Stone and speech in The Winter's Tale : Patronage,oral transmission,and ecology

Abstract

This article nuances the familiar binary of art and nature in The Winter's Tale by considering contemporary trends in manufacturing and art patronage that complicated both fields: trends that rendered nature a site for the circulation of cheap commodities, and incentivised wealthy patrons to signal their purchasing power by commissioning pieces so realistic that they seemed to merge with the natural sphere. Building on scholarship on oral culture and ecocriticism, this article suggests that Hermione's ‘awakening’ speech might be read as an extension of the movement towards hyperrealism, redeeming orality from contemporary prejudices and presenting it, instead, as an aesthetic artefact of its own.

When The Winter's Tale closes by staging the apparently miraculous awakening of a statue of the lost Queen Hermione, this moment represents not just the narrative climax of the play but also its bold aesthetic apogee. Here, William Shakespeare adapts the popular mythic trope of Pygmalion and his statue – a trope wherein the animation of the statue is commonly presented as a reward for the sculptor's repudiation of his earlier misogyny, and repentant pleas to Aphrodite. Lori Humphrey Newcomb, however, offers an insightful counter-perspective when she muses that artists may view the animated statue not simply as a narrative of biologic fulfilment, but also as an object of loss: ‘for the perfected artistic reproduction, the copy so fair that it disappears back into its original, will never be replaced while natural reproduction will continue for generations, regardless of human imperfections’. ¹ The closest that the play comes to acknowledging such a loss is in the words of Paulina as she orchestrates the awakening of the statue, noting that ‘Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale’. ² Though her comment does not address artistic loss specifically, it gestures to a related and much-discussed phenomenon: the historiographic problems attending insufficient data – gaps in the written archives, the loss of material artefacts, and the destruction of ancient ruins – which necessitated recourse to the more fragile truth-claims of oral culture. The restoration of Hermione does not simply represent the dissolution of an artwork; it also represents the loss of a monument, which, left to its natural stony duration, might have stood forth as a historical artefact for posterity. Instead, Paulina's words anticipate how future generations will receive the preceding events – not with the corroboration of a physical monument, but rather as an unauthorised tale to be met with strong scepticism.

As the petrified Hermione begins to move and speak, onlookers onstage and off are faced with the likelihood that there never was any statue in the first place and, instead, that Paulina had conspired to ‘preserve’ the queen far from Leontess censure. Yet the shattering of this illusion is itself a striking artistic product, offering a meta-theatrical convergence of two competing impulses that drive much of the middle portion of the play: those of commemoration and erasure. It is something of a critical commonplace to parse this binary according to the play's clear-cut divisions of place – in contrast to the seasonal vivacity of Bohemia, audiences are left with the impression that Sicilia, ravaged by Leontess injustices, has become frozen in remembrance. Paulina's desire to act as the ‘ghost that walked’ (5.1.63), for instance, recalls the punitive liminality of purgatory and allows her to ‘shriek’ in Leontess ears that he ‘“remember mine”’ (5.1.65, 67). Perhaps unsurprisingly, Leontes reveals himself to be in a state of unresolved psychological distress, pleading to Paulina that she cease mentioning his lost son Mamillius because ‘Thou know'st / He dies to me again when talk’d of’ (5.1.118–19). As Donovan Sherman notes, this suspended remembrance has a strongly elegiac character and, for Patricia Phillippy, the performed petrification of Hermione narrates the passage of remembrance from ‘traditional rites’ to the apparently permanent ‘textual memory of print’. ³ The prospect of monumentalisation also plays a role here, with Leontes planning a shared grave for Mamillius and Hermione featuring an epitaph that might ‘appear, unto / Our shame perpetual’ (3.2.234–5). This commemorative impulse is conclusively realised in Hermione's statue, and yet, with its dissolution, remembrance yields to something more dynamic: in the language of Newcomb's reading, the monumentalising desire to ‘shape and fix’ yields instead to the spectacular, with ‘metamorphosis as the only human constant’. ⁴

In spite of this, the vision imparted to audiences is not one of outright forgetting, but rather a mode of record-keeping that seems tightly intertwined with organic change. The metamorphic principle that prevails with the play's ending prefers the biodegradability of the body over the durability of the lithic monument, and gestures towards a similarly protean mode of remembrance. While the apparent statue tantalises audiences with the prospect of fixed, artefactual memorialisation, the emergence of the speaking Hermione sees the play yield to a culture of storytelling that is ephemeral and partial and also, like the fragile bodies it inhabits, cyclical and regenerative. The significance of this culture is prominently signalled through the title of the play and enjoys a lively presence across both Sicilia and Bohemia: in Mamilliuss whispered ghost tale, in the gossipy exchanges of the courtiers, and the ballad-selling of Autolycus. In fact, the character of Autolycus offers the most concentrated representation of a popular story-telling culture; the broadsheet ballads he sells codified in print the pleasurable and incredulous tales that circulated a broad cross-section of early modern communities in song, and he himself frequently bursts into song in order to market his wares. Such sung ballads were not only a dominant expression of early modern oral culture, they also played a powerful role in producing and sustaining a permeable collective memory. As Erin Minear puts it, ‘remembered music never remains fully in the past: recollection stimulates repetition and return, breaking down the distinction between memory and experience’. ⁵ The mode of remembrance cultivated by ballads resembled a jumbled patchwork – reiterative, repetitive, and non-linear – and might be compared to ‘a drifting of thought, the following of associative rather than logical connections between things’. ⁶ The very porousness of this oral culture maps onto a vision of the carnivalesque body (ballads gush from the mouth and infiltrate the ears agitating for a kind of collective euphoria), while also gesturing towards the mutability of nature: impermanent yet regenerative, declining and reviving with each change of season.

