• 2 Ibid., p. 163 et passim.
• 3 Ibid., p. 167.

From a conceptual point of view, the demarcation between image-meaning and word-meaning was hard to define, Clark argues. But the epistemological nature of the dispute was divisive enough – between those who maintained that knowledge of divine reality could be pursued by means of tangible images and those who opposed such a view – to become a breeding ground for iconoclasm. Images were offensive well beyond “their capacity to represent or misrepresent something else”.² They were offensive because, with their lifelike figure – even more so if they were carved as three-dimensional statues –, they induced the faithful to mistake a delusive and corruptible copy for the spiritual and incorruptible essence of the original. “It was sentiments like these, expressed in the language of pollution and cleansing”, Clark observes, “that helped to make necessary their destruction, rather than their removal”.³

• 5 Ibid., p. 264.

3Among things to be forgotten were images, signs, and narratives connected to the Marian cult. This was a cult which was second only to that of Christ in pre-Reformation England, as Duffy has argued, one that had been recorded in an infinite number of visual representations in painting, carving, glass, and whose enforced erasing must have been felt as particularly depriving for the eye and the soul, let alone the imagination revolving around the maternal figure. In prayers, Mary functioned as a merciful figure of intercession, and the “tenderness of Mary as Mother of Mercy was sometimes contrasted to the justice and severity of the Father and Son”.⁵

• 6 Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater”, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, New York, Columbia Universit (...)
• 7 Barthes also claims that in legitimizing the representation of maternity, Christianity favoured the (...)

4The heretical potential involved in such a compensatory role played by the Virgin Mary, within the Catholic church itself, has been forcefully brought to the fore by Julia Kristeva in her “Stabat Mater”: “In asserting that ‘in the beginning was the Word’, Christians must have found such a postulate sufficiently hard to believe and, for whatever it was worth, they added its compensation, its permanent lining: the maternal receptacle, purified as it might be by the virginal fantasy”.⁶ Originally published as “Héretique de l’amour” in Tel Quel (1977), “Stabat Mater” highlights the power Mary had increasingly acquired since late medieval times – precisely as Mother of Mercy, Mater Dolorosa, or as a body crowned in heaven –, in relation to dynamics related to the unconscious and a pre-Oedipal libidinal economy, as well as to the ways her name and prerogatives fertilized the imagination and the realm of art, especially in counter-Reformation culture. Roland Barthes was of the same view when in the autobiographical framework of La chambre claire he described the way he used to indulge in gazing at his mother’s photo as if it were a cherished heretical ritual of “l’Imaginaire”.⁷

• 8 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, op. cit., p. 485.
• 9 Idem, p. 490-491.

5In England, within the scenario created by early modern Protestant iconoclasm, what Kristeva and Barthes mean by “l’imaginaire” was turned into a field of dilapidation authorized by law. But it also became the field of many forms of heresy. The practices of sale and burial of sacred images sometimes functioned as a remedy to oblivion. In the complex mixture of intentionality, reluctance, opposition, and surrender which characterized iconoclasm in early modern England, sales were sometimes “pre-emptive, designed to retain for parishes the value of objects certain to be seized by the Crown”.⁸ The purchase of desacralized objects, on the other hand, might be interpreted as a gesture aiming at rescuing them. Very often these were images of the Virgin Mary. “When the Edwardine spoliation of the church [at Long Melford] began”, Duffy recounts in his marvellously detailed revisionist reconstruction of this period, “William Clopton systematically bought up many of the images […]. One of these images, of the Virgin and Child in bed venerated by the Magi, was discovered unbroken under the church floor in the nineteenth century, so it seems likely that Clopton took the images to preserve them”. Others at Stamford, “walled their patronal image of the Virgin into its niche, where it was discovered in the nineteenth century”. Some of these images may have been disinterred during Mary Tudor’s return to Catholicism, to enjoy a ghostlike temporary resurgence, before uncannily vanishing again with Elizabeth’s return to Protestantism. “Parishioners at Wakefield hid twenty-five alabaster images in the roof of a local chapel. The parishioners of Flawford, near Nottingham, hid three images under the floor of their chancel”.⁹

• 10 I have dealt extensively with questions related to visual knowledge in my essays “A Spider in the E (...)
• 11 All references to The Winter’s Tale and Pericles are from The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxfo (...)

