The Neurotic Subject of Tragedy: Fantasies of Female Evil in The Winter's TaleAuthor(s):Cristina León Alfar

Publication Details:Fantasies of Female Evil: The Dynamics of Gender and Power in Shakespearean Tragedy. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003. p163-185.

Source:Shakespearean Criticism. Ed. Michelle Lee. Vol. 91. Detroit: Gale, 2005. FromLiterature Resource Center.

Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale, COPYRIGHT 2007 Gale, Cengage Learning

Full Text: [(essay date 2003) In the following essay, Alfar discusses Leontes as the embodiment of the tyranny of masculinist absolute rule and the commoditization of women. By challenging Leontes's patrilineal sovereignty, the critics avers, Hermione and Paulina represent "fantasies of female evil" who threaten the very underpinnings of the patriarchal order through their perceived adultery and rebellion. Alfar concludes that Shakespeare rejected "monarchical and conjugal tyranny" through the generic transformation of The Winter's Talefrom a potentially violent and destructive tragedy to a romance that points to an optimistic future of reconciliation.]At the end of The Winter's Tale, Hermione, believed by her husband to have died sixteen years before, miraculously transforms from a statue to a living woman. Many critics are disturbed by Shakespeare's metamorphosis of Hermione to stone and perhaps even more so by her reanimation from statue to seemingly forgiving and silent wife. Valerie Traub sees Hermione's metaphoric death as "reversed only when another symbolic form of stasis and control is imposed: Hermione's transformation into a statue. ... '[W]arm but not hot' ... Hermione is chastened (made chaste), her erotic power severely curtailed."1 Gayle Kern Paster argues that "Hermione is visibly altered and diminished by her experience of patriarchal discipline, as may be suggested by the silence in which she embraces Leontes. Indeed, as a living statue she is herself the subject of an evidently successful, self-imposed discipline of shame."2 And Mary Beth Rose suggests that the shift from tragedy to comedy is enabled by "the removal of Hermione," who can return only "when she is beyond the age of fertility, rendering [her] unthreatening."3 Rose reads the play as reinscribing "maternal desire [as a] threat to the life of the king/hero and to the society he rules."4 But if we read Hermione's momentary immobilization as containment of feminine erotic power and her silence as, in Traub's view, "bespeak[ing] a submissiveness most unlike her previous animation,"5 we ignore the emancipatory act that precedes this moment of stasis. Hermione rejects Leontes when, in his tyranny, he disregards the oracle's pronouncement of his wife's innocence. It is she who departs from the play's action, independent of any patriarchal judgement; and it is she who returns, deliberately, when her daughter is found living. Hermione's return, in this regard, is voluntary and signals the play's investment in her desire above that of Leontes, whose violent and paranoid fantasies of marital betrayal forced Hermione's flight from his court. Rather than freezing his heroine in stone as an effacement of her maternal or erotic power, Shakespeare takes advantage of the generic traditions of romance to camouflage her homecoming as the miraculous reward to a reformed monarch. Whether this moment is read as magical is irrelevant, then, because the generic conventions of romance enable it to be played as such.Of course, Hermione's return is engineered by Paulina. The two women form a crucial bond in their stand against Leontes' tyranny. While Hermione "dies," Paulina remains at court in a seemingly official capacity, keeping the memory of the "dead" queen and his responsibility for her death fresh in Leontes' mind. But the bond these two women form is also one that unites them in fantasies of female evil; both Hermione and Paulina are accused of evil by Leontes, one for supposed adultery and the other for questioning his power as king to dispose of his "traitorous" wife and her "illegitimate" child as he sees fit. Paulina's challenge of Leontes' absolute belief that Hermione has made him a cuckold makes her, in his estimation, a "mankind witch" (2.3.68) and "most intelligencing bawd" (69), a "crone" (77),

"[a] callat / Of boundless tongue" (91-92), and a "gross hag" (108) he threatens to burn at the stake (114).6Thus The Winter's Tale is a play in which a male character, here the monarch, identifies two women as sources of evil because they both pose a threat to his masculinist sovereignty. But the play clearly does not proceed from his view. For by the end of act 3, Paulina becomes Leontes' trusted source of truth, the one to oversee his daily act of contrition at the chapel where Hermione and Mamilius are buried. I argue that to assume that female power is effaced in The Winter's Tale is to discount the power of Paulina, who challenges Leontes' accusations against Hermione, gives a name to his tyranny, and becomes--at his contrition--his foremost advisor, keeper of his celibacy, and enforcer of his daily exercise of repentance.The play radically and unequivocally, and therefore dangerously, traces fictions of female good and evil to the tyranny of the male monarch, to his investments in patrilineal systems of blood, inheritance, and power. If, in King Lear and Macbeth, Shakespeare interrogates the tyranny of patrilineal structures of power, in part, through women's participation in violent political acts, in The Winter's Tale he takes a new approach.7 Rather than dramatizing Hermione and Paulina's adoption of tyrannical modes of rule, he turns Leontes' tyranny as king and husband against them and stages the consequences of their refusal to confirm his power and to succumb to his brutality. In more overt and deliberate ways than in prior tragedies, female evil is unmasked as a masculinist fantasy. Shakespeare illustrates the paranoia at the heart of a patrilineal economic structure dependent on phantasmatic constructions of femininity for its stability.I will argue that the genre of romance, with its basis in fantasy and magic,8 allows Shakespeare to mask the danger his play potentially poses to absolute monarchy and to put pressure on material concerns with women's socioeconomic position as phantasmatic guarantees of patrilineal succession. The patrilineal economy that conjures women into property is magnified by the monarchical setting, making the necessary purity of Hermione's body the guarantor of the state's patriarchal line.9 Because a royal line of succession is in question, the accusation of adultery Leontes brings against Hermione is conflated with treason, so that the rebellion he fears is born of a female power to threaten male sovereignty. Leontes' accusations, then, are weighted by the need for a royal heir whose blood descends from kings sanctified by God, so that the kingdom's honor is at stake.10

Thus in its generic shift, The Winter's Tale provides a kind of staged commentary for the examination of gender and power I have traced in Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, andAntony and Cleopatra.11 Shakespeare revises the violence staged in these plays and rejects the political and domestic tyranny seemingly demanded by the genre of tragedy, so that the ruthlessness that marked male and female participation in the masculinist competitions for power is disavowed. Because the play insists on Hermione's innocence, the rebellion Leontes fears comes only when Hermione feigns death and Paulina, in her rejection of Leontes' right to condemn his queen, becomes the moral and political voice of the play. Thus The Winter'sTale brings to the surface masculinist anxieties about female power and comes close to installing a female form of power over the monarch/husband's natural position of authority. But the play stops short of this radical reversal when female rebellion against the tyranny of the monarch/husband is camouflaged as the hero's quest for moral and political exculpation, a quest that earns Paulina's magical reanimation of Hermione as a reward to the reformed hero/husband/monarch. Thus patriarchal power is reinstated at the end, but a shift in forms of power is salvaged. When Leontes is cured of his paranoid delusions, Florizel's new order figures the future for both the kingdoms of Bohemia and Sicilia; as a part of the play's pastoral shift to romance, Florizel opposes himself to Leontes' violent control, modeling himself after Paulina's vision by valuing regeneration and procreation. The play's reworking of marriage and monarchy is mirrored in its use of two genres--tragedy and romance, so that the shift at the end of act 3 is deliberate and revisionary.12