The slimy Autolycus, though, is a poor ambassador of oral culture, and his characterisation epitomises the ambivalence with which Shakespeare's play treats orality – invoked ‘with undeniable sympathy’ at times, and at others actively undermined. ⁷ Long associated with a nostalgic view of folk culture, oral transmission was increasingly under pressure from a new direction: the contemporary antiquarian movement, with its strong evidentiary emphasis, discussed oral sources as a treacherous form of data – an unreliable substitute for written records and material artefacts such as sculpture ⁸ – and Shakespeare rehearses these anxieties when he ends his play with a transition from monument to speech. Further, The Winter's Tale reflects prejudices associating fabulous tales with women: though Autolycus peddles the fantastic broadsheets his primary customers are women, and Hermione and Paulina are the architects of the wondrous spectacle at the play's close. As Mary Ellen Lamb notes, the play also channels anxieties about how the pleasures of oral culture might influence the young boys under female care, a scenario vividly staged in the ghost tale whispered between Hermione and Mamillius. ⁹

Even as Shakespeare's treatment of oral culture invokes a number of disparaging perspectives, however, the association of storytelling with the restorative statue scene has led several critics to suggest that the play concludes with a positive view of orality. Carol Thomas Neely, for instance, points to the play's early alignment of speech with the propagation of false tales, but argues that oral transmission is recuperated in the statue scene, in which ‘speech is the means by which Hermione's life is restored and the mark of this restoration’. ¹⁰ Robert Weimann also endorses this recuperative reading, arguing that the liminal and ‘imperfect’ moment of closure at the play's end – when Leontes anticipates a ‘leisurely’ exchange of stories offstage (5.3.152) – is a gesture towards a ‘traditional form of oral memory’. ¹¹ Aaron Kitsch suggests that tensions between official and unofficial records are resolved in this scene, as a ‘feminine aesthetic of “living sculpture” emerges that can both accommodate the marks of time and mediate between fixed forms and diachronic change’. ¹² While Newcomb's reading speaks in terms of spectacle rather than oral culture, she also notes an impulse in the play to reject authoritative modes of remembrance (the monumentalised statue) in favour of a mutability that erases historical traces and celebrates ‘the changefulness of the human body, even the female body’. ¹³

The goal of this article is to consider these binaries of artifice and nature – the stony durability of the monument and the mutable records sustained by the tale-telling body – against the backdrop of a dynamic contemporary art market that exerted transformational pressure on both. While my analysis demonstrates that The Winter's Tale strongly connects oral culture with the human bodies that produce it (and the organic, seasonal vibrance of Bohemia more generally), I also draw on ecocritical research which reveals nature in Bohemia to not be all that it seems. Instead, the commercial ventures of Autolycus render the idyll of pastoral spaces fractured, with nature transformed into a site on which commodities are both manufactured and marketed towards the upwardly mobile labouring classes. Notably, the woodcut prints and stucco replicas of early modernity were milestones in the development of mass-manufactured art; yet trends democratising access to art and décor are, in Shakespeare's Bohemia, reduced to scenes of mindless over-consumption and crudely manipulated consumer sentiment. This portrait could hardly feel more prescient in our present moment, in which a handful of artificial intelligence systems consume the energy and water reserves of a small country while churning out a relentless barrage of suitably-nicknamed ‘AI slop’ – and, in so doing, clogging the digital channels used by human creators. Surrounded as we are by this glut of cheap art, the only scarcity in sight is that of the natural resources exploited to maintain supply.

Yet this depiction of early capitalism shines a spotlight on Hermione's statue, which, before the revelation of the queen's liveliness, is discussed as the most prized commodity of the play – as a rare feat of mimesis accomplished by a prestigious sculptor. This language reflects evolving standards of value in an art market transformed by the possibilities of mass manufacturing, and Paulina is briefly presented as a familiar fixture of this market: a wealthy patron seeking to secure her social status through a performance of genteel taste (a performance that might differentiate her habits of consumption from the newly acquisitive lower and middle classes). As pastoral landscapes like those of Bohemia became overwhelmed with cheaply manufactured goods, such patrons began to agitate for the inverse, commissioning works that mimicked life so powerfully they seemed to dissolve into the natural sphere. Speech, represented as the anima of artist and poet, served as the final stamp of such an artistic feat, and the orality with which the play closes might be read, not just as an expression of biological liveliness, but as a crowning artistic achievement – offering a piece of sculpture that vacates stone and melts into the natural world.

