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« Critical writing sample drawn from my Master 1 entitled « Art and Nature in King Lear and in The

Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare».

Introduction :

The binary combination of art and nature was a very important philosophical tool to understand the

world in Renaissance England. According to E. W. Taylor, the association of nature and art refers to man’s place

in the universe.1 This author is a crucial reference for my dissertation since he defines the relation between art

and nature chronologically from the Classical period to the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, Robert Fludd’s

treatise, a visual representation shows the mirror of nature and the image of art (Integra Natura Speculum

Artisque Imago).2 This engraving expresses the wholeness of nature reflected in the mirror of art.3 The image

shows a naked woman crowned with the stars and at her feet the sphere of earth and water. Behind her feet

the world, with a monkey , is holding a globe and the various works of a man. The animal, vegetal and mineral

spheres are clearly visible. Nature is the work of God. Today we would speak of heredity (nature) as opposed to

environment (art) in social psychology. The Elizabethans entertained the idea of an ordered universe : nature

and art. Those two notions have a historical relationship. The pairing of nature and art corresponds to a

‘Christian humanism’ or to a ‘libertin naturalism’. In the Renaissance the pairing of ‘nature and art’ is the

philosophical equivalent of ‘pastoral literature’. Pastoral literature expresses discrepancies between rural and

urban, country and courtly and natural and artificial. The philosophical problem of nature and art is the tension

between what is natural and what is artificial. In late sixteenth and earlier seventeenth century nature and art

was emblematized in pastoral verse for the first time. It handled the tension between nature and art and

constituted the basis for all pastoral literature. The Golden Age or the Garden of Eden referred to nature which

brought food and shelter to man. The pastoral literary convention was the vehicle for philosophical

controversy. In pastoral landscape, nature was portrayed as being superior to art. There was an interaction of

a philosophical idea with a literary genre.

This long philosophical debate over nature appears in 4.4 of The Winter’s Tale, while this debate is less obvious

in King Lear. If we focus on Renaissance uses of nature and art, Plutarch said about the education of the young

that nature was mutilating. So a balance was necessary between the conflicting claims of art and nature. On

the other hand, primitivists, fideists or naturalists like Montaigne, depreciated reason or intellectual endeavour

or art and valued nature more. However, Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), put forward

that nature was defective and therefore it was necessary to supply it with art. Nature and art was a process of

cross-fertilization. Nature and art corrsponded to a real division in the structure of the universe. In the Middle

Ages a fundamental principle prevailed , that is the idea of order. One spoke of the empyrean heavens in

Aristotle and Plato and of the astronomical system of Ptolemy. Law, order, symmetry and proportion were

fundamental. Man was part of a state and the state was part of the cosmos. The whole universe was directed

1

Edward William Taylor, Nature and Art in Renaissance Literature, New York : Columbia University Press, 1949, pp. 1-37.2

Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia in duo volumina secundum cosmi diffirentia divisa, Bry : typis hieronymi Galleri, 1917.3

<htt://fromoldbooks.org/r/3V/pages/Fabricius-Flud-Natura-Mirror/>

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by Divine Providence [ …] There was a controversy over the relative values of nature and art and a controversy

over man’s role in the order of nature. Nature and art was a principle of classification by which man could

organize his perceptions of what was right and legitimate. The combination of nature and art and the relative

value to each term was infinite. The two main alternatives for Renaissance thinkers were that nature and art

were seen as complementary and contrasted with the fact that nature and art were opposed.

Nature embodies the healthy relationships between the member of the same family. It is seen as a natural

metaphor. The political order, especially the ‘divine right of kings’, customs and traditions as well as the cosmos

were also a representation of nature. As opposed to this Elizabethan and Jacobean orthodox thinking,

Renaissance was developing techniques such as grafting, gardens, compasses, telescopes, optics, mechanical

arts, theatre, art, perspective and trompe-l’œil. Those inventions as well as printing, curiosity cabinets,

monsters, marvels, grotesques fascinated people.

In the course of this dissertation I would like to explore in what way the philosophical debate about art

and nature and the pastoral genre work in King Lear and The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare. I will first

show that nature is the art of God and that it is good, yet, nature is perverted by art. I will then argue that

nature and art emulate each other. Lastly I will wonder how far the return to nature is successfully represented

through the powerful art of the theatre.

I – Nature is the art of God or a ‘social construct’, yet, it is being subverted by art.

Nature is related to theology in the Renaissance era, and, as such, it is associated with the origines

of humanity and therefore it is linked to God in a Judeo-Christian world since if we refer to Genesis, God is the

creator of the universe : ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (…) and God saw that it was

good.’ God also created humankind : « God said, ‘Let us make man in our own image, in the likeness of

ourselves (…) »4 Some other critics like Sarah Doncaster, who has more modern views, will argue that nature is

a ‘social construct.’ 5 Thus it appears logical to connect the family to nature. The political realm is also coupled

with the art of God since kings are anointed by God according to the divine right of kings. Yet, the natural order

of things is not respected in the family and in politics. As a result of errors of judgment, deceit and passions,

chaos is being brought about

A – The natural family order is perverted.

In both plays, the family, the descendance and the genealogy correspond to the good natural order of

things. Yet they are perverted by art. Shakespeare thus satirizes the patriarchal and patrilinear society. In King

Lear and The Winter’s Tale the patriarchal structure is well emphasized by King Lear, Gloucester, Leontes and

4

The Bible of Jerusalem, Genesis, chapter 1, « The origin of the world and of mankind », verse 1 ; 12 ; 25. Liverpool : The Popular edition, 1rst of March 1968, p. 5-6.5

Sarah Doncaster, Representations of Nature in King Lear, Shakespeare online, 20 August 2000 ( 29 October 2014) http://www.Shakespeare-online.com/essays/learandanture.html

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Polixenes. The sixteenth century aristocratic family was patrilinear and patriarchal. Patrilinear means that the

male line had its ancestry traced very diligently by the genealogists and heralds. In almost all cases titles were

inherited via male lines. Patriarchy means that the husband and the father lorded over wives and children

with the absolutist authority of a despot.6

Yet, the patriarchal structure is being threatened in the course of the two plays. King Lear is not

respected by Goneril and Regan who use their rhetorical art against him. They do not welcome him with his

hundred knights in 2.2. In 4.7., Lear hints at his tears which is ussually associated with women and shows that

his masculinity is beiing undermined. Gloucester is being duped by his second son, Edmund. Children are

deceitful and resist the patriarchal order. Leontes is a man, yet, his nature is impaired by the Fall, so that he is

bound to err. His jealousy alienates Polixenes and Camillo, causes his son’s and Antigonus’ deaths and his wife’s

and daughter’s apparent death.7 Patriarchy and patrilinear society are being debunked in both plays.

Moreover, Lear and Leontes embody tyrannical power structures. As such, those two kings pervert the

world of nature. Nature is being abused by the civilized order at court, therefore by art, through tyrannic rule.

During the ‘love test’ (1.1) imposed by Lear to his daughters in order to assess how much he is beloved by

them, Lear does not accept the ‘nothing’ of Cordelia. The latter behaves reasonably, explaining that shes loves

her father according to her ‘bond’, which means according to nature and to ‘truth’. Lear, however, ‘disclaims

all his paternal care’ and disinherits her. When Kent, the voice of natural reason, intervenes in Cordelia’s

favour, Lear conjures him not to come between ‘the dragon an his wrath’. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes indicts

Hermione of ‘high treason’, ‘adultery’ and ‘conspiration’ in the trial scene, 3.2, despite the fact that his wife

behaves with moral ‘integrity’ and abides to natural and divine law. Leontes’s jealousy is an evidence of a

perverse passion. He destroys nature throught his courtly art.

In order to understand characters’ behaviours and to distinguish between two different kinds of nature,

we will compare the old versus the new order. First, Bacon and Hooker support the benign nature and Lear’s

old order. 8 According to Danby, ‘the idea of nature, then, in orthodox Elizabethan thought, is always something

normative for human beings [ …]. Reason [is] displayed in Nature [ …]. Law [is] the innermost expression in

Nature. [ …] Custom […] is the basis of law and equally with Law’. Bacon mentions the allegory of Pan/Nature.

Pan comes from two sources. He originates from Mercury or the Divine Word of Scriptures or he comes from

confused seeds of things in which the state of the world is subject to death and corruption after the fall. Lear

speaks of the ‘crack nature’s moulds,’ 3.1.18.