7How may this collective story of delusive idols and reformed eyes, eradication, burial, and saving from the wreckage, have remained as a trace in Shakespeare’s fable-like representation of the maternal in The Winter’s Tale and in Pericles? In Shakespeare’s time it was no longer piety but theatre, we might say upsetting the purpose of Clarke’s apt phrase, that “invest[ed] heavily in the sense of sight”. The feverish confessional dispute about vision, if not quenched, was being superseded by a parallel, science-based, pre-Cartesian scepticism about the possibility of seeing well. And Shakespeare was forcefully contributing to this secular and newly modulated concern with sight and its pathologies and vulnerability¹⁰, when in The Winter’s Tale (but see also King Lear or Macbeth) he constructed his play as the hallucinatory staging of a king’s eye, and his hero’s destructive jealousy as originated by a non-existent cause, “a touched conjecture” (II.ii.178).¹¹ In this, Shakespeare’s ‘reformed’ art was staging a problem which went beyond the religious connotations. But how is the retrieval of alienated images and narratives of the maternal related to the baroque illusionism of Shakespeare’s late plays, and up to what extent may this be perceived as a return of the repressed and a displaced healing of the loss?

• 12 An expanded and differently angled version of this essay, titled “Shakespeare’s Maternal Transfigur (...)
• 13 See Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams, eds., Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Cu (...)
• 14 The pervasive presence of the counter-Reformist Marian mythology in Shakespeare’s late plays has al (...)

8It is my contention in this essay¹² that Shakespeare’s obsessive un-burial of controversial memories of the maternal is ambivalently intersected by the same drives of destruction and recovery that characterized the early modern English relationship with images of cult – as well as the same interplay of forgetfulness and remembrance that recent criticism has viewed as underpinning the forced “social amnesia” of England’s reformed culture.¹³ In such a context, I want to suggest, references to Giulio Romano, Renaissance Italian art, Paulina’s secret gallery and concealed statue, Cerimon’s and Paulina’s art of resuscitating the dead, can be perceived as the deviated and secular forms of recovery Shakespeare devises to fill up the void inherited from exceptional times of prescribed forgetfulness. ¹⁴

• 15 For more on this and its relation with the theme of the Dormitio Virginis see later p. 13-14.
• 16 Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater”, op. cit., p.177.

9In Shakespeare’s late plays, the representation of the maternal relies considerably on an idea of transit from place to place, state to state,¹⁵ and on a Raphael-like liturgy of death and resurrection. Obsessively and consistently a precluded mother determines a fascination with an economy of representation based on appearance and disappearance. Twice in these plays, typically in Pericles and The Winter’s Tale, a mother dies in order to reappear, together with her daughter – bodies “stol’n from the dead” and “preserved” to each other (The Winter’s Tale, V.iii.116-125) –, as an agent of reconciliation. In both plays death is problematically related to childbirth and the obscure or uncanny side of pregnancy. Meaning produced by the mother figure is in all sense “immeasurable”, and her body non-localizable, one might say borrowing from Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater”.¹⁶

• 18 Ibid., p. 37.
• 19 See Maria Del Sapio Garbero, Il bene ritrovato. Le figlie di Shakespeare dal King Lear ai romances, (...)

Nietzsche’s genealogical lens, with which he interprets Raphael’s painting, helps us envisage the complex paradigm that can preside over romance modes of understanding/representing the world, modes which he traces back to a layered Apollonian ideal, capable of keeping together two opposite spheres and forms of knowledge or art: the annihilating vision of horror and what he calls the ‘naïve’ if freeing illusion of dreams. Indeed, Nietzsche invites us to see a “reciprocal necessity”, an inner relation between the two drives or modes. The relation is an impulse towards harmonious fusion with the surrounding world which, as in Homer, responds to the tragedy of primordial pain through a particular form of “naïveté”. But for the Greeks, “naïveté” is born of the will, it is a struggle, in Nietzsche’s words, a rose slowly budding from thorny bushes. It is the will to be transfigured, to glorify oneself, “and, as a monument of its victory, Homer, the naïve artist, stands before us”.¹⁸ As I have argued elsewhere¹⁹ Shakespeare elicits a similar reading of his “old tale[s]”; tales “which will have matter to rehearse though credit be asleep and not an ear open” (The Winter’s Tale, V.ii.55-56).

• 20 Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, transl. A. B. Hinds and ed. W. (...)
• 21 In his Introduction to The Winter’s Tale (Oxford Shakespeare, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008 (...)
• 22 See Carlo D’Arco, Istoria della Vita e delle Opere di Giulio Pippi Romano. Con tavole, Mantova, 184 (...)

