This paper was presented at the "On Religious Grounds" conference (University of Michigan, January 29-30, 2000). The conference was sponsored by the Early Modern Colloquium; see the EMC website for more details, including a program and list of speakers.
Performing Sorrow: Melancholia and Reformation Aesthetics in The
Winter's Tale
(Amanda Watson, University of Michigan)
ABSTRACT:
Critics of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale who are interested in the role of affect in the play often single out Leontes' jealousy and its possible causes. Such interpretations, although they can be rich in psychoanalytic insight, tend to run up against the problem of what one Shakespeare scholar calls the "psychological incomprehensibility" of the play. In this paper, I will propose a different type of psychoanalytic reading of the play. Instead of discussing jealousy, my reading will first explore Leontes' sixteen-year period of grieving for Hermione in the context of twentieth-century theories of mourning and melancholia. While it is possible to read Leontes as a melancholic in the Freudian sense, however, it is more helpful to examine certain aspects of the play in the light of Reformation-era debates over the legitimacy of grief and the problems of memorialization. The play stages and restages the Protestant anxieties that surrounded the monumental funerary image in England during this period; it also enacts a remarkable trajectory from the word to the image as means of copying and reproduction. Read this way, The Winter's Tale as a whole can be seen as a melancholic fantasy, an attempt to deny loss and make the dead continue to live. Ultimately, I will argue that we should look to the Reformation as a moment in which some of our psychoanalytic narratives have their obscure origin.