In the second half of The Winter’s Tale, beginning with the fourth act of the play, there is a notable, sixteen-year shift from the icy tragedy of Sicilia, to the cheerful comedy of Bohemia in early Springtime. After all, the comedic Autolycus sings early on in Act 4 about how the “red blood” of life continues onwards, in this specific case into the youthful Springtime of Perdita’s youth in Bohemia, beyond the tragedy and “winter’s pale” caused by Leontes’s jealousies in Sicilia (Shakespeare 4.3.4). As befits its generic categorization as a tragicomedy, The Winter’s Tale shifts from a despairing first half into an optimistic second arc sixteen years into a Bohemian future filled with comedic potentialities. Nonetheless, the tragedy of the Sicilian Winter still lingers within the most lighthearted scenes that take place in Bohemia, and the characters are eventually drawn back to the tragic center opening the play, the setting of Sicilia. Although many of the male characters manage to find a kind of redemption for their tragic remembrances, the women of the play, Hermione and, most notably, Paulina, ultimately still shoulder the burden of the crystallized memories of all that has been lost to Winter.
Even in the optimism promised by the sheep-shearing festival held in Bohemia, the tragedy of winter sneaks its way into the most comedic scenes of the play. This whiff of tragedy is present in what are perhaps the most visually notable symbols of Spring’s rejuvenation: the profusion of flowers, some varieties of which Perdita offers to her guests as hostess of the festival. To the disguised Polixenes and Camillo, Pedita gives them “rosemary and rue” (Shakespeare 4.4.75). Upon a first glance, these are simply generic flowery blossoms suggestive of the rebirth of hope with the beginning of Spring after a long Winter’s reign. Yet, Perdita, while presenting the blossoms to the two men, designates them as symbolizing “Grace and remembrance” (Shakespeare 4.4.76). Simply playing the part of gracious hostess, she does not seem to intentionally hint at tragedy through her association of “rosemary and rue” with “remembrance,” but this association still implies the melancholic memory of what has been lost with the passage of time, which Polixenes himself explicitly registers when receiving the gift of flowers – he responds to Perdita, “Well you fit our ages / With flowers of winter” (Shakespeare 4.4.78-79). Despite the cheeriness of Bohemia, the festival, and Perdita, the flowers still essentially serve as props that lead Polixenes to wander down memory lane through large swaths of time to, perhaps, the happiness of younger age. But the happiness of this “remembrance” only further enhances the bitter pain of what has been lost in the past as Polixenes “ages.” In this way, “rosemary and rue,” in addition to being flowers, are also hardy, herbal preservatives with medicinal properties that serve as vessels of nostalgia promising both the blossoming potential of Spring as well as the aroma of bittersweet memories carried into old age. Through Perdita’s gifting of the flowers, the communal passing around of these props, the melancholic and crystalized memory of a tragic Winter sneaks into Bohemia and its sheep-shearing festival, arguably one of the most light-hearted, festive, and joyful settings of The Winter’s Tale.
In fact, Polixenes is the one who at the festive zenith of the sheep-shearing ends the revelry of the celebration through a reminder to Florizel of the duty he owes to his state and forefathers as the crown prince of Bohemia. While still disguised, Polixenes is insistent in the face of Florizel’s determination to marry Perdita that, in foregoing the approval of his father, he pursues “Something unfilial” (411) because “The father, all whose joy is nothing else / But fair posterity, should hold some counsel / In such a business (Shakespeare 4.4.413-415). This, ostensibly, is a warning to Florizel that he is shirking both his royal duties and the respect he owes to his father the kind, but Polixenes’s words can also be interpreted as a reminder to the audience to remember “The father” of the present moment of seemingly Spring-like frivolity. This present moment of loving courtship and marriage between Perdita and Florizel is chronologically birthed from the wintry tragedy of the first half of the play set far away in Sicilia – Perdita’s mere presence in Bohemia and her coincidental meeting with Florizel is ultimately built on a foundation of tragedy. For the audience to forget these hard facts and simply let itself be taken up in the jubilation of the sheep-shearing festival is akin to the reprehensible irresponsibility of Florizel being “unfilial” by forgetting his “fair posterity” and by extension the duties he owes his state and country. Indeed, soon afterwards, Polixenes sheds his temperate disguise as a shepherd and ends the festivities with a violent and wintry bluster of royal rage directed towards his son and all the onlookers – he refers to Perdita’s adoptive father as an “old traitor” (425), objectifies Perdita into a “fresh piece / Of excellent witchcraft” (426-427) and “enchantment” (441) that he menaces to have “scratched with briars and made / More homely than thy state” (430-431), and even threatens to “bar thee [Florizel] from succession” (Shakespeare 4.4.434). For Florizel to forget his roots, which are accompanied by the grave duties he owes to his forefathers, will result in consequences for those he personally loves. By extension, the audience must also not forget the wintry, tragic scenes that proceed and make the present scenes of comedy and happiness possible – the audience, like Florizel, must also take upon itself the wintry burden of remembrance, from which lighthearted scenes are merely a brief, easily blighted distracted from underlying, icy layers of tragedy.
