1Overview of the Play

The Winter's Tale is a play that defies simple classification. Neither comedy nor tragedy—despite its arbitrary placement in the "Comedy" section of the First Folio of 1623—the play incorporates themes and conventions from each genre. The geographic shifts of the play—the wintry oppression of Sicilia, the pastoral warmth of Bohemia, and the redemptive return to a Sicilia desperate for rebirth—allow Shakespeare to crisscross generic boundaries as dramatically as it traverses the Mediterranean setting of Sicilia and the Northern climes of Bohemia. The wide "vast" (1.1.8, TLN 32) of the play's geographical reach and generic filiation also provide Shakespeare with the opportunity to revisit themes played out in his earlier plays: the abrupt, senseless jealousy of Othello finds its parallel in Leontes's motiveless distrust of Hermione's fidelity (1.2); the remorseful contriteness of Lear following his own follied delusions surfacing in Leontes's sixteen-year period of penitential withdrawal (3.2.218-29, TLN 1424-35); Camillo's loyal service to Leontes hearkening back to Kent's longsuffering devotion to Lear (4.2.2, TLN 1617-22); the green world of burgeoning love and fertile beginnings in As You Like It's Arden forest informing the pastoral festivity of Bohemia's sheepshearing celebration (4.4, TLN 1797ff); Puck's impishness in A Midsummer's Night Dream or Feste's pranks in Twelfth Night reborn in Autolycus's cozening of peasant clowns and willing maidens (4.4.190ff, TLN 2044ff). All of these elements and more converge in this "late play" and reflect the masterful hand of Shakespeare returning to and transforming earlier characters and situations. In characterizing it as "late," modern critics avoid the nebulous issue of the play's genre: pastoral, tragicomedy, romance, tragicomic romance, all categories proposed as labels for this most bedeviling of plays. The thorny question remains, however: what "kind" of play is The Winter's Tale?

2That the play is "late" in Shakespeare's career is evident from its performance history, which includes productions at the Globe playhouse in 1611 and in the court of King James in both 1611 and 1613. Whether the royal family beheld the same play in private performance in 1611 and 1613 at Princess Elizabeth's nuptial celebrations as the public viewed at the Globe in 1611 remains a vexing, unanswerable question. Critics have proposed that the marriage of the youthful Elizabeth to Frederick V, Elector Palatine, who later became King of Bohemia, may account for the reversed polarities in Shakespeare's manipulation of his source—Pandosto by Robert Greene, who invests the king of Bohemia with a jealousy borne from his suspicion that his wife has slept with his friend, the king of Sicilia. Shakespeare's play makes Bohemia the more festive, more appropriate setting for the young lovers, Florizel and Perdita, relegating the themes of jealousy and infidelity to Sicilia.

3Simon Forman, court astrologer and amateur occultist, provides accounts of four of Shakespeare's plays in his 1611 "Booke of Plaies," The Winter's Tale being one of them. His well-known account is as striking for what it omits as for what it includes in its three paragraphs: "Observe there how Leontes, the king of Sicilia, was overcome with jealousy of his wife with the king of Bohemia, his friend that came to see him; and how he contrived his death and would have had his cupbearer to have poisoned, who gave the king of Bohemia warning thereof and fled with him to Bohemia." Forman gives a cursory listing of the plot that follows: the oracle's pronouncement of Leontes's isolation unless his banished daughter is restored and the subsequent return of the daughter sixteen years later with her betrothed (3.2.122ff, TLN 1313-16). No mention is made, however, of the bear that devours Antigonus (3.3.57, TLN 1500); Hermione is allotted scant attention, and no mention is made at all of her death and magical restoration as a moving statue before Perdita and Leontes (5.3.20ff, TLN 3208ff), a puzzling exclusion given Forman's own occult proclivities. Forman concludes his account with a paragraph devoted to Autolycus, "the Rogue that came in all tattered like coll pixci [a will-o'-the-wisp] . . . ." Forman's concluding admonition is that one should "beware of trusting feigned beggars or fawning fellows."