Bacon argues that nature is a rational arrangement and that there is a direct connection between man’s logical

order and the order of the physical universe. Hooker’s starting point in Ecclesiastical Polity is that Nature is the

ideal model from which the world copies. If creatures rebel against the law of nature, it leads to chaos. This

rational optimism incorporates Thunder too. Man’s nature implies the maximum successful cooperation of

6 François Laroque, Pierre Iselin, et Josée Nuyts-Giornal, King Lear, L’œuvre au noir, Paris : PUF, 2009 (2008),p. 69.7 Edward William Tayler, op. cit., p.128.8

John Francis Danby, op. cit., pp. 30-31.

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man and the universe. Destitution implies the bare minimum and is unnatural. King Lear becomes a beggar,

3.2. Lear’s perversion is a courtly art that leads to the destitution of his nature.

Hobbes, on the other hand, associates Edmund and Lear’s wicked daughters to a malignant nature. Lear

criticizes corrupt customs from his viewpoint of nature. However, for Edmund, society and customs can be

unreasonable. He worships a goddess Hooker and Bacon disapprove of. ‘Thou Nature art my goddess, to thy

law/ My services are bounds.’ ( 1.2) This is not an acceptable view in Renaissance. Edmund is a medieval devil,

even if Edmund’s goddess Nature is commonplace for post Darwin audiences since Edmund is intelligent,

possesses a vigorous animality, a handsome appearance and an instinctive appetite. In Hooker and Bacon’s

scheme, Edmund is a figure of Pan, half human and half animal. Lear too has a Manichean vision of women

when he becomes mad. Women are centaurs, half women, half beasts (4.6). Edmund has reason, appetites and

is a rationalist. Yet, his reason is contrary to Lear’s reason which is linked to God and nature. Edmund knows

nature’s law and can manipulate them for given effect. He is a Machiavel figure and is individually separated

from nature and is superior to it. Edmund’s philosopher is Hobbes who supports the view of competition and

suspicion in chapter 13 of Leviathan. In his first soliloquy, Edmund is shown making decisions. Goneril’s key

word is ‘politic’ : she belongs to the race of the Machiavels. Goneril, Regan and Edmund are driven by appetites

or lust. Yet they all die as villains of the play. The notion of nature they adhere to is a courtly art that does not

pay.

In The Winter’s Tale, the Garden of Eden is represented as being corrupted. In the second part of the play,

the Bohemian countryside is opposed to Leontes’s corrupt Sicilian court. Shakespeare’s idealization of the

shepherd’s life does not extend much beyond Perdita who is, like Pastorella in The Faerie Queene, of

shepherd’s nurture but not of shepherd’s nature. And while the old shepherd, that « weather-bitten conduit of

many king’s reign » (5.2.61-2), is allowed to display a certain amount of rude dignity, the Mopsas and Dorcases

of Shakespeare’s pastoral world are bumpkins, foils for that snapper-up of unconsidered trifles, Autolycus. 9

Keeping sheep was a big business, enclosures had been an increasingly serious economic and political issue for

almost a century in Shakespeare’s England. The idyllic pastoral is predicated on the satirical pastoral. The

largest figure in the play’s pastoral landscape is neither a shepherd nor a courtier, but the ballad-seller, pedlar,

conman and thief Autolycus. His name means ‘the wolf himself’. The mythical Autolycus was Odysseus’s

maternal grand-father, of whom Homer says that ‘he outdid all men in stealing and swearing’. Autolycus, as the

son of the patron of thieves and liars, became a master of cunning. Ovid says ‘he could make white black and

black white, a worthy heir of his father’s art’.10

B- Bastardy and adultery : a monstruous or unnatural order of things.

Bastardy and adultery are judged by law in England. We will first consider the issue of illegitimacy. John

Witte analyses the late medieval and early modern English common law of illegitimacy.11

The medieval

common law of England defined illegitimate children as ‘born out of right and lawful wedlock’. Those were

9

Edward William Taylor, op. cit., p. 133.10 William Shakespeare, op. cit., 2008, pp. 50-51.11

John Witte, The Law and Theology of Illegitimacy Reconsidered, Cambridge : CUP, 2009, pp. 105-134.

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generally children born of fornication, prostitution, incest, adultery, polygamy, and other unions prohibited by

various marital impediments. Some children are natural and legitimate, those born in lawful wedlock and of a

lawful wife. Some are natural only, and not legitimate, as those born of a legitimate concubine, with whom a

marriage was possible at the time of procreation, as between an unmarried man and an unmarried woman.

Some are neither legitimate nor natural, as those born of prohibited intercourse, of persons for whom

marriage was not possible at the time of procreation. Such children are spurii who are fit for nothing. In King

Lear, in 1.1, Kent has a dialogue with Gloucester in which he mentions his illegitimate son, Edmund. Gloucester

was aware that he was at fault with the English common law. In the later Middle Ages, Parliament occasionally

did issue a special act legitimating the children of a favored family of the realm, a practice that continued until

modern times. But such acts were reserved for the very-well connected who found themselves in extreme

need. And while it conferred some rights and dignities, this private act of Parliament did not give a bastard son

the right to succeed to his father’s political or clerical office. In King Lear, Gloucester in Act 2, scene 1, lines 84-

85, mentions his ‘natural boy’ and promises to ‘work the means/To make [him] capable’. In 5.3.123, Edmund is

addressed as the ‘Earl of Gloucester’ by Edgar. Yet, he does not inherit the throne. The issue of inheritance is

also analyzed. According to Witte, legitimate children could inherit, whereas illegitimate children could not.

We will now consider the issue of adultery. In the Winter’s Tale (3.2), in the trial scene, Hermione is

accused of having had a ‘bastard’ by Polixenes (l. 81) and Leontes asks her alleged adultery to be punished by a

prison sentence : ‘Away with her to prison’ (2.1.103). Polixenes, a supposed adulterer, was threatened to be

killed by poison by Camillo (3.2.158). Gloucester had his eyes pulled out because of his adultery (3.7). Witte

claims that in 1576 Poor Law also empowered the justices of the peace to mete out ‘punishment of the mother

and the reputed father’ for their sexual offences that had caused the ‘great dishonor’ to ‘the laws of man and

of Almighty God.’ A 1610 Poor Law became sterner, calling for the justices of the peace to imprison for a year

and set to hard labor ‘every lewd woman which shall have any bastard which shall be chargeable to the parish.’

In application, proven fathers, too, could be convicted under those laws as accessories to the woman’s ‘lewd

behavior’ and put to work or in prison. It shows that Leontes’s death sentence towards Polixenes was more

severe than the law, that he distorted the latter in his folly.

Leontes wrongly accuses Perdita of bastardy. Orgel asserts that the question of Perdita’s legitimacy is one

with complex social and legal implications. It is related to Elizabeth I, the offspring of Henry VIII and Anne

Boleyn. Elizabeth, like Perdita, was declared illegitimate by an act of royal imagination and had the taint of her

bastardy or contended with it throughout her long reign. Her official iconography included continual allusions

to both the Virgin Mary and the Phoenix, vainly enlisting typology and symbolism to assert the immaculateness

of her own conception. Leontes’s royal patriarch’s fantasy of cuckoldry fed his insane dream which was not a

paranoid invention. However Perdita was legitimized after many years of anonymity and exile. Elizabeth ‘s

claim to the throne derived from her father’s will, which established the line of succession. Under English law,

however, Elizabeth was in fact not illegitimate, nor would Perdita have been. Leontes’s paranoia was not only a

tragic delusion. It had clear cultural co-ordinates. King James I lived under the shadow of his mother’s

reputation for profligacy. He feared the charge against him being illegitimate, not Lord Darney’s son, but

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Rizzio’s, Mary Stuart’s secretary, who would keep him from the English throne. For the three first acts of the

play, Leontes thus artfully manipulates the law of nature.

