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Real and Imaginary Travels 16th-18th centuries

 | 
Anne Bandry-Scubbi
, 
Rémi Vuillemin

Travelling and the Fashioning of Reality

Shakespeare’s Romances and “Figures of Transporte”

Barbara Muller

Abstract

Renaissance classicists such as Sidney advocated precise rules in terms of genre, of meaning, and of unity of space and time, which Shakespeare’s romances transgress: Pericles (1606), Cymbeline (1609), The Winter’s Tale (1609) and The Tempest (1610) are odysseys whose sprawling narrative structures hark back to the Greek romances of the 1st to 3rd centuries AD. They dramatize the disruption and reunification of families. Northrop Frye contends that at the close of these plays “kings remain kings and clowns clowns” (A Natural Perspective, 104) and new historicist critics consider the romances as reactionary fables in which patriarchal order prevails. My view is that these plays, because they rely on the miraculous, the imaginary and the enigmatic, are rather open invitations for the spectator to speculate about the world. They alter the spectator’s perception of a stratified world by means of travels within utopian worlds. Metaphor, “Metaphora, or the Figure of transporte” (Puttenham, 1589), contributes to this widening of perspective insofar as it is a potentially defamiliarising device.

Full text

1Shakespeare’s romances—Pericles (1606), Cymbeline (1609), The Winter’s Tale (1609) and The Tempest (1610)—are odysseys and as such their plots rely heavily on voyages. Shakespeare’s romances are also journeys of the mind, journeys which the classicists and rhetoricians of the seventeenth century regarded as having transgressed the boundaries of time, space, mode and meaning. In other words, the plays were considered to breach decorum such as it was prescribed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They breached both literary and social orderliness. For this classically-trained criticism, the romances illustrate the dangers of unbridled imagination gone astray.

2The boundaries of decorum as they were defined in the Renaissance are examined here in order to show how the plays tested them to a breaking point. The classicists of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries saw Shakespeare’s late plays as aimless wanderings among absurdity and obscurity. Later on, the historicist criticism that prevailed until the 1970s contended that the romances were travels back to order. The outcome of the romances lured critics into viewing the plays as reactionary fables in which patriarchal order prevails. In A Natural Perspective, Northrop Frye contends that at the close of these plays “kings remain kings and clowns clowns” (Frye, 1965: 104). My view is that in the romances, the spectators return from an imaginary voyage with renewed visions of life. Shakespeare’s romances are the most enigmatic plays of the corpus and they stretch and challenge the spectator’s imagination.

3This paper will address four main issues: the exploration of the boundaries of genre, Shakespeare’s romances as odysseys, the experience of utopian worlds and metaphors as “figure[s] of transporte” (Puttenham: 134).

Exploring the boundaries of genre

4From the beginning of the sixteenth century, neo-Aristotelian critics on the continent had been striving to classify and codify the different genres, also providing recommendations on decorum of these genres. However, in practice, most playwrights ignored or flouted these admonitions. Among them Shakespeare, who constantly reconfigured the boundaries of genre, much to the displeasure of critics like Sir Philip Sidney. The problem of the reception of Shakespeare’s late plays by classicists hinges upon the problem of generic hybridity. These plays are difficult to categorize and as such, they were conceived to be bastard plays.

5In the first folio of 1623, as Stephen Orgel points out, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest were classified as comedies, Cymbeline was classified as a tragedy, and Pericles did not even appear. In the Renaissance, genres were not conceived to be “exclusive and definitive” but rather “inclusive and relational” (Orgel, 2008: 3).

6To add to the generic confusion, the group of plays including Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest is nowadays diversely branded as “the late plays,” “the romances” or “the tragicomedies.” And critics usually do not define what they mean by these generic categories. This diversity of labels is symptomatic of Shakespeare’s transcending genre boundaries and encompassing the comic, tragic and historical mode into a syncretic framework. This enables the spectators to travel through different modes and therefore experience a wide range of emotions.

7The label “late plays” is unsatisfactory because it is too vague and suggests that these plays are farewell plays, which is debatable. Moreover, should Henry VIII, whose subject matter differs from the four plays, be included within the group? However, the label “late plays” may imply Shakespeare’s capacity to combine various genres which he had previously used.

