6

Shakespeare’s Resurrections

The Winter’s Tale

Grace is forgiveness.

Karl Barth

Grace, inasmuch as it is given gratuitously, excludes the notion of debt.

Thomas Aquinas

You pay a great deal too dear for what’s given freely.

The Winter’s Tale 1.1.17–18

The Grace of Christ, or the holie Ghost by him geven dothe take awaie the stonie harte, and geveth an harte of fleshe.

Article X of 42 Articles

Let’s forget about the ghosts that have troubled Shakespearean theater in recent years. Let’s for the moment lay to rest Clarence, the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and other haunted and haunting spirits.1 Such ghosts are conjured in The Winter’s Tale, the subject of the present chapter, but though they lend the play their title, they are not finally its subject or its medium (no pun intended!). Hermione’s ghost is twice conjured in the play. When she appears to Antigonus to name her child Perdita, she is strictly provisional, for Antigonus has “heard (but not believ’d) the spirits o’th’ dead/May walk again” (3.3.16–17) “If such thing be,” Hermione’s appeared in a dream more like waking than sleep; in Antigonus’s report she melts shrieking into the air after delivering her message (3.3.17–18). She is stage-conjured once again by Leontes as he imagines the response of Hermione’s ghost to the prospect of his remarriage: her sainted spirit would “again possess her corpse, and on this stage / (Where we offenders now), appear soul-vex’d / And begin, ‘Why to me?’” (5.1.57–60). Why have you done this to me? And Paulina joins the conceit: were she the ghost, she would shriek “Remember mine.” (5.1.67). But the play, even—perhaps especially—in such conscious echoings of Hamlet, refuses such hauntings, or rather they function as pure memorials, tokens to chastise the guilty soul, and not as realized spirits.1 The ghost story whispered to Hermione by Mamillius is private, interrupted, and finally superseded by Leontes’ Lenten penitence and the public rite of participation in the “awakening” of Hermione, which is also the awakening to faith in all gathered around her, a ceremony that brooks no recusance. The Winter’s Tale, I want to argue, consciously replaces the memory theater of the ghost world with the memory theater of a new theatrico-religious paradigm of resurrection. If Shakespearean ghosts have been concerned with forgettings, the new paradigm articulated in The Winter’s Tale is concerned with recollection, re-imagined through the paradigm of repentance and resurrection.2

Shakespeare’s resurrection theater is intimately linked to an exploration of both penitence and repentance as modes of recollection and redemption, mediated through a profound and resonant engagement with the puzzling, concertedly bewildering resurrection narratives of forgiveness in the Gospels, the Easter liturgy, and the Mystery Cycles. The resurrection narratives are, after all, paradigmatic texts for the exploration of recognition.3 In this memory theater it is recognition and acknowledgment that become central. And it is key that in this new paradigm in which response, responsiveness, and responsibility are all important, the returning figures are actual—flesh and blood. What the play offers us instead of ghost stories is the most spectacular in a series of instances in which those supposed dead appear precisely to those who have harmed them. Such characters are not in fact dead at all, but they are specifically dead, indeed metaphorically killed, by those to whom they appear.

Return and Recollection

Consider the following dramatis personae, all presumed dead during the course of the plays in which they feature:

Claudio in Measure for Measure

Helena in All’s Well that Ends Well

Marina in Pericles

Hero in Much Ado about Nothing

Imogen in Cymbeline

Prospero (to Gonzales, Alonso, and Sebastian) in The Tempest.

The drama of their return is always a theater of memory and recognition. The “resurrected” characters burst into the present as reminders of an ineradicable past that must be confronted in the lives and thoughts—in the self-recognition—of those to whom they so hauntingly return. The intensity of their return is particularly felt by, and, I would argue, particularly directed toward, those figures most profoundly implicated in their disappearance.

When Claudio reappears after his reprieve from execution, his sister must greet him as the woman whose last words wished that execution swifter.4 When Helena enters the court, the question of the spectre is raised once again by the king: “Is’t real that I see?” (5.3.306). Bertram’s response, uttered, we presume, to Helena, is at once a claiming of her as shadow and substance, as name and thing of wife, and almost in the same instance an “O, pardon!” (5.3. 8). Her unanticipated reappearance jolts him back to a past in which he has dispossessed her, a past he imagined was his alone to recount. Hero, after a falsely reported “death” and full funeral rites, returns to the man who has brutally and publicly defamed her on her wedding day as his once and future bride;5 and Imogen returns to the man who has, so he thinks, arranged for her murder (5.5.228–29). Marina’s return to Pericles is differently understood: the power of the great recognition scene in Pericles lies in the discovery that she and Pericles share the same story, as they share the same flesh and blood.6 But this discovery might never have been made were they not to come to speech, an act full of massive risk and painful recollection for both of them, as I explained in chapter 4. Posthumus’s encounter with Imogen in the last scene of Cymbeline demonstrates how little recognition has to do with sight. He fails utterly to recognize her even though she stands right in front of him protesting her name. Prospero stands outside the charmed circle in which Alonso and Sebastian are immobilized; this encounter with the man they must have thought was long drowned fails to bring the unrepentant Sebastian to penitent recognition (5.1). But it brings Prospero to take on his humanity in one of the most metatheatrical renderings of theater as a memory palace, a place of redeemed memory and the possibilities, difficulties, and promises of reconciliation.