In King Lear, bastardy and false bastardy are being confused. The paradox of the bastard’s unnatural kind

is close to the heart of King Lear where the notions of ‘nature’ and ‘kind’ are extensively problematized, and

where the oppositions between the ‘true’ and the ‘bastard’, the ‘natural’ and the ‘unnatural’, are alternately

supported and confounded by the behaviour of Lear’s and Gloucester’s children. In a desperate endeavour to

maintain the ‘natural’ boundaries between the legitimate and illegitimate, the two fathers rhetorically

bastardize their legitimate children, making of Cordelia a filia nullia, denouncing Edgar as an ‘unnatural’ […]

monster’ (1.2.76-94), and repudiating Goneril as a ‘degenerate bastard’ […] more hideous than the ‘sea-

monster’ (1.4.254-61). But for Lear the conviction that ‘Gloucester’’s bastard son/was kinder to his father than

my daughters/Got’tween the lawful sheets’ (4.6.114-17), begins to collapse all such distinctions into a

misogynist vision of universal adultery, where all are bastardized and bemonstered by the very circumstances

of their begetting between the Centaur thighs of their mothers.12 Even though Cordelia represents nature itself

in the image of God by her very legitimacy, yet she is treated like a bastard, losing her dower and her lands and

being banished. Her father abuses her even though she abides to the bonds of nature.

C- The political order of nature and its perversion by art or courtly civilization.

The divine right of kings is a doctrine in defense of monarchical absolutism which asserted that kings

derived their authority from God and could not therefore be held accountable for their actions by any earthly

authority such as parliament. By the sixtenth and sevententh centuries the new national monarchs were

asserting their authority in matters of both church and state. King James I of England (1603-1625) was the

foremost exponent of the doctrine of the ‘divine right of kings’ which disappeared from English politics after

the Revolution of 1688.13

In King Lear (1.2) when Lear divides the kingdom and banishes Cordelia, a noble

courtier, Kent, attempts to bring back the king to reason. Yet, Lear’s arbitrary and perverse will banishes Kent.

Lear shows himself to exercise an absolute power over the future of the kingdom. No powerful parliament can

counterbalance his decisions in this scene. The king reigns supreme. Yet, in 4.7, Lear ironically claims that he is

a ‘very foolish, fond old man’ when he sees Cordelia. Orgel declares that during James I’s reign the divine right

of kings became a serious political philosophy and that the mystical side of kingship was essential to the

throne. According to Sarah Doncaster, ‘Nature is a socially constructed concept.’ In light of these arguments

she analyses ‘the representations of nature in King Lear to show how the play can be seen as both a portrayal

of and a contribution to the social and political beliefs of the time.’ We are now informed that ‘the Elizabethan

and Jacobean age were not known for their unity.’ It was a time of change and upheaval […] when James I

succeeded Elisabeth I to become the first Stuart King, although he ended the war with Spain in 1604, he could

not overcome the deep-seated political and financial problems that dogged the state. Therefore in order to

overcome any debate on Kingship regarding legitimacy or efficiency the representation of unity and harmony

between the state and nature was of paramount importance to his continued reign. ‘Kings are justly called

Gods for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of Divine power on the earth.’ This quotation is from a

12 Michael Neill, op. cit., p. 286.13

The New Encyclopedia Britannica, volume 4, Chicago, 2005 (1768), p. 132.

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speech by James I to his parliament and it illustrates a belief in the divine right of kings. ‘By connecting the

notion of the divine to Kings, James I is legitimising his power through naturalisation.’ 14

The royal prerogative ironically leads to a misuse of power. The royal prerogative is essential to the

exercise of the sovereignty’s authority. By the time of the Reformation, kings were called gods and exercised

divine power upon earth. James I insisted that Parliament did not call upon royal prerogative.15

In The Winter’s

Tale , Leontes’s 'prerogative’ is alluded to in 1.1.163 after he has sent Hermione to prison. In King Lear, 1.1, the

king relinquishes his ‘power’ and ‘pre-eminence’ when he divides his kingdom, bequeathing ‘dowers’,

‘revenue’, ‘execution’ to his ‘son’. In one case, Leontes abuses the prerogatives he was supposed to exercise as

a souvereign and by decision, art, transgresses nature based on law. On the other hand, Lear gives up his

natural power and his choice caused by his desire to be loved, leads him astray and out of the bonds of nature.

II- Nature and art emulate each other.

Nature comes first since it conjures up the point of origin, yet art is the product of nature. This leads to a cross-

fertilisation between nature and art. The Renaissance was torn between the traditional values of the Middle-

Ages based on theology and the spirit of innovation in many fields such as the arts, techniques, sciences in a

rising capitalist society. Shakespeare, however, also takes pain to relate human nature to great classical myths.

Those myths are connected to the pastoral. Pastoral is a literary genre that often opposes the natural world to

a more civilised way of life. Yet nature and art may be inverted in the sense that courtly characters may lose

their reason or be deceitful, whereas the natural world may restore civilization to order. Claude Levi-Strauss, a

twentieth century anthropologist, wonders what the respective parts of nature and culture are in Culture et

société, while Rousseau’s famous quote starting the novel, l’Emile , runs thus : ‘One shapes plants through

culture and men through education.’16

A- The conflict of art vs. nature.

Perdita praises nature alone, yet, Polixenes supports the art of grafting in 4.4.. Harold S. Wilson argues

that the passage in The Winter’s Tale (4.4.79) where Polixenes and Perdita discuss the merits of such ‘artificial’

flowers as carnations and gillyvors has been widely admired.17

As Furness has noted, Polixenes in defending the

art of grafting has stated the relation between his royal son and the shepherd’s maid with his metaphor of

marrying a ‘gentler scion to the wildest stock’, and Perdita cheerfully assents to the figure, if not to the

application Polixenes intends ; while the audience, familiar with the play and secure in the knowledge that

Perdita is a true princess, after all, enjoys the further irony of the maid’s accepting the partly false analogy to

justify her marriage with Florizel, urged by the man who mistakenly thinks he has most interest in opposing the

14 Sarah Doncaster, Representations of Nature in King Lear. Shakespeare online. 20 August 2000 (31 October 2014) http://www.shakespeare-online.com/essays/learandnature.html15

William Shakespeare, op. cit., 2008, p. 13.16 Claude Levi-Strauss, Culture et société : les structures élémentaires de la parenté, chapitre I et II, Paris : Editions Flammarion, 2008, p. 9 ; 11.17 Harold S. Wilson, « Nature and Art in The Winter’s Tale, IV, iv, 86 ff », Shakespeare Association Bulletin, New

York : The Shakespeare Association of America, volume 18 (1943), pp. 114-120.

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match. Polixenes defends the carnations and gillyvors which Perdita disdains. Perdita claims that ‘There is an

art which in their piedness shares/With great creating Nature.’ ( 4.4.88-89) Polixenes answers :

Yet Nature is made better by no mean But nature makes that mean ; so over that art Which you say adds to nature, is an art That Nature makes. (4.4.89-92)

This way of couching terms is one of the many ‘nature and art’ relationships familiar in ancient and Renaissance

literature. A few parallels for the passage as a whole have been noted by the commentators and may be

worthwhile to indicate something of the antiquity and extent. The earliest history of the conception of ‘nature’

as subsuming the arts of man has been traced by A. O. Lovejoy and George Boas in Primivitism and Related

Ideas in Antiquity. As they have remarked, Shakespeare’s thought is adumbrated though not unequivocably

anticipated in a saying attributed to Democritus : ‘Nature and culture are much alike ; for culture changes a

man, but through this change unmakes nature. » A clearer Plato supplies to the sophistic antithesis of ‘nature

and art’ ; ‘Law itself […] an art […] exist by nature or by a cause not inferior to nature, since, according to right

reason, they are the offspring of the mind.’ Lovejoy and Boas have ikewise noted at length the occurrence of

the conception that ‘nature’ comprehends ‘art’ in Aristotle and Cicero.

To reassert this debate between Art and Nature in The Winter’s Tale , David Kaula highlights the contrast

between Perdita and Autolycus according to a consistent pattern.18

If Autolycus deals in manufactured wares

such as silks, beads, and bugle-bracelets, Perdita distributes such natural things as flowers and sends her

brother to market to buy fruits and spices. While he sells trinkets which artificially enhances female beauty, she

dislikes painting both in the fower garden and the boudoir (4.4.101). While he is forever contriving how to get

money through picking pocket, cutting purses, and selling his trumpery, she freely offers her flowers, and the

wealth she is associated with is not ordinary money but ‘fairy gold.’ (3.3.118). While he proceeds through a

series of disguises to deceive his victims, she is embarrassed by being ‘pranked up’ as a goddess and wishes to

appear only in her true guise as a ‘poor lowly maid’ (4.4.9-10). The general distinction between Autolycus and

Perdita seems to be between the artificial and the natural, the predatory and the charitable, the licentious and

the chaste.

