Rachel RoseFigura

Professor Rebholz

November 30, 2010

An Improbable Plot: Nature and Art in The Winter's Tale

The Winter's Tale is a strange play full of improbabilities. The first part of the play appears to be

a terrible tragedy. Leonte's jealously results in the humiliation of his wife, the end of his friendship with

Polixenes, and the death of his young son. At this point, The Winter's Tale seems to be like Othello, a

heart wrenching and violent warning about the dangers of “the green eyed monster” jealousy. After Act

III scene ii, however, this tragic atmosphere is completely reversed. While this reversal is logically

problematic, it uncovers a subtle interplay between nature and art.

The first plot twist introduces a cascade of problematic plot elements. Leonte's jealousy is

completely unfounded, and seems out of sync with what the audience has seen of his character. Simply

because Hermione manages to convince Polixenes to stay in Sicily, Leontes denounces both his wife

and his best friend from childhood. One interesting thing to note is that the play has no true villains.

The only possible villain would be Leontes, who acts tyrannically in the first part of the play. However,

by the second part of the play he is remorseful and no longer in any way a villain. In this, The Winter's

Tale is different from King Lear or Othello. While Leontes resembles Othello and Lear in that they all

are protagonists that act badly, there is no Iago or Edmund to cause discord just for the sake of evil

doings. In fact, all other characters comport themselves admirably. Paulina valiantly sides with

Hermione, Antigonus shows himself to be tenderhearted when he must abandon the baby Perdita, and

Camillo saves Polixenes instead of murdering him as ordered. In these characters, Shakespeare builds

on the themes of base madness and sane nobility that appear in his other works. Paulina is distinctly

like Emilia from Othello, attempting to protect her friend from a husband whose jealousies have driven

him to madness. The characters of Gloucester and Kent in King Lear and that of Horatio in Hamlet are

other examples of characters who act nobly in the face of madness in their social superiors, like
Antigonus and Camillo. Madness, in Shakespeare, is indicative of a change from the natural. In Othello

and The Winter's Tale, madness turns men against their true loves. In Hamlet and King Lear, madness

comes from the tearing apart of the natural family. The Winter's Tale is different from these other plays

is that it provides a solution that heals the wounds inflicted by madness and the assault on the natural.

The reversal of the play from tragedy to comedy is strange, especially in light of the deaths of

Antigonus and Mamillius. At first, their deaths seem to have been in vain. Antigonus is eaten by a bear,

consumed by nature. Mamillius dies seemingly at the hand of fate. His death was prophesied by the

Oracle of Delphi. However, Mamillius' death is foreshadowed from the very first scene.

Camillo describes him as “a gallant child; one that, indeed, physics the subject,

makes old hearts fresh: they that went on crutches ere he was born desire yet

their life to see him a man.” Archidamus comments that “if the king had no son,

they would desire to live on crutches till he had one” (I.i.38). Mamillius' galantry is

such that it provokes the desire of a reversal of nature: the old wish to extend

their lives in order to live under his rule. Mamillius dies an unnatural death, torn

between his jealous father and his wronged mother, a sacrifice to the gods and a

divine punishment levied on Leontes. Again, nature combines with art to produce

an outcome rich with poetic justice if not with reality. While it seemed that

everyone in the kingdom of Sicily, even before Leontes' jealous ragings, lived in

hope of Mamillius reign, that possibility is denied to the audience with Mamillius'

death. However, the audience is not completely without hope. Nature, in the form

of death, takes one heir, but shields the other from harm. The audience must

“desire to live on crutches” as it were, maintaining optimism throughout the

tragedy of the first part of the play in order to see Perdita restored in the second
part.

Mamillius' death is more than an example of nature conforming art. Mamillius

himself is an artist: a storyteller. He begins to tell the ladies of the court a story in

Act II scene i, the winter's tale that he says will be a sad one. Beforehand, he

critiqued the unnatural beauty of the court women who drew on their eyebrows

with a pen and used other such tricks. This established not only as a voice of

wisdom but also as a champion of the natural. When he begins his tale, however,

it is one of the supernatural, of goblins and sprites. Art and nature intersect in

story and storyteller: a reflection of the function of the play itself. Before the story

is told, however, Leontes' storms in with a story of his own. He banishes both the

art his son would create, and the natural bonds of the family. Mamillius says that

“a sad tale's best for winter” (II.i.629). And part of The Winter's Tale is indeed sad.

Ironically, however, the tale twists into something like a comedy. This change from tragedy to comedy

is what plays such as Othello and King Lear lack. In those plays, a return to the natural order (in

Othello's case, a realization of Desdemona's love and faithfulness, for King Lear, being reunited with

Cordelia) comes too late to avoid tragedy. But because of the safety net of the second heir, tragedy is

avoided in The Winter's Tale. The mechanism by which tragedy is avoided is art, which takes the

tragedy and turns it through an improbable series of events to comedy. In order to do this, nature and

art must conspire, and the ultimate effect is the reestablishment of nature in the Sicilian court.

The harshness of Sicily, with its death and grief, is counteracted in the play by the natural

beauty of Bohemia. Shakespeare's Bohemia is one of flowers, dancing, and love. It is also one of

mystery. Disguise, another of Shakespeare's themes, is explored: Florizel disguises himself as a

shepherd in order to woo the beautiful Perdita, who is masquerading as a shepherdess against her noble

birth because of a series of improbable events that occurred when she was an infant. In Bohemia, art
and nature become inextricably tangled. The inhabitants are not only singers and dancers, but also

actors. The setting itself is not the reality of nature but instead a beautiful representation of nature, the

same idealized version of nature that a Pre-Raphaelite painting evokes. When the bear consumes

Antigonus, this is nature serving art. The animal eats the man because this is necessary in order for the

story to unfold. It would be decidedly unnatural for a storm to take all the crew of a ship except for a

man and a child, more unnatural that a bear would take the man but not the child, and even more

unnatural that the child would still survive to be adopted. All of these plot elements require the

subservience of nature to the art of the play, the art of the story.

The relationship between nature and art is further emphasized by Hermione's reanimation from

the statue. Hermione is denied her natural role as mother and wife. Her husband unjustly persecutes

her, and her children have been taken away from her. With the help of Paulina, she seeks sanctuary in

art. The humble cottage in which she hides for sixteen years is evocative of the pastoral beauty of

Bohemia, and she is finally presented to Leontes as a statue. She returns from the sanctuary of art when

nature has been restored to her, and she is reunited with both husband and child. This transformation is

like that of Galatea, beloved of Pygmalion. In the myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor creates a statue so

beautiful he falls in love with it, and Aphrodite grants the statue life. Nature is co-opted by art, but the

natural is restored when the unnatural love between man an object is replace by natural love between

two people. The Winter's Tale function's in much the same way. Hermione's reanimation from the statue

is the ultimate symbol of art overcoming nature, but as the curtain falls a natural order has been

restored.