The returns in such resurrections, unlike the ghostly returns of earlier plays, offer the opportunity for transformation, but a transformation that will take up and redeem the past.7 They offer too, the opportunity for a new accounting in which the responsibility of the one who has caused harm is utterly bound up with the response to the person harmed. It is because such reappearances involve the most complex encounters with the past of those to whom they reappear that I call these reappearances resurrections. They utterly and completely violate the fantasies in the harmers’ minds that the past is subject to their will, their possession. The resurrected subject once thought dead is the vehicle for the resurrection of the one whose actions had appeared to lead to an irrevocable harm.8 And of course it is just this mutuality that differentiates these encounters from the ghostly returns of the unavenged in earlier plays. Their putative deaths are nearly always mechanistically contrived, involving complicitous friars, or potent drugs capable of inducing a sleep that mimics death, or, most outrageously, of statues that appear to come to life. To pursue the whys and wherefores of these means is to dissolve the kinds of trust that are being rebuilt in the new communities and identities forged through such returns. Leontes’ puzzled inquiry at the end of the play: “Thou hast found mine, / But how, is to be question’d; for I saw her / (As I thought) dead and have (in vain) said many / A prayer upon her grave” is parenthetical and belated (5.3.138–42). It is not how Hermione has survived that is important but that she has. Her recovery depends on the renunciation of epistemology as our mode of access to others. For the insistence on knowing others as the very basis of our access to them, as Stanley Cavell and Shakespeare know, will make the others in our lives disappear, petrify them, or turn them into nothings. It will cloud the basis of our relations to each other in response and acknowledgment, even as it compensates for the sometimes intolerable responsibilities for the maintenance of our relations with each other when they rest on nothing more secure than such responses.9

It is the resurrection narratives from the Gospels, mediated liturgically in eucharistic worship, and in medieval Corpus Christi theater, that provide the paradigm for these encounters as narratives of forgiveness, of redeemed memory and the possibilities of mutual presencing. In incorporating the deep structure of these narratives, Shakespeare creates a grammar of theater capable of countering both the Protestant suspicion of fiction and the kind of papists who would “grossly palpabrize or feel God with their bodily fingers,” in Nashe’s striking phrase.10 Resurrection narratives take us deeply into an understanding and enactment of memory that denies individual possession and ownership. Such a view is not doctrinal; it does not articulate a set of beliefs about the Resurrection. That would be far too literalistic a reading. Its truths will exist as story because the condition of faith is, in any case, a narrative condition.11 This new grammar of theater will seek not so much to communicate new ideas as to construct shared possibilities to which the understanding of grace as forgiveness will be central.

Penitence/Repentance

In a characteristically witty turn of phrase, David Steinmetz has written that the Reformation began almost accidentally as a debate about the word for “penitence.”12 The Reformation preference for the term “repentance” over “penance” sought to replace the Vulgate reading “penitentiam agite” with its uncomfortable, even blasphemous works theology. Yet the early reformers were far removed from the antinomian willfulness perceived in them by their opponents who could not conceive of the excess and gratuity, the utter one-sidedness, of Reformation grace. The early reformers would have thought that it was precisely those who have progressed in the love of God who could see sin in the first place, and understand their own behavior under its sign. As Steinmetz puts the matter: “It requires some growth in grace in order to repent properly.”13 Yet, when the remorse, call it contrition, of the sinner becomes detached from the power of the keys, as it threatened to do in medieval contritionist theology, Wycliffite heresy, and the structures and institutions of the post-Reformation settlement, there was no formal declaration of forgiveness, no office of forgiveness, no agency authorized to speak God’s forgiveness through the church, as I have been arguing. In Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker makes the distinction between God’s forgiveness and ministerial absolution:

Wherefore having hitherto spoaken of the vertue of repentance required, of the discipline of repentance which Christ did establish, and of the Sacrament of Repentance invented sithence, against the pretended force of humane absolution, in sacramental penitencie, lett it suffise thus farre to have shewed, how God alone doth truly give, the vertue of repentance alone procure, and private ministeriall absolution butt declare remission of sinnes.14

