Shakespearean Resurrection: The Art of Almost Raising the Dead

FIVE: Raising the Dead in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest

149 FIVE z Raising the Dead in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. —Hamlet 1.1.117–20 At the outset of his essay on this late play, the political philosopher Allan Bloom (1993) writes, “The Winter’s Tale takes place in Sicily and Bohemia at an uncertain date, and its characters seem to partake in equal measure of the religion and life of old Greece and Rome and of Christianity” (109). The time frame is inexact, indeterminate, which thus allows Shakespeare to create the wonderful tension between the paganism of classical antiquity and the Christianity that eventually challenged and superseded it in much of the West, certainly in Bohemia and Sicily. It is easy, however, to 150 Shakespearean Resurrection lose sight of Shakespeare’s fine balancing act, especially in Hermione’s quasi resurrection in the final act: “Underlying [the reunions of act 5] is the one Ovidian myth that—beyond all others—informs the play: the story of Proserpina, the daughter of Ceres, the harvest goddess, who was stolen away by the god Pluto, or Dis, taken to the underworld, and then permitted to return to the earth for eight months of the year” (Garber 2004, 847–48; italics mine). Perdita explicitly refers to the scene of Proserpina’s abduction: “O Proserpina, / For the flow’rs now that, frighted, thou let’st fall / From Dis’s wagon!” (4.4.116–18). Hermione’s story is surely analogous to Proserpina’s, though Garber’s assertion that this lone source trumps all others is unnecessary. The Pygmalion story from book 10 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Venus grants the artist’s prayer to animate his sculpture, is also a major influence on the scene as well, as are possibly some scenes from French and Spanish romances where statues are brought to life. Any one of those, such as the Spanish Amadis de Gaule (1532), may be the “old” or “winter’s” tale to which the play refers. Thus, The Winter’s Tale represents not so much the triumph of one source over another as it does Shakespeare’s masterful blending of these sources into his own unique vision. With typical astuteness, Garber also points to the overtones of resurrection in the play. She describes Paulina as “the final artist and wonder-worker of the play” (849) and calls her “a true descendant of her namesake, the Apostle Paul” because she, too, awakes our faith in a way similar to Paul’s call in Ephesians and elsewhere for the church to awake from its slumber to redemption (850). Shakespeare conjoins the Christian story to classical myths; as variations on the theme of death and rebirth, they offer kaleidoscopic but converging perspectives on Hermione’s quasi resurrection. The synthesis that is Shakespeare’s art is eclectic, opportunistic even, as regards his depiction of her return from near death. Raising the Dead in The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest 151 But to speak of Hermione’s return in the last act as a “resurrection” has elicited at least one objection: “Before we attempt to give a Christian meaning to the ‘resurrection ’ scene, we should ask ourselves if by the same logic a similar meaning should be given to Ovid’s pagan Pygmalion story” (Shaheen 1999, 720). The question is rhetorical, the intended answer is no. But that is not the end of the issue. The moment is one of rich synthesis: the classical pagan and the Christian intimations of the moment coalesce in what appears to be an indissoluble whole, without either one predominating or canceling the other. Shaheen’s point is that there is no real Ovidian religious content behind the Pygmalion story; thus, Shakespeare and his audience would not have regarded the story as relaying a religious meaning. Shaheen suggests that if there is no Ovidian religious content in the moment, then one ought likewise to dismiss as similarly fanciful allegorical or other Christian intimations of the moment. But Shakespeare’s audience would have made a fundamental distinction between the mythological veracity of the story of Pygmalion on the one hand, and that of Christ on the other. Shakespeare creates this tension by fusing classical and pagan referents at the moment of Hermione’s...