Cosmogony articulates this conflict between art and nature in both plays too. An allusion to Ixion is made

in King Lear. Gaëlle Ginestet analyzes this myth in the light to its relevance to the debate between art and

nature.19 The allusion to the ‘wheel of fire’ occurs in 4.7. King Lear is rejeted by his selfish daughters, Regan and

Goneril, and he has gone mad. He errs over the heath and faces a dreadful thunderstorm. King Lear was found

by Cordelia’s followers who look after him and brings him, asleep, to his youngest and devoted daughter. When

he wakes up, Lear tells Cordelia : ‘Thou art a soul in bliss ; but I am bound /Upon a wheel of fire, /that mine

own tears/Do scald like molten lead.’ Cordelia’s ’soul in bliss’ is reminiscent of the souls of the valorous, who

dwell in Elizium, a place in the Underworld. On the other hand, Lear recognizes that he is in Hell. Since

18 David Kaula, « Autolycus trumpery », Studies in English Literature , 1500-1900, Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, volume 16 (1976), pp. 293-294.19 Gaëlle Ginestet, « Ixion. » In a Dictionary of Shakespeare’s Classical Mythology, Yves Peyré ed., 2009.

http://www.shakmyth.org/myth/131/ixion

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Fulgentius, Ixion’s wheel often merged with the wheel of Fortune, in particular, Lear, when he says : ‘I am

even /The natural fool of fortune’ (4.5.186-87). This wheel of Fortune embodies both classical and Christian

hells. It highlights the old king’s moral and physical sufferings which are supposed to punish his crimes. The

Ixion myth underlines King Lear’s vanity and delusion. He has been narcissistic when he wished to be loved by

his daughters. Lear also stripped himself from his power, only keeping the mere illusion of it. It is symbolized by

his hundred knights recalling the centaurs. From court, which stands for art or civilization, Lear is turned into a

diminished nature. Ixion is a lso a myth about ingratitude. Not only did King Lear commited deeds of

ingratitude towards Cordelia and Kent, but various characters share Ixion’s part. Regan and Goneril display

ingratitude towards their old father, which makes him exclaim about Goneril : ‘ Ingratitude, thou marble-

hearted fiend’ (1.4.237). This myth structures the play showing a fragmenting process of nature. The irony is

that this process of destructuration comes from court, which usually embodies civilisation and art. The

thunderstorm (2.2, 3.1, 3.2, 3.4) can be interpreted as a symbol of sudden disillusionment and as providential

justice. So physical nature takes part in the punishment of human nature.

In The Winter’s Tale , the myth of Proserpina from Ovid’s Metamorphoses emblematizes a philosophical

reflexion around the departure from nature and then the return to nature and civilization or art, to Sicily.

During the shearing feast, Perdita seeks to award guests some flowers according to their age, yet, she deplores

not being able to achieve this task. (4.4.113-118). The young woman identifies to Proserpina who let all her

flowers drop when Pluto took her away in his chariot. How does the myth of Proserpina enlighten the structure

of The Winter’s Tale in relation to the debate between art and nature ? In Proserpina’s myth, Sicily was a place

of fertility and of Spring fecondity. Proserpina went there to pick up flowers when she was taken away by

Pluto, the god of death. He brought her to Hell and during her absence, Sicily lost her fertility and Winter

settled down. Spring could not return to Sicily as long as Proserpina stayed with Pluto. So it was when

Proserpina returned there six months out of twelve that Winter and Spring could alternate and that the cycle

of seasons could be established. Both Proserpina and Perdita were beautiful women who came from Sicily

and were both forcefully taken away. Proserpina was kidnapped by Pluto and Perdita was abandonned in the

natural environment by Antigonus on Leontes’s order. In both narratives the consequence of the young

women/female baby were heavy. It set Sicilia into an hivernal state. While Hermione was being tried, the

oracle predicted that Leontes will be heirless if what is lost is not to be found again, that is if Perdita does not

return. Antoine Pageau St-Hilaire suggests that this young woman symbolically embodies this ‘Great creating

nature’ that she ardently defends during the shearing feast (4.4.88).20 Perdita’s return to Sicily would be the

necessary condition for nature to return and for the rough Winter to disappear, paving the path for Spring. So

Perdita’s return highlights the return of Spring after a too long Winter of sixteen years. Perdita will bring back

Spring and the natural cycle with it to Sicily, the civilized court standing for art.

B- Pastoral vs. art.

20 Antoine Pageau St-Hilaire, « La nature dans le conte d’hiver », Klesis- Revue philosophique, volume 25 :

Philosophies de la nature, 2013.

10

Tayler gives a definition of pastoral.21

Until the Renaissance the pastoral genre did not develop its full

potentiality as a vehicule for exploring the division between nature and art. Although the pastoral did develop

in antiquity its concern with idealized nature and the Golden Age, it did not fully exploit the moral aspects of

the antithesis between art and nature. The Pastoral idealizes the original condition of man, or at least what it

represents to be man’s original condition. We think of the myth of the Golden Age. This pastoral form conveys

some nostalgia for lost time of happiness and simplicity. The form of the pastoral is itself an expression of the

division between nature and art. In Virgil, the pastoral begins to display moral direction. The Eclogues

represent an aesthetic ordering of primitivist sentiments, and in such sentiments lies the possibility of

opposition betwen nature and art. Nevertheless, the effect of The Eclogues is to idealize the bucolic existence

and hence implicitly to prefer nature before art. In Arcadia, nature has no deficiencies and hence no need of art

to supply them. At this time it will be enough to note that the aesthetic organization of primitive sentiments in

Virgil’s Eclogues may also become under certain circumstances – particularly, of course, in treating the Golden

Age or the Garden of Eden – a moral organization of experience. The Daphnis and Chloe is an atypical romance

but the primary reason for its unique quality is the philosophical and ethical conflict betwen Nature and Art. In

Dio Chrysostom’s Hunters of Euboea, the hunter is less a man than a moral principle, used to exalt nature

above the art of the corrupt and decadent city.

We are going to analyse how the debate art and nature function in King Lear and its pastoral. According

to Wendell the play relates that in the civilized world, the man made artificial world [my understanding]

‘things fall apart’ because the people of power have grown selfish, cruel and dishonest.22

As a result, the

powerless and the disempowered are sent flying from their settled domestic lives into the wilderness or the

world’s wildness or the world of nature. Thus deprived of civilization and exposed to the harschness of the

natural world and its weather, they suffer correction, and their suffering eventually leads to a restoration of

civilization and order. By the unnaturalness of his bad daughters Lear is driven out int nature. Nature is the

open heath in the midst of a « pitiless storm. » The pitilessness of the storm is the measure of the pitilessness

of Goneril, Regan and Cornwall, though the pitilessness of the storm, unlike that of the family villains, is not

unkind, as Lear understands and says in 3.2. The heath and the storm belong to the moral landscape of the

tragedy. And Lear’s dreadful exile upon the heath in the storm and the darkness forces almost immediately a

change upon the character. Even as he announces to the Fool that he is going mad – ‘ My wits begin to turn’ -

he speaks for the first time unselfishly, in compassion and concern for the Fool’s suffering : « How dost, my

boy ? Art cold ? » (3.2.67-8) So his wits are not just turning to madness, which is the utter frustration and

destruction of his sanity as of act 1, but also to a better natural sanity.

Lear’s adversity has persuaded him to know himself. It has reduced him from a king to a mere human,

sharing the lot of other humans. In 3.4 he speaks in compassion, confession, and repentance. The disguised

Kent, the faithful servant, has led the old king and the Fool to a hovel that will provide them some meager

shelter from the storm. At The doorway Lear says : ‘Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,/How shall

21

Edward William Tayler, op. cit., pp. 38 ; 56-63.22 Berry Wendell, « The Uses of Adversity », Sewane Review, Sewane : University Press of Kentucky, volume

115, Spring issue 2 (2007), pp. 211-239.

11

your houseless heads and unfed sides,/ (…) defend you/From seasons such as these ?’ (3.4.28 ; 30-32) Lear’s

admission, ‘O, I have tak’n / Too little care of this !’ (3.4.32-33) is the turning point of the story. Recognition of

the suffering of ‘poor naked wretches’ leads directly here to the biblical imperative of charity to the poor. That

charity is associated to nature in the sense that it is part of a healthy organic society.

