Symbolism in THE WINTER'S TALE

Symbolism is the use of symbols to signify ideas and qualities, by giving them symbolic
meanings that are different from their literal [Link] the play "THE WINTER'S TALE" by
William Shakespeare there is symbolic [Link] symbols used in this play are
Twinned Lambs,The Bear,The Seasons,Time,Hermione's Statue,Predita's Flowers.
The play’s title hints at the importance of
the seasons, and while they are not always an obvious motif throughout the play, the
seasons (in particular winter and summer) form a significant background to the action of
the play. The first three acts of the play take place in winter, as is hinted when Mamillius
prepares to tell Hermione a story and tells her, “a sad tale’s best for winter.” Acts 4 and
5, in contrast, take place in the spring and summer (the exact time is ambiguous), as is
made clear by the occasion of the sheep-shearing festival in Bohemia. As Mamillius’
comment suggests, each season has particular associations appropriate to it. Cold winter
is often associated with old age, death, and [Link] such, it is appropriate for the
first, tragic half of The Winter’s Tale, in which the older generation of characters is at the
center of the action, and which climaxes with the deaths of Mamillius and Hermione
(and also includes Antigonus’ death). Spring symbolizes renewal, rebirth, and new
beginnings, and is associated with youth. Thus, in the second half of the play, the
younger characters (Perdita and Florizell, especially) take center stage, and the tragic
seriousness of the first three acts gives way to the light-heartedness of the sheep-
shearing festival. Moreover, this part of the play reaches a climax with the “rebirth” of
Perdita, as she becomes a princess once again, and with the apparent resurrection of
Hermione. Both seasonal moments thus signify particular things, and emphasize aspects
of the play that occur during each seasonal period. But since the play contains both time
periods, it is ultimately a combination of the contradictory associations of both these
times of year, just as it is a combination of the qualities of several [Link] dialogues
of characters too depict the symbolic significance of season.
(Act 2 Scene 1)
HERMIONE: Come, sir, now
I am for you again: pray you, sit by us,
And tell ‘s a tale.
MAMILLIUS: Merry or sad shall’t be?
HERMIONE: As merry as you will.
MAMILLIUS: A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one
Of sprites and goblins.
The bear is a symbol of Leontes’s wrath, which means that Antigonus isn’t so much a
villain as a victim. He’s bullied into ditching Perdita by Leontes and the bear mauling is
just another version of Antigonus being attacked by a ferocious [Link] literary
critics have pointed out that the whole bear mauling incident seems to echo fertility
rites myths. As literary critic Jean E. Howard tells us in her introduction to the Norton
edition of the play (2008), these kinds of fertility rites usually involve some poor old guy
being sacrificed in order to usher in the spring season and bring about some sort of
sexual fulfillment.
Antigonus’ mistaken justification for his cowardly obedience to his oath is promptly
punished. Jonathan Bate has offered a mythical interpretation for the bear against those
critics who too easily see the animal as an element of comedy: “I still believe that for
Shakespeare and those members of his audience who knew their Ovid, a bear would
have been more than a bear”(Bate 227). His reading of the myth of Callisto in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses, a nymph belonging to the train of Diana, raped by Jupiter and
transformed into a bear by the jealous Juno, and owing her ultimate metamorphosis as
the constellation of the Great Bear to Jupiter, aptly fits in Shakespeare’s narration of
Antigonus’s death, with its connotations of adultery and [Link] another
mythological reading of the bear can be added. The bear is the lunar symbol of Apollo’s
twin sister Diana, the goddess of the hunt (Durand 52, 359). Thus the two deaths in the
play, which puzzled critics into blaming Shakespeare for cynically killing off an innocent
young boy and a weak old man, are in fact yoked together as the results of the revenge
of the twin gods, Apollo and Diana, the sun and the moon of alchemical dualities, the
protagonists of the “chemical marriage”—a realistic coitus conducive to the birth of the
philosopher’s stone (Abraham 8, 35, 54). With these two antique gods, the play enters a
new phase as if the awakening of the Faith (5.3.94-95) that Paulina was soon to require
from Leontes, supposed the rejection of the old medieval belief in “spirits and goblins”
that the Reformers were doing away with, so well emblematized by the two victims.
Polixenes’s description of his childhood friendship with Leontes is
probably the most famous example of imagery in The Winter’s Tale. According to
Polixenes, when they played together as innocent young boys, they were like “twinn’d
lambs that did frisk i’ the sun,” which is a very sweet way to describe the innocence and
joy of a carefree childhood friendship between two boys. It also implies that Polixenes
and Leontes were so close that they were practically identical (“twinn’d”). By the way,
this is also a simile, which compares one thing directly to another. As in, the boys were
like [Link], you’re probably thinking, “Aww, what a sweet way for Polixenes to talk
about his best childhood bud.” Well, we might want to rethink this because Polixenes’s
lovely description of the nearly identical boys gives way to something darker:
We were as twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' the sun,
And bleat the one at the other: what we changed
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not
The doctrine of ill-doing, nor dream'd
That any did.
Had we pursued that life,
And our weak spirits ne'er been higher rear'd
With stronger blood, we should have answer'd heaven
Boldly 'not guilty;' the imposition clear'd
Hereditary ours. (1.2.10)
What’s interesting is that Polixenes claims that he and Leontes would not even have
been “guilty” of original sin if they had remained young and innocent. Note: The
doctrine of “ill doing” is the idea that all human beings are born tainted because Adam
and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, according to the Bible’s book of Genesis. In other
words, Polixenes suggests that he and Leontes would have remained totally innocent if
they hadn’t grown up to become interested in sex and girls. This implies that sexual
relationships with women mark the end of childhood and are probably the reason why
Polixenes and Leontes aren’t as close as they once were.
