Rising Young Generation

The losses of Mamillius and Hermione and the appearance of the young lovers mark the end of one genre and the beginning of the other.¹⁰ The play’s shift from the tragedy in Leontes’ kingdom to the fertility of the pastoral landscape signals a revision of the forms of power. The sheep-sheering festival is a celebration of everything earth and fertile. Furthermore, the love between Florizel and Perdita brings positive light to the former destructiveness of love in the form of jealousy.

Florizel, son of Polixenes and heir to the throne of Bohemia, stands as a sharp contrast to Leontes as a lover. Florizel’s name suggests the union of male and female: “zell” is an archaic form of zeal, ardent love, and “Flora,” goddess of the springing flowers.

Florizel, in comparison with Leontes, is a remarkable lover. His courtship, unlike Leontes’ “crabbed” one, is joyous and confident (I. ii. 102). He rejoices at Perdita’s likeness to the goddess of flowers:

These your unusual weeds to each part of you Does give a life; no shepherdess, but Flora

Peering in April’s front. This your sheep-sheering Is as a meeting of the petty-gods,

And you the queen on’t.

(IV. iv. 1-5)

Unlike Leontes’ manic anxiety in the face of Hermione’s fertility, Florizel pays tribute to Perdita’s affinity with corporeal recreation. According to Cristina Leon Alfar, Florizel’s embrace of everything procreative signifies “a breakdown in the patrilineal dread of the unknowable, uncontrollable Feminine” (171). Instead of

10 Several critics have noted the shift in The Winter’s Tale from tragedy to romance. See Adelman, Suffocating Mothers, 193-238; Gourley, “‘O, my most sacred lady,’”258-79; and Ronk, “Recasting Jealousy,” 50-77.

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fearing females’ fertility power, Florizel rejoices at the life force he sees in Perdita.

What’s more, Florizel acknowledges Perdita’s sexuality and his own,

identifying himself with the gods who have “taken / The shapes of beasts upon them”

(IV. iv. 26-27). However, the prince can control his burning “lusts” and desire with honour and faith (IV. iv. 32-34). As a crown lover, Florizel puts love over his position as a king’s heir, and hoping to commend and condemn his force and knowledge all “to her service / Or to their own perdition” (IV. iv. 378-79). Florizel is indeed an heir to affection, crowning his love for Perdita prior to everything else. Moreover, he delights in Perdita’s frankness, her beauty, her wit, and her doing:

Each your doing, So singular in each particular,

Crowns what you are doing, in the present deeds, That all your acts are queens. (IV. iv. 143-46)

Florizel’s insistence that all her acts are “queens” both praises the grace of Perdita’s performance as mistress of the feast and represents a promise for their future (IV. iv.

146). As Carol Thomas Neely points out, Florizel praises not her looks, but her

“deeds”—each of them—reversing Leontes’ disgust at Hermione’s second “good deed” and purifying the word’s sexual implications (“Women and Issue” 183).

Perdita’s female strength grows with Florizel’s love. The audience has already noted Perdita’s concern that her lover may fall under his father’s censure for his masquerade in the festive dress (IV. iv. 18-22). On stage she and “Doricles” are matched in the costumes that are for her above, for him below, the proper social station. She also feels abashed at the very thought that the king might surprise her in her “borrowed flaunts,” a festive finery above her station; although she

straightforwardly accepts her current status in the social hierarchy, she knows that

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discovery will threaten “this purpose” of their love and may do so with special force if her garments seem presumptuous. She is concerned about things that will harm the prospect of them together in the future. Within the fiction, she does not know who this aristocrat may be, but she stands her ground against Polixenes on matters of both intellect and morality. The audience, knowing her noble heritage, sees her as fit consort to a prince; however, no character in the play is aware of her noble heritage.

Perdita, unaware of her real identity as a princess, spurns the courtship of bribery (Dusinberre 238); her pure love for Florizel can be manifested in the following lines by Florizel:

She prizes not such trifles as these are.

The gifts she looks from me are pack’d and lock’d Up in my heart. (IV. iv. 358-59)

The lines from Florizel show that Perdita demands no other things such as gifts but only Florizel’s love, the deepest affection from his heart. As Catherine Belsey points out, Florizel himself inhabits a realm of pure love, independent of social obstacles (72):

Or I’ll be thine, my fair,

Or not my father’s. For I cannot be Mine own, nor anything to any, if

I be not thine. To this I am most constant, Though destiny say no. (IV. iv. 42-46)

Florizel rejects the filial duty that compels him to be the heir to the country and fulfill his duty as a son to his father. His refusal implies a loss of power, and it suggests that he privileges his bond with Perdita over that of his position as the prince of Bohemia.

Strengthened in her own self-assertiveness by Florizel’s declaration of his selfhood in

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the mutuality of love, Perdita can match Polixenes gracefully in the ironic debate on the breeding of flowers.

Perdita and Florizel’s love pointedly contrasts with Leontes’ love and his treatment of Hermione. “A ruler who rejects his counsellors and accuses everyone else of ‘ignorant credulity’ is self-isolated” (Vickers 199). Indeed, Leontes rules so vigorously as to be tyrannical, understanding his own actions as unquestionable and therefore right. In this one important dimension, the play represents Leontes’ quest for a new understanding of himself as a ruler and also as a husband and a father, “of others in the relationships they bear toward him, and of the place of ruler and ruled in a transformed system of values” (Bieman 86). In Act 5 in Sicilia, Cleomenes pleads with Leontes to forgive himself—his long years of penance have more than “paid down” his trespasses. Mamillius’s death, confirming the oracle’s support for Hermione’s innocence, alters Leontes’ responses. Leontes, remembering Hermione with longing, cannot forget his guilt. Touched by Perdita and Florizel’s fresh beauty and mutual love, Leontes resists Polixenes’ letter asking that he arrest Florizel and promises to intercede for them:

Your father’s image is so hit on you, His very air, that I should call you brother, As I did him, and speak of something wildly By us perform’d before. Most dearly welcome!

And your fair princess,—goddess!—O, alas!

I lost a couple, that ’twixt heaven and earth Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as You, gracious couple, do: and then I lost—

All mine own folly. (V. i. 125-33)

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Leontes’ realization of his mistake prepares him for a renewed relationship with his lostdaughter Perdita, with Florizel, and with Polixenes who he has wronged (Neely 190). Discovering that Perdita and Florizel have eloped, he breaks with Polixenes to become “friend” to the couple’s “desires” (V. i. 230-31). Florizel begs him:

“Remember since you owed no more to Time / Than I do now; with thought of such affections / Step forth mine advocate” (V. i. 217-20). It is significant that the repentant Leontes is willing to identify his own affections with the young couple. This passage also signals that Leontes is ready for reunion with his wife to confront his wrongdoing, and prepares the audience for the final reconciliation scene.