Writing Sample

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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 ofGod 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’. InThe 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.html
15
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 also 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 medicalquestion : 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.

18
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 inThe 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.

19
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.

20
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

21
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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