Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale” (Part 6)

Part 6 of Wes & Erin’s discussion of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, St. John’s College. Learn more about undergraduate–and graduate–Great Books programs at St. John’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Annapolis, Maryland at sjc.edu/subtext. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:13 Wes: Okay, welcome to part six of our discussion of The Winter's Tale. We are just going to finish up Act 4 and then get into Act 5. We just discussed the giving of the flowers and the meaning of all that stuff and grafting on and weeds and all the rest of it. So I think we're ready to move on to the point where Autolycus comes in and is selling the ballads. What do we want to say about that? 0:44 Erin: Just before we do, if you don't mind, for one second, I just want to point out, you know, we were talking in the previous episode about these complications of this flower imagery, how it doesn't quite line up with the whole this element of disguise, this God and goddess metaphor, that it all gets a little bit messy. But one thing I noticed that follows that and precedes this Autolycus stuff we're gonna get into is a complication of this idea of blushing and pallor, which I hadn't noticed before that the queen 1:16 Wes: of curds and cream. 1:18 Erin: Exactly, exactly. Well, and Florizel has been praising Perdita by saying one of the loveliest speeches, I think, in the whole play. What you do still betters what is done. When you speak sweet, I'd have you do it ever. You know, everything she does is better than the thing before it. And he ends that speech by saying, each your doing, so singular in each particular crowns what you are doing in the present deeds, that all your acts are queens, so even everything she does is royal. And she responds to this by saying, oh, doricles, which. This is his false identity, you know, he's dressed down as a shepherd. O Doricles, your praises are too large, but that your youth and the true blood, which peeps fairly through it to plainly give you out an unstained shepherd with wisdom I might fear, my Doricles, you wooed me the false way. So this is really interesting because she says, you know, I could see that you're true and that you are unstained, that you are not trying to get in my pants by saying all this sweet stuff to me. You know, I could see you're innocent, and I could see that by your true blood. This kind of flips, this idea of the virginal pallor image that previously we'd been talking about, or this idea of blood as, you know, the blush entering in as being the sort of rite of spring, as being the, you know, synonymous with, like, obviously imagery of, you know, the sexual act or of becoming blushing, because you're being seen by someone and have a burgeoning romance with them, and therefore, you know, you start to become stained with sexual desire, if you will, in your. The blushing of your cheek. So here it's like, what makes him a true noble intent and sort of like a true virgin, if you will, is the blood is the blush. This is an inversion. And then later, as you point out, Camillo looks at Perdita and says he tells her something that makes her blood look out. Good sooth, she is the queen of curds and cream. So then Florizel is whispering something in Perdita's ear that makes her blush. And then he remarks that she has this peaches and cream complexion to her. So I don't know what to say about that, except just to point it out that the true blood, of course, what she might be noticing is also maybe an inside joke between the two of them about his royal blood, so she could see that he's going to not woo her the false way, precisely because he's a prince. And this also gets into what we were talking about previously, about Perdita's goodness as being inherent to her genetic makeup because she's a princess rather than just a shepherdess. And maybe in this moment, Perdita is attributing Florizel's moral upstandingness with the fact that he's a prince. Those two things are kind of collapsed on each other. Right. 4:08 Wes: She's saying, if I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to get in my pants because of these. With these extravagant praises. Right. This is flattery. And the way. How does she know better? She know because he's blushing, which can be taken as a sign of desire, but it can also be taken as a sign of conscience, shame or embarrassment or something like that. So there are certain emotions that are grafted together and can't be disentangled. It is desire. And yeah, his. There is a deceptiveness to the praises in some sense, but the desire is also entangled with. With. So it's lust on the one hand, but it's also respect and love on the other. And the two things are tangled up. And the two things are both revealed in the blushing, in the redness. So I think that's a great point, which is that, yeah, this is another. The many ways in which this redness can have these two different meanings that are connected to each other. So I think that love is complex in this sense, and