That theme is repeated by Gloucester in 4.1, after he has given his purse to Poor Tom. ‘So distribution

should undo excess’. (4.1.73) Cast out in the storm and the darkness, Lear too is accompanied, first by the Fool

and then by Kent and then by Gloucester, at the cost of his eyes, and then by Cordelia and Albany. They are

the good faithful servants of the play. To this great force of relentless if self-doomed evil, Shakespeare oppose

the counter force of good and faithful service. What the good servants can do, and this they succeed in doing,

is to restore those defeated old men to their true nature as human beings. Martin Lings refers to the Purgatory

of Dante’s Divine Comedy. That is how we could depict this pastoral on the heath. Lear’s sufferings may be

perceived as a kind of purification leading to redemption after death. So King Lear’s and The Winter’s Tale’s

pastoral have redemptive qualities to counterpart an artful civilized court. The King Lear’s black pastoral shows

natural forces of good and evil compete with each other.

Some critics confine their reading of pastoralism in The Winter’s Tale to the standard bucolic features of

Bohemia as a more or less gratuitous vehicle for the typical preoccupations of Shakespearean romance. Such a

reading is incomplete. But none has adequately recognized the play’s debt to the fundamental pastoral rhythm

of ‘recreation’. None has fully considered the implications to the premise that the sojourn in Arcadia for the

natural world of ‘Bohemia’ represents a temporary, restorative withdrawal from the reigning confusion of the

Sicily court so-called civilization to a kind of visionary space where the eyes of the mind are purged and one

sees again in lucido speculo. Bernard wants to show that far from mechanically attaching conventional

pastoral elements to the basic romance formulae of the late plays, in The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare fully

appropriates the spirit of Renaissance pastoralism and embodies it in an organically, even definitely pastoral

work. The core of the work is its visionary poetics, but closely allied are two other features. One is the idea

that as a mode of clarification, pastoral carries the promise of a redemptive view of civilization. Holding up to

nature carries the promise of a rectified imagination and the play becomes an instrument of social

regeneration. The other feature is the habitual self-consciousness traditionally associated within the form.

That The Winter’s Tale portrays the loss of restoration of an innocent world of human felicity is axiomatic,

though the location of that world is often misunderstood. On the other hand, it is suggested that the play,

which begins in an all too familiar ‘fallen’ world of tragic experience and moves through a regenerative one of

pastoral freshness, ends on the freshhold of pure transcendence. The Winter’s Tale portrays a secular version

of paradise lost and paradise regained. In the unfolding of this action with its necessary interval of time for the

maturing of the plays’s restorative vision, a crucial moment occurs near the end of the first tragic half of the

play. As we follow with horror the destructive effects of Leontes’s fantasy, seemingly unrelated events set in

motion the ultimately happy resolution : the birth of Hermione’s second child and the sentence of the oracle.

Famous in antiquity as the omphalos or navel of the world, the shrine at Delphos is where the eternal and

incorruptible world of the god enters our own world of contingency. Pastoral therefore restores nature, far

away from the civilized world of court.

12

C- The medical question : sick nature and its artistic representation.

Lear’s 'hysterica passio’ has an artistic correlation in the scenes of the tempest. Jean Fuzier reports that in

terms of literary background, madness was present in drama from its very beginnings.23 There were classical

examples, both in Ancient Greece and in ancient Rome, by which Elizabethan drama benefited, and whose

influence can be traced in many plays. But madness was only an occasional feature of Greco-Latin drama and it

could never be described then as an all-pervading theme or device. King Lear’s case is one of genuine

madness. It portrays the unnatural. The model referred to being the Hieronimo archetype, an old man driven

mad by grief and anger whatever the cause may be. Lear was not mad when he divided the kingdom as some

critics assumed. Even when Kent, after Cordelia has been banished, tells him ‘be Kent unmannerly/When Lear

is mad’ (1.1.146-7), he does not regard Lear as unsane. When Goneril and Regan discuss their father at the end

of the scene, they complain that his age is full of changes, that he has shown poor judgment, and that even in

early years ‘he hath ever but slenderly known himself’ (1.1.294-5), they imply that Lear is unruly, wayward,

infirm and choleric, he is approaching senility, yet he is not mad. He is driven mad by a series of schocks. The

first schock occurs at 1.4 and is provoked by Goneril’s unexpected attack on her father. ‘Doth any here know

me ?’ (l. 217). Later in the same scene he begins to realize that he has wronged Cordelia , and that it was ‘folly’,

the full recognition of which takes place in the next scene (1.5). And at the end of Act 1, Lear has his first

serious premonition of insanity : ‘O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven !’ (1.5.43). The second shock

comes when Lear finds Kent in the stocks. (2.2) This causes the first physical symptom of the form of frenzy

known to the Elizabethans as ‘hysteria’.

The third shock is caused by Regan’s rejection. Lear prays for patience and he threatens revenge on his

two daughters. Kenneth Muir remarks that ‘Lear’s refusal to ease his heart by weeping is accompanied by the

first rumblings of the storm which is a projection on the macrocosm of the tempest in the microcosm,’ and that

Lear ‘knows from the thunder that what he most feared will come to pass ‘O fool, I shall go mad.’ (2.2.475).

Ultimately, exposure to the storm completes what ingratitude began. Lear’s identification with the storm is

both a means of presenting it to the stage, and a sign that his passions have overthrown his reason. He sees

himself mirrored in Edgar (3.4.62) : ‘Have his daughters brought him to the pass ?’ And the Fool aptly

comments : ‘This cold night will turn us all to fools and mad men.’ (3.4.77) Lear himself discards his clothes to

complete his likeness with Poor Tom. The strange meeting, added to the exposure and physical exhaustion,

prevented him from recovering from the shocks he received. He became a raving mad man , mixing matter

with impertinence and fed his madness with an illusion of power and kingship, when arraigning his daugters

(3.6) and deciding to entertain Edgar. Lear then disappeared until we hear about him again in 4.4. Lear’s

madness shows the disorder of nature inside Lear and in the cosmos. Shakespeare expresses this madness

through his art.

Art competes with nature in the sense that Leontes’s ’tremor cordis’ is also an unnatural phenomenon

which is represented on the stage. ‘Tremor cordis’ is a medical condition ascribed by Galen to overheated

blood, for which bloodletting was the prescribed treatment. But sixteenth and seventeenth century medical

23 Jean Fuzier, « Madness in King Lear », in Suhamy Henry (directed by), « King Lear », William Shakespeare,

Paris : Ellipses, 2008, pp. 111-120.

13

practice rejected this diagnosis, and considered ‘tremor cordis’ not a disease but a common symptom, an

involuntary palpitation of the heart as an indication of an indeterminate disorder with an almost indefinite

range.24

Antoine Pageau St-Hilaire symbolically sees an art (a tale) of nature (Winter) in The Winter’s Tale.25

According to him the tragic dynamic of the beginning of the play is represented as going away from nature.

Leontes’s disease, jealousy, is caused by the complexifications provoked by eros in the king’s soul and realm.

Leontes has an imperfect understanding of nature. Leontes does not feel comfortable with the natural

elementary movements of eros which is part of human nature. This leads him to go away from nature. Leontes

lacks the vision of nature which is benevolent and which organises the universe. In this play, Shakespeare

allows the spectators to move from a philosophy of nature to another : from the nature of eros, primary

nature, to a nature which organises the universe. Antoine Pageau St-Hilaire believes that this shakespearian

symbolic issue allows the spectators to finds a solution to the ethical and the political problems arising at the

start of the play.26 When Leontes and Polixenes were boys, their friendship was innocent because it was

deprived of eros. The problem of the eros is at the heart of a tension in Act 1. It is the arrival of a stronger

blood, of an erotic passion that brings temptations in Leontes and in Polixenes. The appearance of eros made

both men fall. This sudden change is at the heart of the doctrine of the original sin. It is similar to the push of

eros in Leontes’s soul at the sicilian court. The king does not know what to do with eros. According to Pageau,