8The label “tragicomedies” already existed in the Jacobean era but was only applied to the group of plays posthumously. The late plays are tragicomedies in the sense that they meet the criteria for the genre, as it was defined by John Fletcher in The Faithful Shepherdess (1608): “A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy; yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy” (Fletcher: 6). Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest fit the genre as the spectators are constantly led to expect tragic events, but the characters are always saved from the claws of death by some last-minute event. Sir Philip Sidney, in The Apology for Poetry (1595), inveighs against tragicomedies as hybridized forms. They are “mongrel tragedies”, as opposed to purer genres. He disapproves of the success of the genre which “mingled kings and clowns,” “hornpipes and funerals” and loathes the “scurrility” of these bastard plays which made them “unworthy of any chaste ears” (Sidney: 244).

9“Romance” and “tragicomedy” are complementary frames in the study of the late plays. The label “tragicomedy” alone is unsatisfactory since it does not cover either the presence of the supernatural and the miraculous or the hypertrophied narrative structure of the plays that characterize them substantially. “Romance” is probably a more suitable label. Like “tragicomedy,” it is a retrospective label which comes from a nineteenth-century vision of the plays. Nineteenth-century definitions of the romances lacked substance insofar as they defined the genre in terms of common plot devices, mood and scenery, such as Edward Dowden’s definition in Shakespeare, his Mind and Art (1877):

There is a romantic element about these plays. In all there is the same romantic incident of lost children recovered by those to whom they are dear—the daughters of Pericles and Leontes, the sons of Cymbeline and Alonso. In all there is a beautiful romantic background of sea or mountain. The dramas have a grave beauty, a sweet serenity, which seem to render the name “comedies” inappropriate; we may smile tenderly, but we never laugh loudly, as we read them. Let us then name this group consisting of four plays, Romances. (Dowden: 358)

10In her introduction to Shakespeare’s Romances (2003), Alison Thorne underlines that these plot devices are indebted to the Greek romances from the 1st to 3rd centuries AD. The group of plays shares with classical romances a “familiar repertoire of plot devices: journeys to faraway places, abandoned offspring, shipwrecks, oracles, pirates, astonishing reversals of fortune and elaborate recognition scenes” (Thorne: 4). This classical legacy sets off the group of plays from the rest of the Shakespearean corpus. But it is more substantially the aura of mystery, “the powerful aura of suggestiveness” and the use of non-realistic modes of representations that define them, “tantalising us with intimations of some larger significance (whether experiential, religious or political) that refuses to be pinned down” (Thorne: 1). To this view might be added that the enigmatic nature of the romances partly stems from the odyssean quality of the plays, namely the heavy use of travels to faraway and sometimes exotic places. It may also arise from the fact that the characters and the trials they endure are larger than life—a characteristic that distinguishes both tragicomedy and romance from comedy.

Shakespeare’s romances as odysseys

  • 1 The Aethiopica was popular in Renaissance England and was translated into English by Thomas Underdo (...)

11Shakespeare seems to have read Heliodorus, a Greek writer of the third or fourth century AD, famous for his romance entitled the Aethiopica or “Theagenes and Chariclea”. The latter is referred to in Twelfth Night, act V, scene 1.1 Shakespeare’s romances share with this Greek text the profuseness of narrative structure. The wide-ranging plots of Shakespeare’s romances run counter to the unities of action, time and space, defined by Aristotle in his Poetics (Aristotle: 23-27, ch. VII-VIII, 1450b21-1451a35). In the Renaissance, the classicists disapproved of Shakespeare’s lack of interest for the Aristotelian unities. My view is that this disregard for the unities is the result of the transposition of plots that are inspired from the narrative structure of the Greek romances, which are prose romances.

12To make up for the flouting of the unities, Time appears in The Winter’s Tale as a chorus and bridges the gap between two places and two time sequences:

TIME […] Your patience this allowing,
I turn my glass, and give my scene such growing
As you had slept between. Leontes leaving—
Th’effects of his fond jealousies so grieving
That he shuts up himself—imagine me,
Gentle spectators, that I now may be
In fair Bohemia […]. (
The Winter’s Tale, IV, 1, 15-21: p. 160)

13Similarly, in Pericles, Gower, who “stand[s] i’ the gaps” seeks the power of the spectator’s imagination to travel “from bourn to bourn, region to region”:

GOWER. Thus time we waste, and longest leagues make short;
Sail seas in cockles, have and wish but for ‘t;
Making, to take your imagination,
From bourn to bourn, region to region.
By you being pardon’d, we commit no crime
To use one language in each several clime
Where our scenes seem to live. I do beseech you
To learn of me, who stand i’ the gaps to teach you,
The stages of our story. […]
Your ears unto your eyes I’ll reconcile. (
Pericles, IV, 4, 1-22: p. 341-42)

  • 2 Aristotle uses this expression in reference to the successful metaphor: the successful metaphor wil (...)
  • 3 Gower’s speech is reminiscent of the prologue in Henry V, act III, in the sense that it relies on t (...)

14The romances stretch and challenge the imagination of the spectators. “Our scenes seem to live” (Pericles, IV, 4, 7): Shakespeare’s romances, like the Greek ones, are visual. They “set things before the eyes”, to borrow Aristotle’s expression in the Rhetoric.2 What characterizes this passage is the use of the figure of energeia (or evidentia), defined by classical authors and by Erasmus in De Copia Verborum (1514) as setting forth a thing to be “viewed as though portrayed in colour on a tablet, so that it may seem that we have painted, not narrated, and that the reader has seen, not read” (Erasmus: 47). Gower’s speech enables the spectator to reconcile “[his] ears unto [his] eyes” and the odyssey of the spectator’s mind is, above all, a voyage of the inner eye, namely imagination.3

15What is set before the eyes is magnified. The plot devices rely on travels prompted by life threats, abductions, exiles, miracles and oracles. The heroes and heroines endure obstacles that are beyond the ordinary. In Pericles, Marina grows to be a graceful young woman, which inspires jealousy in Dionyza, her adoptive mother. Dionyza orders the murder of Marina, but her attempt fails as Marina happens to be abducted by pirates sailing to Mytilene where they sell the young and virtuous princess to a brothel. Marina then struggles for her virtue among corrupted pimps and clients.

16Shakespeare’s romances also dramatize the disruption and reunion of families. Pericles, believing his wife and daughter to be dead, returns to sea heavy-hearted with no clear goal or destination. Fortune leads his ship to Mytilene where he is miraculously reunited with his daughter. At the acme of bliss, the goddess Diana appears in a vision and orders him to visit her temple in Ephesus. There, he meets his wife, whom he had presumed dead, in an elaborate and moving scene of anagnorisis. Such theophanies are among the many plot devices Shakespeare’s romances share with the Greek romances.

17The magnitude pertaining to the romances is in keeping with Francis Bacon’s views on poetry, that he opposes to history, in The Advancement of Learning (1605):

Therefore, because the acts of events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical; because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribution, and more according to revealed providence; because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness and more unexpected and alternative variations. (Francis Bacon, Book II: 186, emphasis added)

18In the Renaissance, “to feign” also meant “to imagine” and a suspension of disbelief is required in order to adopt “unexpected and alternative variations”. The lack of verisimilitude is compensated for by the spectator’s experience of worlds of utopia.

Exploring Utopian worlds

19The utopian worlds into which the spectators are carried are like magnified images of the world in which they live. In The Tempest, Prospero, dwelling on an enchanted island, is endowed with magical powers. He interacts with a spirit, Ariel, and with Caliban who is half monster half man.

20However, the plays incorporate realistic and sometimes bleak and dismal experiences, such as the brothel scene in Pericles (act IV scene 6) or the harsh enslavement of Caliban in The Tempest. These moments serve as wake-up calls to the crude aspects of reality and connect the utopian worlds to “real life,” which allows for a dialectics between the spectator’s everyday reality and the immaterial world shown on stage.

21The romances rely on the miraculous and the enigmatic and are thus open invitations for the spectator to speculate on the world. But rather than being mere social prescriptions they alter the spectator’s perception of a stratified world. I share Ryan Kiernan’s idea that these utopian worlds adumbrate possibilities that might subvert the status quo: “[The romances] dramatise the utopian within the historical. They excite our hope that these dreams of release from history’s coercions might one day be realised, by giving us provisional images, lodged in recognizable and thus more persuasive forms, of what such a realisation might look and feel like” (Kiernan: 39).