it combines honesty and deception and combines ulterior, your physical, lustful motives with true respect for a person. That's what comes across here to me. 5:20 Erin: Yeah. You're also making me think of maybe if Leontes saw this, he would say, is blushing nothing? Because it's something that is, as you're suggesting. It can mean all of these things together or at once, and it could mean innocence or it could mean guilt. Right. But it's complicated and it's something that. The way you present could be deceptive. It could have many different potential meanings or all the meanings together. And this opacity, even of something as sort of self revealing as blushing to me, indicates the complexity of human nature and human desire, which is one that Leontes wants to flatten into one single read. Right. He would read guilt into a blush rather than being shy, as you're suggesting, or actually being innocent. Right. And that. That flattening is what makes Leontes so dangerous. Whereas I think that what you're suggesting is that the multiplicity of possible interpretations is actually much more accurate and much more fruitful. And, you know, both on a linguistic level, as we see in the complexity of these speeches, but also in terms of just understanding people having many different sides to them. 6:30 Wes: You know, and I think we'll get some of the same complexity with Autolycus's songs. I love the way he's introduced by the servant. He sings several tunes, faster than you'll tell money. He utters them as he had eaten ballads. So he's memorized a lot of songs. Is that a reference to memorization or is it just a reference to how well he performs them? Because obviously they're written down, but in any case, he shall come in. I love it. This is the clown. I love a ballad even too well, if it be doleful. Doleful matter merrily set down are a very pleasant thing indeed in sung lamentation. So seems like a bit of a reference to this admixture of comedy and tragedy that we have here in the Winter's Tale. And then the servant says he has the prettiest love songs for maids. So without bawdry, which is strange, that he makes the maid to answer, whoop, do me no harm, good men. I'm not actually quite sure what's being said here, except that it seems like they're so free of. Of bawdiness that they frame the intentions of the man as being pure, as being good. You know, again, we get this connection to what we've just been talking about, but you can correct me if I'm wrong on that interpretation. And we do, you know, Perdita, just a little ahead of that, will say, forewarn him that he used no scurrilous words in his tunes. I love that. So, again, you know, that's what's deception, what's manipulation? What's an expression of pure, pure good intentions. Autolycus the deceiver seems to be providing the implements of deception that will lead to love. But maybe this, again, an invisible hand argument where the ornamental deceptive serves the higher, a higher purpose of the down to earth. So maybe this is kind of a counter thesis that I talked, again about the mind not being able to pay off reality in several different ways. Maybe the suggestion is, is that, yes, it can, because the world would not reproduce if it weren't for these elements, these things that happen in the domain of the mental, the symbolic, the possibly deceptive or possibly inadequate to reality. In other words, we need to misapprehend the world to some extent in order to bring it into being and in order ultimately to. To connect to it. Maybe that's the counter thesis here. 8:55 Erin: That's a great point tied up with that, I think. Is this what you've pointed out about him having eaten ballads and Whether that means he's a good memorizer or a good performer. It puts me in mind of someone who has to be a good actor, right? If he's, you know, a good repertory actor will have to have eaten many parts, right? He'll have to have many parts memorized and at the ready to be able to perform them. And also, of course, he has to be a good actor in actually performing them convincingly. And you have me thinking about the implications of what it means to be a good actor. And a good actor that is like, you know, not a bad actor, not someone who performs bad actions, but someone who performs good actions and the ways in which Autolycus is, as a pickpocket is a bad actor. But in the end, you know, his pickpocketiness is put to good ends. He becomes a good actor almost in the spite of himself. Right. And that. This, I think, is the nature of what you're suggesting about courtship, that deception or being a bad actor can be put to these more positive ends, that this is the way the world goes round. This is how people are born. 9:57 Wes: But it's interesting. It sounds like the tales are non. The ballads tell tales that are winter's tales. They're non romantic, they're non sexual, and somehow that serves the purpose of wooing a woman. So Mopsa says, pray now, buy some. She's talking to the clown. I love a ballad in print of life, for when we are sure they are true, for then we are sure they are true. So