play promises an ending in which the ideology of blood is allowed to triumph, the question of gender relations is not quite that simple. The final and perhaps most telling of Perdita’s affinities with Paulina is suggested by Camillo, who, echoing carnivalesque inversions with which the scene begins, remarks of Perdita: “I cannot say ’tis pity / She lacks instructions, for she seems a mistress / To most that teach” ( ~ 8 2 - 8 4 ) . ~ ~

VI

In the final act we witness both the necessity of women’s power and the reappropriation and repression of that power by men. There is the typically comic resolution: not only are the “pair of kings” restored to one another’s brotherly love, but the problem of the missing heirs is

3 1 . Notice that Polixenes’ revulsion at the negation of degree that Perdita-as-queen would represent is paralleled by Leontes’ similar disgust at the social and political levelling that Hermione’s supposedly disruptive sexuality embodies:

You have mistook, my lady, Polixenes for Leontes. 0 thou thing! Which 1’11 not call a creature of thy place. Lest barbarism (making me the precedent) Should a like language use to all degrees, And mannerly distinguishment leave out Betwixt the prince and beggar. (2.1.81-87)

32. Cf. Henry Smith, Preparative to Marriage ( I 591): “the ornament of women is silence; and therefore the Law was given to the man rather than to the woman, to shewe that he shoulde be the teacher, and she the hearer,” quoted in Marianne Novy, “Patriarchy and Play in the Taming o j the Shrew,” English Literary Renaissance 9 (1979), 278.

David Schalkwyk 265

also resolved, as it is in T h e Tempest, by a marriage that, for all the personal devotion of the couple, fulfills all the political desires of patriarchy.

The final scene is not strictly necessary for this restoration. Again, as in The Tempest, such a political resolution could be achieved in the absence of the mother: all that is required is her word, now transcen- dentally vindicated. So 5.3 indicates that something is missing from that scenario, and it can only be provided, after years of disciplined patience, by women. As Greenblatt suggests, the last scene enacts a ceremony for the purification of a king who believes that he has been stained by the grotesque potency of the female b0dy,3~ and who has to come to terms with what is essentially an indelible mark.

The female potency of speech and birth, being indispensable for the continuation of the patriarchal bloodline, is, as we have seen, usually reviled as the product of witchcraft. The last scene, presided over by the “mankind witch” Paulina, thus enacts a containment of patriarchal fear and loathing as well as a gradual exorcism of the specter of witchcraft as the unholy power that is supposed to inform all that issues from the female. Leontes is now required to participate in the rebirth of Hermione, and Paulina seeks to annul the prior taint of witchcraft by openly invoking and then dispelling its fear through Leontes’ irresistible desire to acquiescence in its practice.

The statue itself is the first to be obliquely accused of bewitch- ment-by Leontes himself, in a significant parodic inversion of his earlier slurs:

0 royal piece, There’s magic in thy majesty, which has My evils conjur’d to remembrance, and From thy admiring daughter took the spirits, Standing like stone with thee. (5.3.38-42)

Only when Paulina has repeatedly challenged the two kings to brand the potency of her art as unholy and unlawful, and received their full endorsement for her project, do the women finally consent to the restoration and rebirth of Hermione. Particularly significant is the public expression of Leontes’ wish at this point to pledge his faith where he has before been able to register only fear and suspicion:

33. Greenblatt, p. 132.


0, she’s warm! If this be magic, let it be an art Lawful as eating. (109-11)

In contrast to his earlier disgust at the “warmth” of women, Her- mione-as-statue invites him to contemplate and celebrate the female body as an object of wonder rather than of loathing.34 The “cold stone” as ostensible work of art thus evokes a renegotiation of cus- tomary perception and evaluation that has been denied Hermione as living body. Paulina thus insists that Leontes maintain his distance in order to preserve a response that is reminiscent of Luce Irigaray’s concept of “ a d m i r a t i ~ n . ” ~ ~ This “first passion” quickly passes over into an irresistible impulse to possess the object, however, and Paulina needs constantly to check Leontes’ desire to close that distance. This male urge is dramatically contrasted with Perdita’s expression of pa- tient admiration:

