Death as Preservation in The Winter’s Tale

Abstract

ABSTRACT Unusual for a comedy, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale centres early modern preservation: a state that was neither illness nor wellness, but a reprieve from both degeneration and reproduction. Unlike recovery, preservation sits comfortably with death and even borrows some of its features. As a liminal state that does not naturally occur unless instigated by trauma, preservation must be constantly demarcated and maintained via ritual and art; in The Winter’s Tale and other Shakespeare plays, the result is a space that accommodates grief and operates in queer time. The play’s foregrounding of preservation is best seen when Hermione returns to court after sixteen years, and especially when we read the romance’s conclusion in light of actual Jacobean practices. On one hand, Hermione’s reintroduction recalls the Churching ceremony that marked the end of postnatal confinement and celebrated ‘preservation’ after childbirth. But the scene also evokes the early seventeenth-century deaths of England’s two youngest princesses, memorialised as statues at Westminster Abbey shortly before the play was first performed. By reminding playgoers of these losses during Hermione’s reunion with Perdita, the play resists its genre’s promotion of repro-futurity – a staking of hopes on those not yet born or fully matured – and instead honours preservation itself.