this idea of printing, it occurs, this metaphor of printing occurs a few times in the play, mainly with respect to children looking like their parents. So that we know, right? So that Leontes knows that Mamillius is his, because he looks a lot like him. Or Perdita will look a lot like her mother. But in this case, right, it's an absurd thing to say, because if you look at what Autolycus is selling, here's another ballad of fish that appeared upon the coast On Wednesday, the four score of April, 40,000 fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids. All this very specific. It sounds like data, right? But it's all bullshit. It. It was thought she was a woman and was turned into a cold fish, for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her. The ballad is very pitiful and as true. Is it true too, you think you five justices hands at it and witnesses more than my pack will hold. So again, these are old wives tales, or winter's tales, obviously false, but being Represented as true. And that's the way they differ from being just a mere fairy tale, tale or piece of fiction. People want to believe that they're true, and in believing that they're true, be romanced, be wooed to love with non body, like tabloid content. In a way, it's like handing someone the National Enquirer and saying, here you go, love. This is my gift to you. Have I won you over? Really fascinating idea. I. I think we would normally expect these ballads to be romantic, and that would be their function. So we have a rather odd thing going on here, and it's clearly supposed to serve a thematic purpose. And again, I think it speaks to the necessity of some sort of untruthfulness in leading us back to truth and back to love. 12:23 Erin: Yeah. The thing this is putting me in mind of is my favorite song from. From any Shakespeare play, which is the Sigh no More Ladies song from Much Ado, which maybe it has a similar function in that it's kind of doing the opposite of what you would expect it to do. Right. It's a love song, or it's a song in a romantic comedy which is advocating against love. I think it goes, sigh no more, lady Sigh no more Men were deceivers ever or men were constant never One foot in sea and one on shore to one thing constant never. That's right. Then sigh not so, but let them go and be you Blithe and Bonnie Converting all your sounds of woe into hey nonny nonny. So it's like, forget about men. They're awful, they're deceptive. Just give up love. Right. And this is within a play which is advocating for love and for marriage, and also in which the women are being accused of deception. You know, hero is being accused of deception, not her boyfriend. Right. But here that's kind of flipped on its head in this, where instead of saying, get married, it's saying, don't get married. Instead of following the theme of the play in which a woman's constancy is called into question, the song is saying that men are the inconstant ones. So I wonder about these songs as counterpoints. 13:36 Wes: I think, yeah, this Autolycus is the suitable provider of counterpoints here. And I think we should skip to the end of the act where he gives his final speech. What happens with. With Polixenes and Florizel. I think it's a bit of plot development. And so he's gonna get very angry and forbid them from being together and makes lots of threats. And the interesting thing is we Get a little bit of a repetition between Florizel and Polixenes of the dynamic between Leontes and Camillo earlier on in the play. And we get a bit of Polixenes being a madman like Leontes was, but now with respect to the Youngins. And then Camillo, you know, we get another reiteration. Camillo saves the day with a nice little plot, sends them to Sicilia and ultimately get them costumed for that. And then we have Autolycus enters and gives us a little capstone or what's the word to the act? Cherry on top. I don't know. 14:36 Erin: Yeah, like putting a button on it. Mm. 14:38 Wes: Yeah. So I think the one thing I wanted to draw attention to was this idea that, you know, he says, what a fool Honesty is. And that's right after. Where does he say that? 14:51 Erin: Line 594. Gosh, this is a long scene. 14:56 Wes: So, you know, Camillo has just helped them plan to do something deceptive, but again, it's a deception that serves a higher cause. And Autolycus, ha ha. What a fool Honesty is. And trust his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman, but he's celebrating his thievery and his ability to. To sell all these knickknacks and ballads as if he's manipulated or deceived people into doing that. You know, my clown, who wants but something to be a reasonable man, grew so in love with the wench's songs that he would not stir his pettitoes till he had both tune and words. 15:32 Erin: Pettitoes. It says here, toes, usually of a pig. So it's like his little piggies, his little toes. Sorry. 