Leontes ‘s psychological and political instability in this situation reveals that the king does not know how to

deal with women in the public sphere. Leontes is deeply unsettled by the irruption of eros at court and in his

friendship for Polixenes. Leontes does not know how to understand the friendly attachment between Polixenes

and Hermione. He imagines that the desire that drives them together is of a sexual order. His vision of love is

altered by his understanding of eros, which is based on the biblical conception of carnal desires. When he

speaks of his love for Hermione, Leontes keeps his mind fixed on sexuality and he considers it like a vile activity

which leads to sin, in particular to the sin of adultery. Leontes has a sad sinful view of love which is associated

with tragedy. Leontes swiftly becomes jealous. As a result he moves away from nature. Pageau St-Hilaire

compares Leontes’s jealousy to the Old Testament God’s jealousy. By placing himself at the centre of the world,

Leontes denies the existence of a superior natural order which would be above his will. The conception of love

by Leontes can be contrasted to the ‘erotic love’ of the clown for Mopsa and Morca. The shepherd is in love

with two women at the same time, yet he will marry none of them. Eros, or primary nature, or libertinism, is

handled in a comic mode by Shakespeare. No psychological damage ensues this. No love convention is

expected here. As a third alternative, Florizel and Perdita accepts eros because it rimes with spring, fertility

and nature. Yet, they go further than the clown and accepts the convention of marriage, which makes nature

civilised.27

24 William Shakespeare, op. cit., 2008, p. 100.25

Antoine Pageau St-Hilaire. « La nature dans Le Conte d’hiver », Klesis – Revue philosophique, volume 25, 2003.26

Antoine Pageau St-Hilaire, ibidem., p. 88.27 Roger J. Trienens, « The inception of Leontes’s Jealousy in The Winter’s Tale », Shakespeare Quarterly,

Washington : Folger Shakespeare Library, volume 4, issue 3 (1953), pp. 321-326.

14

Leontes’s brain is very sick and unnatural and his false assumptions leads him to make errors of judgment

and to create chaos around him. Leontes’s motive for jealousy is internal, whereas Lear’s motives for becoming

mad are external. Leontes’s nature is impaired by his suspicious jealousy. Shakespeare points to the two kings’

diseases, which is a way of satirizing the folly of kingship. Yet, the playwright strives for restoring the lost state

of nature.

Before the Renaissance the absolute superiority of the divine creation over the human creation was accepted

by everyone.28 During the Renaissance, however, things began to change. The focus shifted from reproduced

reality to reproduction. Artists kept on imitating nature, but they did so in a spirit of rivalry and they were

pushed to become bolder and bolder in that direction. They even hoped that human creation would outshine

its model.

III- Shakespeare’s powerful art : a return to nature ?

In the aesthetic field the mimetic definition of art reigned supreme from the Greek classical period until

the middle of the ninetenth century, after which it collapsed. 29

Shakespeare mocked at the realistic cult, but

his reasons for doing so were different from our contemporaries’ motives. The playwright saw in the triumph

of the artifice a first twist to the integrity of human nature. Behind the fetishism of the realistic imitation,

Pascal and Shakespeare sensed the mimetic desire of mimesis and, with it, a neglect of the living being, which

reflected the rise of a huge mimetic crisis.

In Shakespeare’s time, the mannerist context of emulation between the arts and the artists was made

possible through the medium of print and the ambivalent relation to nature which the artist is called upon to

surpass. Henrick Goltzius was one of the most representative artists of Northern Mannerism. He describes it as

‘bold touch, variety of postures, curious and true shadow’. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot compared the

Shakespearean quest for a multiplicity of viewpoints with the mannerist techniques and aesthetics. The English

playwright, too, was associated with the ‘spectacular’ and he took the spectators away from the bare stage

and from the austere simplicity of the « wooden O » to lead us towards the new scenography in perspective of

the private theatre of the Blackfriars and towards the masks at court. As Ben Jonson depended for those masks

on the technical mastery of the drawer and architect Inigo Jones, Shakespeare may have hoped to take part in

this new form of artististic sophistication.30

Shakespeare’s theatrical art has a universal mission to entertain and to educate the public who comes

and watches his plays. This was the Renaissance view of the theatre’s role. The playwright instructs viewers

about human nature and its worst sides as well as its capacity to improve itself. While showing the worst

passions in men, the theatre performs a role of catharsis. In Greek, catharsis means ‘purgation’. Aristotle uses

the word in his definition of tragedy in chapter VI of Poetics. The key sentence is : ‘tragedy through pity and

28 René Girard, Les feux de l’envie (traduit de l’anglais par Bernard Vincent), Paris : B. Grasset, 1990, p. 535.29

René Girard, op. cit., p. 534.30 Josée Nuyts-Giornal. « La virtuosité shakespearienne et le tour de force maniériste dans Le conte d’hiver »,

Shakespeare en devenir – Les Cahiers de la Licorne – Shakespeare en devenir n°2, 2008.

15

fear effects a purgation of such emotion.' So, in a sense, the tragedy, having aroused powerful feelings in the

spectators, has a therapeutic effect. After the storm and climax there comes a sense of release from tension

and of calm.31

A- The art of disguise : a necessity to return to the natural order of things.

The art of disguise is a way of restoring nature. ‘Disguise’ in the Elizabethan drama is defined as Miss

Bradbrook to mean the ‘substitution, overlaying or metamorphosis of dramatic identity, whereby one

character sustains two roles. This may involve deliberate or involuntary masquerade, mistaken or concealed

identity, madness or possession.’ Hugh Maclean goes on to speak of Kent and Edgar, who illustrate

Shakespeare’s use of ‘an old tradition, that of the disguised protector.’ 32 ‘Edgar’s are protective colouring,’

required of the good man who ‘trusts to patience, and that process of providence or time which he calls

ripeness,’ and who will at length reveal himself and ‘overcome the Machiavel.’ Maclean suggests that while

both Edgar and Kent are, in broad terms, ‘of the Lear party,’ they represent two ways of life, one a model, the

other an imperfect imitation.

Maclean quotes Bradley, who, impressed with, ‘a consciousness of greatness in pain, and of solemnity in

the mystery we cannot fathom,’ concludes that, ‘whether Shakespeare knew it or not,’ the ‘indictment of

prosperity’ is a theme present throughout the play, and that ‘the only real thing’ in a world containing good

and monstuous evil is the patient and devoted soul.’ In spite of the tragic events in the world of King Lear, life

has meaning in terms of a more final reality than the natural world can encompass […]

If Goneril and Regan are all seeming, Cordelia is all being ; her absolute lack of pretense is matched by

their lack of anything else. Living in a world of pretense, Lear is blind to it : his tragedy unfolds in consequence.

The person best fitted to move through this ‘tough world’ will, hypothetically, combine something from each

of those : he will recognize the need, from time to time, to conceal his true character from the ‘wolfish face’ of

nature turned monstrous. And he will vindicate himself and his purposes by direct action at the proper time.

There is one character who meets these conditions : Edgar alone is able to combine knowledge and action with

the judicious use of disguise. But his capacity is fully revealed only in terms of contrast with Kent.

Edgar, through the art of disguise, will restore the kingdom of England. He will return to nature, even

though, other characters except Kent and Albany, can no longer find a natural place politically or as family

members. In this sense, Shakespeare, through his art shows that when human beings turn too far away from

nature, they seem unable to reform and to live in a state of nature. They are eliminated from the universe. The

art of the theatre shows an ambiguous and rather pessimistic perspective on human nature.

31 J. A. Cuddon, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, London, New York : Penguin Books, 1992 (1997), p. 124.32 Hugh Maclean, « Disguise in King Lear : Kent and Edgar », Shakespeare Quarterly, Washington : Folger

Shakespeare Library, volume 11, Winter issue 1 (1960), pp. 49-54.

16

Autolycus wears masks in order to hide the truth. He is a tale teller and a singer, a rogue-agent of

Providence, a man of masks and a busy clothes-changer. He serves to advance a variety of themes on art and

nature. Shakespeare repeatedly calls attention to the incredibility of both the tale in general and of the story in

particular. He links the tale and the ballad, which is also composed of ‘deal and wonder’ : the attested to the

truth of the ballad about the usurer’s wife is appropriately named Mistress Tale-porter. He not only reminds us

that tales are made of the unreal (2.1.25-26), but he also reminds us that his story is a tale (4.1.14) and

repeatedly points to its wonderful nature. Of ballads and tales, Shakespeare illuminates the nature of The

Winter’s Tale. Tales are false : the tale bearing Mistress Tale-porter is obviously a purveyor of falsehood, the

dealer in tales. But the false tale masks the truth : although Autolycus falsely declares that the tale of the

usurer’s wife ‘brought to bed of twenty money-bags’ and the tale of the woman turned into ‘a cold fish’ for not

‘exchang[ing] flesh with one that loved her’ are true, he tells the truth. Whatever view one may take of

Autolycus’s final words, it cannot be denied that in a tale it is particularly fitting that the false man should be

an agent for truth. It is proper that a man of masks, who is in his last appearance on the stage comes before

others without a disguise for the first time, should be a representative of a Providence whose ‘secret purposes’

are revealed at the end of the play.33

Autolycus helps the plot to move back to nature in Sicily. Artistically,

Shakespeare’s art gives evidence in this play that human nature in the political sphere and in the family sphere

can be regenerated, even though Mamillius and Antigonus are being sacrificied. While in King Lear, the return

to nature is being problematic. The transmission of royal power will be successful, yet most characters are

dead. Will Edgar be a capable king ?