Thus the fantastical basis for romance makes the play a forum for both replicating and interrogating masculinist fantasies about female sexuality and desire,13 so that Hermione's and Paulina's disruption of the patrilineal structure's control over the female body is both

deployed and disguised. Shakespeare underscores the vulnerability of the female body to masculinist anxieties, which, through Paulina, he names "disease." The evil of which the women I have examined thus far are accused by their male counterparts is replicated and systematically disavowed in The Winter's Tale when Leontes' paranoia, his fantasy of cuckoldry and drive toward violence are transformed by Paulina into a feminized form of rule based on reconciliation rather than on violent competitions. Leontes' performance of repentance and reconciliation and his apparent recovery from paranoid fantasies conjuring Hermione's and Paulina's "evil," make him worthy of his wife's return, worthy of his power as husband and king. Thus the play stages a revised patrilineal order that embraces the procreative opportunity of the feminine rather than fearing it as chaotic and dangerous.I read Leontes' anxiety as paranoia in Jean-Joseph Goux's terms. Goux theorizes what he calls the "neurotic subject," who is constituted by five major socioeconomic modes of production (primitive, Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and capitalist). These modes "produce a dominant symbolic coherence that correspond to the neurotic syndromes. ... Hysterical, obsessional, and paranoid structures go back to positions in the symbolic stratifications which correspond to modes (dominant or vestigial) of production and exchange. ... Thus the living, socialized subject is installed in a layered symbolic topography that constitutes it as a pole, a subject of exchange, through a specific process of substitutions--whence various neurotic types, various forms of neurosis."14 In this light, Leontes' paranoia is the logical result of a system of relations based on emerging capitalist formations of sexual bonds in marriage. As the economic necessity for pure lines of descent increases, the female body is rendered phantasmatic. As definitions of virtue, the general equivalent for women's value, become overdetermined, the neurosis accompanying such material concerns is paranoia.15 Leontes' "disease," in Shakespeare's terms, is not a biological imperative but a production associated with a specific socioeconomic, cultural process in the early modern period when the transition from a feudal, multiruler economy to an emerging mono-monarchical and capitalist mode of production generates new marital and parental structures of power relations.16 As is illustrated by conduct manuals such as Vives's The Instruction of A Christian Woman, those relations produce the suspicion and brutal enforcement of authority as the basis for women's commodification.17 As Goux puts it: "in this rift or drop [denoting the division of man from woman through reproduction] is the outline of the ontogenetic lurch by which the male subject attains a position of vehemently denying the genetic generosity of the primitive mother, good or bad, by masculinizing the life standard, with the result that the new, neutralized mother, moving from genetrix to mater, is condemned to signify negation, evil, sickness, and death."18Leontes' suspicions about Hermione's loyalty reflect the radical denial Goux describes. Her pregnancy stimulates anxieties in him about her generative power and threatens his power both as husband and king. She comes to embody, in his imagination, evil, sickness, and death and is violently negated--even abjected (in Kristeva's terms)--by Leontes. For if, as Kristeva argues, the abject is present in anything transgressing the moralized sanctions of society, but especially in blood, pus, urine, excrement, and sweat--in the excretions of the body--then it is clear that Hermione, in the depths of her uncontrollable and pregnant body, represents the limits and limitlessness of the abject.19

But as I have argued throughout this study, the abject is located not within a feminine chaos but rather in the masculinist competition for property and domination that builds on a hierarchical and ruthless exploitation of the female body. As Kristeva's sense of the abject suggests, woman's mutability, the challenge to dominion and restraint that the indeterminacy of her body's secretions, rhythms, and expulsions pose is exacerbated by the failure of the masculinist order to contain her fluidity, her inconstancy, making her a demonized threat. While male power is definitive of honor, female power figures a danger. As Luce Irigaray notes: "The womb is never thought of as the primal place in which we become body. Therefore for many men it is variously phantasized as a devouring mouth, as a sewer in which anal and urethral waste is poured, as a threat to the phallus or, at best, as a reproductive organ. And the womb is mistaken for all the female sexual organs since no valid representations of female sexuality exist. The only words we have for women's

sexuality are filthy, mutilating words. Consequently, the feelings associated with women's sexuality will be anxiety, phobia, disgust, and the haunting fear of castration."20 Repeatedly, Hermione is identified by her husband as a symbol of excess. As I will argue below, her pregnant body becomes a site of terror, for his inability to control her womb leaves Leontes vulnerable to theft. She is both a fertile land open to invasion and an unruly subject whose betrayal threatens his sovereignty. The threat her body poses for him conjures realms of decay and death. Leontes' paranoia dramatizes masculinist failures to identify, grasp, and restrain woman's corporeality, making woman that which must be tamed. That no ordering project succeeds at such mastering aggravates masculinist fears and sends into motion the juridically inscribed constraints played out in tracts on women's nature.Leontes' paranoia exhibits itself as an overflow of images of Hermione's body, as a source of venom (the spider in the cup) for which he lacks the antidote. The symbolic economy on which he draws for his understanding of Hermione's pregnant body functions as Irigaray describes: as a demarcation between pure and impure bodies that enables the masculinist order a way of guaranteeing itself.21 As Leontes' mania in the courtroom scene demonstrates, his power can be secured only through Hermione's social, physical, and symbolic annihilation. But Shakespeare challenges this violent impulse in The Winter's Tale when he stages Leontes' suspicions as paranoia, so that he uncovers the masculinist tendency to enforce a self-interested universe of language and symbols and rejects the violence of that imposition by bringing Hermione back to life. By making the male monarch the penitent confessor of his play,22 Shakespeare assigns responsibility for women's oppression to masculinist tyranny, so that tyranny, rather than the body of the woman, becomes the greatest threat to a monarchical state.Critics have attempted repeatedly to find the motive for Leontes' jealousy in act 1, scene 2. Some conclude that Hermione's playful and assertive talk stimulates his anxieties.23 Indeed, Hermione's speech pretending shock at Leontes' praise, her pose of incredulity that she could "have ... twice said well," fairly prances with glee (1.2.90). She wheedles Leontes, teases him about his meager praise, and begs good-naturedly for more. Hermione's playfulness reveals that she does not fear her husband, that, in fact, she feels free to express herself and confident in her relationship with him.24 Not even the conventions of courtly love, which license playful banter, can account for her unrestrained behavior with Leontes and Polixenes in this scene. Her speech is devoid of fear, reserve, or formality, which suggests that she is entirely unequipped for the accusations Leontes hurls at her in the next scene. Her behavior precludes the possibility that any such drama has entered their married lives before. Thus her speech alone seems unlikely to provoke the violence of his reaction.25 As another motive, Adelman argues that Hermione's pregnant body becomes the "site of longing and terror, its very presence disruptive of male bonds and male identity."26 Yet the pregnancy, while crucial, cannot be the only motive for Leontes' paranoia because Hermione has been with child before, seemingly without similar crises.I want to suggest that Hermione's freedom with her words merges with her pregnancy to become the singular catalyst for Leontes' suspicions.27 A specific moment in the conversation conjoins with the anxieties provoked by her swollen body to produce Leontes' imaginings. At the end of her speech playfully mocking her husband, Hermione makes the mistake of equating her husband and his friend as her reward for speaking well:                              'Tis grace indeed.Why, lo you now! I have spoke to th' purpose twice:The one for ever earn'd a royal husband;Th' other for some while a friend.[Gives her hand to Polixenes.](1.2.105-8)

Leontes, of course, had demonstrated his own playfulness in response to that of his wife when he answered Hermione's wheedling with:

                              Why, that was whenThree crabb'd months had sour'd themselves to death,

Ere I could make thee open thy white hand,[And] clap thyself my love; then didst thou utter,"I am yours forever."(1.2.101-5)Playfully, Leontes exaggerates the agony of courtship he experienced as a result of her delayed fulfillment of his desire. His description of that time is significant because he juxtaposes Hermione's verbal utterance with the physical act of giving him her hand. When she subsequently takes Polixenes as her friend and gives him her hand, she reenacts the moment when she accepted her husband's love and gave herself to him. Both her words and the act of giving her hand to Polixenes fuel her husband's jealousy. That she uses the term "friend" for Polixenes, with all its sexual connotations in the period, is less interesting, less compelling than the redramatization of a moment that, by his own loving mockery, Leontes has revealed was meaningful to him. However, her use of "friend" for Polixenes also conjures images of adultery, so that word and act merge in Leontes' fantasies of cuckoldry. This moment is followed by Leontes' first spoken suspicion. When the king describes Hermione's and Polixenes' conduct as "paddling palms and pinching fingers, / As now they are" (1.2.115-16), he describes this moment; it haunts him and recurs throughout his paranoid hysteria until it expands to the fantastical whispering, leaning cheek-to-cheek, meeting noses, and kissing with the inside lip that he later describes to Camillo (1.2.284-86). The phantasmatic nature of Leontes' accusations become clear when Hermione's friendship with Polixenes fuses in Leontes' mind with the word and act that made Hermione his wife.28