15:38 Wes: So cute. So, you know, and then towards the end, we get. I see that this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive. The prince himself is about a piece of iniquity stealing away from his father. You know, he's been in the service of Florizel, and it's as if he's finding redemption and dishonesty. He's going to use. Use it to do some constructive things and ultimately to help out Florizel. And he's going to claim that he's deceptive by nature and he needs to keep that identity, but that, you know, it's in keeping. So he's going to do good things by accident, in other words, is essentially what he'll say. He's not violating his own code to be a thief and deceiver. It just so happens that that is going to serve an ironic good, which I thought was a really interesting part of the play. 16:31 Erin: Yeah, he Notes often that he used to work for the prince and now has since been fired. This obviously sticks in his craw, but he says at the very end of the act, if I had a mind, to be honest, I see fortune would not suffer me. She drops booties in my mouth. I am courted now with a double occasion. Gold and a means to do the prince, my master, good. Which, who knows how that may turn back to my advancement. So it's a two for one deal. I can make money and I can do some good. So he does make the distinction there, but then comes back around to also who knows how that may work out in my favor, as you're suggesting. So it is mercenary, but there's an acknowledgement of wanting to help his former master, even though he has been been fired. And he feels regretful about this, Right? So no hard feelings. He's going to help out. He got fired from Applebee's. He doesn't work there anymore. But, you know, he wants to help his manager out, which, you know, that seems like a pretty generous thing if you ask me. Right? 17:31 Wes: The end, he says, I'll have a. I'm courted now with a double occasion. Gold and a means to do the prince, my master good. Which, who knows how that may turn back to my advancement. He has to pretend that he's just thinking. Thinking about himself. All right, we're gonna have to do the fifth act really quickly. So we get a secondhand account of them figuring out Perdita is the daughter, right? Because it basically, Polixenes has chased them to Sicily, and he's furious. And between Autolycus and the gentleman, we're gonna. We're gonna find out secondhand about that. So we don't get to see that climactic scene. Instead, later on, what'll be substituted is a different climactic scene where Hermione comes to life from. You know, Hermione turns out to have been alive all the time, and she's disguised as a statue. And this is something in the secondary literature. This is one of the reasons why the play was thought to be so flawed. This idea that you would bury the climax and then have it related secondhand. But I'm not so sure that it's such a flaw, especially given that he doesn't necessarily want to upstage what he's going to make. The true climax of the play. And then the other element here is that we get these references to. Someone tells the story of Antigonus getting eaten by the bear. And that's like an old Tale. You know, we get these important references to what Shakespeare is doing here, and that also this whole. Oh, they figured out she's the daughter. Again, it's like an old tale. I think part of what he's doing here is he's once again drawing attention to the implausibility of all of this, for thematic reasons. 19:09 Erin: Yeah. And tying everything together by saying, it's like an old tale. And also, just prior to that, saying, such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour that ballad makers cannot be able to express it. Again, this is even beyond the crazy ballads of the National Enquirer, like Ballads of Autolycus. And I'm wondering if there's some significance to the fact that there's not one, not two, but three gentlemen that have to report the story. I don't know, something about the rule of threes in providing finality or in wrapping things up. And that their speeches, in the sort of retelling of this story that's happened offstage, are all thematically resolving some of the preoccupations of the entire play. You know, we have the third gentleman saying, in response to the question, has the king found his heir? He says, most true, if ever truth were pregnant by circumstance, you know, and then he says, actually, right after that, that which you hear, you'll swear. You see, there is such unity in the proofs. So it's all coming together here, Right? We have this idea of, like, pregnancy, that Perdita is the true daughter of Leontes. That circumstance or evidence does, in fact, win out, because we get a description of the evidence that proves that Perdita is their daughter. And this evidence is convincing, unlike Leontes. 20:30 Wes: Yeah, it's the stuff that Antigonus left with the baby. 20:33 Erin: Right? 20:33 Wes: Right, yeah. 20:34 Erin: Right. Yeah. 20:35 Wes: That's been on the boat, by the way, the whole time. And it's explained that, well, Polixenes got sick and that's why they couldn't resolve that issue. 20:44 Erin: Right. 