B- Does the dramatic device of ‘Temporis filia veritas’ in both plays leads to a natural order ?

Brailowsky explains that the phrase ‘Temporis filias veritas’ is taken from the motto of Greene’s

Pandosto.34

The notion that ‘Truth is the daughter of Time’ was a Renaissance commonplace, often illustrated

in emblem’s books, wisdom literature, and a number of Shakespeare’s plays. It does not mean that Time and

Truth were always associated or necessarily related in the eyes of early modern audiences, but the saying

resonated with a culture steeped in Christian teleological discourse, which held that God, hence truth, would

prevail at the end of time. Justice was commonly associated with Time an Truth. For a play which is titled after

a season, The Winter’s Tale seems insistently to explore the notions of time, be it through timelessness, or

time’s destructive and restorative qualities. Brailowsky discusses the idea that Truth is the daughter of Time,

and that we must distinguish the multiple and clashing temporalities at work in The Winter’s Tale. In her

seminal essay on ‘The Triumph of Time,’ Ewbank develops ideas on the redemptive power of Time. Following a

chronological analysis of The Winter’s Tale , she contrasts the frienzied pace of Leontes’s jealousy in the first

acts with the sudden stop in time which occurs with ‘ the first actual death’ in Act 3. Act 4 performs a ‘visible

turning of the hour-glass by Time, the Chorus’, and the following scenes exemplify the positive effects of time,

33 Cox Lee Sheridan, « The Role of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale », Studies in English Literature , Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, volume 9, Spring issue 2 (1969), pp. 283-284 ; 300-301.34 Yan Brailovsky, The Spider and the Statue : Poisoned innocence in The Winter’s Tale, Paris : PUF, 2010, pp. 81-

86 ; 108-112.

17

in tune with nature and the seasonal cycle.35

Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists made no particular effort

to follow Aristotle’s precepts on time and space in theatre. The ‘Time Chorus’ was a dramatic artifice from the

Greek tragedy. When we reach the final scenes, a synthesis is effected illustrating both time’s revelatory

qualities and its destructiveness – there is no turning back the clock. Still, Leontes can claim to have defeated

time by having found an heir, if not Mamillius, irretrievably lost, at least with Perdita and Florizel, his son-in-

law. Time is a theatrical device which defies the law of nature.

‘Temporis filia veritas’ concept is embodied in King Lear too. Cordelia is the perfect embodiment of

nature.36

She is like Chaucer’s Griselde, she stands in the framework of medieval allegory and acquires

meanings that transcends psychology. Cordelia is the other nature Edmund, Goneril and Regan ignore. She is

the redemptive principle itself. The gentleman in 4.6 says that she ‘redeems nature from the general curse.’

Cordelia embodies the nature which Edmund denies to exist and which Lear – although he believes in it –

cannot recognize when it is before him. Danby wants to show that this normative humanity embodied in

Cordelia incorporates the traditional ideals of ‘natural theology’ ; and that, furthermore, this ideal requires not

only perfection in the individual, but also perfection in the community. In other words, Cordelia cannot stand

for individual sanity without at the same time standing for rightness in the relation of a man-to-man- social

sanity. In so far as there is always a discrepancy between the truth the person aims at and the actual setting

which makes it necessary to have that truth for an aim – in as far as the good man is necessarily in relation to

bad society – the ideal community Cordelia implies will be a non existent one. We can call it a Utopia or

Jerusalem. Art, like ethical action, is utopian in intention. Cordelia expresses the utopian intention of

Shakespeare’s art. What is at stake is the real reference which Shakespeare’s art makes to Shakespeare’s times,

though it is the utterance of a historical person. Cordelia is an integration of gentleness and toughness. What

this is we can only describe as an eminent degree of ‘integration’ : the reconciliation of passion with order, of

impulse and law, of duty and desire. Cordelia claims that she ‘love[s] [her] Majesty/According to [her] bond’

(1.1.92-3). For her ‘bond’ means ‘natural tie’. The pervasive mutuality is essential in the law of nature. And it is

in this sense that Cordelia allegorically is the root of individual sanity as well as social sanity. Cordelia is the

norm by which the wrongness of Edmund’s world and Lear’s imperfection is judged. Cordelia, as Shakespeare’s

art of nature, wishes to help Lear to return to nature. Yet, Lear dies and so will Cordelia. It is as if when lack of

judgment takes people too far away from nature, there is hardly any way back to it. It is certainly ironical that

Cordelia, who perfectly embodies nature, should not survive.

C- Does the power of the arts of tragicomedy, romance and perspective aim at representing to return to a

natural order of things ?

Tragicomedy is a dramatic work incorporating both tragic and comic elements.37

When coined by the

Roman dramatist Plautus in the second century B.C. the word denoted a play in which gods and men, masters

and slaves reversed the role traditionally assigned to them, gods and heroes acting in burlesque and slaves

35

Yan Brailowsky, ibidem., pp. 100 ; 101.36 John Francis Danby, op. cit., pp. 114-140.37

The New Encyclopedia Britannica, volume 7, Chicago, 2005 (1765), pp. 888-9.

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adopting tragic dignity. In the Renaissance tragicomedy became a genre of play that mixed tragic elements into

drama that was mostly comic [ …] Central to the kind of tragicomedy were danger, reversal, and a happy

ending. Despite its affront to the strict Neoclassicism of the day, which forbade the mixing of genres,

tragicomedy flourished, especially in England, whose writers largely ignored the edicts of Neoclassicism. The

Winter’s Tale belongs to that dramatic genre and explores human nature through the art of tragicomedy.

According to Orgel The Winter’s Tale appears in the folio as a comedy, yet was renamed a « romance »

together with Pericles, The Tempest and Cymbeline. 38 They are characterized by unrealistic elements, fairy tale

plots in which violent and destructive irrationality or wickedness are overcome through magic, miraculous

restorations and most unlikely reconciliations.

The final scene of The Winter’s Tale , the statue scene, is unparalleled in Shakespeare for sheer theatrical

daring and ingenuity. It is a spectacular revelation of the queen’s statue. The statue of Hermione is not claimed

to be just a statue : it is a work of art by a sculptor named ‘that rare Italian master Giuliani Romano’(5.2.95).

The Northern mannerist engravers are behind the fame of some Italian painters such as Giulio Romano, famous

for his sculptural graphism in England. The technical advances of printing contibuted then to emphasize the

rivalry between artists and workshops. Shakespeare presents thus this mysterious sculptor, that man whose

art is supposed to surpass what any man’s hand had created sofar. The passage about art and nature when

Polixenes exclaims : ‘the art itself is nature (4.4.97), can be associated with the improbable final dramatic turn

of event of the queen’s living statue sculpted by Giulio Romano. The queen’s representation is characteristic of

those formal mannerist stagings. Shakespeare takes a critical distance towards the mannerist excesses. He

qualifies the sculptor of ‘nature’s ape’ : ‘who, had he himself eternity and could breathe into his work, would

beguile nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape.’ (5.2.96-98). Shakespeare shows the limits of the

Italian sculptors. While through his dramatic maestria of the theatre, he claims that the latter is the only form

of art which can breathe life to inanimate matter : ‘ What fine chisel/ Could ever yet cut breath ?’ (5.3.78)

Renaissance theorists assert that drama brought about the therapeutic catharsis that Aristotle describes,

not through the power of poetic language or heroic action but through ‘wonder’, through the marvels of

representation and spectacle. Paulina demands for a ‘suspension of disbelief’ and she invokes wonder. Paulina

is the heroic artificer in the resolution of the play and her authority is not contested, despite the play’s

ambivalence about her shrewdness, her insubordination and her magic. Hermione’s statue is itself invented out

of old tales, out of Ovid’s account of the sculptor Pygmalion in The Metamorphoses. Classical mythology

characterizes mannerism. So Shakespeare’s art is influenced by the mannerist art of his times. He makes use of

his spectacular dramatic art to return to nature. Hermione has become a real woman again. The continuation

of the throne will be ensured through Florizel’s marriage to Perdita. In contrast to the tragi-comedy of The

Winter’s Tale, the tragedy of King Lear is connected with the problems and conditions of life lived under the

shadow of death and disaster of nature, because the art of deceit went too far.