It is, then, after this moment that Hermione's visibly sexual body becomes suspect, leading Leontes immediately to question his son's paternity. "Mamillius, / Art thou my boy?" he asks the child at his side (1.2.110-20). He accepts the boy's "Ay, my good lord" (120) for only six lines before he must ask again, "How now, you wanton calf, / Art thou my calf?" (126-27). His question is predictable. Hermione's "adultery" threatens Leontes and the necessary transmission of the Crown through pure bloodlines. Leontes must accept only on faith the legitimacy of his children, a faith that is never secure.29 The fragility of his faith renders female desire, the female body, always suspect, and Hermione's body is conspicuously heavy with child. Leontes' questions about his son's paternity reveal his anxieties about the paternity of the child Hermione carries.30 As other critics have noted, Leontes' maniacal ravings make of his wife a great gaping hole.31

Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a fork'd one!Go play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and IPlay too, but so disgrac'd a part, whose issueWill hiss me to my grave: contempt and clamorWill be my knell. Go Play, boy, play. There have been(Or I am much deceiv'd) cuckolds ere now,And many a man there is (even at this present,Now, while I speak this) holds his wife by th' armThat little thinks she has been sluic'd in 's absenceAnd his pond fish'd by the next neighbor--bySir Smile, his neighbor. Nay, there's comfort in't,Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open'd,As mine, against their will. Should all despairThat have revolted wives, the tenth of mankindWould hang themselves. Physic for't there's none.It is a bawdy planet, that will strikeWhere 'tis predominant; and 'tis pow'rful--think it--From east, west, north, and south. Be it concluded,No barricado for a belly. Know't,It will let in and out the enemy,With bag and baggage. Many thousand on'shave the disease, and feel't not.(1.2.186-207)Leontes makes his wife's body not just a sexual object but a piece of property. Her body is vulnerable to entry, vulnerable to exploitation by others, and he is powerless to stop it. Her belly has no barricade, which makes enemies of other men and his unborn child. He is the innocent victim of theft. But he is also the cuckold whose reputation will never be recovered, not even in death. Leontes fantasizes woman's body as dark and unknown depths of

infinitely penetrable matter that men can never know or contain.32 Such unpredictability makes wives into rebels, unruly subjects who, by threatening the purity and stability of patrilineal power, become guilty of treason, guilty of making otherwise sovereign lands vulnerable to invasion.33Leontes' vision of female infidelity, then, is grounded in material concerns, in anxieties about loss of absolute ownership, of property rights.34 The disease he identifies as that from which he and untold numbers of other men suffer is dispossession. His deprivation implies as well a loss of honor, since honor is bound to ownership. Moreover, the indeterminacy and capriciousness of women's nature make men powerless dupes. Leontes' self-identification with cuckolds becomes a source of both comfort, therefore, and of violence, for it is his escalating sense of dishonor that provokes his reckless abandonment of wife and children. Leontes' fears are produced both by the vision of his wife's swollen body and by the freedom with which she gives her hand to Polixenes in friendship, an act that fuses in Leontes' mind with a loss of sovereignty over that which is his. He becomes, in this light, a weak, sickly victim of women's faithlessness and mutability.

Images of disease and contagion haunt the first three acts; several characters invoke the female body as infection and Leontes as the victim of disease. While Shakespeare's use of such imagery might suggest a misogynist agenda, that is not the case. For Leontes himself reveals that the disease in question is phantasmatic, a brain sickness causing paranoid fantasies of marital and political betrayal:

                              How blest am IIn my just censure! in my true opinion!Alack for lesser knowledge! how accurs'dIn being so blest! There may be in the cupA spider steep'd, and one may drink; depart,And yet partake no venom (for his knowledgeIs not infected), but if one presentTh' abhorr'd ingredient to his eye, make knownHow he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,With violent hefts. I have drunk, and seen the spider.Camillo was his help in this, his pandar.There is a plot against my life, my crown.(2.1.36-47)That Leontes' suspicions leap from the illegitimacy of his son to the perceived threat against his life and crown is no accident. Son, life, and Crown conjoin to form the blood and interest inherent in and requisite to a patrilineal economy. Like Othello in regard to Desdemona's supposed adultery, Leontes laments his knowledge of Hermione's "sin" and invokes ignorance as the peace for which he longs. His image of the spider's venom repeats infection as the trope for the evil of female sexuality. His "knowledge" of his wife's contagion assumes that he contracts the disease from her. However, Leontes has invented, fabricated that illness. Because Hermione's evil is Leontes' phantasmatic construction, the disease is figured as emanating from Leontes rather than his wife.35

Because Leontes' pathological fantasies necessarily reach out to envelop those he perceives as having betrayed him, Camillo, informing the Bohemian king of Leontes' accusations, tells Polixenes that he "cannot name the disease, and it is caught / Of you that are yet well" (1.2.386-87). Innocent of adultery, yet judged guilty, Polixenes swears that were he Leontes' deceiver, then "my best blood turn / To an infected jelly ... and my approach be shunn'd, / Nay, hated too, worse than the great'st infection / That e'er was heard or read" (417-18, 422-24). Were he guilty of such betrayal, Polixenes wishes upon himself a masculinist nightmare: the infection of his blood, a fallen reputation, and ostracism from society and honor. But disease is not an image raised solely by the men. Paulina, taking it upon herself to defend the wronged Hermione, curses these "dangerous, unsafe lunes i' th' King" (2.2.28). The disease running through the kingdom becomes located in Leontes' mind. Paulina approaches Leontes, as she says, "with words medicinal as true, / Honest as either, to purge him of that humor / That presses him from sleep" (2.3.37-39). She is his "physician" (54), coming to cure the fantastic disease of his mind.36 Thus Shakespeare relentlessly

underscores the phantasmatics of fears of cuckoldry, of the masculinist order's construction of feminine betrayal and chaos. But he also indicts the process whereby the female body is commodified in a patrilineal system, so that Shakespeare defines the fears producing a spectralization of feminine good and evil as pathology. The masculinist economy that depends on the purity of woman's body is infected with a sickness that leads, in The Winter's Tale, to the destruction of the monarchical line. By the end of the third act, the deaths of Hermione, Mamillius, and the loss of Perdita signify the end of Leontes' line as he knows it. And as act 5 opens, he takes a vow of chastity, in essence, by promising never to marry except by Paulina's approval. She is indeed, then, his physician, and by association, physician to a structure of relations that depends on binaries of female identity for its stability and perpetuation.37