The priest as confessor had exercised the power of the keys in offering absolution as both verdictive and exercitive—in J. L. Austin’s terms, as both verdict and sentence.15 In the absence of that verdictive and exercitive role, the problem of assurance—a medieval as well as a Reformation pre-occupation—became increasingly pressing. So having asserted the merely declarative nature of absolution, Hooker continues: “Now the last and sometymes hardest to bee satisfied by repentance are our mindes.”16

In Measure for Measure Shakespeare had explored the project of a political and social reformation of sin, yet the conclusion that, as Lucio says, “grace is grace, despite of all controversy” (1.2.24–25) is hardly made readily available in that play; indeed that play might be understood to exhaust hope in any such social and political “solution.” Measure for Measure might be understood to thematize the exhaustion of extrinsicist conceptions of grace as it does the resources of comedy for Shakespeare. Even if one accepts, as I do not, the Duke’s dispensation of pardon as “pow’r divine” (5.1.269), the play has so concertedly sundered will from intention in the plot that it becomes clear that change is imagined less as a complete transformation than as an external imposition.17 It is in the late plays, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline, that Shakespeare evolves new ways of making manifest the presence and possibility of grace and forgiveness. In this chapter I want to explore the presence of these topoi in these late plays, and then seek to outline why it is the resurrection narratives that provide the paradigm, the deep structure of this theater and, finally, show how those narratives inform Shakespeare’s sacramental theater.

Is’t enough I am sorry?

“Is‘t enough I am sorry?” As if to confirm Richard Hooker’s insight, this is Posthumus’s anguished question in Cymbeline (5.4.11). “Sir, you have done enough,” is Cleomenes’ response to Leontes in The Winter’s Tale (5.1.1). The question of sufficiency haunts penitential discourse as it haunts Shakespeare’s last plays. What is enough and for whom? What are the agencies of forgiveness? God? The person wronged? The priest on behalf of the church? To Cleomenes’ assertion that he has redeemed his faults, “paid down / More penitence than done trespass,” that he should now “as the heavens have done, forget your evil / With them, forgive yourself,” Leontes replies: “Whilst I remember / Her and her virtues, I cannot forget / My blemishes in them, and so still think of / The wrong I did myself; which was so much / That heirless it hath made my kingdom, and / Destroy’d the sweet’st companion that e’er man bred his hopes out of” (5.1. 3–4, 7–12). Cleomenes’ confident language of sufficiency is cast in the language of a measurable debt, a debt which once paid permits the forgetting of evil and the forgiving of self. Cleomenes is also complacent that heaven’s actions in the agency of forgiveness are transparent, fully readable to him, if not to Leontes. But Leontes understands enough about the grammar of forgiveness to know that he cannot forgive himself, that the grammar of forgiving yourself is in fact nonsensical. To forgive himself would entail absolving himself, and this would imply that he could, by an act of his will, reclaim his acts and their effects on others back from the lives of those others and order them by dint of that will.18

Forgiving, then, like promising, requires the presence of others; and in the acknowledgment of that mutuality lies the truth that others have reality in a past that is no one’s individual possession.19 In remembering Hermione, Leontes will remember what his relation to her has been—it is part of the particularity and the hard faithfulness of his memory that he must acknowledge his relation to her. This is what fidelity now is. To know his deed, to paraphrase Macbeth, is to know himself. That is why, as Raimond Gaita has suggested, the natural expression of remorse is: “My God what have I done! How could I have done it?”20 For Leontes, his remorse is the path to finding the independent reality of Hermione. It is the way he refinds her.

Raimond Gaita has described remorse as a “recognition of the reality of another person through the shock of wronging her, just as grief is the recognition of another through the shock of losing her.”21 Leontes’ remorse shows the lucidity of his suffering. It shows that the only true remembrance of her will, mortifyingly, involve a remembrance, blasting and perpetual, of his own folly in harming her. The causes of the death of Hermione and Mamillius will be marked on their graves, and in visiting them he will constantly be faced with the mark of his own actions. The two memories are coterminous; this is why remorse is a form of proper memory. It is also why it is so radically isolating and lonely in its fearful lucidity, expressed in the compact grammar of “Come, and lead me / To these sorrows” (3.2.242–43). Lifted out of the mad fantasy that has turned Hermione to stone, for Leontes to know Hermione is to acknowledge his relation with her.

The plays in which these questions are asked and prematurely answered stage their own tentative responses. In Cymbeline, as I explored in chapter 5, the response comes in a bravura recognition/reconciliation scene whose revelations begin their unfolding by virtue of the truths revealed in a deathbed confession, a scene that holds the moving and the ludicrous in exquisite tension, in which virtually every single character on stage is restored to him- or herself, as they also encounter each other. And in The Winter’s Tale it appears in an astonishing scene in which a statue seems to come to life, a scene in which the agencies of both religion and art are deployed to embody the ravages of time and the possibilities of a reconciled community.