With this depressing end to the sheep-shearing festival, Act 4 of The Winter’s Tale is reoriented-towards the wintry domains of tragic Sicilia both geologically and psychologically. Worth noting is that, at this point in the first half of Act 4, much of this reorientation is driven by the men in the play, both accidentally and intentionally. The conflicting responses of Polixenes and Florizel to the burdens of remembrance owed to their forefathers and pasts leads them both to return to a space of previous tragedy: Florizel, choosing to be “heir to my affection” and carve out a new life from himself flees to Sicilia (485), while Polixenes, the father in pursuit, is drawn back towards the site of unfounded sexual jealousy from sixteen years past, though earlier in Act 4, he laments to Camillo, “Of that fatal country Sicilia, prethee speak / no more, whose very naming punishes me with the / remembrance of that penitent – as thou call’st him – / and reconciled king my brother, whose loss of his most / precious queen and children are even now to be afresh / lamented (Shakespeare 4.2.20-25). Like his son, Polixenes is plagued and “[punished]” by a kind of “remembrance,” though Polixenes’s remembrance is attached to a specific place and event rather than generally related to the duties of royalty as passed down along the royal bloodline. Ironically, the clashing burdens of father and son both end up circling around Sicilia, which lends a circularity to the play’s setting, as though the two men are magnetically pulled back to the wintry Sicilia of the opening. Behind the scenes of this return and intentionally orchestrating this circularity is Camillo, who is similarly burdened by remembrance: a nostalgia for his homeland, despite the wintry tragedy that compels him to flee it in the first place – “It is fifteen years since I saw my country … I desire to lay my bones there” (Shakespeare 4.2.4-6). So he directs Perdita and Florizel to Sicilia and reveals in an honest aside to the audience that “I shall so prevail / To force him [Polixenes] after, in whose company / I shall re-view Sicilia, for whose sight / I have a woman’s longing,” with his mention of “woman’s longing” reemphasizing the fond memories of his birthland that remain frozen within himself (Shakespeare 4.4.668-671). To be cyclically pulled away from a hopeful, Bohemian Springtime to a treacherous Sicilian Winter is natural. Mixed with the optimism of the transition from Winter to Spring with the movement into Bohemia is an inherent fragility: the frost of Winter forever lurks around the corner, geographically and within the characters’s memories.
Of course, back within the borders of Sicilia, the memory of winter persists despite the large swaths of time that have passed since the initial tragedy. Despite Leontes’s courtly advisors insisting on the need to willfully forget the past, as though it had never happened, to supposedly
“Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil; / With them, forgive yourself,” the tragic death of his wife, Hermione, certainly weighs even more heavily on himself than it, of course, even does Polixenes (Shakespeare 5.1.5-6). He is continually struck by his complicity in her death, how “Killed? / She I killed? I did so,” with the repeated use of the first-person “I” emphasizing Leontes’s sense of his own heavy and active responsibility for the death of his beloved queen (Shakespeare 5.1.16-17). Therefore, much like the men hailing from Bohemia, the men in Sicilia are glacially trapped by collective trauma of Hermione’s death. To the concerns of Leontes’s male advisors, Sicilia, as a whole, is “heirless” (10) as Leontes remains frozen in time in a kind of perpetual mourning and self accusation: again emphasizing his complicity with the heavy use of self reflective first person pronouns, he explains, “Whilst I remember / her and her virtues, I cannot forget / My blemishes in them, and so still think of / The wrong I did myself” (Shakespeare 5.1.6-9). Though his hand in Hermione’s death happened sixteen years ago, for Leontes to “remember” and be unable to “forget” means his wintry “[wrongs]” from so long ago cannot simply thaw over in “[forgiveness].”