4For the modern audience, Forman's skeletal account of the play jars with the magical, fantastical elements that dramatically redeem the play's tragic beginning. The promise of domestic bliss that opens the play is abrupt and fleeting. Two old friends, Leontes and Polixenes, share their nostalgic memories of a childhood free from worry and anxiety, an innocence that is shattered by Leontes's sudden onset of jealousy over his pregnant wife's persuasiveness in extending his friend's stay in Sicilia, and his unsubstantiated doubt over the paternity of his yet unborn child. Perhaps Shakespeare hints at the tragic turn of the play in the brief opening scene in which the competitive nature of reciprocating hospitality is implied in the dialogue between Camillo and Archidamus:

ARCHIDAMUS
If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia on the like occasion whereon my services are now on-foot, you shall see (as I have said) great difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia.
CAMILLO
I think this coming summer the King of Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the visitation which he justly owes him.
ARCHIDAMUS
Wherein our entertainment shall shame us, we will be justified in our loves. For indeed --
CAMILLO
Beseech you --
ARCHIDAMUS
Verily, I speak it in the freedom of my knowledge. We cannot with such magnificence -- in so rare -- I know not what to say. We will give you sleepy drinks, that your senses (unintelligent of our insufficiency) may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse us.
CAMILLO
You pay a great deal too dear for what's given freely.
(1.1.1-6, TLN 4-21)

Implicit in the courteous modesty of competing hosts is the more lacerating emotion that surfaces in Leontes's psychotic outburst against his spouse and best friend:

There have been,
Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now,
And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by th' arm,
That little thinks she has been sluiced in's absence,
And his pond fished by his next neighbor, by
Sir Smile, his neighbor.
(1.2.192-97, TLN 273-78)

Leontes's fear that Polixenes has bested him and stolen his wife is abrupt and unexpected, but the insecurity behind the sentiment may permeate the Sicilian atmosphere of mistrust, jealousy, and irrational fear.

5In the opening scene of Act 2, the doomed Mamillius unwittingly points to the bleakness unfolding in Sicilia when he asks his mother to tell him a "sad tale": "A sad tale's best for winter." He of course will become part of the collateral damage of Leontes's actions. Indeed, were the play to end at the conclusion of 3.2, the audience would be entitled to leave the theater hopeless and despairing of any redemptive intervention: friendships can be torn asunder by mere suspicion; children can be drained of life by unraveling family order; and innocent babies can be banished to the wild because of an irrational hint of bastardy, wives can be indicted by a husband's capricious jealousy and imprisoned on a whim. Yet Shakespeare pivots the play away from tragedy by relocating the action to Bohemia, a pastoral realm of shepherds, a charming conman, and disguised lovers blocked from consummation by obstinate fathers-all features of romantic comedies. Bohemia promises the green world of rebirth and regeneration common in Shakespeare's greatest comedies such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like it, and Love's Labor's Lost. To reach Bohemia, however, Shakespeare entrusts the play's transformation to an allegorical figure of Time and the inexplicable bear whose maw swallows up the fleeing Antigonus and the tragic remains of Sicilia. This brings us back to the question of the play's genre.

6The Question of Genre

Some Shakespeareans consider these late plays as "outriders," a grouping of plays that have a suppleness of plotting, a flirting with tragic outcomes, and the miraculous appearance of gods or god-like devices that hint at the spectacular. Often this experimentation has been associated with the rise of the tragicomic works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher. The "tragicomedies" that Beaumont and Fletcher conceived were based on Giovanni Battista Guarini's Italian model that, while taking its characters to the precipice of death, pulled it back from the consummation. In his play The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1608), John Fletcher provides us in his address to the readers with the operative definition that suggests how distinct are Shakespeare's "romances" from typical tragicomic structure: "A tragie-comedie is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is inough to make it no tragedie, yet brings some neere it, which is inough to make it no comedie". Despite certain dramatic features (dramatic revelations, unconventional plots, and exotic settings) discernible in Shakespeare's "romances," the presence of death and of emotional states that have tragic, highly affective potential for its characters make the "tragicomic" label unsatisfying.