Posthumus’s anguished question, expressed in the form of a prayer, exposes his new sense of creatureliness discovered in the very act of repentance; only the gods’ forgiveness can give him the “penitent lock” that will pick the bolt of his conscience. Posthumus’s sense of indebtedness is complete; it pertains to his very life, a life that, even if rendered, would not restore or repay hers. In these late plays the understanding of grace and forgiveness is intimately associated with what it means to be human creatures. The costs of the denial of creatureliness in fantasies of autonomy, in denials of dependence, in the creation of others in conformity to our own will, in the negation, therefore, of the condition of createdness, are what the plays must recover from. The discovery of others, of self, and of God is in these plays often part of one and the same movement.

It is central to my understanding of this endeavor that the languages and discourses for thinking about such peace are primarily liturgical. They entail an understanding of the body of Christ as liturgically enacted and not institutionally guaranteed. That is why in medieval practice and penitential theology, the sacrament of the eucharist and the sacrament of penance are incomprehensible except by means of each other. Indeed the abolition of penance as sacrament and the incorporation of confession into general confession at Morning and Evening Prayer and Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer services might have placed even more emphasis on the eucharist as the place of reconciliation. For the body of Christ in this understanding, as it is elaborated in some of the most central medieval cultural forms, is precisely not the wafer held between the hands of the priest, whether understood as the transubstantiated elements of bread and wine, or as a memorial enactment of Christ’s redemption. It is the reconciled community. The church as reconciled community might be occluded or betrayed, it might cease to become visible just insofar as a peaceable kingdom is lost, and its lineaments will be restored where such a peace is glimpsed or embodied in its practices. This understanding, which sees the church itself as a performance of the body of Christ rather than a possession of it, has certain consequences. To understand some of the depths of the transformation of Renaissance theater we need to see it in the light of the revolution in ritual and performative culture entailed in church and theater together.22 For the church to perform the body of Christ means that the church itself will become visible or invisible as these bonds of community are made and broken. That is why the discourses and languages of penance and repentance are an intrinsic part of Shakespearean reconciliation, and need to be understood in all their complex longue durée. It is why, I think, in the creation of a theater that is post-tragic, Shakespeare turns with a renewed intensity to the structures and practices of penitence. If Shakespearean tragedy has been about the consequences of the denial of acknowledgment, then the late romances will find in an exploration of the languages of penitence and repentance an exploration too of the possibilities of acknowledgment. We might recall what Hannah Arendt has said: “Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we would never recover.”23 Forgiving, as I earlier suggested, following Hannah Arendt, is a redemption from the predicament of irreversibility.

Resurrection Narratives: I

To understand, in Karl Barth’s terms, grace as forgiveness is to understand the deepest implication of the resurrection narratives in an exploration of memory. In order to see Christ as risen the disciples must recognize themselves as the ones who abandoned him. Recognition of Christ is for them bound up with a self-recognition that must involve a painful confrontation of the past and its diminutions. In a moving exploration of the resurrection narratives, Rowan Williams examines the way in which God’s memory can hold open the past for the apostolic community. To be able to see Christ, for example, Peter must accept his role as denier. He has denied Christ three times as he warms himself before the charcoal fire (John 18:18); in John 21 when the risen Christ is on the shores of Galilee, Peter jumps into the sea to go to him and “Assoone then as they were come to land, they saw hote coales, and fish layd thereon, and bread.”24 Peter is called to recognize the risen Christ in front of the very object by which he had denied him, and he is asked three times if he loves Christ. The reprise of Peter’s actions is essential to the granting of his new apostolic identity: there is no new identity without the redemption of that memory of betrayal, but it is the presence of Christ that allows such a memory to be borne in the first place. The resurrection stories create forgiven persons.25

Peter’s remorse is made a focus of the treatments in some of the resurrection narratives of the mystery cycles.26 In The Towneley Plays, for example, Peter dismisses Mary Magdalen’s witness as foolish carping, and Paul joins in with his misogyny here by assimilating 1 Cor. 15.9–11 to John 20.18–19: “And it is wretyn in oure law / ’Ther is no trust in womans saw.”27 When Peter begins to believe Mary, he is filled with remorse, and his thoughts immediately turn to that moment before the burning coals when he denied Christ: “I saide I knew not that good / Creature, my master” (Thomas of India, ll. 87–88). He rehearses the moment of his betrayal. But when Christ comes with his wounds freshly bleeding, Christ’s forgiveness of his disciples becomes central to his establishment of their apostolic mission. As he breathes the Holy Ghost into them, he grants them the power to bind and loose sin:

I gif you here pauste:

Whom in erth ye lowse of syn,

In heuen lowsyd shall be;

And whom in erthe ye bynd therin,

In heuen bonden be he.

