Mark Moran

Prof. James Shapiro

English 3336y – Shakespeare II

April 18, 2000

 

Artistic License: Stretching Reality in The Winter’s Tale

 

In the fourth act of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, two characters have a brief discussion that does not seem to have any purpose or immediate effect on the plot.  The 30-line exchange is ostensibly about the appropriateness of growing artificially-bred flowers such as carnations.  This essay will demonstrate, however, that their exchange is actually somewhat more profound.  While their dialogue does not seem to have much direct impact on the play’s action, it does evoke more metaphysical issues, such as how much a play should exaggerate the truth to find a higher truth.  To show this, I will first break down and summarize the dense and slightly archaic language of the exchange itself.  Then I will consider various interpretations of the dialogue, particularly in light of the situation in the scene.  Finally, I will propose several ways this brief conversation adds depth and meaning to the play and its improbable conclusion.

While numerous layers of interpretation can be gleaned from Perdita’s and Polixenes’s conversation in scene 4.4, the exchange itself is relatively straightforward.  Perdita, the Sicilian princess who has been raised as the old shepherd’s foundling daughter, is the hostess at their cottage as guests arrive for the sheep-shearing celebration.  The Bohemian king Polixenes and his servant Camillo arrive in disguise to find out the status of Polixenes’s son Florizel, who is planning to marry Perdita.  As they arrive, Perdita offers them “rosemary and rue” flowers because they retain their “seeming and savor all the winter long” (4.4.74-75).  Polixenes playfully feigns feeling insulted at being given such wretched flowers and replies: “well you fit our ages / With flowers of winter” (78-79).  Rather than offering him different flowers, Perdita defends her original choice.  She retorts that while “the fairest flow’rs o’ the season / Are our carnations and streaked gillyvors[1],” she considers them “nature’s bastards” of which her “rustic garden’s barren” (81-84).  Polixenes asks why she doesn’t like carnations, and this is where their short debate about art and nature actually begins. 

Perdita’s compact reply is that she has “heard it said / There is an art which in their piedness shares / With great creating nature” (4.4.86-88).  Here she indicates that she doesn’t want to pick carnations because they are produced by the art of cross-breeding.  She seems to suggest that this art, which gives them their piedness (multi-colored appearance), seeks to be great by creating nature, which is presumably not the appropriate domain for humans.  Polixenes rebuffs this argument with an equally dense response: “nature is made better by no mean / But nature makes that mean” (89-90).  Essentially, he argues that she is right that nature cannot be improved, unless it is improved by nature itself.  He continues that “over that art [of crossbreeding] / Which you say adds to nature is an art / That nature makes” (90-92).  Since nature is being modified by people, who are as much a part of nature as the elements being modified, the art of crossbreeding must be natural.  Furthermore, he argues that people can actually improve nature, exemplified by marrying “A gentler scion to the wildest stock, / And make conceive a bark of baser kind / By bud of nobler race” (93-95).  He summarizes his point: “This is an art / Which does mend nature—change it, rather—but / The art itself is nature” (95-97).

Surprisingly, Perdita appears to agree with him and responds, “So it is” (4.4.97).  Perhaps she is trying to return to her role of polite hostess, or she may be tired of the argument.  But when Polixenes presses the issue by telling her she should grow lots of carnations and “not call them bastards” (99), Perdita reveals that she was clearly not persuaded by his earlier argument.  She replies that she’ll not plant a single carnation “no more than, were I painted, I would wish / This youth [Florizel] should say ‘twere well, and only therefore / Desire to breed by me” (101-103).  Since she would not want to be desired simply because she was wearing cosmetics, she also has no use for flowers that are artificially made beautiful by man.  Her reference to Florizel desiring to breed by her is awkwardly sexual and blunt, perhaps implying that false nature is sterile and can’t breed, as is the case with crossbred animals such as mules.  On a metaphorical level, this suggests that the enterprise of crossbreeding is futile because it creates life that is outside the divine scheme and therefore unnatural.  She firmly concludes the discussion at this point by offering them different flowers, namely lavender and marigold, which “are flowers / Of middle summer … given / To men of middle age” (106-108).

At the most literal level, this conversation is about the desirability of natural flowers such as rosemary and rue versus more beautiful but artificially engineered flowers like carnations.  In one sense, it is a rehash of the ancient dialectic on art and nature.  Perdita echoes Plato’s argument in The Republic that art is base because it is a mere imitation of nature (which itself is only an approximation of divine forms), while Polixenes’s view coincides more with the reasoning in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—that art is sublime because it is the child of nature which is the child of God.  Essentially, it asks whether something that is invented or modified by man can be better than the real thing itself, or whether it is even worthwhile.  Since all forms of art are invented or modified by man, this question is crucial to any creator.  However, it is particularly relevant to a poet or playwright who is inventing a fictional story either from exaggerated or wholly made-up elements.  Can a story or fable, whose events are fictionalized, reveal a general or universal truth in the same way, or an even better way, than a factual account of a historical event?  Perdita’s final analogy of the crossbred flowers to a woman wearing makeup suggests that art can only improve nature on a superficial and temporary level, if at all.