7Turning elsewhere, perhaps nostalgically to Shakespeare's past, others trace the The Winter's Tale elements to Shakespeare's invocation of native romances such as Mucedorus (c. 1590)—revived in the public playhouses as recently as 1610—and the miracle plays such as the Digby Mary Magdelene, which were popular in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. From Mucedorus, Shakespeare could have teased out the story of a prince disguised as a lowly shepherd who saves a princess from a ravenous bear. Moreover, suggestively, the allegorical appearance of Comedy and Envy as characters to wrestle with the play's theme provides Shakespeare with a blueprint for the generic tension he establishes more subtly in The Winter's Tale. From the Digby miracle play of Mary Magdalene, Shakespeare could have excavated the themes of tested faith, the maritime separation of families and the miraculous return of those once thought dead. The spiritual implications of Mary's faithful service and her ascent into heaven are perhaps echoed in Hermione's providential return to "life" in Paulina's chapel. Given the iconoclastic nature of the Protestant church, the appearance of a venerated statue of a "deceased" queen evokes the outlawed Catholic belief in the intercession of saints. If this element of the play—missing in Shakespeare's source—hints at Shakespeare's own Catholic sentiments (a view suggested most recently by Stephen Greenblatt) Hermione's re-animation points to the role of grace in providing forgiveness and reunion. This appearance of conventions attributable to prose romances and miracle plays provides us with a glimpse into Shakespeare's dramatic method.

8Other factors can be extracted from the dramatic skein presented by The Winter's Tale. Shakespeare was writing for three different venues: the public outdoor Globe, the private indoor Blackfriars, and the court of James I and his family. Certainly the dance of the satyrs in the sheepshearing festival of Act 4 reflects the power of the court masque to influence Shakespeare's dramatic choices, and the acquisition of the Blackfriars venue gave Shakespeare and his company a theater that appealed to an elite audience with particular sensibilities of genre and spectacle. With the play's performance for Princess Elizabeth's nuptials to Frederick, the play's ability to address contemporary politics enlarges its generic girth.

9In conclusion, the issue of genre requires us to expand our definition to encompass a broad range of sources and influences. For the The Winter's Tale, genre invites an expansion of the geography, the content, and temporal influences to such an extent that the artifice draws attention to itself, to become a "tale that is to be hooted at" in Paulina's terms (5.3.11). The "sad tale" that Mamillius requests from Hermione in 2.1 takes on different forms and obtains different ends. The first three acts in Sicily promise a tragic end. Were the play to end with the ursine removal of Antigonus, the abandonment of Perdita to the fortunes of nature, and the announced deaths of Mamillius and Hermione, Leontes would be an isolated tragic figure, devoid of any possibility of a restoration of family. He would confront a lonely death looming in the distance, the pathetic end Lear submits to without his Cordelia, or the suicidal stroke that Leontes's prototype, Pandosto, inflicts on himself, a "sad tale" indeed. Shakespeare's decision, however, to revert to "mouldy tales"—Ben Jonson's contemptuous jeer in his Ode to Himself—provides him with a means of generating hope and recovery. It is an admission that there are indeed costs to one's actions but that "providential forces" provide hope: "the benevolent coincidences that provide the occasion for final resolution . . . all seem part and parcel of a providence that has operated throughout" (Bliss 156).

10Sources and Cultural Context

Robert Greene's Pandosto

Major characters

While Robert Greene's Pandosto. The Triumph of Time (1588) provides us with the narrative structure, basic characters (see chart above), and essential pastoral and romance elements for The Winter's Tale, Shakespeare's adoption and manipulation of the narrative elements display his ingenuity in choosing sources and synthesizing those sources with the vast storehouse of personal readings and dramatic influences that were available to him. The story outlines King Pandosto's emerging jealousy over his wife Bellaria's presumed trysts with his lifelong friend, Egistus (TLN 360ff). Though it provides the essential ingredients for The Winter's Tale, Greene's novel constructs a narrative that is straightforward and predicated on a reader's engagement with a story that is lurid and devoid of the enigmatic motivation and spiritual aura found in Shakespeare's play. As in The Winter's Tale, Pandosto's jealousy leads to both the death of Bellaria (Hermione) (TLN 1388ff)—in this instance an actual death—and their son, Garinter (Mamillius) (TLN 1326ff). Like The Winter's Tale's Camillo, Pandosto's cupbearer Franion spirits away Egistus to his home in Sicilia—not Bohemia, which Pandosto rules in Greene's prose narrative. Pandosto's wrath, once the king discovers Egistus and Franion's departure (TLN 643), is now trained on Bellaria, whom Pandosto conjectures committed her adultery with Franion's assistance. Pandosto's jealousy is prompted by an extended narrative in which Bellaria's involvement with Egistus becomes more intimate and more "familiar": Bellaria's desire to please her husband extends to her visiting Egistus in his bedroom.