But despite the profusion of these various, burdensome wintry memories piled upon the backs of the male characters over sixteen years’ time, all or the majority of these are seemingly melted by the end of The Winter’s Tale – Leontes reconciles with Polixenes and reunites with his long lost daughter, Perdita, while Florizel’s marriage to Perdita receives the approval of both the kings of Bohemia and Sicilia; Camillo has successfully returned home to Sicilia; and perhaps most miraculously and to Leontes’s absolute elation, a statue of Hermione returns to life. Everything that is lost is seemingly restored, with the union between Perdita and Florizel, promising an eventual heir for the continuation of both royal family lines that have been brought ever closer by their marriage. But the burden of remembrance is not completely abated, and, instead, its locus turns elsewhere, to the women in The Winter’s Tale. A frosty glaze still lingers until the end of The Winter’s Tale, much of which still arguably coats Hermione and, most significantly, Paulina. After all, Camillo, in his seemingly insatiable reminiscences about Sicilia, refers to them as his “women’s longing.”
While the tragedy of wintry memories has an effect on all the characters in The Winter’s Tale including in even the redemptive second arc, those remembrances held by the women seem to be especially oppressive and unresolved compared to those held by the men. In fact, even much earlier on than in Acts 4 and 5, The Winter’s Tale is subtly interested in the power of feminine memory. During her trial, Hermione ends her appeal with the mention that “The Emperor of Russia was my father. / O that he were alive, and here beholding / His daughter’s trial” (Shakespeare 3.2.117-119). With this easily overlooked hint from Hermione of her childhood under her “father,” “The Emperor of Russia,” she dangles before the onlookers of the trial and the audience of the play an inner life built upon wintry memories associated with the, at least as was the case in the English Modern imagination, icy, unknowable, and literally geographically distant fantasy land of “Russia.” Hermione suggests her own inner life built on wintry remembrances of her own but much of her power lies in her ability to withhold specific details about it from the voyeuristic eyes of the public, instead only allowing onlookers, including those in the audience, to only feed on the unwholesome morsels of fantastical ambiguity.
Nonetheless, Hermione does not shy away from the burden of the wintry memories she carries upon her shoulders during her trial – she asks that her “father” see “The flatness of my misery” (120) and look upon her “with eyes / Of pity, not revenge” (Shakespeare 3.2.120-121). The remembrance of her lineage as the royal daughter hailing from the wintry land of “Russia” means that it is not just her personal chastity or integrity that is being unjustly put on public trial. Should she be found guilty in this trial whose single juror, Leontes, is absolutely and delusionally convinced of her guilt, all of the children she has had with Leontes will also become suspect, regardless of whether those suspicions are truly justified: what is truly at stake is a collective memory of the royal legacy and lineage of two countries, Sicilia and Russia, that has been unjustly put on trial. Against the impossible odds of her trial, Hermione’s “misery” and “pity” lies in the fact that though she remembers and has faithfully accomplished her duties as a daughter, wife, and queen of the royal family, Leontes has ultimately stacked all the cards against her – she will inevitably fail the memory of her heavy, wintry duties instilled in her as the daughter of “The Emperor of Russia.”
Within the context of Hermione’s wintry remembrances of her own inner life, her decision to entrust Paulina with the newborn Perdita takes on new layers of poignancy. Hermione is not simply trusting a close confidant with her mother’s love for her newborn daughter. In entrusting Paulina to present Perdita to Leontes so that “he may soften at the sight o’th’child. / The silence often of pure innocence / Persuades when speaking fails” (Shakespeare 2.3.39-41), Hermione is also entrushing Paulina with the safekeeping of her legacy as the daughter of “The Emperor of Russia” and all of the lineal duties she remembers she owes as one of the most powerful woman in the royal family. Hermione is allowing Paulina to also take on and share her burdens accompanying the wintry remembrances of her duties as a queen. Therefore, Paulina’s surrogacy for Paulina is a multifaceted traversing of the realms of memory, motherhood, and political duty.
Throughout The Winter’s Tale, in spite of Sicilia’s glacial thaw into a Springlike hopefulness, in many ways, the burden of memory lies increasingly with Paulina. Eventually, Paulina becomes the conscience of the play, its moral center, even choosing to become a corporeal vessel for the memory of what has been lost, declaring to Leontes that “Were I the ghost that walked, I’d bid you mark / Her eye … then I’d shriek that even your ears / Should rift to hear me, and the words that followed / Should be, ‘Remember mine’” (Shakespeare 5.1.63-67). In response to Leontes’s male advisors who advise him to forgive and forget his wrongdoings and simply “wed again” (23-24), Paulina delivers a righteous tirade against them, asserting, “There is none worthy, / Respecting her that’s gone. Besides, the gods / Will have fulfilled their secret purposes. / For has not the divine Apollo said … That King Leontes shall not have an heir / Till his lost child be found?” (Shakespeare 5.1.34-40). Leontes himself also passes off some of the heavy responsibility of wintry memory to Paulina, represented by how he gives Paulina the agency to decide when he may remarry: when Paulina asks him, “Will you swear / Never to marry but by my free leave?” (69-70), Leontes answers directly in the affirmative, responding, “Never Paulina, so be blest my spirit” (Shakespeare 5.1.71). In this way, the male characters pass on the burden of remembrance for the tragic winter of sixteen years passed onto Paulina’s shoulders, a role which she in part also chooses for herself out of the close companionship and surrogacy she shares with Hermione.
As aforementioned then, the burden of memory is lifted off the shoulders of the men onto the women of The Winter’s Tale, such as Paulina. After all, the main male author of the tragedy, Leontes, is ostensibly more or less redeemed at the end of the play, with the restoration of Hermione to life concurrent with a kind of return to a faith in Christian miracle as Leontes exclaims, “O! she’s warm! / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating” (Shakespeare 5.3.109-111). However, the women are left to contend with the icy memories that have crystallized over time. After coming back to life, the first person Hermione addresses directly in words is her daughter Perdita, whom she fusses over – “You gods, look down, / And from your sacred vials pour your graces / Upon my daughter’s head! Tell me, mine own, / Where hast thou been preserved? Where lived? How found / Thy father’s court” (Shakespeare 5.3.121-125). She addresses Perdita with exuberant motherly affection, with multiple uses of first person possessive pronouns in the form of “my daughter’s head” and “mine own,” as well as the familiarity of “thou” and “Thy.” Her reception of her husband Leontes is comparatively cooler – the closest recognition she makes of him directly in speech is by reference to Perdita and “Thy father’s court” rather than anything more indicative of a direct personal relationship, such as “my husband,” for example. In the scene of her revival, there is also a disconnected distance in how the onlookers describe from a third person perspective the way in which Hermione interacts with Leontes, how “She embraces him” (111) and how “She hangs about his neck” (Shakespeare 5.3.112). This lingering coldness in Hermione in contrast to her warm and affectionate reception of Perdita suggests that though she is able to partake in the joy of reuniting with her daughter, she has not forgotten Leontes’s false and ultimately tragic claims of her being an adulteress sixteen years ago – the bitter iciness of the remembrance of such losses still remains frozen in her newly revived veins.
Most vocal about the lingering frost of winter is, once again Paulina, who remains in mourning for her own tragic losses. Now, she remains frozen in time, in a perpetual state of loss, grieving that “I, an old turtle, / will wing me to some withered bough, and there / My mate, that’s never to be found again, / Lament till I am lost” (Shakespeare 5.3.131-134). Unlike in the case of Leontes, the miracle of a beloved’s revival from death is not extended to her, with the literal remains of her husband, Antigonus, having already been buried into the earth by the Shepherd and his son earlier in the play, “never to be found again.” Though Hermione also seems to feel the burdens of feminine memory, she, unlike Paulina, can still, at the very least, find some comfort in the seemingly miraculous return and restoration of her long lost daughter back to her side and the gain of a “son-in-law,” whose union with Perdita creates the potential for the continuation of her royal legacy (Shakespeare 5.3.149). Additionally, though Leontes attempts to pay Paulina some kind of reparations, they seem negligible in comparison to Paulina’s deeply-engraved wintry losses. Leontes grants Paulina “An honourable husband”(143) in the form of Camillo who Leontes claims possesses “worth and honesty / [that] Is richly noted, and here justified / By us, a pair of kings” (Shakespeare 5.3.144-145). In a particularly cynical reading of Leontes’s response to Paulina as a vessel of burdensome remembrances, his paltry, last minute arrangement of a marriage for her seems a bit like an attempt to perhaps even buy her off or silence her, the voice of memory and the play’s moral center and conscience – “O peace, Paulina!” Leontes exclaims just before bequeathing Camillo upon her (Shakespeare 5.3.135).