Orality between the pastoral and the market

The buzzing antiquarian movement was responsible for some of the most critical assessments of oral culture, with antiquaries often juxtaposing what they viewed as reliable, written records (‘true Antiquitees’) with ‘devylyshe fables and lyes’. ¹⁴ Such assessments, of course, did not tell the whole story – antiquarian methods were necessarily elastic, often interpolating local rumours and legends in the imaginative labour of chorography. Nonetheless, a preference for written records over oral accounts was explicitly voiced, and even records of dubious provenance were sometimes dismissed with the derogative label of ‘fable’. Where oral sources were used, antiquaries were often eager to narrow their scope to a single generation: John Leland's recourse to the phrase in hominum memoria (in living memory) captures this preference for eyewitness testimony over received oral tradition. ¹⁵ William Camden's groundbreaking antiquarian work, Britannia, contains some of the strongest repudiations of oral culture: here, he grieves the many gaps in Britain's historical archives, but lambasts the tales propagated by those ‘studious to supply these defects out of their own invention’. He presents these ‘divers stories’ as distractions from true historical study, noting that ‘without a more curious search into the truth’ many were ‘so taken with the pleasure of the fables, that they swallow’d them without more adoe’. ¹⁶ If this image of ‘swallowed’ fables implies gullibility, it does so while pointedly attaching oral culture to the bodies – and porous folkloric orifices – that produced it.

This view of the enmeshment of oral culture and the human bodies circulating it – spouting, swallowing, tale-telling bodies – is endorsed early in The Winter's Tale. When Mamillius arrives to exchange a tale with his mother, the text foregrounds the intimate link between the tale's transmission and the embodiment of the pair, with Hermione inviting the boy to ‘give’t me in my ear’ (2.1.33) and Mamillius promising that he will tell it so ‘softly’ that even ‘Yond crickets shall not hear it’ (2.1.30–1). The exchange draws attention to the partial and precarious status of oral culture, pointedly denying the audience access to knowledge and participation. As such, Phillippy considers it a ‘textual cenotaph’ – as she puts it, a ‘phantom narrative’ or ‘provocative absence around which images of monuments, graves, effigies, and epitaphs congregate’. ¹⁷ We might even view Mamillius as an early agent of an oral culture that comes to saturate the play: Sherman points out that he is a ‘resolutely corporeal and oral’ figure, and Lamb reads the scene as a reminder of a pleasurable oral culture shared between women and boys, and evading masculinist modes of historiography. ¹⁸

The softness of Mamilliuss tale offers a suggestive echo of the same soft-hard metrics we apply to data; it also anticipates the speech of Autolycus, who emerges as the liveliest and most extravagant representative of oral culture as the play transitions to Bohemia. When he feigns a dislocated shoulder so as to rob the Clown, Autolycus repeatedly invokes softness – first entreating the clown to help him ‘softly’ and then repeating the word as a stage direction indicates that he ‘[picks his pocket]’ (4.2.67, 70 SD). Here, the softness of physical touch blends imaginatively with the softness of Autolycus’ crime, an act so supple that the poor Clown is fooled. When Autolycus takes leave of the Clown by announcing his intention to ‘pace softly towards my kinsman's’ (4.2.101–2), this softness begins to present as his primary mode of being and action. It is worth noting that this adverbial usage of ‘softly’ is restricted to Autolycus and Mamillius, implying a shared logic of motion and transmission between the two agents of oral culture – a logic that continues to ally oral transmission to the mobile, speaking bodies who produce and maintain it. At points of The Winter's Tale, orality is even demarcated as sensory input passed between bodies: Polixenes, learning of Leontess suspicions, imagines a process of rumour-mongering in vivid, olfactory terms, as his ‘freshest reputation’ turns to ‘a savour that may strike the dullest nostril’ (1.2.415–16).

The characterisation of Autolycus places him at the centre of this network of embodied orality, with his febrile production of folk songs and tales attributed to a dynamic and porous carnivalesque body. The Servant informs the Clown that Autolycus ‘sings tunes faster than you’ll tell money. He utters them as he had eaten ballads, and all men's ears grew to his tunes’ (4.4.185–7). The peddler's sung ballads, then, reflect an appetite for oral culture inscribed on the body, and in turn powerfully attracting bodies around him – a folk culture passed directly between the orifices of mouth and ear. Autolycus gleefully affirms this assessment when he declares that the Clown had drawn ‘the rest of the herd to me that all other senses stuck in their ears’ (4.4.586–7), an image suggestive of an excessive aural input obstructing other means of perception. In fact, Autolycus goes on to describe the scene as ‘senseless’ and a perfect opportunity for pick-pocketing, with the crowd having ‘no hearing, no feeling, but my sir's song’ (4.4.589). Even as oral culture resides and transmits between bodies, this tableau of a mass oblivion suggests that it also dulls the senses through which empirical testing might be conducted.