(Thomas of India, ll. 236–240)

Their mission to forgive others is indissolubly based on their own forgiveness, so that their past may be faced and not prove annihilating.

In The Chester Mystery Cycle, the race to the tomb between Peter and “the other disciple” from Luke 24.12 and John 20.2–10 also prompts Peter’s remorse, now tinged with wonder at the emptiness of the tomb and the discarded shroud which he takes as a sure sign of resurrection. Once again he recalls his betrayal of Christ by the coals and his felt lack of worth and is comforted by John.28 In the meditational play from E museo 160, Christ’s Resurrection, the fully penitential dimensions are enlarged even further as Peter enters weeping bitterly and confesses his denial “with teres of contrition.”29 Here the ecclesiological dimensions are drawn out as Peter, first apostle and future pope, reflects on the name given him by Christ:

Petra is a ston, fulle of stabilitee,

Always stedfaste! Alase! Wherfore was I

Not stabile accordinge to my nam, stedfastlye?

(Christ’s Resurrection, ll. 297–300)

The church is founded not in triumphant glory but on the basis of the taking up of just this sinful past. Here, as Leontes remembers Hermione, so Peter remembers Jesus and so also his own cowardice, fear, and lack of fidelity: “When it commys to remembrance / In my minde it is euer!” (Christ’s Resurrection, ll.327–28).

In The Towneley Plays, the intertwining of the eucharistic and penitential is further elucidated by the use of the central text of John 6: “I am the bread of life.” In Towneley’s Resurrection play, as the soldiers sleep, Christ emerges from the tomb as angels sing “Christus resurgens” and, displaying his bleeding wounds, he links the Johannine words to the offering of his body in the mass, a scene usually treated in the Last Supper plays in the other cycles:

I grauntt theym here a measse

In brede, myn awne body.

That ilk veray brede of lyfe

Becommys my fleshe in wordys fyfe:

Whoso resaues in syn or stryfe

Bese dede foreuer,

And whoso it takys in rightwys lyfe

Dy shall ne neuer.30

Yet if resurrection both requires and releases remorseful remembrance, what is being substantiated in Christ’s apparitions is an open question in the plays. Is he a ghost? Both Peter and Thomas ask the question.31 Thomas’s hand deep into the wound of Christ and his sharing of fish and honeycomb materialize his resurrected body for the apostles, but the question of his “ghostliness” plays on the signification of the word as spirit, third person of the Trinity, and the “soul of a deceased person,” appearing in visible form.32

What is being founded is a new community and a new kind of self in which memory can be redeemed, not through the counting and recounting of sin, but through a new form of intersubjectivity. In Shakespeare’s version of resurrection, it is the agencies of both art and religion, of religion working through the agencies of theatrical art, that have become essential to the workings of these narratives.

Resurrection Narratives: II

The trope of resurrection is far from being unique to Shakespeare. Indeed it is very widely used. It appears in Antonio and Mellida, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, The Lady’s Tragedy, The Dutch Courtesan, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, A Trick to Catch the Old One, The Jew of Malta, The London Prodigall, and The Widow’s Tears, for example, and this list is very far from comprehensive.33 Peter Womack helpfully describes the motif and its immense popularity thus:

To die is to deploy, as it were, a power which exceeds that of the ruler; death is the outside of the network of relationships that constitute the society of the play. Those who return from death, then, are impossibly able to exercise this uncanny, asocial authority within ordinary society. It is a fantasy of justice.34

This is a perceptive comment, and it is borne out, I think, by Thomas Middleton’s extraordinary play The Lady’s Tragedy, a play performed by the King’s Men shortly after The Winter’s Tale in 1611, and which presents a sustained interaction with The Winter’s Tale.35 Each play features a tyrant; each play flirts with funerary and statuary art, and with the language of superstition, idolatry, and iconoclasm; each has a lady in a sequestered “tomb.” In Middleton’s play, “the tyrant” usurps Govianus’s throne and seeks to satisfy his lust on the lady betrothed to Govianus. The Lady prefers to die than to submit to his depredations and in a grotesquely staged scene kills herself just before the tyrant’s men enter to abduct her. But if Womack suggests that the motif of resurrection stages a “fantasy of justice” by exercising an uncanny authority within ordinary society, the justice remains “wild” in Middleton’s version. The tyrant, seeking to deny the very limits of death, breaks into the cathedral, kisses her effigy, and breaks open the tomb in which she is kept. Govianus disguises himself as a painter ordered by the tyrant to make the lady look as if she is still alive. Painting her lips with poison (in a bizarre reprise of The Revenger’s Tragedy), he ensures that the lady, so “disguised” as a painted idol, will be the instrument of his death when next the tyrant kisses her. The play works in counterpoint to the medieval tropes of Easter; the tyrant is Herod, and his soldiers are sent not to guard the empty tomb to prevent a resurrection, but to violate and rob the sacred space of the church. The lady “all in white, stuck with jewels, and a great crucifix on her breast” resembles nothing so much as the images of Christ reserved with the sacrament in the Easter sepulcher until Easter Sunday in the medieval rites.36 But she is also a conscious reprise and reversal of Hermione. In the one play a living woman poses as a statue: in the other a dead woman is treated as if she were living, and herself delivers death through the necrophiliac desires of the tyrant. Though she is cold in one play, the amazed response to her warmth constitutes the wonder of the other. In one play the hand of art is used to conceal, and the tyrant’s perverse pleasures are secret; in the other art is revelatory and the event of its disclosure is a public event in which the participation of all present is constitutive of the art of theater.

