Claxton Mahaley

Incomplete Thoughts on The Winter’s Tale

My resent research suggests that early modern dramatists regarded painting as a rival art, an art that shares a fundamental element with theater—its visual nature. Conflicting attitudes toward images and image makers in early modern England produced some highly ambivalent representations of painters and paintings in the theater. Shakespeare’s ambivalence created its most negative portrayal of painting in Timon of Athens, but it was only about five years later that Shakespeare presented the painted work of art in a more complicated, positive light. 

In the Winter’s Tale, Paulina unveils a painted statue in a scene that rivals a religious ceremony; yet as a “miracle” of art rather than religion, the theatrical image and what it represents can be understood as natural. In one character’s words, “This is an art / Which does mend Nature—change it rather; but / The art itself is Nature” (4.4.95-97). Art is nature in the most literal sense, for the statue of Hermione is in fact not a statue, but rather the living Queen herself. Her devoted friend, Paulina, seeks to “mend Nature” by bringing the statue to life. Paulina’s art does, however, have a dark element to it, as is theatrically obvious by its very deceptiveness, but Paulina’s art is a response to Leonte’s even darker art, for she betrays and undermines the destructive power of Leonte’s jealous, Medusa-like gaze. The very unnaturalness of Leontes’ gaze is figured metaphorically in the petrified image of his wife. By literalizing and reversing the metaphor through the theatrical art, Paulina does indeed “mend” the worst of human nature. Through her stone she offers one more lasting rebuke of Leontes, softening his heart as his “evils [are] conjur’d to remembrance” (5.3.37, 40). 

Thoughts on Images in The Winter's Tale.

Early modern dramatists seem to have regarded painting as a rival art that shared a fundamental element with theatre—it was a visual medium. This might best be seen in the rather ambiguous ways in which painters and their images are represented within the theatre. Marguerite Tassi points out in her The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism and Painting in Early Modern Drama that Shakespeare's Timon of Athens offers one of the most negative portrayals (208), which I will look at more closely at another time. 

My current interest is in The Winter's Tale, a piece which came out some 5 years after Timon but portrays the painted work in a much more positive and complex light. It is in this play that Shakespeare unveils a painted statue in a scene that radiates in ideas such as epiphany, revelation and unveiling. That may not be very clear, but suffice it to say that the scene has power and does some emotional work on the stage and in the text. This miraculous unveiling seems to stand in stark contrast to the divine origin of the conventional miracle standing as a triumph of art over nature, perhaps. The problem is that "[t]he art itself is Nature" (4.4.97). And quite literally, it is nature because the statue really is the living Queen, so Paulina's art, dark as it seems to be, is mending nature. 

It seems to me that this idea of mending is quite loaded, and this is, of course, a digression, but as it is me simply writing my thoughts I am going to allow it. What does it say that Paulina has the power to mend nature? Further what nature is she mending? And still, how is her dark power in comparison to the binding jealousy of Leontes? 

If Leontes has the Medusa-like power of petrification doesn't Paulina's truly mend that nature? 

But, more importantly (for me anyway) isn't the true power in Shakespeare's ability to deceive the spectator's eyes (nature) through the concealment of the statue, which always positions a revelation as forthcoming.