11Bellaria's subsequent imprisonment, trial, and exoneration through the Delphic oracle are all repeated in The Winter's Tale. The birth of a daughter—in Greene named Fawnia—similarly elicits Pandosto's enraged jealousy and suspicion that the child is not his; and after pledging to have the girl burned to death, he retreats in his anger thanks to his advisors' intercession. Despite this reprieve, Pandosto still orders that the daughter be set adrift on the ocean and left subject to Fortune's whimsical treatment (TLN 1105ff). Bellaria's and Garinter's death provided Shakespeare with the same tragic coda to the first half of the play. Despite the desire to commit suicide—which he fulfils by the end of the narrative—Pandosto persists, as does Leontes.

12Greene, like Shakespeare, transports the narrative across the sea, where the infant Fawnia floats ashore in Sicilia and is discovered by a shepherd, Porrus, who raises her. As with Perdita, Fawnia matures in her beauty and wit with tremendous modesty, qualities that ultimately draw to her side at a chance encounter the young prince, Dorastus, son of Egistus. Greene's attention to these star-crossed lovers is so extensive that in its 1635 printing, Pandosto was retitled The Pleasant History of Dorastus and Fawnia. As in Shakespeare, Greene's second half focuses on the young lovers and their flight from Sicilia and arrival in Bohemia, where Pandosto imprisons Dorastus and attempts to seduce his own daughter.

13While Shakespeare brings Polixenes and Leontes together in Sicilia for their emotional reunion, Egistus sends a message to Pandosto asking that his son be released and Fawnia executed; Pandosto agrees to this request until the shepherd Porrus describes Fawnia's orphan past, a recounting which reveals her to be Pandosto's daughter. This reversal overturns the potential tragedy that has been building: Pandosto apologizes for his lust, knights the peasant Porrus, and sails with Dorastus, Fawnia, and Porrus to Sicilia to reconcile with his friend Egistus. Overwhelmed by grief for his suspicious treatment of Egistus, for his role in bringing on Bellaria's death, and for his incestuous feelings towards his daughter, Pandosto commits suicide and is returned posthumously by Dorastus and Fawnia. Greene characterizes this suicide as a "tragical stratagem" to "close up the comedy."

14Besides the obvious reversal of kingdoms—Pandosto's Bohemia becomes Leontes's Siclia while Egistus's Sicilia becomes Polixenes's Bohemia—Shakespeare invests the play with two dramatic alterations to Greene's novel, both of which give the lie to Greene's moral ("the Triumph of Time") and the presence of "Fortune" as a blind impetus for the novel's tragedies. As critic Inga-Stina Ewbank has astutely observed, Shakespeare's "triumph" of time is a regenerative force that restores Hermione after 16 years and provides Leontes with a penitential opportunity to atone for a violence that sends his wife into isolation, his son to an early grave, and his daughter abandoned to the wilds. Greene's novel, which concludes with Pandosto's suicide, following his wife's and son's earlier deaths, ends with no opportunity for providential intervention, and thus provides only the aftertaste of satisfaction. Shakespeare's choice to resurrect Hermione as a statue affords the play a redemptive turn:

Leontes: Her natural posture.
Chide me, dear stone, that I may say indeed
Thou art Hermione; or rather, thou art she
In thy not chiding, for she was as tender
As infancy and grace. But yet, Paulina,
Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing
So aged as this seems.
(5.3.23-29, TLN 3212-18)

For Phebe Jensen, this moment "makes [Hermione] miraculously present, in a ceremony performed under the direction of a Pauline practioner [sic], during which stone is transformed into flesh, just as bread and wine become body and blood in the Catholic Mass" (304). The theater that makes this moment possible is aligned with the performance of ritual that transforms lives and provides for rebirth. Such a conclusion would have been irrelevant for Greene's novel, which celebrates melodramatic situations that prompt emotional excesses and Pandosto's anticlimactic, seemingly appropriate suicide. The logical, linear movement provided by Greene, in which narrative heaps situation upon situation, outcome upon outcome, is given a cyclical, sacramental dimension by Shakespeare, in which Leontes's precipitous jealousy and Mamillius's premature demise are bound up by a gracious Hermione and a banished daughter restored. This would have been beyond Greene's novel and outside of his authorial capacity.