In Middleton’s reversal of the usual energies and directions of the trope, we are very far from any return to the “ordinary” in Womack’s phrase. Indeed the camp, expressivist horror of the play is an insistence on the difficulty, not to say impossibility of that task. In short, there is no “resurrection” in The Lady’s Tragedy. Justice is revenge, and the lady is the instrumental object (her agency as passive as a dead person can be) of Govianus’s device. “I am not here,” says her ghost, a “voice within” the tomb, when Govianus visits her now empty sepulcher (4.4.40). This is the “non est hic” of the angels on the empty tomb announced to the visiting Maries in the Gospels. The absence of Christ there is the sign of his resurrected presence which must be disseminated in the witness of his apostles. The absence of the lady here can only seem like a stage joke; she is now the material ghost who must be there to give voice to itself, the actor doubling the dead and living bodies—the grammar of “he is not here” and “I am not here” so ludicrously different. Middleton’s brilliantly iconoclastic play allows us to see anew the commitment to the miracle of the ordinary in Shakespeare’s play.

Peter Womack goes on to say that these tropes are authorized by Christ and borrow the “gestic vocabulary of the theatre…which came to an end only twenty years or so before Juliet died and rose again.”37 But the authority of those tropes is unavailable in Middleton’s play. Let us now, finally, turn to Shakespeare’s great resurrection scene to test out the authority of inheritance there.

Leontes’ Shame

However protracted Leontes’ penitence, however drawn out his sadness, however deeply he repents, his actions and his words cannot secure him forgiveness. Though they are necessary indications of the depth of his repentance (for us as audience, for his audience, most especially for Hermione) they cannot in themselves secure any release from the responsibility for the damage he has caused. The discourse on forgiveness in The Winter’s Tale makes it clear that it must come, like grace, through the very medium of religious theater. The stillness of Hermione’s life (her still life, the still life of her) and Leontes’ past actions as set in stone are coterminous. That is why no understanding of the scene is complete without an appreciation of the centrality of Leontes’ tears as the sign of his shame to it. To Paulina’s praise of the carver’s excellence which “makes her / As she lived now,” Leontes returns to what might have been but is not: “as now she might have done / So much to my good comfort as it is / Piercing to my soul” (5.3.32–34). Returned to a vision of her self when first he wooed her, he declares his remorse: “I am asham’d” (5.3.37). It is clear from the words of Camillo and Polixenes at this point that Leontes is crying. Camillo’s logic, though motivated by pity and not by politics, uses the same logic of accounting. There is, he claims, no sorrow that could possibly be so great as not to be blown away by sixteen winters. (“My Lord, your sorrow was too sore laid on / Which sixteen winters cannot blow away / So many summers dry” {5.3.49–51}). He has understood that forgiveness is aporetic.38 For how can Hermione forgive him? She is dead. And there is nothing he can do that might count as reparation in this instance. The encounter with Paulina after the oracle’s declamation has indicated that nothing can come from him that might make any difference, no way of being led away from his sorrows. It is only by fully acknowledging the absolute lucidity of Leontes’ remorse that we can credit the final resurrection of his hopes and loves. He lives now fully unprotected by his own fantasies and denials, quite naked before his own terrible actions. The statue gives him a view of Hermione, but it is in the felt presence conjured by her likeness, in the sheer promise and gratuity of her return, in the self-forgetful yearning and love conjured into being by the statue, that he can also bear the thought of being seen by her, and so bear his shame. His remorse, as I have been arguing, has awakened him to the reality of Hermione. In being able to see her, he must be able to bear being seen by her such that both can be brought to new life through this new presencing. His shame and his repentance are then the very substance of the grace he is in the process of receiving, and there can be no separation between the two movements.