20:44 Wes: It's a ridiculous explanation. Cause he arrives angry, and it's the source of something dramatic. But it doesn't make any sense. It's like a plot hole. Because why wouldn't they have gotten all that worked out during the trip? Oh, he was sick. I mean, it's. You know, Shakespeare's having a laugh. You know, it's like, there are no rules to this because it's a winter's tale. 21:05 Erin: So that's a generous read. Then the third gentleman, too, will. It's via hearsay. It's via this talk that we first get this idea of the statue introduced. The third gentleman says that everybody there was so moved by the scene. Perdita has been told how the queen died and the king has to. Again, he's on his 16 year apology tour. Now he has to tell his own daughter exactly how the mother came to have died. So Perdita says with an alas, I would fain say bleed tears, for I'm sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there changed color, Some swooned also. If all the world could have seen it, the woe had been universal. So he's saying, you know, everybody there, anyone there who saw this, even if they were made of stone, they would have changed color. 21:52 Wes: And again, unfortunately, we don't get to see it, but if we had been able to see it would have been great. Again, I think he's having a laugh, 21:59 Erin: but there's a significance to this because again, this even wraps up this thread we were talking about with pallor versus the blush, color being brought to one's cheeks. And we have stone being brought to life before we even hear of this statue for the first time, which happens a couple of lines later and we hear of it through hearsay. So the princess hearing of her mother's statue, which is in the keeping of Paulina, is like, what? You know, we didn't even hear of this prior to this. And now Perdita is hearing of the statue that we've never heard of before, 22:31 Wes: which, by the way, was made by that rare Italian master, Giulio Romano, who's a contemporary of Shakespeare. 22:38 Erin: Oh, really? 22:39 Wes: Yeah. 22:40 Erin: Oh, I thought he was just some fake Italian. 22:42 Wes: No, no, he's a real guy. You can go look at his stuff. I mean, he's great, but he's a contemporary of Shakespeare, not of these people back in the old. So clearly he's having a laugh with all this stuff. 22:55 Erin: Well, I thought it was even funnier if he was just some. Oh, you know, we'll just put in some random Italian. You know, those Italians are really good at statues. So, you know, Giulio Romano, you know, like Ray Romano's brother. I don't know, it's like this guy just comes out of nowhere and. Oh, right, that guy. The guy that's been in the background this whole time holding a chisel, you know. 23:18 Wes: But in any case, that use of anachronism, I think it's again, self referential and then it's in the third. So we can wrap up with the third scene of Act 5 here. One thing I want to say about early on in the scene is just that again, there's another recapitulation of the whole thank you situation that happens at the beginning of the play. They're visiting the chapel in Paulina's house and Leontes says, oh, you know, you're such a great comfort, Paulina, even though she's just basically there to apply the whip, you know, to keep chastising him and making him feel bad for all those years. And he loves it, so he's turned into a big masochist. And then she'll say, no, no, this visit is a surplus of grace, which never my life may last to answer. And I'm like, oh shit, is this gonna start all over again? The last time someone was playing that game with him, it didn't go well. And then he says, no, this is all I'm just troubling, you know, this is a big pain for you to have the king visit. We honor you with trouble. So they're doing a little bit of the excessive politeness and the idea that there are these unrepayable debts. That's one thing that occurred to me. Well, I have in my notes, Psyche itself is a form of debt, which is again, this is just the ax that I've been grinding through all of these parts. But about the mind reality relationship, what I mean by that is that it exists only insofar as it owes in some sense. Or there's something about our comportment as self conscious beings. Our self consciousness depends upon the recognition of the other and certain normative relations that show up within that. And there's this kind of double vector of reciprocal recognition. I don't want to keep beating that dead horse, but you know, we might think of that owing others recognition as actually being constitutive of self consciousness. This is a very Hegelian theme. So I'm going to just put that in there as a little side comment to this whole theme of debt and gratitude and thank yous and all that. So what do we make of the big reveal? 