14Tracking Giulio Romano, “that rare” and only “Master” (V.ii.87) to be mentioned by Shakespeare in his plays, one is led to Mantua at Federico Gonzaga’s court, a court renowned for its unique art collection. This was started when Giulio Romano arrived from Rome in 1524, thanks to the good offices of Castiglione, who was the Gonzaga’s ambassador to the court of Pope Clement at that time. As an ambassador, a former friend of Raphael and Giulio himself, Castiglione used all the means at his disposal, according to Vasari, to secure the services of the man whose “excellent qualities gave him the reputation of being the best artist in Italy” after the death of Raphael.²⁰ Giulio Romano – Raphael’s best pupil and his assistant in many of his works – would remain in Mantua for the rest of his life to serve as a court painter and an architect for the many “fabbriche” launched by the Gonzaga (including the Palazzo Te, which he designed and lavishly decorated with mythological frescoes). But he also worked as an “ordinatore” (consultant) of the “galleria”, an office that he maintained until his premature death in 1546, and which may have played a part in inspiring Paulina’s secret “gallery” in Shakespeare’s play.²¹ Among those who had preceded Giulio as court painter in the previous century was Mantegna, and among those who succeeded him in the office of “ordinatore” in the early years of the new century was Rubens. Indeed, by the time the Gonzaga’s gallery was deemed complete by Federico’s successors in 1611-1612, the Mantuan court had become a sought-after place for the best artists in Italy and Europe. Titian, Rubens, and other Flemish painters sojourned and worked there. Others, Raphael, Leonardo, Tintoretto, were present with their masterpieces. However, it was mainly during and thanks to the Giulio Romano period that the splendor of the Mantuan court achieved widespread fame in Europe where knowledge of its palaces and works of art (especially those of the Palazzo Te) circulated through prints, often taken from drawings by Giulio Romano himself, who excelled in most of the skills linked to the three arts of design – architecture, sculpture, and painting – mentioned in his tomb epitaph, as attested to by Vasari and later biographers.²²

• 23 See Northrop Frye, “Recognition in The Winter’s Tale”, in Shakespeare: The Winter’s Tale. A Caseboo (...)

15Shakespeare claimed a place in this outstanding list of Italian and European artists when, taking us by surprise in his Winter’s Tale, and through a crucial visual episode of his Sicilian play, he chose to conjure up the artist who had authored the wonders of one of the most dazzling Italian courts and officiated the marriage of the arts. No: Shakespeare’s mention of the artist was not “pointless”²³, I want to argue. The Tudor’s long-standing cultural transactions with the Mantuan court had been only slightly jeopardized by the Reformation, and for the aristocratic audience at Whitehall in Stuart reformed England, Giulio Romano stood for a ‘rare’ and most coveted and empowering item – art – however contentious its visual compound might be in terms of ‘truth’ and deception.

• 24 See The Courtyer of Count Baldessar Castilio […] done into Englyshe by Thomas Hoby. London, 1561; R (...)
• 25 See Alessandro Luzio, La Galleria dei Gonzaga venduta all’Inghilterra nel 1627-28 (con i documenti (...)

16“Prepare / To see the life as lively mocked as ever / Still sleep mocked death. Behold, and say ’tis well” (V.iii.18-20, my emphasis), Paulina announces to Leontes, Perdita, and the group of gentlemen who are visiting her secret gallery in her “removed house” (V.ii.96). Then, as per the implied stage directions, she “draws a curtain, and reveals Hermione standing like a statue”. Dramatically, and with a single gesture, Shakespeare endorsed the interconnection, or kinship, between theatre and the visual arts. But here he also contrives a metatheatrical scene which while conjuring up the very terms of reformist ostracism against images – namely the confusion between copy and prototype – overturns them into an apotheosis of perfect likeness and quasi ‘sacramental seeing’: “[Giulio Romano] so near to Hermione hath done Hermione, that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer” (V.ii.90-91). Aptly, the unveiling of the statue, as Shakespeare conceives it, draws the awe-stricken male beholders toward a speculation on mimetic art and the relevant wonders of fictive truth, a speculation now provided as a ‘civile conversazione’ seemingly modeled on the discourse on art that his aristocratic audience might find proposed as a self-fashioning and enabling practice in Castiglione’s Courtier (among others), where, intriguingly, it is alike dramatized as a convivial dispute presided over by women: Elisabetta Gonzaga and her witty waiting gentlewoman, Emilia Pia.²⁴ Suggestively, such a mimed, if not divinatory, rite of possession materialized between 1628 and 1632 when Charles I, taking advantage of the Gonzaga’s declared bankruptcy, purchased a large part of their art collection.²⁵

• 27 Ibid., p. 365. Vasari had not yet been translated at that time. But a conversational discussion of (...)

Indeed, to the eyes of Vasari’s European readers, Giulio excelled in delusive architectures and ‘painted’ statues: “he also painted a building that curves around like an amphitheatre and contains statues of such beauty and composition that none the better could be seen”, Vasari wrote.²⁷ By which he meant to underline that Giulio excelled in the art of making true – through perspective and the lights and shadows (“i lumi e le ombre”) of painting – the three-dimensionality of sculpture and architecture.

• 28 See Sigmund Freud, “On Femininity” (1933), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Wo (...)