The early modern market for print ballads represented a relocation of story-telling from the physical communities amongst which oral culture was disseminated and into a domain of ostensibly authorised print. Yet, as Charlotte Scott notes, even when oral culture was transported into print it remained a highly corporeal product, with the body of the seller – here, Autolycus – serving as a guarantee of the veracity of the narratives therein. ¹⁹ Fiona McNeill also attests to the enduring pull of the oral domain: she illustrates how print ballads were quickly re-integrated ‘back into oral culture when they were purchased and learned by working maids’. ²⁰ In The Winter's Tale the link between print ballads and embodiment is explicated further, with broadsheets functioning as metaphors for genetic similarity and, as such, offering the complex topic of print ‘authority’ as a locus for exploring themes of legitimacy and bastardry. Leontes observes of Mamilliuss nose that ‘they say it is a copy out of mine’ (1.2.121), yet the notion that someone has ‘smutched’ it (1.2.120) imagines ink bleeding from a botched (presumably cheap and unauthorised) printing process. The dubious authority of print ballads is also used as a metaphor for paternity by Antigonus, who frets that his daughters might bring about ‘false generations’ and fail to ‘produce fair issue’ (2.1.148, 150). But, conversely, legitimacy is also affirmed through a language of faithful printing: Paulina notes of the infant Perdita that ‘Although the print be little, the whole matter / And copy of the father’ (2.3.98–9) and Leontess grants of Florizel that ‘Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince; / For she did print your royal father off, / Conceiving you’ (5.1.123–5). This expansive metaphor accommodates both suspicions about bastardry and affirmations of legitimacy, and Kitsch aligns these themes with anxieties about the appropriation of ‘print-oriented authority in order to spread lies’. ²¹ Phillippy goes even further, suggesting that The Winter's Tale foregrounds the complexity of discerning truth amidst ‘the exodus of cultural memory from place to print’, and suggests that Leontess misreading of the ‘printed texts’ of his children as bastards positions his crisis of faith as a ‘crisis of literacy’. ²² Equally intriguing, however, is the way these traces of oral culture are mapped onto the body, and interpolated alongside cycles of biological futurity. These references offer a vision of the liveliness of oral culture as it transmits and evolves across generations – embedded in the protean human body and sharing in its processes of growth, decline, decomposition, and reproduction.

The notion that oral culture, like the bodies producing it, is subject to growth and decay links it with broader socio-ecological phenomena in the play – in particular, the cultural rituals attending seasonal change. This link is established by the play's title, and first given voice on stage by the fated Mamillius, who selects his tale of ‘sprites and goblins’ on the basis that ‘a sad tale is best for winter’ (2.1.26, 25). The contrast between sad and merry tales recalls the periods of the liturgical calendar, with the familiar divisions of Lenten restraint and carnival festivity feeding an early modern nostalgia for folk culture. Autolycus also introduces his ballad-selling with a song about seasonal change and, where Mamillius signals a sense of decorum in selecting a sad tale for winter, Autolycus gestures towards the inverse, promoting ‘summer songs for me and my aunts, / While we lie tumbling in the hay’ (4.3.11–12). In Autolycus’ song, even nature itself participates in this vibrant oral cacophony: ‘the lark, that tirra-lyra chants’ and ‘the sweet birds, O, how they sing!’ (4.3.9, 6). This portrait of inter-species integration presents oral culture as a harmonious meeting point, one that melds into natural cycles of decay and rebirth – both those of the body and of the seasons. As such, oral culture seems to sit at the heart of the symbolic ‘rhythms’ first identified by F. R. Leavis, through which The Winter's Tale mirrors seasonal change with portraits of human maturity and decline. ²³ Nevertheless, Perdita's comment about ‘the year growing ancient, / Not yet on summer's death nor on the birth / Of trembling winter’ (4.4.79–81) presents the cyclical model of time emerging from nature as surprisingly elastic: contracting into the seasons, yet expanding to recall the ancientry of past cycles, and even to grow into ancientry itself.