15Classical Influence

Ovid

Ovid was an important storehouse of mythic influences for Shakespeare throughout his career. He drew on Ovid's Metamorphoses for his earliest narrative poems and sonnets, and wove Ovidian allusions into plays as diverse as Titus Andronicus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest. The Winter's Tale afforded Shakespeare the opportunity to incorporate a number of Ovidian myths to amplify the play's narrative structure. In Perdita, Shakespeare created echoes of Flora, the goddess of fertility and spring, an allusion also noted by on Robert Greene in Pandosto: "Every day she went forth with her sheepe to the field, keeping them with such care and diligence, as all men thought she was very painfull, defending her face from the heat of the sunne with no other vaile, but with a garland made of bowes and flowers: which attire became her so gallantly, as she seemed to be the Goddesse Flora her selfe for beautie" (D1v). Shakespeare's dramatic adaptation of the Flora myth is also present in subtle hints such as allusive names, as Jonathan Bate suggests: ". . . is the goddess really Flora? We also know that Time has taken it upon himself to name Bohemia's son Florizel, so for the latter to call Perdita Flora is to stake a claim for her by grafting his own name to her" (Bate 229).

16Ovid's presence is palpable in Florizel's unwittingly ironic allusions to Apollo's penchant for transforming himself to achieve sexual congress (4.4.24ff, TLN 1825 ). The greater tapestry of Ovidian influence, however, is found in Shakespeare's overarching dramatic structure. The cyclical return of Proserpina governs the two-part—diptych—structure of the play: the first three acts take place in a Sicily made tragically wintry by Mamillius's death, Hermione's apparent demise, and the mortuary climate that surrounds the court; the last two acts introduced by Time are initially relocated to the pastoral climes of Bohemia, where life is restored—despite Antigonus's violent end—and obstinacy replaced by youthful vigor. Shakespeare's choice of Proserpina's myth is especially poignant for this play. Daughter of Ceres, Proserpina was abducted by Dis, god of the underworld, and cloistered there for six months in death-like clutches, followed by six months of fertile growth with her annual restoration to her mother. As Jonathan Bate proposes, The Winter's Tale can aptly be named for this dormancy of hope: "Waiting for Proserpina" (Bate, 220).

17Ovid's presence is given more resonance in the statue scene, in which Shakespeare unobtrusively interweaves two separate myths to capture the profound reach of this final reunion of husband and wife. By alluding to the myths of Orpheus's descent to regain his Eurydice and the power of Pygmalion's imagination to turn an ivory statue into a warm, vital woman, Shakespeare invests Hermione's own resurrection before the rapt Leontes with a profound magic. Paulina's warning to Leontes resonates with Orphic power: "Do not shun her / Until you see her die again, for then / You kill her double" (5.3.104-06, TLN 3313-15).

18Leontes's faith in Paulina's vision recasts Pygmalion's miracle as a metaphorical restoration: Hermione's cloistered statuary is exchanged for a domestic life she had forsaken 16 years before. Leontes's language betrays its Ovidian traces: "methinks / There is an air comes from her . . . What fine chisel / Could ever yet cut breath?" (5.5.76-8, TLN 3278-80). Though Giuliano Romano is credited with carving this figure, the sculpture is Hermione's own aging visage that beholds her daughter and penitent husband, a charitable gesture that Leontes little deserves but one which is provided for by Paulina's intercession. Shakespeare found in these Ovidian transformations the power of faith to restore life from stone and to transform living beings into ossified figures entranced by magic. The implications of the moment are given special weight by Leonard Barkan: "Hermione's life as a sixteen-year statue is her own winter's tale, but the whole world of Sicilia has in fact been similarly hardened. Only with the discovery of Perdita does the softening begin to take place" (661).

19Shakespeare's provocative grafting of Ovid's Metamorphoses onto his drama mitigates the melodrama he gleaned from Greene's Pandosto and humanizes the obdurate figures of Leontes and Polixenes. Both stifle love by repudiating, repeatedly, Hermione's potent love and the emerging youthful love of Perdita and Florizel, and both are metamorphosed into passionate, responsive figures who promote love over suspicion, trust over mistrust, and faith over the lunacy of prejudice.

