The Winter’s Tale: Faith in Law and the Law of Faith

Abstract

This essay examines the sort of law that merits faithful submission in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Specifically, I examine two options as to how Leontes can be king after he realizes that he must live under the law. The first option is to submit to a systematic law of works; the other, quite different option is submission to a law of faith neither normative nor juridical, an option that Shakespeare embraces and that demands neighborly love only. If Shakespeare critiques absolutism, then, he does not do so in order to adopt a clear religious or republican vocabulary. Accordingly, I read the play in the present contexts of Agamben and Badiou, whose Paul is distinctly nonconfessional, and in a Montaignean context rather than that of more systematic early modern thought. Read so, we can see how Shakespeare contributes to thinking about the Pauline legacy, and especially about how The Winter’s Tale presents a Pauline, yet secular — and strikingly unsystematic — method for the cultivation of virtue.