Perdita seems to disdain things that are not natural or what they actually seem, yet this scene is fraught with pretense and disguise.  By disguising himself as a farmer, Polixenes is hiding the fact that he is actually the king of Bohemia.  Perdita is not what she seems either, as she is actually the princess of Sicilia, although at least she is not intentionally deceitful.  However, she does know that her fiancé Florizel is actually the Bohemian prince disguised as the unsophisticated Diocles.  Polixenes also knows that Florizel is in disguise, yet no one seems to realize Polixenes is in disguise (not even his own son!), and the poor old shepherd doesn’t realize anybody is in disguise.  Fittingly, the scene begins with Perdita, dressed in holiday attire, and Florizel, dressed in shepherd’s garb, discussing how clothing can improve someone.  Florizel tells her that her “unusual weeds to each part of you / Does give a life; no shepherdess, but Flora [the goddess of flowers]” stands before him (4.4.1-3).  Perhaps she does not fully believe her later statements against superficial or temporary beauty, since she apparently enjoys his compliment of her outfit.  She playfully says, “I should … swoon, I think / To show myself a glass” (12-14).  Even more incriminating, she later admits “this robe of mine / Does change my disposition” (134-135).

Seasonal imagery plays a key role in this play, as its title suggests.  The entire exchange takes place because pretty flowers are not naturally available at this time of year.  When Perdita laments that she does not have spring flowers for Florizel and the young maidens, she says “O Proserpina, / For the flow’rs now that, frighted, thou lett’st fall / From Dis’s wagon!” (4.4.116-118).  This reference is particularly relevant to the play’s seasonal imagery, since the Roman goddess Proserpina (equivalent to the Greek goddess Persephone) is the very cause of winter in the first place.  According to mythology, Proserpina, while picking flowers, was kidnapped from her mother Ceres (goddess of the harvest) and taken to live in Hades for three months every year.  Ceres mourns during these three months by making the earth barren and preventing crops and flowers from growing.  Like Proserpina, Perdita (Latin for ‘lost one’) was also taken from her mother, who mourns in a death-like state awaiting her daughter’s return. 

While Perdita is away, her mother Hermione is a barren statue whom her father Leontes believes is dead, so that he cannot have an heir unless his lost daughter is found (as the oracle predicts in 3.2.133).  Winter suggests barrenness and lack of potential in several forms.  In one sense, Shakespeare uses the word ‘winter’ to refer to old people and thus impotency, such as the 83-year-old shepherd.  This implication is what Polixenes initially objects to about being offered winter flowers.  Further, like Proserpina, Perdita is causing a form of winter by her absence from Sicilia.  Not only is it preventing her father and mother from being reunited and producing heirs, but Florizel is also not able to properly marry her because she is presumably not royal.  Of course, by returning to Sicilia, she will learn she is the princess and spring will finally arrive.

Ultimately, Perdita’s and Polixenes’s exchange has no direct impact on the characters or plot.  In performance it goes by in less than thirty seconds and is almost completely lost within the 850-line scene.  So why does Shakespeare put it in?  One answer is that this is just one of several instances in which Shakespeare steps slightly outside the play in order to communicate directly with the audience.  He does this as well at the beginning of Act 4, when the chorus Time comes on stage and tells the audience that the play is skipping ahead 16 years and leaving behind Leontes in order to tell the story of Florizel and Perdita.  This intermission is probably the most radical turnaround in any Shakespeare play, although the chorus Gower presents a similar time-leap at the fourth act of Pericles too.  These choruses summarize previous actions and put spins on upcoming ones, which helps Shakespeare to steer the audience’s experience.  Another meta-literary device is when characters refer to drama or acting, as when Perdita says “Methinks I play as I have seen them do / In Whitsun pastorals” (4.4.133-134).  These devices prepare the audience and thus allow Shakespeare to turn the play’s events in unusual directions.  By establishing his self-awareness as a storyteller, Shakespeare is freer to pursue a highly implausible ending that provides some sort of artistic resolution, even if it is unnatural.

Like Cymbeline and Pericles, The Winter’s Tale has an absurdly optimistic ending which transforms this potential tragedy into an enigmatic comedy.  With long-lost lovers reunited, along with mothers and daughters separated from birth, the resolutions of these plays are sensationally uplifting.  This split is nowhere more apparent than in this play, whose first-half tone is so different from the second half that it almost feels like two distinct plays until the final reunification.  Unlike pure comedies, these tragicomedies retain some of the complexity or dark edge of their beginnings.  For example, Leontes and Hermione’s first child Mamillius and their servant Antigonus have both died, which Antigonus’s widow Paulina reminds us of in the play’s final scene: “My mate, that’s never to be found again, / Lament till I am lost” (5.3.136-137).  Furthermore, Hermione has unjustly spent 16 years in isolation, separated from husband and daughter even though Leontes repented for his errors long ago. 

By giving these later plays bittersweet endings, however melodramatic, and thereby saving his tragic protagonist in the end, Shakespeare seems to be experimenting with a new level of personal redemption.  Leontes, Polixenes, and Pericles are all allowed a final saving grace which was denied to characters like Lear and Macbeth.  The exchange in Act 4 in one sense justifies the artistic experiment of these hybrid tragicomedies.  By having Polixenes propose that art can enhance nature, or that theatrical exaggeration can improve upon reality, Shakespeare is able to alter the tragic courses of these stories.  In the end, we are left with the emotional satisfaction of an uplifting ending coupled with some of the deeper resonance of a tragedy.

 

2085 words