When Leontes confronts Hermione with his accusations, Shakespeare begins the process of naming that ruthlessness. Like his use of "disease" for masculinist anxieties about feminine nature, Shakespeare uses "tyranny" to describe Leontes' treatment of his wife and newborn daughter.38 When Hermione denies his accusations, Leontes exercises his power to condemn her:                              I have saidShe is an adult'ress, I have said with whom:More--she's a traitor, and Camillo isA federary with her, and one that knowsWhat she should shame to know herself,But with her most vild principal--that she'sA bed-swerver, even as bad as thoseThat vulgars give bold'st titles; ay and privyTo this their late escape.(2.1.87-95, 103-5)Like other male characters who threaten and curse women in early modern tragedy, Leontes' condemnation and denunciation of Hermione encompass not just adultery but treason to the Crown. As king, he fears both the impurity of his line and threats against his life. He conflates Hermione's sexual misdemeanor with a political conspiracy against him. Consequently, he perceives himself as using his power as king to quash an insurrection. When his advisors attempt to dissuade him, he asserts that "Our prerogative / Calls not your counsels, but our natural goodness / Imparts this; which if you ... cannot, or will not, / Relish a truth like us, inform yourselves / We need no more of your advice"(2.1.163-65, 166-68). By rejecting the counsel of those men whose function it is to advise him in matters political, Leontes proves himself a tyrant.39 Secure in his absolute authority, he denies the wisdom of others and of the law. Disregarding the passionate defenses of his wife made by Antigonus and the First Lord, he rushes to bring official charges against her for treason and adultery. His power over her life, over the lives of his children and advisors, hangs over the heads of everyone on stage, so that their objections to his behavior dwindle and then stop. The futility of their words against Leontes' absolute authority underscores Hermione's, her children's, and the court's total subjection to his will. That he admits to having called upon spiritual counsel from Apollo comforts Antigonus but fails to mitigate Leontes' tyranny.Leontes' suspicions about Hermione's infidelity are revealed by the oracle as false. Shakespeare's device is significant because it suggests that women's fidelity can only be known through divine intervention.40 While such a statement could testify to his reinscription of masculinist fears, as Mary Beth Rose contends, I argue that Shakespeare uncovers those fears as a product of the fragility of patrilineal control. He highlights women's physical and economic dependence on the patriarchal word, on masculinist confirmation of their virtue; while female virtue stabilizes the masculinist order, women remain dependent on that order's public recognition and valuation of their virtue.41 That Leontes refuses to accept Apollo's word on Hermione's innocence demonstrates that when it comes to female sexuality, fantasy is more powerful than reality. Thus Shakespeare both discloses the spectrality of early modern formulations of feminine identity and exorcises their haunting power. The Winter's Tale, asKing Lear and Macbeth do not, conceptualizes an order in which a violent and tyrannical political system fails to control women's desire and must be

modified to satisfy the regenerative needs of a culture in the peaceful transmission of property.

In this instance as well, Paulina serves as the agent of liberty, as the physician of the court and of the king, curing the kingdom of Leontes' despotism. When Hermione "dies" upon the news of her son's death, Paulina's anger and grief move her to call the king a tyrant:

What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?What wheels? racks? fires? What flaying? boilingIn leads or oils? What old or new tortureMust I receive, whose every word deservesTo taste of thy most worst? Thy tyrannyTogether with the working of thy jealousies(Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idleFor girls of nine), O, think what they have done,And then run mad indeed--stark mad! for allThy by-gone fooleries were but spices of it.(3.2.175-84)

Leontes' tyranny coincides, in Paulina's account, with his jealous paranoia. She also identifies his jealousies as fancies, so that his suspicions regarding Hermione's virtue are explicitly defined as phantasmatically imbued. But by fancies, Paulina also means his suspicions about the threat against his crown and his life. So while Shakespeare distinguishes the intersections between masculinist investments in blood, Crown, and life, he also marks Leontes' perception of the threat against all three as fantastic. Faced with the destruction of his royal line, Leontes internalizes Paulina's indictment and determines to spend the rest of his life in repentance: "Once a day I'll visit / The chapel where they lie, and tears shed there / Shall be my recreation. So long as nature / Will bear up with this exercise, so long / I daily vow to use it" (3.2.238-42). While he has indicated doubt as to his "own suspicion" prior to Paulina's lecture on tyranny, the veracity of her castigation and the physical loss of Hermione provoke Leontes' contrition. His refusal to silence Paulina because "Thou canst not speak too much, I have deserv'd / All tongues to talk their bitt'rest" (215-16) reverses the early modern tragic paradigm demanding female repentance for sexual chaos. Hermione's "death," like that of Hero, testifies to her innocence and underscores his own brutality. His pose of absolute authority collapses in the face of his line's annihilation, for it is that authority that is responsible for its ruin. Thus Paulina can say with impunity that Leontes has been condemned to an ignominy that even the gods will not heed should he attempt repentance on "A thousand knees, / Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting, / Upon a barren mountain, and still winter / In storm perpetual" (210-13). That it is indeed to such a fate that Leontes has been exiled becomes only too apparent.

That is, of course, only the end of act 3, scene 2. Act 3, scene 3, portrays Antigonus's death following his abandonment of Perdita and the Shepherd's and Clown's discovery of her.42 The two events mark the end of one genre and the beginning of the other.43 The play's shift from the infertility of Leontes' kingdom to the fertility of the pastoral landscape enables a revision of forms of power. Shakespeare abandons the winter of Leontes' country for the spring of Polixenes'. The generic shift in the middle of the play signals Shakespeare's rejection of forms of monarchical and conjugal tyranny. The sheep-sheering festival and the feast celebrate everything earthy, abundant, and fertile. Everything feared and vilified by Leontes is glorified. Florizel, son of Polixenes and heir to the throne of Bohemia, pays tribute to Perdita's affinity not just with nature, but with corporeal procreation:These your unusual weeds to each part of youDoes give a life; no shepherdess, but FloraPeering in April's front. This your sheep-shearingIs as a meeting of the petty-gods,And you the queen on't.(4.4.1-5)

Florizel revels in Perdita's likeness to the goddess of the flowers, rejoices at the life force he sees in her, making her the queen of a festival associated with the fecund earth. In contrast to Leontes' manic anxiety in the face of Hermione's visible fertility, Florizel's embrace of everything procreative signifies a breakdown in the patrilineal dread of the unknowable, uncontrollable Feminine. Thus, Goux's masculinist paranoia is absent, making Florizel capable, when Perdita expresses misgivings about his father's reaction to their love, of confidently asserting,

                              I'll be thine, my fair,Or not my father's; for I cannot beMine own, nor any thing to any, ifI be not thine. To this I am most constant,Though destiny say no.(4.4.42-46; emphasis mine)Florizel rejects the filial duty that compels him to fulfill his father's desire and not his own. Radically, Florizel equates the giving of himself to Perdita with a sovereignty over the self. The capacity for giving himself to another appears integral to his idea of self-determination, for Florizel suggests that this ability provides him with access to a prior, more authentic self. His refusal of his father's hold upon him, a refusal that implies a loss of power, suggests that Florizel's subjection to the patrilineal competition for place and preferment underwriting Leontes' kingdom is limited. Florizel allies himself with the male/female bond above that of the male/male bond. In opposition to the bonds between men in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, which remain primary to the detriment of women involved, the prince of Bohemia privileges his relationship with Perdita, with the feminine.The primacy of Florizel's bond with Perdita remains unbroken even in the face of his father's wrath. Polixenes' anger at his son for refusing to consult with him before negotiating a marriage with the shepherdess resembles both that of Lear in the face of Cordelia's "nothing" and that of Leontes in the face of Paulina's chiding.44

                    Mark your divorce, young sir.Whom son I dare not call. Thou art too baseTo be [acknowledg'd]. Thou, a scepter's heir,That thus affects a sheep-hook!... And thou, fresh pieceOf excellent witchcraft, whom of force must knowThe royal fool thou cop'st with--(4.4.417-20, 422-24, 425-31)

Polixenes makes clear, as does Lear, that Florizel's inheritance depends on his privileging of the father-child bond. Like Leontes, he functions within a masculinist order definitive of tragedy. Florizel's place in the patrilineal order depends on his subordination of the male/female tie. But Florizel disavows such a hierarchy, and upon his father's exit, he informs Perdita, her shepherd father, and Camillo that he is "but sorry, not afeard; delay'd, / But nothing alter'd. What I was, I am: / More straining on for plucking back, not following / My leash unwillingly" (463-66). His earlier declaration of self-determination against duty to father and crown remains fixed. The threat to Florizel's interests that Polixenes attempts to locate in Perdita fails to associate her with specters of femininity, fails to make her, in Florizel's eyes, less valuable, less desirable. Florizel's loyalty to his shepherdess demonstrates more than his amiability and romanticism. The play's generic shift, which encompasses time, space, and character, deliberately deconstructs the brutal confirmation of male honor through female virtue. It separates the female body from chaotic, indeterminate, and therefore fearsome materiality and embraces its corporeality. Thus Florizel's rejection of traditional early modern configurations of filial gratitude and obedience--of, in fact, the system by which masculine honor and value is assessed--acts as a direct challenge to the authority of that system.