Leon. No! not these twenty years! Per. So long could I

Stand by, a looker-on. (84-85)

This desire for possession is what finally marks the suppression of women as bearers of power and truth in the closing lines of the play, where we witness the reinvestment of potency in the patriarchal word. Once Paulina’s spell, now accepted as “holy” and “lawful,” has revived Hermione and reinserted her into a social order that in Her-

34. The most intense expression of such loathing comes from King Lear: Behold yon simp’ring dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow; That minces virtue, and does shake the head To hear of pleasure’s name- The fitchew nor the soiled horse goes to’t With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women above; But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiends’: there’s hell, there’s darkness, There is the sulphurous pit, burning, scalding, Stench, consumption. Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civit, sweet apothecary, Sweeten my imagination. (4.6. I 18-3 I )

35. This is well-defined by Stephen Heath as “the first of all the passions, the ‘sudden surprise’ of the new and the different that precedes objectification of the other.” Stephen Heath, “Male Feminism,” in Men in Feminism, ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (London and New York, 1987), pp. 29-30.

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mione’s words is “[Perdita’s]&~her’s court” ( I 25), her power dissolves, her “rough magic” is abjured. By her own admission, while she might have brought the Queen back to life, she is powerless to cause her “Antigonus to break his grave, / And come again to [her].” That would indeed be “monstrous to our human reason, ” beyond all that is “holy” and “lawful.” This constitutes a final indication of something we have suspected all along, namely that the designation “witch” is an act of political violence perpetrated upon those, especially women-, who threaten the patriarchal state and its metaphysics of blood. One might say that to be a woman and to speak, to be a woman and to be sexually available, to be a woman and to give birth, is to be a “piece / Ofexcellent witchcraft” (4.4.422). By identifying the witch’s conspiracy against God with a conspiracy against himself, James himself defined witchcraft as the apotheosis of treason.36 What this scene does, then, is to expose the representation of witchcraft as a form of ideological violence. Paulina’s crucial inability and unwillingness to raise her husband from the dead denies the Jacobean identification of witch, devil and treachery. It reveals instead that what goes under the name of witchcraft is simply the Other of patriarchal political power.

Among Jacobean plays The Winter’s Tale is remarkable for the extent to which both truth and power are invested in women. This is an inversion, a form of carnival or grotesque, that might itself have been designated a form of enchantment. The play stops far short of maintaining such power in the bodies and words of women, however. In contrast to Leonard Tennenhouse’s reading of the representation of the aristocratic body of woman in Jacobean tragedy, The Winter’s Tale seems to hark back to what in Tennenhouse’s scheme is an Elizabethan conception of the body of the aristocratic woman and the body Tennenhouse argues that Jacobean stage represen- tations split the identity, formerly maintained in Elizabeth Tudor’s name, between the female aristocratic body and the metaphysical body of state power. This allows for the purging-through acts or threats of rape, torture, disfigurement, or murder-of any aristocratic female who threatens to rupture the body aristocratic. The

36. See Lucia Folena, “Figures of Violence: Philologists, Witches and Stalinistas,” in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, eds., T h e Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (London, 1989), 222-26.

37. Leonard Tennenhouse, “Violence Done to Women on the Renaissance Stage,” in T h e Violence of Representation, pp. 77-97.


Winter’s Tale appears to restore the earlier notion that an attack on the aristocratic female is in fact an act that dismembers the state itself, while at the same time holding up to our gaze the fear and loathing of the female body that characterizes Jacobean representation^.^^ The transfusions of power from male to female and back to male again follow the course of a similar movement in the concept of witchcraft. From being a grotesque, unholy potency that resides in the polluted bodies and words of women, it is first shown to be a site of political struggle rather than metaphysical essence, and then, by the very frequency of its invocation by Paulina herself in the last scene, it passes back to the male with the restoration of the excluded aristocratic female. The prerogative-pertaining to the monarch and the father- of enunciation and endorsement thus returns to patriarchy through the intervention and ultimate repression of female potency, along with the power to command silence.

