At the end of class on Thurs. I was glad another student asked, ‘So, was she really dead, or did the statue come to life?” It was exactly what I was wondering. So I finished reading the final scenes, and the 2nd Gentlemen says,“I thought she had some great matter there in hand, for she hath privately twice or thrice a day, ever since the death of Hermione,visited that removed house.”
Paulina could have been keeping Hermione alive, feeding her, etc.
Or she could have been working her magic, creating a statue that would one day come to life. But why then did Paulina create a statue with wrinkles?? It’s almost as if W.S. wants us to consider that she might have been living there, waiting, aging.
And we are free to wonder and choose what it means. And live with the mystery of not knowing exactly what Shakespeare intended.
I thought the 2nd hand account of the restoration scene was interesting. In some ways it distanced us from the actual account, or at least from experiencing it through their eyes, but in some ways another person’s view can intensify the scene. In the same way that ‘what we said of it became a part of what it is.’
“Who was most marble there, changed color; some swooned, all sorrowed.” That sums it up quite eloquently, who was most marble, most stony and unreachable, hint hint, Leontes.
Leontes says to Paulina: “Does not the stone rebuke me for being more stone than it? Methinks he’s finally understanding his own hard heart.
On page 729, Paulina utters a telling thing:
“It is required
You do awake your faith.”
A little throw-away line that embodies much of this play.
Leontes had to learn how to listen to others, and understand the high cost of not listening. He stubbornly pushed through with his own thoughts,suspicions, and plans, after all, he was King. And who will challenge the king?
That old turtle, Paulina. In her own unique way. But in the end she brings him to the place of realizing that though king, he is only human, and flawed at that. And when humans are at their basest, lowest level, faith may awaken. If allowed. And speaking of faith…
Gerard Manley Hopkins is probably my favorite poet of all time.
I especially love this one:
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I love the line,’flame out, like shining from shook foil,’ It just doesn’t get any better than that.
His sense of rhythm, metaphor and sound are unparallelled, and seem strangely modern when you consider he wrote this in the late 1800’s.
JenniferThornburg--wecrytodreamagain 