25:23 Erin: You know, I think it enacts this idea of thank you never being enough inherently ties in with grace. Right. Grace is more than any thank you can be. You can never make up for it. You can never thank somebody enough or you can never thank God enough. Right. For grace, it's supposed to override or reduplicate any attempt to repay it. That's the whole point. It outruns any thank you. So maybe the message here for Leontes is this acceptance of grace in the form of his wife, that maybe this is better than he thinks that he deserves, but he just has to accept Hermione, that is grace, rather than looking a grace horse in the mouth. I don't know. And the absurdity of a great thing of grace happening to an undeserving person is then literalized, perhaps by the absurdity of this statue coming to life, this free bounty. You just have to accept it, just like we, the audience members, just have to accept that this is happening and there's nothing we can do about it. And sure, okay. Hermione's been in her house for 16 years. Just out, whatever. 26:42 Wes: She's been in the spare bedroom for 16 years. 26:44 Erin: Yeah. 26:45 Wes: We're given lots of clues that it's not magic, even though Paulina keeps alluding to the fact that they're going to take it to be magic. But, you know, she's the aged version of Hermione and people want to kiss her or whatever, touch her. And no, Paulina's like, oh, no. But the paint's not dry, so can't do that. The paint's not dry. So obviously. Right. It's not magical. Although there seem to be some. Some dispute in the secondary literature, which really surprised me because there's all these clues that of course, it's. She's been. Paulina has been keeping her in the spare bedroom, which is, you know, just as ridiculous. But it ought to make us wonder, well, why does that need to happen? Why can't they get together before that? Why do we need Leontes? Why 16 years of berating himself? Why not just do, like, 10 or 5? They lose all that time that they might have had together, so what's the point of that? You know, the oracle predicts that what's lost has to be found. Perdita, her name meaning lost, she has to be found again before they can get back together. But within the context of psychological, Paulina's and Hermione's actual motivations, how do we make sense of it? 27:52 Erin: Yeah, you're putting me in mind of. I mean, the arbitrariness of this number. You know, I wish it was something that I could say, like, oh, well, you know, 16 has tremendous biblical significance or something like that, but it doesn't. It doesn't even line up with something that I think the, geez, I'm not going to be able to find it now if I try to look for it. I think it's something the shepherd says about how everybody who's between the ages of 10 and 23 should just go to sleep, you know, because all they do during those ages is get up to trouble. Right? So that's 13 years. That doesn't even match up with the time that we, the audience, have been sort of put to sleep, or the play rather, has been put to sleep and reawakened for a 16 years. Numerologically, none of it kind of adds up. But I guess what we could say regarding this idea of loss, or why things had to be lost. Have I talked before in a previous episode? I must have of the Felix culpa, the fortunate fall. 28:48 Wes: I think you might have. 28:50 Erin: This is the result of the fall of man and the source of original sin as being actually a good thing. The concept is just. I think this is from Aquinas who said that God allows this evil to happen in order to bring about a greater good from that. So somehow you need to have loss, you need to have sin in order to have the greater good of redemption from sin, of grace. In other words, there is no concept of light without having the darkness. Right. There are lots of cliches about this, but it has its roots in a theological question of the felix culpa, which is related to this philosophical problem of the problem of evil. So in order for the grace to happen, in order for the statue to come to life, one has to register significant loss. It's not quite that grace needs to be paid for. This is getting into the weeds here in Christian theology. Like Christ's death, his death and resurrection is a kind of like payment for the sins of man. So there is certainly an economy of salvation. But also there needs to be a reckoning for what Leontes did. There needs to be some comeuppance. There needs to be something that he needs to, in essence, pay for, even if what he's going to get back in return for that payment is like a hundred thousand fold on that payment. I'm trying to not get into a deeper theological discussion and maybe by skirting it, I'm just to going kind of being even more confusing than not. But in other words, all of that to say, I think that the loss needs to be registered for the return to be affected. 