What becomes clear, then, is that by dramatizing a generic shift within this play, which revises male/female ties, Shakespeare rejects an economic and political order in which

women embody, for men, a utilitarian, socioeconomic advantage over other men. The male/male bonds that in tragedy separate those between men and women and create a basis for competition, constructing a hierarchy that makes some men more powerful than others, underwrite women's exploitation. Female virtue, in this regard, is figured in the early modern period as reflecting directly on male honor and power.45 But Florizel's utter lack of concern for his socioeconomic interests suggests that he resists the kind of investment in female virtue to which Leontes conforms. I do not argue that he seeks to overturn Polixenes' right to a throne, but that he challenges the basis of his authority. He revises the criteria by which male honor is defined, so that it is no longer based on specters of feminine identity. Florizel's conception of Perdita as infinitely valuable in and of herself goes against all contemporary philosophies on marriage. So while a patrilineal form of authority remains in place, Florizel's reconfiguration of the definitions of his own honor acts as a deconstructive move. Thus Neely's claim, that because "Florizel remains faithful to his vows, to Perdita, and to himself[,] ... Leontes' reduction of the world to his dreams cannot be repeated by Polixenes in Act IV,"46 expresses the revisionary ambition of Shakespeare's play.

That Florizel is written as a revision of Leontes becomes clear when madness, formerly "disease" through act 3, is redefined by Florizel in response to Camillo:

Flo.

From my succession wipe me, father, IAm heir to my affection.

Cam.

                                                                                Be advis'd.

Flo.

I am--and by my fancy. If my reasonWill thereto be obedient, I have reason;If not, my senses, better pleas'd with madnessDo bid it welcome.(4.4.480-85)In contrast to Leontes, Florizel admits that his emotions may be devoid of reason. His madness is embraced and not feared as a threat to logic and power. It becomes a movement away from the masculinist order that denies and fears the indeterminate. If such madness is constituted by his love for a woman, then such madness is welcomed. Thus Florizel moves toward, without dread, a life of uncertainty and mutability formerly defined by feminine chaos, but now defined by independence from the ghostly conjurations of a patrilineal order. Florizel's autonomy is striking in contrast to Leontes' agonized reliance on Hermione's virtue to confirm his power as husband and as king and in contrast to the fear that the feminine provokes in him. While Leontes' paranoia can be understood, in Goux's terms, as an identification of the feminine with "an amorphous negativity devoid of its own laws, a lesser being associated with pain, corruption, contingency, and death,"47 Florizel's perspective on women rejects the moralized binary between man and woman, a binary that depends on a denial of woman's "genetic generosity."48 When Polixenes attempts to conjure a threat in Perdita, he fails because Florizel does not rely on patrilineal definitions of her value to confirm his own. The revelation of Perdita's identity as the daughter and heir of Sicilia, making Florizel future king not just of Bohemia but of Sicilia as well, signals the potential for a revision in the monarchy's conception of female nature. While their crowning might be read as a reward of goodness, Florizel's flight from his father into the bosom of his father's greatest enemy can hardly be called "goodness" in any traditional, patrilineal sense.49 Moreover, Florizel's placement of woman above power and Crown, above filial duty, enacts a gross betrayal of patrilineal morality. But that form of morality is precisely what

Shakespeare is disavowing. Florizel's repudiation of the ruthlessness of patrilineal power, loyalty to which both Leontes and Polixenes owe the loss of their progeny, suggests that he embodies a procreative reformation in masculinist strategies of authority.Such a revision in the political structure is possible, I argue, because Paulina and Hermione determine that it must occur.50 Thus it is important to return to the first three acts of the play and the role of Paulina in the play's revision of monarchical practices. For Paulina acts as a kind of counterpart to Hermione, refusing to accommodate Leontes' expectations for obedience on the part of his subjects, especially on the part of his female subjects. While Hermione is unequivocally innocent of the accusations made by her husband, Paulina is certainly guilty of disobedience to and rebellion against her king. His rage in act 2, scene 3, is provoked by the threat to his sovereignty she poses when she refuses to be silenced, speaking her mind even when Leontes rages "I'll ha' thee burnt:"                                        I care not.It is an heretic that makes the fire,Not she who burns in't. I'll not call you tyrant;But this most cruel usage of your queen(Not able to produce more accusationThan your own weak-hing'd fancy) something savorsOf tyranny, and will ignoble make you,Yea scandalous to the world.(2.3.114-21)

Paulina's refusal to obey her king, to echo his accusations as an obedient subject, makes her, as is expected, a traitor. And I have already cataloged the list of derogatory names Leontes calls her throughout the scene. Paulina's rejection of silence not only as the proper response of a loyal subject but of a woman makes her an unnatural woman in Leontes' eyes. Her evil, then, in contrast to that of Hermione, derives not from her abundant and uncontrollable fertility, but from the power she attempts to wield over him as the bearer of truth, a truth that ought (under early modern conceptions of monarchy) to reside only with him. Paulina usurps his power as monarch, then, placing his sovereignty as king in jeopardy and becoming a different source of evil from that of Hermione. For she threatens his entire view of himself as a monarch and as a man. Until Leontes faces the irrevocable evidence of his wrong, Paulina indeed represents for him the evil of the rebellious subject. Thus, it is clearly Paulina who poses the greatest threat to his monarchical authority, not just in this scene but also throughout the rest of the play. For while Leontes' authority is never under serious danger of being overthrown, Paulina is the catalyst for fundamental changes in the way that Leontes should and will rule.

But Paulina's changes cannot be implemented until Leontes understands his error, and this occurs in the scene of Hermione's "death." When the king refuses to see his wrong, the women's total rejection of Leontes' tyranny becomes the only mode of survival for Hermione. The words of the oracle proclaim the truth: "Hermione is chaste, Polixenes blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten, and the king shall live without an heir, if that which is lost be not found" (3.2.132-36). The truth, decreed by Apollo and spoken by his messengers, should set Hermione free and absolve those Leontes accused of plotting treason. But Leontes responds, "There is no truth at all i' th' oracle. / The sessions shall proceed; this is mere falsehood" (140-41). When Hermione swoons at news of her son's death, she is taken offstage by Paulina and the ladies. When Paulina returns, she gives Leontes the news of his wife's death. I have already quoted much of her speech, but I want to note once more the emphasis that Paulina places on Leontes' tyranny. Up to this point, Paulina only hinted at the king's despotism, at an infection she takes it upon herself to cure in him. But once she returns from Hermione's side, she no longer minces words. Perhaps she is licensed by the oracle. Perhaps her grief at Mamillius's death, compounded by the loss of Perdita and Antigonus, motivates her words. However, Hermione's death does not, for Hermione lives.

Perhaps no one today ever entertains the notion that Hermione might actually have died, so that her reanimation in act 5 presents no surprise, except insofar as it signals her return to a despotic husband. But the fact is that Shakespeare seemed interested in making his audience believe in her death. News of Mamillius's death comes directly upon the oracle's prophecy, so Hermione's death acts as its further fulfillment. Antigonus is haunted by her ghost, and Paulina poses Hermione's transformation from stone to flesh and blood woman as magic, as a "spell" (5.3.105) she casts. The generic conventions of romance enable Shakespeare to conjure the possibility of supernatural causes for Hermione's return as a cloak for what is really an interrogation of marital, economic, and monarchical tyranny. Juxtaposed with the fantastical aspects of the scene are material signs of aging that Leontes takes note of in the "statue" of his wife. Hermione also explains that, as she tells Perdita, "I / Knowing by Paulina that the oracle / Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserv'd / Myself to see the issue" (125-28). She makes clear that her "death" was a deception, and I am suggesting that it responded directly to the violence Leontes' legal proceedings potentially demand. Because she wished to see her daughter once more, Hermione lived, but she lived apart from her husband. It is clear that upon Leontes' rejection of the oracle's pronouncement, Hermione determined that Leontes' madness made him a man with whom she no longer wished to share her life. In response, Paulina and Hermione hit upon a plan that allowed Hermione, in essence, to divorce her husband. Hermione's sixteen-year separation from her husband comes to an end, then, only when Leontes' sincere atonement invites her return.51 When Leontes proves himself impervious to the divine power proclaiming her innocence, Hermione's choice to make her collapse evidence of death joins her voice to that of Paulina's in disavowing a power structure whose phantasmatic constructions tyrannize women's lives. Sensing the king's self-doubt, both women take advantage of the ominousness of the oracle's proclamation to take a stand. Hermione refuses to live by her husband's side any longer until, with Paulina's help, she can live there safely. And Paulina, in her place, becomes an advisor and a physician, to fight for justice and to cure once and for all the king's madness.