Though this ecological liveliness seems idyllic, nature in The Winter's Tale emerges as a complex and contradictory space. Ecofeminist critics often consider Perdita's childhood in rural Bohemia – alongside her active interests in nature and horticulture – as a repudiation of the masculinised attempts at maintaining cultural control that led to Leontess callous treatment of Hermione. ²⁴ Todd Andrew Borlik reads Perdita's rural upbringing as a reflection of how ‘Stuart England had begun to revere girlhood as a state of prelapsarian intimacy with nature’, and suggests that the pastoral offers a space in which the muteness of nature comes to counter fantasies of male control discursively configured through courtly and Latinate language. ²⁵ As Neely observes, however, the language of Bohemia is not always muteness – instead, it often gives way to a profusion of unauthorised, chatting, conjectural speech that appears to be modelled on the labouring classes in England. ²⁶ And chattering orality is not the only alien force penetrating the pastoral idyll of Bohemia: as the presence of Autolycus attests, market forces had begun to, quite literally, set up shop in nature, with the vendor's much-touted broadside ballads revealing the extent to which oral culture might be appropriated and commodified. Charlotte Scott argues that The Winter's Tale is highly invested in exposing the commercial processes which rendered natural spaces ‘no longer the province of rural escapism’ and instead the locus of ‘a new fantasy’ – that of consumerism. ²⁷ Simon Estok puts this transformation in even more explicit terms, reading the exodus of Perdita from Bohemia as indicative of an early modern (and present-day) insistence that ‘the space of nature is the space of commodities’, and that, consequently, ‘living there permanently is not something that people of class do’. ²⁸

Since ecofeminist readings argue for the symbolic and political alignment of women with nature, it follows that natural spaces might brim with the modes of speech that were often dismissively coded as feminine: an oral culture replete with songs, old wives’ tales, folklore, gossip, and other forms of unauthorised speech. More discomfiting is the way in which The Winter's Tale exposes the complicity of women in the transformation of such natural spaces into a market. Autolycus’ wares are primarily targeted towards women, and Dorcas and Mopsa emerge as particularly eager buyers of ballads – ‘I love a ballad in print alife, for then we are sure they are true’, exclaims the naïve Mopsa (4.4.249–50). As Autolycus markets his goods, he sings a song that demonstrates the extent to which models of pastoral nostalgia might accommodate capitalist transformation: he lists commodities (lawn, gloves, masks, jewelry) and appeals to his female customer base with a promise to provide ‘what maids lack from head to heel’ (4.4.222), before giving way to a repetitive rallying cry to ‘come buy’ (4.2.223–4). Even so, the formal aspects of the song, its ballad-like features and simple AABB rhyming structure firmly ground Autolycus’ commercial venture in a model of folk culture often represented as feminine, and sentimentally tied to nature. The residual romanticism of pastoral spaces is strained by these market pressures, and the attendant transformation of the rustic suitor into a consumer is embodied in the infatuated clown, who grieves that his love for Mopsa ‘will also be the bondage of certain ribbons and gloves’ (4.4.226–7) – a familiar Petrarchan device inverted into a portrait of capitalist captivity.

Art and anima: Hermione's statue, nature, and the spoken word

This appropriation of oral culture and nature by early capitalism directs attention to Hermione's statue which, before being revealed as a body, presents for a few brief moments as the play's most rare and precious commodity. It also directs attention to Paulina, who figures (with equal brevity) as the play's most extravagant consumer, commissioning and curating the piece amongst her extensive art collection. Of the many roles interpolated into Paulina's performance – possibilities ventured by critics include those of magician, meta-theatrical director, alchemist, preacher, humanist counsellor, and collector of curiosities ²⁹ – that of patron feels comparatively banal but, in historical terms, Paulina very much fits the brief. In Italy and, increasingly, in England, wealthy widows formed the largest market for female art commissions. Isabella d’Este is the most famous example of this trend – and, as Marchioness of Mantua, she acts as a suggestive (though unspoken) counterpart to her fellow-Mantuan Giulio Romano – but the large textile collection of chronic widow Bess of Hardwick attests to similar dynamics in England. The imagined commissioning of Hermione's statue also reflects real-world patterns of demand, with sculpture commissions acting, almost ritualistically, to mark key moments in a woman's life (marriage, childbirth and death) and servicing a commemorative impulse propelled by the very transience of these phases. Paulina herself harnesses a vocabulary of active and collaborative patronage, asserting ownership over the statue and referring to its material as ‘mine’ (5.2.57). And while this performance of patronage emerges as a meta-theatrical device by the scene's close, Leontess description of Paulina's sumptuous ‘gallery’ with ‘many singularities’ suggests that the character is, nonetheless, a very keen commissioner of other pieces. Even with the revelation of the living Hermione, Paulina's metatheatrical role suggests a continued investment in artistry: as Chloe Porter puts it, her patronage is that of a ‘matriarchal gatekeeper’ guarding the very notion of mimetic unity. ³⁰

While Paulina's ostensible sculpture commission feels worlds away from the cheap novelties sold by Autolycus, historical scholarship suggests that these patterns of consumption were actually highly interconnected. If the pastoral scenes in Bohemia represent the new purchasing power of the lower classes, these possibilities exerted immense pressure on the self-fashioning of wealthier consumers, who were forced to differentiate their spending habits in a newly saturated market. Shakespeare's play astutely registers these pressures, presenting Autolycus’ peddled commodities as a backdrop against which characters signal, or sometimes betray, their true social status. Autolycus introduces himself to the audience in prose, disclosing that ‘My father named me Autolycus, who being (as I am) littered under Mercury, was likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’ (4.3.26–7). Here, the bestial image of the litter asserts poor breeding in the most literal sense, while the ‘snapping-up’ of trifles suggests that father and son share an indiscriminate appetite for cheap novelties.