21Antiochus’s daughter at the opening of Pericles, the female figure which incestuously combines the familial roles of daughter, wife, and mother, affects her suitors through the eyes as delusive idols would do. “See where she comes, apparelled like the spring” (i.55, my emphasis) says Pericles, in ekphrastic mode, on the Princess’s apparition as a mute, though seductive, Flora-like image. The delusive image of Flora is then soon replaced by an utterly horrific and damaging ‘likeness’ – the uroboric and incestuous circle of the viper provided by the riddle: an abrasive image for Pericles, which leaves him with “sore eyes” as a dust storm would. Nevertheless, as if obliquely complicit with great Antiochus’s sin (one might invoke Freud’s reticence in this regard, which he adopts in defence of fathers in his seduction theory),²⁸ he decides that that image will remain dumb – an unspoken, if internalized form of knowledge which he likens by inversion to that of a “blind mole”, crushed under overwhelming weight (i.142-143).

• 29 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays. Hamlet to (...)

23Safety depends on “the excision of the sexual female body”, Janet Adelman has argued. This is superstitiously known by the sailors when they insist that the dead body of Thaisa, still warm with the humors of childbirth, be thrown overboard. But in the world of Shakespeare’s romances, differently from his tragedies, this is the beginning of a cure achieved “by splitting and dispersing the female body”, that is, by separating the roles which appeared as “dangerously compacted in [Antiochus’s daughter] and [by assigning] them to discrete persons”. Mother, daughter (and father) “are violently put asunder, each to be desexualized and reborn purified”.²⁹

• 30 See Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia. A Description of the Body of Man, London, 1615, p. 225.

25In between, there is the suspensive stage of death and concealment, which is crucial, in defining the condition of resurrection and reapparition for Shakespeare’s mothers. For, what the maternal body recovers during this suspensive state of death – the state by means of which Shakespeare dramatically articulates and amplifies the cloistering or disciplining role performed by the culturally prescribed postpartum lying-in month – is the integrity and sanctity of a virgin mother. Thus Hermione’s ghost appears to Antigonus in The Winter’s Tale – “In pure white robes, / Like very sanctity” (III.iii.21-22) – once she has been cruelly snatched away from both her parturient bed (her “child-bed privilege” [III.ii.101]) and her baby. As for the dead Thaisa in Pericles, by the time she has completed her transitus by coffin towards Diana’s temple in Ephesus, she has recovered the intactness of her body: the necessary supplement, one might say, of the resurrecting liturgy officiated by Cerimon. It is no coincidence that she is imagined as having no memory of childbirth, an expedient forgetfulness for the role of votaress in Diana’s temple she is about to assume: “That I was shipp’d at sea / I well remember, even on my eaning time; / But whether there deliver’d, by the holy gods / I cannot rightly say” (xv.4-7). Thus she enacts the fantasy of a desexualized body, a woman without a womb, unwittingly freed of those “disturbances” so disquietingly medicalized in contemporary constructions of women’s reproductive bodies.³⁰

• 31 Stephen J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (2002), Oxfo (...)

26Ephesus, however, on whose shore Thaisa is tossed in her coffin to remain cloistered in the temple of Diana until her final reapparition at the end of the play, conveyed more, I argue, than it did simply as the site of the pagan goddess. In fact, according to one of the many ancient Christian traditions regarding the end of Mary’s life, none of them with scriptural foundation, Ephesus was also the place where Mary died and was assumed into Heaven. Specialists in the Ancient Church and the Dormitio Virginis issue inform us that this belief (which contrasts the mainstream account of Mary’s death in Jerusalem) originated in the early Christian tradition of the apostle John’s mission to Ephesus, and in a conjecture that Mary may have accompanied him, following “Christ’s instructions from the cross to his mother and the ‘Beloved Disciple’, ‘Woman here is your son’, etc.”³¹

• 32 See Velma Bourgois Richmond, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance, New York and London, Continuum, (...)
• 33 In 1527, at the eve of the Reformation in England, The Golden Legend (first printed in 1483) had re (...)

27As some critics maintain, the link between Catholicism and Shakespeare’s late predilection for romance should not be underrated,³² especially, I argue, if we take into account the relation between Shakespeare’s resurrected mothers and the legendary nature of the apocryphal Dormitio Virginis theme (also called Transitus), as it was best recorded in the Catholic fabulous world of the once popular The Golden Legend.³³

• 34 I owe this term to Stephen J. Shoemaker who in his study Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Do (...)

The music, the awakening, the wonder of the beholders, the empty grave: these are all elements which seem to be exploiting Marian assumptionist³⁴ resonances, with the extra metatheatrical awareness on the part of Paulina (and Shakespeare) of enacting an event which changes place with an ancient fable-like story or stories: “That she is living, / Were it but told you, should be hooted at / Like an old tale” (V.iii.116-118).