I want to emphasize that Paulina's and Hermione's deception is not designed nor do I see it as an overturning of male rule. There is no exchange of Leontes' reign for that of Hermione or Paulina. He remains king and they his subjects. Rather, the women enforce a period of penitence for Leontes that seeks a monarchical restructuring informed by values other than suspicion, paranoia, and absolutism. The socioeconomic privilege that underwrites political structures and women's physical and economic dependence on masculinist formulations of feminine ontology is repudiated by Hermione's "death" and challenged by Paulina's diatribe against her king. That Leontes' brutality as monarch has caused the breakdown of his own line suggests that a new method of rule, founded on a revision of women's roles in a patrilineal state and of their "nature" as women, is imperative to the continuation of the state. Hermione's "death" and Paulina's defense of her queen work as deconstructive moves designed to revise Leontes' ruthless enforcement of women's function as property, though not to topple his rule. It is the materialist basis of masculinist rule, then, that is under revision and not male rule itself.

Thus their rebellion corrects and transforms the masculinist order so that male/female relations can be reclaimed. When Paulina succeeds in eliciting from Leontes the liberty to "Go on, go on; / Thou canst not speak too much, I have deserv'd / All tongues to talk their bitt'rest" (3.2.214-16), she begins to work a re-visionary agenda. What I propose, therefore, is not a simple reversal in a hierarchical order. Rather, the order that Paulina, and Hermione behind the scenes, install seeks not to punish with violence or tyranny Leontes' transgression against his wife, but to enlighten and instruct him, to redefine political power, to eliminate phantasmatic constructions of feminine identity and socioeconomic investments in those fantasies. When Shakespeare rejects the masculinist conventions of tragedy, a new economy emerges in which a shepherdess who wants to marry a prince can seek and obtain protection from a king. Though Perdita turns out to be a princess, Leontes' protection of her

is won before his knowledge of that fact. Shakespeare's turn toward romance, enabling Perdita's acceptance in Leontes' kingdom despite her "common" paternity, signals a rejection of the tragic mandate that would have ostracized and vilified her. A revised economy is, in part, made possible by sixteen years of enforced atonement on Leontes' part, so that he pays tribute to a structure of relations against which he has transgressed.

As many critics have noted, however, Leontes' pose of penitence is mitigated by the authoritative and essentially cavalier attitude he displays once Hermione and his daughter are restored to him.52 In response to Paulina's lament that she "Will wing me to some wither'd bough, and there / My mate (that's never to be found again) / Lament till I am lost" (5.3.133-35), Leontes exclaims,                              O, peace, Paulina!Thou shouldst a husband take by my consent,As I by thine a wife: this is a match,And made between 's by vows. Thou hast found mine,But how, is to be question'd; for I saw her(As I thought) dead; and have (in vain) said manyA prayer upon her grave. I'll not seek far(For him, partly I know his mind) to find theeAn honorable husband.(135-43, 151-55)

In this speech, Leontes recuperates kingly authoritativeness and imperiousness. Not only is he finished listening to Paulina talk, but he overturns their power reversal to bring her into an unlooked-for marriage with Camillo. He also speaks of questioning Paulina and Hermione about his wife's disappearance in terms that are threatening; his parenthetical references to having been deceived hint at some displeasure whose expression may only be deferred. While he begs of Hermione and Polixenes a pardon, his speech is marked by one command after another, signifying Leontes' return to a sense of himself as king. I would argue, in this light, that Shakespeare's revision of patrilineal structures of power is not embodied in his characterization of Leontes. Like Lear, Leontes ultimately cannot transcend a structure of relations that he has heretofore ruled with some ruthlessness. As Lear looks forward to his period of imprisonment with Cordelia as an interval during which he owns his daughter completely and thus achieves the desires that motivated his division of the kingdom, so Leontes reappropriates enthusiastically his position as sovereign once his culpability is mitigated by Hermione's and Perdita's return to him.

I do not, however, propose that Shakespeare's reformation of the masculinist order fails, for Paulina's passionate rebellion against Leontes' tyranny has demonstrated the necessity for a change. The play's revision of orthodox notions of gender and power is embodied in Florizel and Perdita as the future rulers of two countries. In contrast to Edgar and Malcolm, whose acquisitions of their respective thrones is accomplished through violence rather than reconciliation, the future rulers of Sicilia and Bohemia embody an optimistic revision in absolutist and tyranical power.53 Such a revision makes way for alternate forms of political power and male/female relations and is enabled by Shakespeare's turn away from the traditional generic conventions of tragedy toward romance.54 Florizel, as the future monarch of both kingdoms, rejects the economic fantasies of female ontology. Thus while in The Winter'sTale male rule remains solidly in place, the play ends--in contrast to Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra--with a hopeful vision of a new form of rule independent of the hierarchical division between man and woman. The human destruction left on stage at the ends of tragedies, we have seen, results from the uninterrupted, unmodified strategies of command. So long as violent competition stands as the modus operandi of male bonds and absolute monarchy, tyranny reigns as do fears of female desire. Tragedy, Shakespeare seems to suggest, ends in a nonregenerative and infertile mandate. Not only are the Lear and Macbeth lines wiped out at their plays' ends, not only does male competition win out at the end of Antony and Cleopatra, but the hope for an alternate approach to unlimited and uncompromising monarchical power emanating from the

heirs to and colonizers of the thrones dissipates in the violence of their victories. As if to reject the destructive relations between men and women that are implicated in his tragedies, Shakespeare writes TheWinter's Tale. He imagines a new order in which neither monarchical rule nor male/female bonds need be defined by tyranny. Female power no longer equals female evil; rather it becomes requisite to the a balance of power, literally, among men and women.Notes1. Valerie Traub, "Jewels, Statues, and Corpses: Containment of Female Erotic Power in Shakespeare's Plays," in Shakespeare and Gender: A History, ed. Deborah Barker and Ivo Kamps (New York: Verso, 1995), 135.2. Gayle Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 279.3. Mary Beth Rose, "Where Are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance," Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1991): 306, 307. Rose's argument ignores Hermione's agency in her "death," and the recuperation of the maternal body that Janet Adelman so brilliantly maintains is affirmed by the play's removal to a pastoral landscape in Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare's Plays, "Hamlet" to "The Tempest" (New York: Routledge, 1992), 193-238. For further readings on Hermione's transformation to stone, see also Abbe Blum, "'Strike all that look upon with mar[b]le': Monumentalizing Women in Shakespeare's Plays," in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 99-118; Katherine Eggert,Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 162-68; and Shirley Nelson Garner, "Male Bonding and the Myth of Women's Deception in Shakespeare's Plays," in Shakespeare's Personality, ed. Norman Holland, Sidney Homan, and Bernard J. Paris (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 135-50.

4. Ibid., 306.

5. Traub, "Jewels, Statues, and Corpses," 135.

6. The Winter's Tale, Evans, G. Blakemore (editor), The Riverside Shakespeare, Copyright © 1974 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All quotations from and references to The Winter's Taleare used by permission and cited parenthetically in the text.7. On The Winter's Tale as a reworking of Macbeth, see Kay Stockholder, "Dream Works: Lovers and Families in Shakespeare's Plays from Matter to Magic: The Winter's Tale," in"The Winter's Tale": Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: Garland, 1995), 319-34. For an analysis of tyranny on the Renaissance stage, see Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990).8. "[T]ypical of the sophisticated Greek Romances of love and adventure," Barbara A. Mowat writes, is a "complex--indeed contorted--... structure, dependent on surprise, suspense, numerous dei ex machina; filled with dream-visions and oracles and magic; much emphasis on chastity, a miraculous happy ending, and a realization on the part of characters that they are pawns in the hands of fate," in The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1976), 129. Mowat points out that Shakespeare's romances seem to offer us visions of a "real" world, but that he introduces distortions that interfere with such a reading (63); her suggestion is made to explore the effects of these disjunctions, and I would like to extend her analysis to my examination of material conditions of the play that put pressure on women's economic roles in the early modern period. See also Howard Felperin,Shakespearean Romance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), especially 3-54 and 211-45.

9. For a comparison of Leontes' tyranny to that of Henry VIII and his accusations against Anne Boleyn, see M. Lindsay Kaplan and Katherine Eggert. They see The Winter's Tale as "tak[ing] a feminist stance in relation to early modern law," in "'Good queen, my lord, good queen': Sexual Slander and the Trials of Female Authority in The Winter's Tale,"Renaissance Drama 25 (1994): 110. In addition to emphasizing the materiality of the play's generic shift, my reading adds to Kaplan and Eggert's analysis a claim that the false accusations against which Hermione is made to stand give her the right to refuse the continuance of her husband's legal right to and authority over her body. Early modern tracts such as T. E.'s The Law's Resolutions of Women's Rights (in Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640, ed. Joan Larsen Klein [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992], 27-61) clearly state that a woman has no such rights, making Shakespeare's play a radical revision of women's rights in the period. See also David M. Bergeron's analysis of the play as drawing on conflicts between James I and his son Henry in Shakespeare's Romances and the Royal Family (Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 1985); and Richard Wilson, "Observations on English Bodies: Licensing Maternity in Shakespeare's Late Plays," in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 121-50.10. See Jean-Joseph Goux's analysis of paternity as "an ideological position or, better, interposition--that is, as a power in another sort of reproduction. ... The attested father is not only the genitor, he is at once witness and control, like the constant point of comparison used in scientific experiment" (218, 219). Shakespeare stages his interrogation of mystifications of feminine identity through Leontes' socio-economic investment in the paternity of his children and, therefore, in the ownership of his wife. Reprinted from Jean-Joseph Goux: Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). Used by permission of the publisher, Cornell University Press.11. For an influential account of Shakespeare's movement beyond a tragic vision to reconciliation, see E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's Last Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, 1938). Mowat presents a counterargument to Tillyard's in The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare's Romances. She also offers a trajectory of Shakespearean images of women in "Images of Women in Shakespeare's Plays," Southern Humanities Review 21, no. 2 (1977): 145-57.12. On Shakespeare's revision of Robert Greene's Pandosto, see Robert G. Hunter, "Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness: The Winter's Tale," in "The Winter's Tale": Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: Garland, 1995), 156-73. Most significant of Shakespeare's revisions is, Hunter notes, Shakespeare's choice to eliminate Pandosto's suicide, the real death of the queen, and "the genuinely suspicious appearance of the queen's affections for the visiting king" (160). Patricia Southard Gourley notes that the character of Paulina is also original to Shakespeare's version in "'O, my most sacred lady': Female Metaphor in The Winter's Tale," in "The Winter's Tale": Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: Garland, 1995), 258-79; see also Charles Frey, Shakespeare's Vast Romance: A Study of "The Winter's Tale" (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1980); Marco Mincoff,Things Supernatural and Causeless: Shakespearean Romance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992); and Mowat, "Rogues, Shepherds, and the Counterfeit Distressed: Texts and Infracontexts of The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Studies 22 (1994): 58-76.13. On Shakespeare's recuperation of the body of the mother in The Winter's Tale, see Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 193-238.14. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 79-80, 81, 82.

15. Ibid., 81-82, 98-99.

16. This is a very long process that can be traced from the formal organization of agrarian industries and protocapitalism, making women vital sites of exchange among men for the perpetuation and accumulation of wealth and property.

17. As I discussed in chapter 1, Juan Luis Vives's Instruction of a Christian Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde, in Daughters, Wives, and Widows: Writings by Men about Women and Marriage in England, 1500-1640, ed. Joan Larsen Klein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 97-122, is a frighteningly graphic example of the value placed upon the female body, upon its nonviolation (105-6). Shakespeare's play and manuals such as Vives's are dissonant products of the same cultural moment, then, so that a gradual process of women's commodification, in response to their sexual threat, emerges in the early modern period.18. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 226-27.19. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 56-89.20. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 16-17.

21. Ibid., 20.

22. Anne M. Haselkorn argues that Jacobean adulteresses' penitent confessions reassert "patriarchal values ... [and] encode patriarchy's need for its own survival," in "Sin and the Politics of Penitence: Three Jacobean Adulteresses," in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 130. Shakespeare's characterization of Leontes as the play's confessor points to a revision of such values.23. For multiple perspectives on Leontes' motive, see Richard H. Abrams, "Leontes' Enemy: Madness in The Winter's Tale," in Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film, (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986), 155-62; Maydee G. Lande, "The Winter's Tale: A Question of Motive,"American Imago 43, no. 1 (1986): 51-65; Norman Nathan, "Leontes' Provocation,"Shakespeare Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1968): 19-24; Carol Thomas Neely, in "The Winter's Tale": Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: Garland, 1995), 243-57. "The Winter's Tale: Triumph of Speech"; and Martha Ronk, "Recasting Jealousy: A Reading of The Winter'sTale," Literature and Psychology 36, nos. 1-2 (1990): 50-77. Recently, Catherine Belsey has argued that the play locates Leontes' anxieties in true love; see Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 85-127.

24. See also Hunter, "Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness," 159.

25. That Hermione's spirited speaking transgresses her gender role is confirmed by Vives's injunction that "if [a woman] be good, it were better ... in company to hold her tongue demurely, and let few see her, and none at all hear her" (Instruction, 102). Lynn Enterline's "'You speak a language that I understand not': The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter'sTale," Shakespeare Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1997): 17-44, brings new life to the complexities embedded in Hermione's verbal power and to the differences between speech and silence.26. Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 220. For further theories on Hermione's pregnancy as provocation for Leontes' jealousy, see Lawrence Danson, "'The catastrophe is a nuptial': The Space of Masculine Desire in Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale," Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993): 69-79; Peter Erickson, "Patriarchal Structures in The Winter's Tale," PMLA97, no. 5 (1982): 819-29; and Jean Addison Roberts, "Shakespeare's Maimed Birth Rights," inTrue Rights and Maimed Rights: Ritual and Anti-ritual in Shakespeare and His Age, ed. Linda Woodbridge and Edward Berry (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1992), 123-44.

27. Enterline writes, "If ... the spectacle of Hermione's pregnancy troubles the play's language from the start ... , this spectacle works together with her potent tongue to spark her husband's suspicions" (25). I have extended Enterline's emphasis on Hermione's verbal

power to the economically motivated fantasies that the conjunction of her verbal and fertile power produces in Leontes' mind. See "'You speak a language that I understand not,'" 17-44.