In contrast, Perdita's lack of interest in Autolycus’ products – Florizel praises her that ‘she prizes not such trifles as these’ (4.4.337) – implies a more discerning approach to consumption, and signals an elite identity that transcends both her upbringing and environment. Though Perdita's disinterest in ballads is not entirely congruent with the state of the contemporary market (ballads, in fact, appealed to a large cross-section of classes) her disdain for Autolycus as a vendor has strong precedent amongst the self-fashioning elites, many of whom were eager to distance themselves from this fixture of early modern capitalism. ³¹ In his Britannia's Pastorals, for instance, William Browne disparages the singing of his local ballad-seller as ‘as harsh a noyce / As ever Cart-wheele made’. ³² Throughout Act 5, this disdain seems to be shared by Florizel and Leontes, for whom Autolycus’ ‘trifles’ transform into a vocabulary – even a rhetorical plaything – whereby they broadcast their superiority of rank. When Florizel asks Leontes to mediate his suit with Polixenes, he represents the transportive power of their friendship as one which might obstruct genteel approaches to value and consumption: ‘at your request / My father will grant precious things as trifles’ (5.1.220–1). But Leontes quickly contains this portrait of recklessness – and uses codes of material value to crystalise Perdita's worth – when he comments that ‘would he do so, I’d beg your precious mistress, / Which he counts but a trifle’ (5.1.222–3).

The play thus represents pressures faced by genteel families to differentiate their spending habits from those of the lower classes – pressures which ultimately exerted a powerful influence on the preferences of patrons. As the early modern marketplace became inundated with commodities, wealthy patrons placed a higher premium on artistic methods that might distinguish their treasures from a glut of cheaply manufactured goods. In Renaissance Italy, sculpture had been on the forefront of democratising access to art: from the fifteenth century onwards, it became easy to cheaply duplicate sculpture using piece moulds. ³³ This sharp rise in supply prompted patrons to promote their collections in new ways, emphasising ‘the rarity of the work, guaranteed by the unique creativity of its maker’ over ‘earlier criteria of value such as size, public visibility, and the expense of the raw materials’. ³⁴ When Leontes and Perdita praise the ‘many singularities’ of Paulina's gallery (5.3.12), they invoke these exact metrics, and display familiarity with a dynamic contemporary art market driving patrons to the pursuit of scarcity. When the Third Gentleman represents Giulio Romano as ‘that rare Italian master’ (5.2.82–3) he also demonstrates an astute sense of these dynamics, shifting attention to the identity of the artist as a guarantor of value and prestige. Although Giulio Romano's recent passing is often viewed as an oversight on Shakespeare's part, the death of a premier artist was also caught up in these metrics of value, sparking public interest in a body of work which could only increase in rarity.

Diehl points to the shared interest of Autolycus and Paulina in peddling spectacle as an avenue through which Shakespeare ‘raises questions about the role of trickery, sense perception, and collective desire in the production of theatrical wonder’. ³⁵ However, we can also ground the similarities between these characters in the contemporary art market, with Paulina embodying an approach to consumption that strongly interacts with, and reacts against, the salesmanship of Autolycus. In fact, the woodcut images adorning print ballads (such as those peddled by Autolycus) represented an early milestone in mass produced art, and were among the most widely possessed and circulated artistic artefacts of the nominally iconoclastic Jacobean period. For Sarah F. Williams, the early decades of the 17th century saw ‘the standardisation of the broadside ballad as “image”’, with broadsides often covering the walls of taverns and theatres, and even coming to be proudly displayed in private homes (in a particularly suggestive comment, Richard Brathwait refers to these decorative broadsides as ‘lasting-pasted monuments’). ³⁶ It is easy to sentimentalise the folk culture appropriated by these broadsides, and to expound an overly simple transition from orality to print when, in actual fact, the two modes of transmission were contemporaneously popular. Nonetheless, the extraction of ballads from a shared and porous common domain and their transformation into a material object that might be privately owned is worthy of note, and this market for ‘monumentalising’ orality anticipates – and inverts – the dissolution of an actual monument into a breathing and speaking human at the play's close.