22It might be added that the romances are in keeping with Francis Bacon’s conception of imagination, as expressed in a passage of The Advancement of Learning (1605) devoted to poetry:

Poesy is part of learning in measure of words for the most part restrained, but in all other points extremely licensed, and doth truly refer to the Imagination; which, being not tied to the laws of matter, may at pleasure join that which nature hath severed, and sever that which nature hath joined, and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things […]. (Bacon, Book II, 186, emphasis added)

23Imagination, therefore, consists of matching and divorcing things unlawfully. It is worth underlining that, for Bacon, interbreeding (alluded to in the phrase “unlawful matches”) has a positive connotation and is the seat of creation and revelation.

24However, not all critics approved of Bacon’s judgement. “Unlawful matches” in the romances were seen by most critics as a seat of incongruity. The non-realistic modes of representation in the romances were much disparaged. The romances have often been accused of being deprived of verisimilitude. In 1614, Ben Jonson deprecated “Tales, Tempests, and such like Drolleries” (Jonson, “Induction”: 492). And in 1765, Dr Samuel Johnson, although a rather open-minded neoclassicist, rejected the play Cymbeline as most improbable. He underlined the “folly of the fiction” and stressed the “absurdity” and “incongruity” of Cymbeline:

This play has many just sentiments, some natural dialogue, and some pleasing scenes, but they are obtained at the expense of much incongruity. To remark the folly of this fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life, were to waste criticism upon unresisting imbecility, upon faults too evident for detection, and too gross for aggravation. (Johnson: 235)

25My view is that the plays were considered incongruous and preposterous because they were not seen for what they are, that is to say imaginary travels into utopian worlds. The point I wish to make is that such reactions were the result of a growing distrust of the powers of imagination, that led Thomas Hobbes a few decades later to claim in Leviathan that “Imagination therefore is nothing but Decaying Sense” (Hobbes, II, “Of Imagination”: 11).

26Hobbes also rejected metaphors as fostered by imagination. In 1651, he classified metaphors among the “abuses of speech” (Hobbes: 21), and the “causes of absurditie” (Hobbes: 31). Metaphors are like “like Ignes Fatui; and reasoning upon them, is wandering amongst innumerable absurdities” (Hobbes: 32).

Metaphors as “figure[s] of transporte”

27Sixteenth-century rhetorical treatises provide many definitions of metaphors. For George Puttenham, in his treatise entitled The Arte of English Poesie (1589), metaphor is “the figure of transporte,” namely “a kinde of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so naturall, but yet of some affinitie with it.” The dynamics at stake in metaphors relies on the voyage of the mind: “they alter and affect the minde by alteration of sence.” They “transporte” a word in a somehow violent way, namely a “wresting” (Puttenham, 2010: 134).

28However, rhetoricians, Henry Peacham among them, seemed to fear that metaphors could be far-fetched (“that the similitude be not farre fetcht”), and that there may be “uncleane, or unchast signification contained in the Metaphore” (Peacham, 2010, “The Caution”: 14). The Renaissance inherited Aristotle’s idea that a metaphor properly devised should not be “far-fetched” or strange (Aristotle, Rhetoric: 443, chap X, 140b33) and Cicero’s idea that it should “avoid all unseemliness as well as obscurity” (Cicero: 11-2). The rhetoricians feared that in the “transport” within a far-fetched metaphor, the sense might be lost. Their definitions are illustrated by hackneyed and ready-made metaphors, which is symptomatic of such anxiety: “I see” for “I understand” (Erasmus: 28), “I cannot digest your unkind words” (Puttenham: 134), “I feele you wel” (Wilson: 141), “I smelle where about you go” (Sherry: 17) are metaphors that leave little space for the imagination.

29The romances show little interest in these prescriptions. Far-fetched, unusual and enigmatic metaphors are found in the four plays. So much so that the spectator embarks on an imaginary voyage that leads him to see the object of the metaphor from another angle, in an almost anamorphic way.

30Metaphors in the Shakespearean corpus are usually studied in terms of imagery. But they can also be considered and classified according to the gender and social rank of those who utter them and those whom they refer to. Both a qualitative and quantitative approach is required in order to grasp the ideology of the romances. The classification of metaphors according to gender and social rank reveals that kings do not remain kings and clowns clowns, just as women do not remain women and men men, which contradicts Northrop Frye’s views on the romances (Frye, 1965: 104).

  • 4 For further analysis on the patriarchal conceptions in Renaissance England, see Orgel.

31At first sight, the use of metaphors seems to match the patriarchal conceptions of gender in the Renaissance, sometimes even verging on the cliché.4 Indeed, according to the classifications I have made, men are often referred to as boats, trees, and eagles, evoking an idea of force, determination, and they appear to be deeply rooted in reality. On the other hand, women are referred to as flowers, jewellery, and graceful birds such as the dove, so much so that they are assimilated to refinement, fragility, freshness and grace. In Pericles, only men use metaphors of hunting and navigation.

  • 5 Paulina, II, 2, 34 (“trumpet”), p. 204; Paulina, II, 3, 85 (“whose sting is sharper than the sword’ (...)
  • 6 Hermione, I, 2, 33 (“beat”), p. 152; Hermione, I, 2, 92-3 (“One good deed, dying tongueless, / slau (...)
  • 7 Perdita, IV, 4, 581-2 (“I think affliction may subdue the cheek,/but not take in the mind”), p. 295

32However, some metaphors run counter to the episteme of a patriarchal world. In The Winter’s Tale, thirty-two metaphors belong to the imagery of war (battlefield, weapons, blow, fortress, defense, attack and so forth), eleven of which are by women. Paulina uses no less than six metaphors pertaining to the imagery of war.5 Hermione uses three war metaphors6 and Perdita, although she embodies sweetness in the play, surprisingly uses two of them.7 Furthermore, Paulina is the object of war metaphors—her feelings are metaphorically fighting on a battlefield in act V, scene 2:

THIRD GENTLEMAN But O, the noble combat
that ‘twixt joy and sorrow was fought in Paulina.
(
The Winter’s Tale, V, 2, 71-2, p. 331)

33Paulina embodies the power of women. In The Winter’s Tale, act II, scene 3, Paulina brings the king’s daughter to him, whom he supposes to be a bastard, in order to solicit his pity. The king grows furious with her and accuses Antigonus of not controlling his wife properly:

LEONTES Traitors!
Will you not push her out? Give her the bastard:—
Thou dotard! [To ANTIGONUS] Thou art woman-tir’d, unroosted
By thy Dame Partlet here:—take up the bastard;
(
The Winter’s Tale, II, 3, 73-75: p. 135)

34The passage presents a cluster of metaphors relating to fowls. “Tir’d” is a term used in falconry and means henpecked (“to pull or tear with the beak”) and “unroosted” means “pushed from your perch.” “Dame Partlet” is an allusion to the name of a hen in the stories of “Reynard the Fox” (Orgel, 2008: 135). Paulina is assimilated to a hen, and more precisely to Dame Partlet, pushing the rooster (her husband Antigonus) from his perch. This metaphor expresses Leontes’ anxiety towards powerful women. From Leontes’ metaphor by analogy there emerges a relation between Paulina (Dame Partlet) and Antigonus (a rooster), namely a form of matriarchal domination that should be crushed. Paulina is thus seen as a domineering figure.

35A breach of literary decorum is here to be found in terms of the choice of metaphor. To assimilate a lord with a rooster and a lord’s wife with Dame Partlet would have been stretched and offensive to a classicist mind, for it runs counter to Peacham’s formal prescriptions in The Garden of Eloquence “that the similitude be not greater then [sic] the matter requireth, or contrariwise lesse” (Peacham: 14).

  • 8 Paulina is the only one who really stands up against Leontes’s folly and is restored to favour in a (...)

36Furthermore, a breach of social decorum may also derive from the metaphor. Even if Leontes’ message is to annihilate Paulina’s power, the spectator does not necessarily take Leontes’ metaphor of woman as a threat for granted, especially since Paulina is the moral force of the play.8 The spectator has a glimpse of an uncanonical gender relationship, in which a woman controls her husband.

37Such deviations from the norm are more than counter examples and invite the spectator to question the sexualisation of discourse and the patriarchal values it seems to convey. They are a journey of and in the imagination that provide new experiences. The spectator’s inner eye is stimulated in order to imagine alternatives. And metaphors participate in this widening of perspective insofar as they are potentially defamiliarising devices.

