“If all the world could have seen’t”: Imagination and the Unseen in The Winter’s Tale

For a play with some of the most famous of all theatrical images, The Winter’s Tale contains a significant number of unseen happenings only reported onstage: the strange death of Mamillius and the devouring of Antigonus are offstage events that punctuate a lengthy sequence in which Hermione is imprisoned, gives birth, and then “dies,” all out of the audience’s sight. In Act 5 scene 2, the emotional reunions of Leontes with his daughter and Polixenes are merely described by three unnamed “gentlemen.” At such moments, playgoers are forced to envision the unseen with their mind’s eye. Later, Paulina moves to draw a curtain around Hermione’s statue, to hide it from both the onstage onlookers and the audience, warning: “No longer shall you gaze on’t, lest your fancy / May think anon it moves.” She is stopped, of course, but why does this play seem to so carefully choose to stage some actions and not others? Early modern models of psychology held that the imagination was responsible for processing images received by the senses. But the imagination was also thought capable of generating its own mental forms or “phantasms.” In this process, vision, paradoxically understood as the most reliable and easily deceived sense, and the imagination’s “inner eye” were subject to dangerous distortions. The “fancy” that so concerns Paulina in the statue scene could lead to misperception: “phantasm” becoming “phantasie.” The Winter’s Tale is acutely, and quite self-consciously, concerned with what is at stake with visual perception and ocular proof. The first half of the play presents the dangers of an infected imagination: Leontes’s raging jealousy, built around a conviction of what he thinks he sees, coins deranged mental phantasms generating tragic carnage, including his son’s death from “mere conceit.” Utilizing early modern accounts of the imagination as a potential cause and cure for various diseases, this chapter will examine the juxtaposition of seen and unseen in the play’s final scenes, suggesting that Paulina’s manipulation of the statue provides a potential act of visual healing to the rupture between the senses and the imagination, for both the audience onstage and in the playhouse.