The technical mastery of Giulio Romano, then, may well be invoked to offset the cheap propagation of art via print ballads; yet Autolycus advertises another product that conceptually aligns with the illusion of statuary in the final scene. While the vendor does not peddle the stucco replicas popular amongst the labouring classes in Italy, he does sell a product which – at least superficially – anticipates the material of the statue: a ‘counterfeit stone’ (4.4.577). Of course, there are clear differences between the two raw materials implied here; while Autolycus’ stone was almost certainly a false gemstone, Hermione's statue was likely intended to imitate marble or limestone. Audiences, however, are not privy to such details, and the shared lexicon of ‘stoniness’ performs a conceptual alignment of otherwise diverse materials. In fact, before the revelation of the living Hermione, Paulina's guests routinely distil the statue into its material, with Leontes in particular exhorting it to ‘chide me, dear stone’ (5.3.24) and wondering ‘does not the stone rebuke me / For being more stone than it?’ (5.3.37–8). The early reference to Autolycus’ counterfeit stone, then, anticipates the corrective of the final scene – the vibrant, reproachful stone of Hermione's statue – and invites audiences to view Paulina's commission as a reactive means of distinguishing her collection from a market of cheap replicas.

The conversation between the gentlemen in Act 5, however, does not simply establish the economic importance of scarcity, it also gestures towards new measures of aesthetic value. When the Third Gentlemen praises Giulio Romano's ability, he proclaims that the painter, ‘(had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work) would beguile nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape’ (5.2.83–5). This elevation of mimesis points to the increasing prestige of realism, particularly in the face of a market proliferated with mass-manufactured products. And, as a later comment from Paulina suggests, the challenge of achieving mimesis was so great that the ‘carver's excellence’ (5.3.30) was coming to impart more value than the price of the raw materials themselves. In fact, the gentlemen's enthusiasm closely resembles the language of an epitaph praising Giulio Romano recorded in Giorgio Vasari's Le vite de’ piú eccellenti architetti, pittori, ed scultori italiani (1550), which also celebrates the painter's ability to impart the illusion of breath: through Giulio Romano, this epitaph claims, ‘Videbat Juppiter corpora sculpta pictaque Spirare’ [Jupiter saw sculpted and painted bodies breathe]. ³⁷ Many scholars have read this shared vocabulary as an indication that Shakespeare sourced his knowledge of Giulio Romano from Vasari's first edition text ³⁸ – an argument that firmly grounds Shakespeare's treatment of sculpture in the real-world dynamics, measures of value, and processes of canonisation driving the marketplace for early modern art. Where cheap artifice had become common, the attention of wealthy patrons instead turned to the organic, to staggering approximations of life that seemed to even conjure breath. One facet of this movement towards mimesis, as Amy L. Tigner notes, was a vogue for hydraulically powered mechanical statuary that could mimic motion; as she argues, Paulina's role ‘enlivening Hermione from this seemingly petrified statue’ mirrors that of the gardener or horticulturalist activating the spectacle. ³⁹

Before this spectacle begins, however, the liveliness of the embodied Hermione – Leontes and Polixenes applaud the appearance of pulsing veins, shifting eyes, and a vitality that ‘seems warm upon her lip’ (5.3.67) – is firmly attributed to the superlative artistic genius of Giulio Romano, and works to aggregate the high market value of the work. When Leontes notices Hermione's wrinkles, Paulina responds with a gesture to Giulio Romano's skill, ‘Which lets go by some sixteen years and makes her / As she lived now’ (5.3.31–2). Likewise, Leontes perceives the liveliness of the sculpture as an aesthetic achievement (and not simply the product of magic or possible shared psychosis) when he presents it as a triumph of mimesis and ponders the role of artistic technologies in its execution: ‘what fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?’ (5.3.78–9). While these comments harness a vocabulary of the plastic arts, the convergence of nature and artifice towards which they build recalls the conventions of the theatre, gesturing towards the performance itself as a highly curated staged tableau. The statue is, of course, quite literally breathing and, like Hermione, the body of the boy actor straddles the organic and inorganic, with the strain of his awkward pose and unnatural stillness only highlighting his physical precarity. The comments of Leontes and Polixenes, then, are among a number of reflexive features – including the unnatural posture of the actor, the intensification of his usual makeup into a painted veneer of stoniness, the onstage directives of Paulina, and the awed spectatorship of her visitors – which all collude to produce the scene as a tautly metatheatrical moment. In particular, the scene foregrounds the pleasures of spectatorship, inviting audiences to stare at the body of an actor rendered newly conspicuous: painted, moulded and displayed for visual consumption. Yet the impossibility of the actor's brief here – of complete, unwavering stillness – is ultimately recuperated into the artistry of the scene. Each trembling hand or twitching eye contributes to the illusion of a seeping vitality on the cusp of release, while pointing to the theatre itself as a medium collapsing artifice and nature into the very body of the actor.