28. I do not believe, as Kenneth C. Bennett does, that it is necessary to ask whether Leontes has actually seen what he describes in this scene. It is enough to note that the hand Hermione offers Polixenes in friendship becomes the paddling palms, and that he fantasizes the rest. As I will show throughout this reading, the language of fantasy, tyranny, and sickness with which the king is described not only by Paulina, but by Camillo and other advisors, all point to the phantasmatic nature of Leontes' accusations. See "Reconstructing The Winter's Tale,"Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993): 81-90.29. On Leontes' struggle with "Affection! thy intention stabs the centre" (1.2.138-146), see William R. Morse, "Metacriticism and Materiality: The Case of Shakespeare's The Winter'sTale," ELH 58 (1991): 283-304.30. In regard to Leontes' competition with "Hermione to produce a child, an offspring he is sure is his own (because self created) ... [which] makes him unjustifiably mystify the reality of female parturition," see Maurice Hunt, "The Labor of The Winter's Tale," in "The Winter'sTale": Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: Garland, 1995), 336-37.31. For an analysis of Leontes' imagery in this speech, see Derek Cohen, "Patriarchy and Jealousy in Othello and The Winter's Tale," MLQ 48, no. 3 (1987): 207-23; and Diane Elizabeth Dreher, Domination and Defiance: Fathers and Daughters in Shakespeare(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986).

32. Danson's analysis in "The catastrophe is a nuptial" is instructive in this regard. See also Cohen, "Patriarchy and Jealousy."

33. In The Doctrine of Superiority and Subjection (London, 1609), Robert Pricke elaborately affirms the hierarchy making women their husband's subjects by invoking the fifth commandment as that which "upholdeth ... all those estates, degrees, and orders, whereby society, or fellowship of man, is as it were, by certain joints and sinews, joined and knit together, and without which it would by a certain pernicious confusion, be clean dissolved, and utterly perish" (I have modernized and regularized Pricke's spelling). Pricke argues the familiar early modern paradigm wherein the husband is the head of the wife as the king is the head of the nation and Christ is the head of the church. Leontes' anxiety about Hermione as an unruly subject is, therefore, embedded in this trope. See also William Whately's A Bride-bush, or A Wedding Sermon (London, 1617) in which the first duty of a woman is, as I noted in chapter 1, to "acknowledge her inferiority" (36).34. As I demonstrated in chapter 1, in his The Excellency of Good Women (London, 1613), Barnabe Rych argues that women's sexual virtue must be hoarded, like gold, to increase men's honor. Thus Leontes' anxieties about cuckoldry are entrenched in early modern conceptions of women as guarantor of patrilineal power, so that they embody economic stability and become comparable to market goods. See also Thomas Becon's The Book of Matrimony, in Renaissance Women: Constructions of Femininity in England, ed. Kate Aughterson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 111-13. Like Pricke, Whately, Rych, and Vives, Becon locates the stability of patrilineal succession in woman's subjection to her husband, in her silence, chaste behavior, and frugality as a housewife.

35. On Leontes' speech, see Neely, "Triumph of Speech"; Wilson, "Observations on English Bodies," who argues that "Leontes' fury at Paulina, as he spurns the 'bastard' daughter born to Hermione, taps the paranoia of Jacobean patriarchy, and he vomits a litany of misogynistic stereotypes in his conflation of witch, scold, and unruly woman" (131).

36. For a reading of Paulina's role here, see Janet S. Wolf, "'Like an Old Tale Still': Paulina, 'Triple Hecate,' and the Persephone Myth in The Winter's Tale," in Images of Persephone:

Feminist Readings in Western Literature, ed. Elizabeth T. Hayes (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994), 32-44.37. On Paulina's power over Leontes as "an effective 'tying off' of the male potential for generation" (202), see D'Orsay W. Pearson, "Witchcraft in The Winter's Tale: Paulina as 'Alcahueta y un Poquito Hechizera,'" Shakespeare Studies 12 (1979): 195-213.38. See Stuart M. Kurland's analysis of Leontes' tyranny in this scene, in "'We need no more of your advice': Political Realism in The Winter's Tale," SEL [Studies in English Literature 1500-1900] 31 (1991): 365-86.39. For a comparison of the sacrifice at Delphos with Leontes' sacrifice of Hermione and Perdita, see Joan Hartwig, "The Tragicomic Perspective of The Winter's Tale," in "TheWinter's Tale": Critical Essays, ed. Maurice Hunt (New York: Garland 1995), 174-99.40. Howard Felperin, in an argument that makes Hermione at least partially culpable for Leontes' madness, notes that only divine intervention assures an audience of Hermione's innocence. However, Felperin does not believe that such intervention is necessarily reliable. "'Tongue-tied our queen?': The Deconstruction of Presence in The Winter's Tale," inShakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 3-18. See Kenneth C. Bennett's "Reconstructing The Winter's Tale," for an excellent rebuttal of Felperin's essay.

41. See Kaplan and Eggert who argue that "sexual slander ... performed a valuable patriarchal function: the threat of public humiliation and rejection, or even disciplinary prosecution for the imputed behavior, served as a deterrent against sexual misbehavior both for victims of slander themselves and for either chaste or promiscuous bystanders" (93). The circularity, or mutual dependence, of male and female honor illustrates the vexed nature of early modern gender ideologies; see "'Good queen'," 89-118.

42. Hunter ("Shakespeare and the Comedy of Forgiveness") sees Antigonus as a "victim of the gods' unalterable design for Leontes" (165), but I argue he is more immediately and personally culpable. Antigonus's death is staged as a punishment for his loyalty to Leontes above his own doubts about Hermione's guilt. For he, unlike anyone else in the play, accepts Leontes' fantasies as fact. Antigonus's death seems to result from his judgment against Hermione, then. As the last proponent of Leontes' psychotic order, Antigonus dies in obedience to it.

43. Several critics have noted the shift in The Winter's Tale from tragedy to romance, and I extend their observations to the material conditions producing Leontes' paranoia. See especially Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 193-238; Gourley, "'O, my most sacred lady,'" 258-79; Sara Hanna, "Voices against Tyranny: Greek Sources of The Winter's Tale," Classical and Modern Studies: A Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1994): 335-44; Morse, "Metacriticism and Materiality," 283-304; and Ronk, "Recasting Jealousy," 50-77. Hartwig argues that the play's tragicomic force lies throughout the play and not as "critics mistakenly ... assume [in] acts IV and V [as] the comic performance of the first three acts" ("The Tragicomic Perspective," 183).44. I would note that all three men demonstrate typical early modern anxieties about female power by invoking witchcraft. Both John Knox (The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women [London 1558]) and Cardinal William Allen (A True, Sincere, and Modest Defense of English Catholics, in The Execution of Justice in England by William Cecil and A True, Sincere and Modest Defense of English Catholics by William Allen, ed. Robert M. Kingdom [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1965], 51-268) associate witchcraft with the unnatural notion of women's rule in their often hysterical responses to the idea of Elizabeth, as a woman, on the throne.45. Coppélia Kahn's Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981) is still the best articulation of this argument.

46. Neely, "Triumph of Speech," 250.

47. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 230.

48. Ibid., 227.

49. See Pricke's Doctrine for the duties children owe to parents.50. On Paulina's and Hermione's "having learned to defy the dominance of male rule [to] find their own worth," see Irene G. Dash, Wooing, Wedding, and Power: Women in Shakespeare's Plays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 134.51. Thus, I cannot agree with René Girard, who asserts that Hermione is "selflessly devoted to [Leontes]," in "The Crime and Conversion of Leontes in The Winter's Tale," Religion and Literature 22, nos. 2-3 (1990): 194.52. For opposite readings of this scene, see Joyce Wexler, "A Wife Lost or Found," The Upstart Crow 8 (1988): 106-17; and Dreher, Dominance and Defiance.53. While Erickson reads the play less optimistically, I would note that he does not account for the future structure that the Florizel-Perdita union promises. See Erickson, "Patriarchal Structures in The Winter's Tale," 827.

54. Morse also engages the play's "demystification of authority," but his purpose is not, as mine is, to explore that demystification as a critique of male/female material relations ("Metacriticism and Materiality," 283-304).

I invoke Catherine Belsey's The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985; New York: Routledge, 1993) in my title both playfully and to acknowledge her influence on this study as a project examining the play's, Leontes', and Hermione's locations in culture, which are subject to the splittings and disjunctions Belsey highlights in her text.