38

Stephen Orgel, « The Statue in the Gallery : Ambiguous Art in The Winter’s Tale », in Delphine Lemonnier-Texier et Guillaume Winter (ed.), Lectures de «The Winter’s Tale » de Shakesppeare, Rennes : Presses

Universitaires de Rennes, 2010, pp. 91-92 ; 95-100 ; 102 ; 104.

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The representation of a human experience, of old blind Gloucester and his son, Edgar, is being narrated

through the art of perspective in the Dover cliff scene in King Lear. This scene is as ‘spectacular’ as the statue

scene in The Winter’s Tale. Jonathan Goldberg39 reminds us that in 4.1.45, Edgar is disguised as Poor Tom

meets his father with his bleeding eyes, and Gloucester asks him to lead him to Dover : ‘the way towards

Dover,’/ ‘Knowst thou the way to Dover ?’ (4.1.58). Again Gloucester asks : ‘Dost thou know Dover ?’ (4. 1. 74)

The old man describes the cliff which constitutes his utmost desire. It is a verge from whose dizzy height he

expects no return. Either way, - as the place where Lear will see Cordelia, or the place where Gloucester will

have the satisfaction of suicide – in these reiterations of Dover, the word names a site of desire, the hope for

recovery or, at least, repose, restoratives to answer ‘eyeless rage,’ or the final closing of the eyes in a sleep

without end. Edgar’s lines describing Dover’s Cliff establish themselves as illusion by illusionist rhetoric. His

description answers to a particular mode of seing, and the limits that Dover represents in the text are the limits

of representation themselves. The representation of the real, the realization of representation, is in question.

Edgar’s description of Dover recasts a version of illusionist representation upon which the Renaissance painting

depends. The line (4.6.11-24) offers a perspective on perspective. The theory of Italian Renaissance painting as

presented in a treatise like Alberti’s Della pittura depends on a few elements. The viewer is imagined as

stationary . The surface of the painting is as a frame window, and the distance of the viewer’s eye from the

surface of the painting determines the distance into space of the painting, which is organized around a

vanishing point that represents the horizon of vision, and which is placed exactly correspondent to the fixed

eye viewing the scene. All elements beyond the frame diminish proportionally until they reach the limit of

vision which organizes the pictorial space. Blind Gloucester is positioned to have this illusionistic experience.

The illusion of continuous space rests upon what cannot be seen, on exhausting the limits of sight and arriving

at what is «’too small for sight’ (4.6.20). Vision depends upon both blindness and invisibility. It rests upon a

vanishing point. Alberti’s notions of the continuity betwen the viewer’s space and the space of the painting

become a prospect of madness in which the conviction of illusion produces the annihilation of the viewer.

Gloucester embraces the illusion and plunges into it. He has been convinced by the trompe l’œil of

representation and his fall shows that he is the perfect audience for it. In the scene that Edgar presents, two

perspectives, two perspectives are in question, the one that can be associated with the optical illusion of

anamorphosis – the theatre, that is, illusion of multiplicity, and another perspective, associated with

representation or illusionism, theatrical reality, and one-point mathematics.

Renaissance paintings depended on rigid approches on perception but mannerism used diagonal and

askew perspectives. According to Le Petit Robert, ‘Mannerism explicits the artistic devices and pays less

attention to nature.’40

The Dover Cliff scene seems to be represented in a mannerist art to describe the suicidal

Gloucester who found himself in and his blurred perception due to his blindness. The art of perspective

highlights the chaotic side of human nature.

39 Jonathan Goldberg, « Perspectives : Dover cliff and the conditions of representation », in « King Lear », William Shakespeare, Kiernan Ryan (ed.), New York : Palgrave (New Casebooks : contemborary critica essays), 1993, pp. 145 ; 147 ; 149 ; 150-151 ; 153.40

Alain Rey, Le Petit Robert, , Paris : Le Robert, 2012, p. 1525.

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Conclusion :

At the beginning of this research, I asked myself in what way the philosophical debate about nature and

art and the pastoral genre functioned in King Lear and The Winter’s Tale . Interestingly enough, Shakespeare

strove with this binary combination of art and nature throughout his career, which shows how pregnant this

debate is in the playwright’s work as a whole, and, in the Renaissance period, too. The philosophical debate

about nature and art is defined in the fields of the family and of politics. In both plays, Shakespeare ironically

demonstrates how eros is misunderstood and how it creates unnatural disorders in the families of Lear,

Gloucester and Leontes. In the Christian world, however, Cordelia represents an ideal utopian nature, an

allegory, the ideal daughter of nature according to Danby. She is the measure against which all the other

characters are measured. Compared to Cordelia, Lear and Gloucester stand for monsters of nature due to their

hubris and to their lack of judgment. Edmund, on the other hand, is worshipping the pagan goddess nature. In

The Winter’s Tale , nature as embodied in Perdita, the heir, is saved by powerful characters like Paulina,

Antigonus and Camillo who manage to defeat Leontes’s art of deceit. The English playwright satirizes kinship in

both plays since King Lear and Leontes transgress the law of nature through the art of deceit. It is a political

message which also reflected the politics of the times during James I’s reign in England. If the transmission of

royal power is achieved in both plays according to the law of nature, Shakespeare through his powerful art of

the theatre also shows that nature has been damaged by the eradication of human nature. King Lear

demonstrates more pessimism about the system of the natural divine right of kings. Edgar will become king,

yet, as a human being he is less bright and energetic than his bastard brother, Edmund. In The Winter’s Tale,

on the other hand, even if the succession was threatened by the loss of Perdita, her marriage with Florizel

allows the state of nature to be perpetuated. The art of the romance and « wonder » reverses the situation,

miraculously reestablishing the state of nature. The art of the theatre uses powerful mannerist devices like the

art of the perspective in the Dover Cliff scene or the spectacular artefact of the statue scene to rehabilitate

nature, even though Gloucester will not live long. In particular in The Winter’s Tale, the debate between art and

nature is centrally handled in Act 4, showing how art and nature emulate each other. This sense of emulation

existed in Shakespeare’s time when artists of all arts strove to surpass nature through their art. The English

playwright seems to mock this surfeit of art, yet, he clearly defends the art of the theatre above any other art.

Art portrays glorified as well as depraved nature and physical nature support the natural order of things. If we

consider the genre of pastoral in the debate of art and nature in both plays, the Bohemian pastoral and the

pastoral on the heath with the tempest, pastoral is emblematic of change. In The Winter’s Tale, the shearing

feast, Shakespeare underlines the ambiguïty of the pastoral. It is about spring and rebirth and love betwen

Florizel and Perdita, but it is also about Autolycus’s cunning art, yet it is linked to the return to nature

(marriage and royal transmission of power) and a return to art, in the sense of positive civilisation, at the Sicily

court . The pastoral in King Lear, is black in the sense that Lear’s nature is being diminished. Yet, the old king

becomes more human after the tempest on the heath and inside him. He looks after the poor. However, Lear

will not survive, hence Shakespeare shows a pessimistic view of nature. In both plays court is opposed to

pastoral. Art or court or civilization is the source of corruption, yet in Sicily in Act 5, art (convention of

marriage) and nature (happy ending of eros and successful royal succession) are united. The pastoral in King

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Lear is far darker than in The Winter’s Tale . Human nature is more degraded in the former play. In King Lear,

the art of deceit went too far and most characters are past redemption on earth. If redemption occurs it will

happen after death. The transformation through the pastoral is spiritual, not temporal. On the contrary, in The

Winter’s Tale, if Leontes’s erred through his jealousy,his dreams and his fantasy (creation or art of the mind),

the bad effect of art is being eradicated through the pastoral scene in Bohemia, through Leontes’ s penance,

Paulina’s art and the statue scene.

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