38Shakespeare’s romances are based on a dialectic game of reality and illusion. Just as the characters return from their travels having learnt a lesson from their journeys, the spectators come out from the romances with a renewed vision of life. Through the study of metaphors in the romances, I hope to develop Kiernan’s fresh approach to the plays and his idea that far from surrendering to conformity, the late plays allow the spectators to have a glimpse at what life might be and to widen their horizon.

39Rather than underlining the “folly of [these] fiction[s]” (Johnson: 235), I believe Shakespeare’s romances test time, space, mode and meaning to a breaking point, without dramatic shortcut, provided that “[y] ou do awake your faith,” even if it is “monstrous to our human reason” (Paulina, The Winter’s Tale, V, 3, 95: 228; V, 1, 41: 209). The romances are thereby in keeping with Francis Bacon’s belief that the material world is inferior to the human soul (Bacon: 186). Imagination provides what the simple observation of reality fails to capture and reality needs to be magnified in order to access deeper meanings.

Bibliography

References

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Notes

1 The Aethiopica was popular in Renaissance England and was translated into English by Thomas Underdowne in 1569. The Egyptian thief mentioned by Orsino in Twelfth Night is a direct allusion to Heliodorus’romance (Aethiopica, Book 1, XXX, 1-7): “Why should I not, had I the heart to do it,/Like to th’Egypian thief at point of death, / Kill what I love—a savage jealousy / That sometimes savours nobly […].” (Twelfth Night, V, 1, 113-6).

2 Aristotle uses this expression in reference to the successful metaphor: the successful metaphor will set things vividly before the eyes of the audience (pro ommaton poiein) (Aristotle: 443, ch. X, 1410b32-35).

3 Gower’s speech is reminiscent of the prologue in Henry V, act III, in the sense that it relies on the figure of energeia to bridge time gaps in the transposition of prose into drama: “CHORUS Thus with imagined wing our swift scene flies / In motion of no less celerity / Than that of thought. Suppose that you have seen / The well-appointed king at Hampton pier/Embark his royalty, and his brave fleet / With silken streamers the young Phoebus fanning. / Play with your fancies and in them behold, / Upon the hempen tackle, shipboys climbing. / Hear the shrill whistle, which doth order give / To sounds confused. […] / Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege. / Behold the ordnance on their carriages, / With fatal mouths gaping on girded Harfleur.” (Henry V, III, Prologue, 1-28).

4 For further analysis on the patriarchal conceptions in Renaissance England, see Orgel.

5 Paulina, II, 2, 34 (“trumpet”), p. 204; Paulina, II, 3, 85 (“whose sting is sharper than the sword’s”—I include this figure of speech because no clear distinction was made between metaphors and similes in rhetorical treatises), p. 212; Paulina, III, 2, 217-8 (“He is touched/To th’noble heart.”—see Oxford English Dictionary: “Touch: To strike or hit lightly (esp. with the spur, or in Fencing)”—, p. 234; Paulina, V, 1, 73 (“affront his eye”), p. 316; Paulina, V, 3, 98 (“Music, awake her; strike!”), p. 343; Paulina, V, 3, 100 (“strike all that look upon with marvel”), p. 344.

6 Hermione, I, 2, 33 (“beat”), p. 152; Hermione, I, 2, 92-3 (“One good deed, dying tongueless, / slaughters a thousand waiting upon that”), p. 157; Hermione III, 2, 78-9 (“My life stands in the level of your dreams, / Which I’ll lay down”—See Oxford English Dictionary: level means here the target in archery) p. 226.

7 Perdita, IV, 4, 581-2 (“I think affliction may subdue the cheek,/but not take in the mind”), p. 295.

8 Paulina is the only one who really stands up against Leontes’s folly and is restored to favour in act V scene 1: LEONTES Good Paulina,/Who hast the memory of Hermione,/I know, in honour—O, that ever I/Had squared me to thy counsel! Then even now/I might have looked upon my queen’s full eyes,/Have taken treasure from her lips” (The Winter’s Tale, V, 1, 49-54: p. 314).

Author

Université de Strasbourg

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