Hermione speaks only once in 5.3, at the invitation ofher lady-in- waiting, who requires her to turn from her silent embrace of her husband and give her attention and blessing to “our Perdita.” Is this possessive inclusive or exclusionary? There is much that points to the former: Hermione’s address to Perdita as “mine own,” the confession that she has preserved herself, not to rejoin her husband, but in hope of seeing this, her “issue,” and the theatrical import of the three marginalized “witches” forming a circle that for a few moments excludes the assembled kings and courtiers.

The speech to Perdita is Hermione’s first and last word in the second half of the play, and it is a prelude to Paulina’s being silenced by a patriarch who has resumed control over all speech. “0, peace, Paulina!” (135). Good-natured as it may now be, the impatience betrayed by this injunction recalls the former “Dame Partlett.” The peremptory match to Camillo may indeed be seen as a repayment of a debt, a fair exchange, as Leontes suggests it to be, but it marks the ultimate restoration of the play: that of the overriding potency of the lord’s word.

38. See Karen Newman’s similar argument concerning The Taming offhe Shrew in “Renais- sance Family Politics and Shakespeare’s The Taming offhe Shrew,” English Literary Renaissance 16 (1986), 99: “Such a representation ofgender, what I will call the ‘female dramatizable,’ is always at once patriarchally suspect and sexually ambivalent, clinging to Elizabethan patriarchal ideology and at the same time tearing it away by foregrounding or italicizing its constructed character.”

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This essay has suggested that patriarchy in The Winter’s Tale is predicated upon a paradox: its greatest need is at the same time the source of its deepest fears and insecurity. Nothing but a woman’s word can justify the legitimacy of its bloodline. The whole action of the play springs from that paradox. Throughout we have witnessed the continual justification of women’s word while men’s words have been revealed to be false, cruel, evasive, arrogant and self-centered. The play ends with a remarkable piece of effrontery, of blatant but confident impudence. “I’ll not seek far,” Leontes asserts to Paulina,

(For him I partly know his mind) to find thee An honorable husband. Come, Camillo, And take her by the hand, whose worth and honesty Is richly noted; and here justified By us, a pair ofkings. (5.3.141-45)

Compare this with an earlier pronouncement by the King on the difficulty of pronouncing upon the honesty of women by their out- ward face (2. I .65), and we can see at once why, for all the rich noting of Paulina’s worth and honesty, it still has to be underwritten by the companion kings. Leontes can know Camillo’s mind, but the terrible inscrutability of a woman’s needs the endorsement that only a king (preferably two of them) can provide. This marks the final reinvestment of Paulina’s power into the word of the monarch, thus perpetrating both the magic of wish-fulfillment and the violence of repression and displacement. Woman’s word and worth are endorsed at the end, but only by the transcendental signified of patriarchy’s united justification, the product of a fantasy, a will to power that is much more than mere witchcraft.

This appropriation through repression does not go unnoticed, however. Almost immediately the text offers us an enigmatic but significant stage--direction-a hiatus, followed by a puzzled question from Leontes that indicates some silent gesture on the part of the newly tongue-tied Queen. “Let’s from this place. / What? Look upon my brother” (5.3.146-47). It calls to mind the similarly repressed reaction of Hippolyta to Theseus’ patriarchal word in I . I of A Mid- stimrner Night’s Dream:

For you, fair Helena, look you arm yourself To fit your fancies to your father’s will; O r else the laws of Athens yields you up


(Which by no means we may extenuate) To death, or to a vow of single life. Come, my Hippolyta; what cheer, my love? ( I 17-22)

It is a moment of signal blindness in both Theseus and Leontes, which at the same time registers an important ideological fissure in the smooth text of comedy. What does Hermione do, what does she wish to say to this arrogant “justification” which is no less than the complete displacement and recuperation of the power of the “witch” into the body of patriarchy? We shall never know.

