ESC: English Studies in Canada

T H E “G I L L Y V O R S ” E X C H A N G E I N T H E W I N T E R ’ S T A L E RICHARD W. HILLMAN University of Toronto D u rin g the sheep-shearing festival in Act rv, Scene iv of The Winter’s Tale, Perdita and Polixenes have a well-known disagreement concerning nature and art. To call it a “debate,” as many commentators do, is necessarily to detach it from its dramatic context to some extent, and I should like to take very much the opposite approach. I shall argue that the concepts of nature and art derive from that context a particular significance which ties the conversation in more closely with central dramatic issues yet adds a further dimension to its universality. Perdita’s association with nature remains basic to any understanding of the exchange in dramatic terms. But only one aspect of this association is generally brought to bear: her connection with natural beauty and fecundity. As several critics have observed, however, Perdita’s symbolic value in the scene as a whole extends to nature’s destructive dimension, first established by the con­ junction of birth and death in the violent episode introducing us to Bohemia (m,iii) ,1As the festive elements of this pastoral world are firmly contained by actuality and the abundance of summer is implicitly limited by the progres­ sion of the seasons, so Perdita herself embodies fertility governed by the cycle of life and death. This affiliation with natural reality is brought out from the first through her own insistent realism. She resists Florizel’s attempts to impose his romantic fantasies upon their situation, citing his “extremes” (iv.iv.6).2 She cannot, as he urges, “Apprehend / Nothing but jollity” (24-25), and her continuing consciousness of the obstacles to their match seems to be linked with consciousness of mortality itself by her prediction that, when they are discovered, “you must change this purpose, / Or I my life” (39-40) ,3 Yet within the confines of her realistic outlook, of course, she ardently returns Florizel’s love. That Perdita represents both sides of nature is most clearly signalled by her association with flowers, which is introduced through her role as Flora and developed in her reception of the Old Shepherd’s guests (including Polixenes and Camillo). Flowers, for Perdita, epitomize the richness and beauty of nature’s creations, on the one hand, their fragility and transience on the other; E n g l ish Studies in C anada, v , i , Spring 1979 she appreciates them as a manifestation at once of nature’s bounty and of the cycle of growth and decay. Throughout her welcoming speeches and bestow­ ing of flowers, she shows herself highly conscious of the changing seasons and pointedly relates them to the seasons of human life. Moreover, in expressing the wish that she had flowers appropriate to the ages of Florizel and the shep­ herdesses (112-29) 1she again demonstrates awareness, not only of the passage of time, but of death itself: she refers first to the rape of Proserpina (116-18) — queen of the dead, we should remember, as well as bringer of fertility— then to the premature death which maids often have in common with prim­ roses (122-25).4 Her consciousness of mortality is somewhat uncomfortably taken up by Florizel, who, when she talks of strewing him with flowers, is reminded of the strewing of a corpse (129). She counters by affirming life and love, but in a way which implies that death, too, is a part of nature and that love can flourish in its shadow; he will be garlanded, she tells him, like a bank, for love to lie and play on: Not like a corpse; or if— not to be buried, But quick, and in mine arms. . .. (130-32) It is, then, in the midst of a celebration of nature as cyclical, both life-giving and death-bearing, that the argument about nature and art takes place. Polixenes’ presence at the celebration involves interference with both aspects of nature. On the surface, of course, lies the threat...