Cleomenes’ discourse has been continued in the interventions of Polixenes and Camillo as they attempt to assume the agency of absolution again and to assuage his penitential tears. Yet the logic of the scene does not lie with their comfort; it stakes itself exclusively on the mutuality of response between Hermione and Leontes. Leontes’ remorse has awoken him to her reality. But her agency is crucial here. (That is why it is a conscious rejection rather than an enaction of Ovid’s Pygmalion: she is decidedly not his creation, his fantasy, though Paulina offers that as a teasing possibility.)39 I imagine that quite what she will do in the chapel when Paulina has drawn the curtain must be open. None of the responses can be predicted, they can only be risked. Were Leontes to revert to fantasy, would she hold still? Could she hold still? The demands of human nature would militate against that. Realizing that she is alive is part of the mesmerizing power of this moment, and she will have to move sooner or later because she is woman, not stone. But if his responses proved disappointing she cannot, being living, avoid acknowledging him, even if such an acknowledgment takes the form of rebuff. (It does take such form in some stagings, and no staging can erase the absent presence of Mamillius in this scene or the weight and waste of time, the pointless, corrosive destruction of love and life.) If she is to remarry him, if he is now to take her hand in his, it must be that in being warm, it can go cold.40

Leontes is transformed in his understanding of himself—sinful and redeemed from sin in one and the same moment, as the past is carried into a redeemed memory. And so a new present and a new presence is made possible. “This is my body,” we might understand Hermione as saying, through which you both remember me and acknowledge me. This is sacramental theater. For in it “how we present ourselves to each other (the classical domain of theater) and how we are present to each other (the domain of the sacrament)” have once again become both theological and theatrical resources, and the Pauline tropes of mortification and vivification are both figurative and actual.41 Here is Donne glossing Shakespeare’s play (as I like to think) in his 1626 sermon on 1 Cor. 15.29:

But this death of desperation, or diffidence in God’s mercy, by God’s mercy hath swallowed all of us, but the death of sinne hath swallowed us all, and for oure customary sinnes we need a resurrection; And what is that? Resurrectio a peccato, & cessatio a peccato, non est idem; every cessation from sin is not a resurrection from sinne. A man may discontinue a sinne, intermit the practice of a sin by infirmity of the body, or by satiety in the sinne, or by the absence of that person, with whom he hath used to communicate in that sin. But Resurrectio, est secunda ejus, quod interrit station. A resurrection, is such an abstinence from the practice of the sin, as is grounded upon a repentance, and a detestation of the sin, and then it is a setting and an establishment of the soule in that state, and disposition: it is not a sudden and transitory remorse, nor onely a reparation of that which was ruined, and demolished, but it is a building up of habits contrary to former habits, and customes, in actions contrary to that sin, that we have been accustomed to. Else it is but an Intermission, not a Resurrection, but a starting, not a waking; but an apparition, not a living body; but a cessation, not a peace of conscience.42

In many of the scenes of return and recollection that I alluded to earlier, there comes a moment when the sudden apparition of the returning figure hovers between the insubstantial and the substantial. So the king in All’s Well will wonder if Helena is real, and Pericles will wonder whether Marina is flesh and blood and not an angel or a blessed spirit. These meanings hover between a gift so wonderful it cannot be of this world, and a sense of imminent haunting loss—and they might say, as the resurrected Christ does: “for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as you see me here” (Luke 24.39).

Perhaps the most extended trope of this kind of encounter is the one between the twins, Sebastian and Viola in Twelfth Night. Viola is in man’s clothing, so she mirrors Sebastian exactly. This time the question is not: are you flesh and blood? But are you a spirit? Yes, says Sebastian, “but am in that dimension grossly clad / Which from the womb I did participate” (5.1.237–38). He could have said—no, I am flesh and blood. But he chooses to animate the other meaning of ghost—not a spirit from the dead but that which gives life to mortal bodies. Do we need the Lutheran joke on ubiquity to see how this figure is borrowing a sacramental affect, a sacramental effect?43 This is recognition as realization, a recognition that slowly grants the reality of the other’s ensouled body, which loss has made so precious.

But Sebastian’s eucharistic language is not just a localized joke of here and there, hic et ubique, a joke repeated in Hamlet as Stephen Greenblatt has reminded us.44 When Calvin in the Institutes pours scorn on this same Lutheran doctrine, he says that Luther renders Christ into a “phantasm.” And his subsequent discussion of Christ’s resurrected body coheres with exactly the kind of exploration of faith and credence, of realization, that occurs in this same statute scene. In Book IV of the Institutes Calvin discusses the appearances of the resurrected Christ in a eucharistic idiom. He is here concerned to distinguish his views, on the one hand, from the gross absurdity of the papist view of the sacrament, and conversely from the view that envisages faith itself as a “mere imagining,” one that therefore has no reality,45 and again from the view that sees participation in Christ as the product of an intellectual understanding only (therefore purely cognitive). The paradigm of participation is, of course, the eucharist, the “sacred supper” and he proceeds to a dense commentary on John 6. It is here that he reserves his greatest scorn for Luther’s idea. The Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity, he claims, opens the door to Marcionism.46 In so doing it makes the body of Christ a “phantom or apparition.”47 In Calvin’s insistence that faith in the body of Christ operates effectually and in a realm distinct both from “merely human imagining” (in which case it is subjective and in the domain of human fantasy) and from the reach of epistemology (mere knowledge), the resurrection appearances are intrinsically linked to faith’s reality. This is what is at stake in the fleshliness of Christ and the fleshliness of Hermione. What Shakespeare adds to Calvin is the beauty and the miracle of what Calvin might call the “merely human.” Shakespeare utterly abjures the eradication of the human in reformed versions of grace. For it was axiomatic to reformed grace that as God-given, and to be God-given, it must be free of all human words and deeds. It is human response that is, for him, rather the medium of grace.