30:33 Wes: Yeah. No, I like that. We have two returns. One is Perdita's and one is Hermiones. And the return of Perdita is like the registering of the loss. I like that. And you know, she's loss incarnate. You might ask, well, why not go find her? Of course, they don't know she's alive, but on the other hand, they have the prophecy and Hermione's hiding in a room as if, like she's waiting to come out. So if they have some inkling that what's lost might return, that Perdita might actually be coming back, then why not accelerate the process and go actually look for her? But yeah, psychologically we could speak to the necessary process of mourning. And it's not enough for Leontes to berate himself and be mean to himself and have Paulina berate him and do all that stuff. There has to be some sort of transformation. And perhaps it's reuniting with Perdita that actually affects that. And then also on a more literal level, it undoes one of his horrible crimes and redeems that Polixenes at one point says, make it manifest where she has lived or how stolen from the dead. So he's unsure if it's magic or was she hiding somewhere? And Paulina doesn't answer that question. She does another of these references to the old tale that she is living, were it but told. You should be hooted at like an old tale. But it appears she lives though yet she speak not. So another one of these references to, you know, this is really outlandish. This whole story is silly. Well, which you might on first blush think she's saying to Polixenes, I didn't tell you because you would never believe it. But that can't be what she's saying because, you know, apart from him being gone, or maybe in general, I didn't tell people because they would never believe it, but she can always take Hermione out of the closet and demonstrate. I find that to be a really odd moment. It's as if Paulina is actively trying to create a winter's tale, trying to bring to life this implausible story and by creating that implausibility bring about either redeem or bring about a reuniting again. It speaks to the necessity of this deceptive world or this fantasy world in reconnecting people or reconnecting us to reality. 32:58 Erin: It's interesting that as an agent of Grace, then she's bringing this about. That this agency is also about fashioning a story or about storytelling. That these two things would go together seems on the one hand really strange, but really. Yeah, but really important. 33:16 Wes: Yeah, maybe it's this necessity for a mythology. The Romantics like Schlegel, we're always on about that. What is the relationship between grace and old wives tale? This type of of storytelling, I think one could very easily read it as a reflection on the necessity for fiction and sort of dramatic and maybe a bit of a reflection on the relationship between what he's doing and what's happening. When people gossip or do their tabloid thing, it's different, obviously, because when we read fiction, we read it as fiction, or when we see a performance, we see it as a performance. We don't need to believe that, yes, there are UFOs or whatever it is that's in the superstitious tale, but I think the point is that those two things are not entirely unrelated. And the suspension, the willingness to suspend disbelief and embrace certain types of implausibility that's supposed to be, I think, significant at some level. I like the connection to grace and to this waiting period that Leontes has to go through before he can get back with Hermione. It's not just that he needs to regret what he did and castigate himself for what he did. The story has to come to a particular type of conclusion. And again, it's as if Paulina arranged for this very implausible thing to unfold as if it were the only redemptive possibility. 34:51 Erin: I wonder, in regards to this idea of grace, would a fuller grace, would a truer grace restore Hermione to Leontes as she was 16 years ago, if this was going to be real magic? You know, much is made of the fact that she's much wrinkled, nothing so aged as this, right? And Paulina says so much the more our carver's excellence, which lets go by some 16 years and makes her as she lived. And Leontes calls this good comfort. But the loss registered here, the time that can't be gotten back, there's redemption within grace, there's this outpouring. And at the same time, it seems the lesson here is that it can't restore lost time back to you. Like something still has to be, you know, I hesitate to say degraded, but, you know, let's just say degraded, right? Like he can't get her back the way she was. Even if that would be kind of true grace, right, would be to have Hermione, exactly at the moment that she dropped dead, come back in that exact state. So I don't know what to make of that. The last little thing I'll say about that is that in Leonti's final speech, I mean, maybe there's a suggestion to me that the reason why Hermione is aged is not just because it's a practical thing, because she's been alive all along and she's aged like everybody. I wonder if Leontes really has learned his lesson. And one of the things he says in his Final speech is, well, first he tells Paulina to shut up, which is, you know, maybe an ill advised thing to do. And then he says, this is a match. And made between's by vows, thou hast found mine. But how is to be questioned? So he's talking about getting a wife back and he says, thou, meaning Paulina, hast found mine, meaning her mother. But how is to be questioned? For I saw her, as I thought, dead, and have in vain said many a prayer upon her grave. This is my problem. This adds credence to this idea that this is a magical event. Because as we know, Leontes has seen Hermione's dead body. He's been praying over her grave. But what does he say here? I have in vain said many a prayer upon her grave. Actually, the opposite is that it hasn't been in vain. Right, she's back. 37:01 Wes: Well, if she's dead, you say a prayer to talk to her in the afterlife, but she's not in the afterlife. 