20Jacobean Culture and Royal Absolutism

In the midst of the sheepshearing festival in Act 4, a group of artisans perform a "gallimaufry of gambols," a dance of satyrs that resounds for the court audience who witnessed Ben Jonson's earlier Masque of Oberon (1611). The masque entertainment—a spectacle of dance, song, and elaborate scenic devices by Inigo Jones—was a trademark of King James's court and James's own penchant for "spectacles of state." Though the dance of satyrs is often seen as a detachable interlude inserted into the play by Shakespeare to take advantage of his company's role in Jonson's entertainment, the presence of the dance and the spectacle clearly reflects both a Jacobean aesthetic influence and the courtly venue of the Banqueting House, site of the November 1611 performance and the February 1613 performances arranged for the festivities surrounding the wedding of Princess Elizabeth.

21Masques were allegorical extensions of the royal court in which panegyric praise of the monarch performed an embellishment of courtly power. As Stephen Orgel puts it (Illusion 39):

Masques were essential to the life of the Renaissance court; their allegories gave a higher meaning to the realities of power and politics, their fictions created heroic roles for the leaders of society. . . . In form they were infinitely variable, but certain characteristics were constant: the monarch was at the center, and they provided roles for members of the court within an idealized fiction.

The ascension of James I to the throne of England in 1603 provided not only patronage for court masques but also, more importantly, a domestic and political break from Elizabethan rule, during which dynastic succession remained a public fear. As David Bergeron (Royal Family 27 ff) has noted, James I brought with him a family of potential successors who provided a stability desirable to a country ruled previously by childless Elizabeth I. James's reign provided, thus, a domestic model that made him not only pater patriae at the national level but also pater familias domestically. Despite the promise of orderly succession, the relationship between James and his queen, Anna of Denmark, and more specifically between the monarch and his children, Prince Henry and Prince Charles, engendered a public display of familial rivalries and domestic discord, a theme that is prevalent in The Winter's Tale. The promise of succession and the potential ruptures between father and son are profoundly relevant in the relationships between Leontes and Mamillius and between Polixenes and Florizel.

22While the Jacobean family may not be responsible for the dynamics reverberating within the The Winter's Tale, their presence reminds us of the power of theater to reflect its cultural milieu. As Jonathan Goldberg has observed (James I85-112), James I frequently applied domestic metaphors to the promulgation of regal doctrine. In his 1597 Trew Law of Free Monarchies, he wrote: "as the Father of his fatherly duty is bound to care for the nourishing, education, and virtuous government of his children even so is the king bound to care for all of his subjects" (Political Works 55). In the more intimate Basilikon Doron addressed to Prince Henry and intended as a royal handbook for a future monarch, James reminds his son of his "fatherly authority" (4) and the need to regard his future subjects in patriarchal terms. More dramatically, Leontes's discussion with Mamillius over their physical resemblance is itself a representation of the very real need for monarchs to guarantee their legitimacy through dynastic succession and a visual, emblematic imprinting of the royal patriarch upon his children. The dialogue is worth citing in full, for its content is nothing less than the patriarchal need to guarantee a succession that duplicates the legitimacy of its ancestry:

[LEONTES]
How now, you wanton calf,
Art thou my calf?
MAMILLIUS
Yes, if you will, my Lord.
LEONTES
Thou want'st a rough pash and the shoots that I have
To be full like me, yet they say we are
Almost as like as egg -- women say so
That will say anything. But were they false
As o'er-dyed blacks, as wind, as waters? False
As dice are to be wished by one that fixes
No bourne 'twixt his and mine, yet were it true
To say this boy were like me? Come, Sir Page,
Look on me with your welkin eye, sweet villain,
Most dearest, my collop.
(1.2.126-39, TLN 201-213)

In a famous double portrait of 1583, James and his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, are captured on canvas in a pose that asserts their visual resemblance: face, gestures, and posture are exactly duplicated, and mother and son mirror each other. James's authority is affirmed by his physical resemblance to his mother, a fact not lost on Leontes as he looks on his own progeny.