Although Paulina credits the technical skill of Giulio Romano with Hermione's lifelikeness, she does not forfeit her prestige as the supposed commissioner of the piece. Her assertion of ownership over the materials (‘the stone is mine’) reminds audiences of her purchasing power as a patron, and implies her active engagement in the artistic process – as Porter notes, the collaborations between artist and patron were not dissimilar to those driving the theatre-making process. ⁴⁰ Paulina's presentation of Hermione amongst her gallery containing ‘many singularities’ also gestures towards the curatorial power of the patron, a power which instilled significant meaning in the finished work. In cinquecento Italy, works of sculpture were purposefully integrated into the dwelling of the patron – usually inserted into customised niches or statue bases – so as to be conceptually interpolated into the history of the family. ⁴¹ Before this movement towards the construction of purpose-built spaces, though, such statues were more likely to be propped against the walls of loggie (outdoor galleries attached to the house, but physically opened onto the garden), where visitors might approach, touch or sit next to the works. ⁴² The eagerness of Leontes and Perdita to physically engage with the statue – dissuaded by Paulina only through appeals to the wetness of the paint, rather than rules of situational decorum – suggests that Hermione may have been presented in such an informal context. And while critics often assume that Paulina's gallery was staged as an indoor chapel, Tigner offers a compelling argument that it may have been such a loggia, as a garden setting for Hermione's restoration would intertwine with a series of horticultural images that come ‘to represent Hermione's disputed body’. ⁴³ This is a generative reading, not least because a garden setting would have enhanced the apparent realism of the statue, placing it in a context that stressed the organic and the lively over the bounded and artificial. Such a curatorial act might also be read as a reaction against the commodification of pastoral spaces, establishing the desire of wealthy patrons to perform a reversal of this process – commissioning an artistic product that melts into nature, in contrast to a natural space pillaged and destroyed for raw materials.

Although the illusion of motion may seem the crowning achievement for a sculptor straining for lifelikeness, the conversation between the gentleman introduces another metric: that of speech. When the Third Gentleman applauds the mastery of Giulio Romano, he comments that he ‘so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of an answer’ (5.2.85–7). The hope of speech is also voiced in the responses of Leontes and Perdita to the statue. Perdita is eager to ‘kneel and then implore her blessing’ (5.3.44), and Leontes is at his most transported when he fantasises about speech: ‘does not the stone rebuke me, / For being more stone than it?’ (5.3.37–8). This notion of speech as the culminative achievement of sculpture, an expression of a vital anima infused into the work by its creator, was widely propagated in Renaissance artistic theory. Kathleen Wren Christian notes a trend towards the ‘assignment of voice and persona to antiquities’, which ‘encouraged poets and artists alike to personify them ubiquitously, transforming them into agents and actors of their own creations’. ⁴⁴ Because they were inspired by the paragone between the arts famously reiterated by Michelangelo – a dynamic at times combative, but at others supplementary – these theories tended to associate the animation of sculpture with the production of verse. ⁴⁵ Wren points to Leto's Roman Academy, which was set in a garden surrounded by ruins and designed to simulate a classical symposium, as an example of a context in which verses ‘were recited in the presence of sculpture, written in the “voice” of ancient sculptures and physically attached to these works’. ⁴⁶ And while ancient sculpture was viewed as the gold standard for such an infusion of anima, this theory also influenced contemporary artistic practice. On St Anne's Day, a tombstone carved by cinquecento sculptor Jacopo Sansovino inspired the composition of hundreds of Latin verses, mostly comparing his ability to impart life to that of the ancients – and, suggestively, pinned to trees and sculptures in the surrounding garden. ⁴⁷ In Vasari's Vite, Giulio Romano's ability to impart anima is also celebrated through a comparison with the ancients: in particular, the Hellenistic painter Apelles, whose lost Venus Anadyomene was considered a touchstone of classical art. ⁴⁸ ‘In short’, Dennis Ribouillault concludes of this trend, ‘sculptures began to speak and converse, a practice strongly linked to the decoration of Renaissance gardens’. ⁴⁹

The illusion of speaking statues was thus integrated into the imaginative fabric of many loggie, particularly those attached to Italian academies. When Camillo and Polixenes challenge Hermione to speak to prove that ‘she pertain to life’ (5.3.113), their empiricist vocabulary might also accommodate an aesthetic vocabulary: one in which a triumph of mimesis depended on the production of speech, an expression of anima extending between artistic and the biological spheres. Though Hermione's speech may shatter an antiquarian fantasy of preservation, it realises an aesthetic fantasy of mimesis – the most fragile material of historiography is recuperated as the surpassing feature of art. The movement towards nature entailed in this vision of hyperrealism may well reflect anxieties about the status of the pastoral, a mode increasingly untenable under the pressures of early capitalism. Instead, having represented the disruptive impact of seventeenth-century commerce, The Winter's Tale offers an artistic vocabulary that celebrates artifice at the exact point in which it merges with the organic sphere. Orality emerges as an artistic achievement that collapses the aesthetic with the biological – moving away from antiquarian ideals of monumental duration, and towards a model of the spoken word as an aesthetic artefact of its own.