37:07 Erin: Oh, interesting. 37:08 Wes: Yeah. But also, I think your reading is correct. I mean, it's a nice irony, of course, if his prayers could be thought of as bringing her back to life or for at least preparing him to be in her company again, then of course they haven't been in vain. It's a misunderstanding. 37:23 Erin: Well, it seems to me to represent still a confusion that he has about the power of his. His own words or the power of speech in general. Speech and words. And him talking himself into a lather caused all of this in the first place. And in the end, something still doesn't seem to be lining up between speech and its reflection in reality. So he does not believe in the efficacy of his own words. In the end, I don't know if that represents a progression because he's downgraded his belief in his own words. And therefore this maybe actually represents some positive change in him, or if it represents a flattening, the continuation of this idea of flattening things out, that words and reality all kind of experience the same level of being debased by Leontes in practice, that a prayer has no efficacy, that prayers needn't line up with reality, words needn't line up with reality. In the end, you sort of make your own reality. In which case a prayer would be a kind of like an extremely hollow thing. It's performative, you know, he was praying and in vain. And the result, the fulfillment of his prayer has nothing to do with the prayers that he said. So I'm not sure where that leaves us in terms of words et Cetera. That being said, I mean, Shakespeare's words have had the efficacy of actually bringing Hermione back to life, right? So there is something to be said here for the power of language just in terms of like what the play is actually enacting, or Paulina saying awake your faith or something like that. There is some sort of magical quality imbued within the words on a meta level. Or just in terms of Paulina seeming to speak Hermione back into existence. 39:10 Wes: You know, I was thinking, I was wondering if this is much like the Tempest, a way of saying goodbye and abjuring his rough magic. Magic. It seems to run a bit in the opposite direction in this tongue in cheek equation of what he's doing with an old wives tale. Or maybe not in the opposite direction. It strikes me as a critique in a way or an apology for being an artist. Prospero apologizes at the end and the playwright is essentially apologizing for the play. And I think the art object must also be an apology. It can't just be a great thing, but it must also be an apology to the audience. For various reasons, one is worried about inducing envy, right, Rather than enjoyment or mania, grandiosity or projecting one's own grandiosity in the art object. And it has to be tempered. So you need to undercut the power of the words, right? This is the omnipotence of thought thing we were talking about earlier with Polixenes Blue believing that his ideas could make things come true. You want to undercut that idea ultimately. Now he does have empirical evidence, right? He thinks he saw her dead, which is an odd touch. There's a certain point in the play where I thought, okay, Paulina is going to do the whole potion thing and we're going to see that in the plot. See her do the, you know, the whole Romeo and Juliet potion that makes the person seem dead and then they come back to life and it's all arranged. But that never happened. And I wonder if it was taken out in some sense. Instead we get this weird hanging thread at the end, but we don't know why. You know, maybe we're supposed to think it could have been magic, I don't know. But there's all sorts of clues that it's not. So, you know, I think a lot of critics see that as a kind of flaw. And I. I guess I'm inclined to agree with that. I don't know what it's doing here for him to think that he saw her dead. And then that's. It's just left at that. But I think you're right again. This is another. There's a lot here when it comes to this, this idea of a prayer care in vain about the relationship between ideas and reality, words and reality, potential omnipotence of thought and its effect on reality. All right, do you have anything else to say? Or shall we call it, let's call 41:20 Erin: it the Statues back to Life and We're all back in Sicilia. And yeah, let's you and I already 41:29 Wes: pass out at this point. 41:31 Erin: Yes, we are two and a half 41:32 Wes: hour recording, even though it'll be edited down to something shorter and cut into two parts. But now this has been great. I love doing Shakespeare this way in multiple parts and getting into it in great detail, doing a close reading. I hope the audience enjoys that. Let us know if this is a good way to go or if it's too much. But yeah. 41:50 Erin: Thank you, thank you. 41:53 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com airwavemedia.com.