At the beginning of Act 4, Time, a
winged figure with an hourglass, appears on stage. Time is an [Link] Time
announces that the play has fast-forwarded sixteen years into the future and tells us that
the setting has changed from Sicily to Bohemia, where Perdita has grown up, Time is also
acting the part of a [Link] his speech, Time apologizes to the audience for all of
this: “Impute it not a crime / To me or my swift passage, that I slide / O'er sixteen years
and leave the growth untried / Of that wide gap”. Translation: “Don’t be mad that the
play has skipped ahead sixteen years.” Why is Time apologizing? Well, flash forwards and
major setting changes were a big no-no on the English stage in Shakespeare’s day
because they disregarded the “classical unities” , a set of literary rules that said all plays
should have the following features: 1) the action should take place within a 24 hour time
span; 2) the action should take place in one geographical place/setting; 3) the play
should have one main plot and no sub-plots. The Winter’s Tale pretty clearly breaks all of
these rules.
The statue of Hermione is one of the most controversial
issues in the play. By the time Paulina invites everyone to see Hermione’s life-like statue
in the play’s final act, Hermione has been presumed dead for the past sixteen [Link]
is why everyone is so shocked to see that an artist has created such a realistic and
stunning [Link] is even more shocked and amazed when Paulina calls for some
dramatic music and says “Tis time. Descend. Be stone no more” and Hermione steps
down from the pedestal and gives Leontes a hug. Clearly, this is a pretty dramatic and
moving scene, for the characters and the [Link] problem is this: it’s not entirely
clear if Hermione is somehow brought back from the dead, or if she’s been alive the
whole time. Some critics argue that Hermione is magically and miraculously resurrected
when her long lost daughter returns to her. Others argue that Paulina just hid Hermione
away for sixteen years so that 1) Leontes wouldn’t hurt her and 2) she could teach
Leontes a lesson. There’s enough evidence in the play to argue either way. So, what do
you think? Is this magic, or is it just Paulina’s parlor trick?
In the stone of Hermione’s statue are many traces. It bears the mark of the Catholic
Giuliano Romano whom Vasari described as a painter and a sculptor (Orgel 56; Wilson
265), or those of William and Cornelius Cure, the sculptors of the statue of the newly
rehabilitated Mary Queen of Scots erected in Westminster Abbey in 1605 by her son,
James I (Orgel 56; Wilson 246), or the sculptors of the Earl of Arundel’s gallery (Orgel
55). In that stone, there is the potentiality of metamorphoses as there was in the ivory
statue of Ovid’s Pygmalion (Bate 234-37), or in the rocks thrown down by that other
Ovidian figure, Deucalion (4.4.431-32) and turned into live men (Laroque 215-16). As for
the walking statues of hermetic philosophy described as man-made wonders in the
Asclepius or the Perfect Word (Ménard 146; Yates 37), they no longer need worry the
defenders of the doctrines of the Church as they had worried St Augustine (City of God,
Book VIII, ch. 23). For art, now, in the seventeenth century, has a religious aim and
pictures are the vectors of Grace, as Marc Fumaroli writes in L’École du silence:Hegel a
pu écrire que la peinture était l’art chrétien par excellence. Cette vue se vérifie de façon
superlative en Italie. La peinture religieuse, parce qu’elle est religieuse, est sommée de
collaborer au travail de la grâce . Elle doit jouer des apparences pour faire voir la
transcendance. (Fumaroli 18)It does not follow that Hermione’s statue should represent
one religion or the other. The statue scene can puzzle us into seeing it as a stance against
Puritan iconoclasm, but also as a “cancellation” of Catholic iconography since there is no
miracle in the end as Hermione was alive all the time, whereas in Robert Greene’s
Pandosto, Hermione had truly died (Wilson 264). But the point of James’s religious policy
was not to set up one religion against the other but to try by all means to unify them.
Such was also Shakespeare’s aim when he proposed a hermetic interpretation of the
[Link] stone of Hermione’s statue is akin to the philosopher’s stone, the elixir of life
produced in the ultimate phase. In Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist to Subtle’s question
about the nature of the lapis philosophicus, Face answers “’Tis a stone, and not/A stone;
a Spirit, a Soule, a body” (2.5.40-41) (qtd. in Abraham 147). The spiritualization of matter
is the essence of the Great Work, perfectly illustrated by the statue scene. Alchemical
imagery used figuratively and not literally any more is the perfect, modern, medium
capable of expressing a re-appropriation of spiritual values after a period of
philosophical [Link] is the silence from which can emerge the speaking body.
No other than Mercury/Hermes, the god of both silence and of eloquence lurking in
Hermione’s name, could have worked this miracle. Language alone and its rationalities
are helpless for they can only tell of this wonder as if it were a tale. Says the second
gentleman: “This news which is called true, is so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in
strong suspicion” (5.3.27-28). Paulina points to the same idea: Paulina. —
That she is living Were it
but told you, should be hooted at
Like an old tale. (5.3.115-17)
The old language could only induce scepticism, irony, mistrust. The silence of
hermeticism has rooted language in Grace. Now can the king speak this new language of
belief, and practise tolerance. Thus, Shakespeare has “awakened” belief by weaving old
myths in a simple story of mistrust for the improvement of religious peace.
Shakespear blends the realistic and the symbolic with the surest [Link] play is not
merely a fantastic fairy [Link] is possible to read it at several levels and each reading
brings out that it has layers within layers of meaning in it.