“It is required / You do awake your faith”: Shakespeare’s Theater of Faith

So how could it not be the case that all who attend these mysteries—the audience on the stage and the audience off it—must awake their faith? The Johannine resurrection narrative takes it as axiomatic that the resurrected Christ appears only to those who believe. Indeed John never uses a noun for the term “faith,” but only a verb: faith is not something that you have but something you do. Of the other disciple who reached the empty tomb before Peter, the author of the fourth gospel says: “Then went in also that other disciple which came first to the sepulcher, and hee saw, and believed.”48 We are not told that these disciples believed because they remembered the scriptural predictions of resurrection.49 The risen lord appears only to those who believe in him. It is just such a distinction that Augustine is at pains to make in his commentary on John 6: “that you should believe in him; not that you should believe things about him (Ut credatis in eum, non, ut credatis ei).” He goes on to say: “But if you believe in him, that is because you believe what you have heard about him, whereas whoever believes things about him does not by that fact believe in him; for the demons too believe truths about him but still do not believe in him.”50

In Augustine’s vital distinction between belief in a person and belief about that person, we might discern how the prevailing cognitivist models that inform so much of the discourse on religion in the current academy understand belief in terms of “about,” not “in.” And for the statue scene we don’t need to believe any set of precepts at all to have the experience available to us. But we do have to trust Paulina’s authority. Both John and Paulina understand that the credibility of the resurrection is bound to the credence of believers. Indeed this is simply a tautology. So Paulina’s banishment of all those unwilling to awaken their faith is an impeccably orthodox statement, a philosophical and theological tautology, one might say. And it is vital that what she says is that what is required is that you awake your faith, not that you willingly suspend your disbelief. The latter notion is in contemporary usage, at least, tutored in cognitivist (and in the end, I think, incoherent) models.51 The condition of wonder that the scene seeks to cultivate is not at all attendant upon belief but rather of immediate attunements and attitudes.52 The statue scene, one might say following Altieri, rests on commitments, not opinions.53 We do not need to rely on notions of make-believe.54 The primacy of belief-based modes of analysis then only obscures the working of this scene and its modes of recovery precisely from the epistemic modes of understanding. So it is also vital that Leontes’ faith is as foundationless as his doubt has been. This is what makes it, and the new community founded on it, so fragile and so central. The Winter’s Tale has been called a miracle play. But the miracle is only ordinary just as another human life is both miraculous and ordinary. It is as if theater requires the resources of both art and religion because credit and trust have come to seem not so much the ground of our intelligibility to each other, as phenomena that require nothing short of a miracle.

In an astonishingly prescient series of reflections in the Dialogue Concerning Heresies, Thomas More’s narrator argues with a figure called “the messenger” who, having been infected with Lutheran heresy, comes to argue the position of sola scriptura and sola fide. What emerges in his pressingly skeptical inquiries is that nothing will lay to rest his doubts and fears. The dialogue simply breaks off in a shared meal. But at one point in the dialogue, the narrator compares the messenger to someone who is trying to prove that his father is really his. If you needed proof of everything, he suggests, you would constantly doubt your own origins and legitimacy. The whole proof would rest on one woman, and she would have the most cause to lie:

Let the knowledge of the father alone therefore amonge our wittys mysteryes. And let us se yf we byleue nothynge but that we se our selfe who can reken hymmselfe sure of his owne mother for possible it were that he were changed in the cradell….55

More’s fundamental point is that the messenger is simply unanswerable on his own terms and that he has forgotten the most fundamental forms of trust on which our everyday relations are habitually based. Such skepticism is, he implies, both completely compelling and utterly corrosive for its practitioners’ most basic relations, and therefore self-understandings. You cannot prove who you are. He could be describing Leontes, who doubts not his father’s paternity, but his own. More’s casting of this fundamental problem—in 1529—shows that a man’s fears about paternity and the most divisive religious issues of his culture can feed off the same world and soul-destroying perspective, whose attempted cure will only push him more deeply into the disease of doubt. Wittgenstein says, “The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief.”56