In Cotton Mathers’s Winter Meditations, he characterizes winter as a time of “Reflections,” not just on the cold “Circumstances of Winter” but also the “Notable Works of God” (1). Though Mather acknowledges “the Accidents of the Winter,” he portrays them in an ultimately generative light: “in and from” these “Accidents,” “Man should acknowledge God” in a redemptive return to a belief in miraculous “Religious Works” (1). While this redemptive return birthed from the stillness of winter may have been accomplished for powerful men like Leontes, female characters, such as Hermione and, especially, Paulina, seem barred from this particular path of catharsis from tragedy. For Paulina especially, a woman who takes on the burden of remembrance with heavy consequences for herself, the memory of what she has lost beyond a hope of restoration, her beloved husband Antigonus, suggests that her experience of winter has crystallized glacially in her blood – she stands steadfastly counter to the comparatively easy forgiveness, redemption, and returned warmth of a kind of masculine memory. In the final moments of Shakespeare’s play, Paulina’s heavy sense of perpetual mourning, that she will “Lament till I am lost” over “My Mate, that’s never to be found again,” suggests a permanence of the burdens of memory to those, especially the women, who choose to take them on. Again, the Seasons are cyclical, and after a promising Spring in which the crystallized, icy memories of tragedy seem to have melted away, with the mere passage of time, Winter lurks just around the corner. Consequently, a frosty melancholy lingers at the end of The Winter’s Tale as Shakespeare asks the audience to inhabit a form of feminine memory that is not so susceptible to the supposedly cathartic and redemptive forces of tragicomedy. In a sense, the audience is asked to be in the position of Paulina, a righteous upstander who did not have to actively involve herself in opposing Leontes and, as a result, endure the loss of her husband, Antigonus, who loses his life while accomplishing Leontes’s orders to have the newborn Perdita abandoned. Paulina is much more statically frozen trapped in time, stricken by the permanence of Antigonus’s death and his irreplaceability in the same way the audience may be left wondering about the obvious elephant in the room: can all the joy and seemingly miraculous union at the end of The Winter’s Tale really make up for the tragic loss of the innocent Mamillius, whose death seems ungrieved even by the close of the play? Shakespeare offers no easy answers – loss will not always be miraculously paid by twofold in Jobian fashion. Instead, he perhaps desperately implores his Early Modern audience to be conscientious like Paulina beyond all hope or possibility of satisfactory reparations. Paulina actively chooses to involve herself in Wintry tragedy and to partly shoulder the burdens as a surrogate for Hermione – she chooses total fidelity and belief in the integrity of womankind, though she operates at a complete loss with little benefit or comfort to herself. Through the lingering tragedy of The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare charges his audience with the burden of memory and belief, especially of the tales told by women and amongst women, even without the promise of a miraculous return, when all that lingers, instead, are the bitter, frosty remembrances of permanently lost happiness.
Works Cited
Mather, Cotton, 1663-1728. Winter Meditations Directions how to Employ the Leisure of the Winter for the Glory of God : Accompanied with Reflections as Well Historical as Theological, Not Only upon the Circumstances of Winter, but also upon the Notable Works of God, both in Creation and Providence … / by Cotton Mather ; with a Preface of John Higginson. , Boston (Mass.), 1693. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/books/winter-meditations-directions-how-employ-leisure/docview/2248540257/se-2.
Shakespeare, William. The Winter’s Tale, edited by John Pitcher, Bloomsbury, 2020.
Isabella Zhou 