Knowledge and Belief in The Winter's Tale

Abstract

At narrative moment immediately preceding animation of Hermione's statue, Paulina exhorts Leontes, It is requir'd / You do awake your faith.' Faith in what? For Leontes, it is faith in reality of miracles, coming back to life of a queen who has been dead sixteen long years. For William Shakespeare's audience, it is faith tied to willing suspension of disbelief, a readiness to accept that theater is capable of representing just about anything. But it is not only in representational space of theater that dead find themselves coming back to life. Scripture itself purports to offer inerrant accounts of people who have come back from dead: daughter of Shunamite woman in Old Testament book of 2 Kings, Jarius's daughter, Lazarus, and, of course, Christ himself, described typologically as the firstfruits of them that slept.2 The animation of Hermione's statue in The Winter's Tale finds its informing source not only in mythic account of Ovid's perennially popular Pygmalion, but also in stories of resurrection afforded by Scripture. With regard to Bible, one source Shakespeare appears to have had in mind when producing The Winter's Tale is book of 2 Kings. The bear's devouring of Antigonus is Shakespeare's revision of story found in this book, of how prophet Elisha called up a bear to kill off some young kids who had audacity to mock his bald pate.3 The book of 2 Kings also offers following account of miraculous resuscitation that might have constituted a central scriptural source informing Shakespeare's representation of enlivening statue: