Miraculous Reawakening
Long Covid and Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale'
Welcome back to The Art of Convalescence. This is the second of two essays on Shakespeare’s late plays, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale.
Well, that’s Easter gone. Christ rose: Alleluia. No resurrection for this post-viral convalescent took place last weekend, however. Instead, I resemble the poor, drowsy souls at the bottom of this painting, resting through history:
Piero’s painting was commissioned by the Sansepolcro authorities to celebrate the city’s liberation from Florentine rule in the 1450s, a secular assertion of sovereignty hidden behind the Christian theatrics. Similar thematic layering happens in Shakespeare’s late romances The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale: Christian motifs jockey for position with the humanistic notion that art is a form of magic, without which a happy ending might not be possible.
Resurrection, liberation, renewal and redemption are the Christian substrates that float beneath the waves of these plays. Words like grace, penitence, forgiveness and mercy keep creeping into the language, as in this advice from the loyal Cleomenes to his friend Leontes, the reformed King of Sicilia:
Sir, you have done enough, and have performed
A saintlike sorrow. No fault could you make
Which you have not redeemed—indeed, paid down
More penitence than done trespass. At the last,
Do as the heavens have done: forget your evil;
With them forgive yourself.
But Shakespeare isn’t content to leave his audiences with a tidy Christian moral – what he really wants to impart is a lesson about the power of ‘art to enchant’, as the actor playing Prospero puts it in the Epilogue to The Tempest.
In The Winter’s Tale this power is distilled into one great set piece moment: Hermione, thought dead for sixteen years, is unveiled in the final act as a statue, a work of art. She is brought before her husband, Leontes, whose mad jealousy (‘the infection of my brains’) condemned her all those years ago and caused their son to die. ‘O royal piece, / There’s magic in thy majesty’, Leontes cries upon seeing her. The chisel work of the sculpture is so fine that it could ‘cut breath’, Hermione so lifelike that ‘The fixture of her eye has motion in’t’.
‘Awake your faith’, says Paulina, an old chum of Hermione, who declares that she can aminate the statue through an act of conjuration. And then the miraculous happens: Hermione descends from her plinth. Leontes reaches out to touch her:
O, she’s warm!
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.
‘O, she’s warm!’ The three most beautiful words in Shakespeare? I defy any bedbound post-viral patient, statuary as they are, to watch/read this and not be moved to tears. The conversion of the statue into human form symbolises the melting of formerly hardened hearts but it also stands for the porous boundary between art and life and is the metafictional embodiment of Shakespeare’s not-so-subtle advertising about the power of the theatre to transform life in his late plays.
Hermione has been resurrected and reconciled with a repentant Leontes. But so has her daughter, Perdita, also thought dead, now repatriated to Sicily after ‘this wide gap of time’ – the same length of sixteen years – in which she has lived as a shepherdess in a distant land. Hermione, astonished that she’s not the only one in the room to deliver a miraculous return, addresses her daughter:
Where hast thou been preserved? Where lived? How found
Thy father’s court?
(Preserved – that’s what we post-viral types are, like giant cornichon suspended in vinegar and salt, curled up in a jar at the back of the kitchen cupboard.) The homecomings of mother and daughter in The Winter’s Tale involve a restoration of identity: Hermione resumes her role as queen and, Perdita hers as daughter to Leontes. Leontes is granted a second chance.[1] A restoration of identity – music to the ears of the post-viral patient!
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Where does all of this leave the post-viral convalescent, for whom such happy resolutions have failed to materialise? Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who probably suffered from M.E., wrote a beautiful sonnet called ‘Grief’, which alludes to Hermione’s statue. ‘I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless’, she begins, before pulling people up for the performative practice of heavy emoting – the ‘loud access / Of shrieking and reproach’. Real grief is silent, statuesque:
Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy dead in silence like to death—
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.
The allusion to ‘warm’ Hermione at the end of The Winter’s Tale is inverted (‘the marble eyelids are not wet’), and the traditional sonnet is refracted – a romantic poem about earthly love is changed to become an expression of eternal love and the inner pain that guards and sustains it.
The poem is a lament for her drowned brother Edward, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is also a sublimation of the profound sense of loss Elizabeth had incurred by her illness which rendered her statuary for long periods of her life and would confine her to bed for five years after her brother’s death.
To me, some lines from Larkin come to mind that seem to convey the paradox of post hoc stillness that Elizabeth describes – the feeling that one lives with as a post-viral patient living quietly on the fringe of things and mourning a ‘death’, disappearance or disseverment of the self not dissimilar to those found in Shakespeare’s late plays:
As if out on the end of an event
Waving goodbye
To something that survived it.
Of course, her brother is dead, but, through her poem and the act of memory, his death is survived – Elizabeth is waving goodbye to something she can’t let go of. This is the condition of post-viral existence, where one cannot completely leave behind the life one used to lead. (Hence this Substack – where I can, for a time, pretend I am an English teacher once again!)
Let’s hope, then, that a miraculous reawakening happens to us one day, and we can return to centre stage.
[1] Fortunately, this is romance, not tragedy, and Leontes is pardoned his mistakes. Desdemona wasn’t so lucky: not warm, but ‘‘Cold, cold, my girl? / Even like thy chastity’, Othello laments after he has murdered her. He has prefigured her death by comparing her skin to ‘monumental alabaster’ – the marble of statuary – earlier in the scene. Without extremely lucky things happening in both The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, we might be looking at a more conventionally tragic ending. Crucially, underpinning the deus ex machina is the magic of art.