Coda: Prospero’s word? Read as a representation of the patriarchal struggle to contain and appropriate the potency of the female word, T h e Winter5 Tale displays certain political affinities with its “sister play, ” T h e Tempest. One might say that whereas the earlier play makes that struggle the very subject of its representation, and thus, whether by intention or not, unmasks both the necessity of woman’s word for the continuation of the patriarchal bloodline and the repression of that word in the name of patriarchal justification, T h e Tempest simply assumes the success of that violent displacement. The mother, in word and body, is simply absent from the latter play, as Orgel has so fruitfully shown us, except insofar as her word (about Miranda’s legitimacy) has been internalized and thus justified by the father: “Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and I’ She said thou wast m y daughter” ( I .2.56-57). Again, as Orgel argues, this enables Prospero to adopt the roles ofboth father and mother, to give birth to Miranda himself, and so, in a typically Jacobean trope, to insure patriarchal authority by expunging from it the always-grotesque body of the female:

James’s sense of his own place in the kingdom is that of Prospero, rigidly paternalistic but incorporating the maternal as well: the king describes himself in Basilicon Doron as “a loving nourish father” providing the common- wealth with “their own nourish-milk.’’ . . . . At moments in his public utterances, James sounds like a gloss on Prospero: “I am the husband, and the whole island is my lawful wife; I am the head, and it is my body.” Here the incorporation of the wife has become literal and explicit. James conceives himself as the head of a single-parent family. In the world of T h e Tempest, there are no two-parent families. All the dangers of promiscuity and bas-

David Schalkwyk 271

tardy are resolved in such a conception-unless, of course, the parent is a woman. (p. 59)

In T h e Winter’s Tale, on the other hand, the body of the female is an object of almost continuous focus and attention. Leontes in making himself a single parent does indeed expunge the mother, but with such dire consequences to the patriarchal state that it has to be ritually restored. That body is finally reduced to silence, however, in a displacement of lord’s for lady’s word: patriarchal justification is offered as a dubious transcendental signifier to ward off the perceived imma- nence of promiscuity and bastardy within the female body.

At the same time, the potency of female word and body, derided as witchcraft, is in fact appropriated by the patriarchal word that represented it as witchcraft in the first place. As Prospero’s pronouncement to his daughter indicates, the lady’s word simply becomes the lord’s in a paradoxical, implicit acknowledgement that it is indeed more potent. This complete appropriation of someone else’s word is what Vol- oshinov/Bakhtin calls “substituted direct ~peech .”3~ The contours of another’s speech are taken over and used as one’s own, completely unmodified, with no grammatical or stylistic indications of the appropriation. The other voice is annihilated, while the potency of its word is totally incorporated into the mouth of the new speaker. There is a signal instance of such suppression in T h e Tempest, remarkable even in a play that is so concerned with the exchange and appropriation of speech.

In Act V, as many editors and commentators point out, when Prospero prepares to renounce his “rough magic” by paradoxically representing its potency in a speech of unprecedented power (beginning, “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves” (5.1.33), he speaks, literally, with the voice of a witch. If Prospero uses the “substituted direct speech” of Medea at this climactic moment of patriarchal authority, Orgel argues, the distinction between white and black magic that both he and many critics wish to maintain collapses. Orgel is right, but is it enough to put the point in such general terms? In the light of the analysis of the contest between male and female speech in T h e Winter’s Tale, this substitution of Medea’s words in the

39. V. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy oflanguage, p. 1 3 8


name of patriarchal power provides a final, violent enactment of both the indispensability and the total appropriation, and thus repression, of the “lady’s word” in all its terrible potency. How else is Hermione to be transformed from Sycorax back into the “good queen,” Perdita from “bastard” banished to “some remote and desert place” ( WT, 2.3.175-76) to an issue that Leontes will “acknowledge his,” and Polixenes from infectious devil to “brother king”?

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“A Lady’s Verily’ Is Women, Word and Witchcraj …leonidas.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/112051390/WT Schalkwyk Fem.pdfWomen, Word and Witchcraj in The Winter’s Tale ... tal signifieds