'You speak a language that I understand not': The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter's Tale

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"'You speak a language that I understand not'
The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter's Tale"

• by Lynn Enterline Shakespeare Quarterly 48
  (1997) 17-44.

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Thesis Statement

• "The elabotate Pygmalion fantasy offtered in
  the last scene as a way to resolve the problems
  inaugurated by Hermione's initially 'portent'
  tongue tells us that before we can begin to hear
  the full resonance of her concluding silence, we
  must consider the relationship between, on the
  one hand, the trope of the female voice in the
  Ovdian-Petrarchan traditions that Shakespeare
  inherits and transforms in this play and, on the
  other, the quite specific rhetoric concerns
  through whcih The Winter's Tale reads that
  traditon, turning into theatrical
  metacommentrary"

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I. Shall I Be Heard?"- The Petrarchan tradition
and the stony Lady coming to life.

• A. Ovidian-Petrarchan Tradition and the power of
  and the power of address and of epideixis
• B. "the rhetoric competition between Hermione and
  Leontes
• C. misogyny and the aesthetic triumph
• D. Leotes's language and the violation of
  Hermione's sense of self
• "Hermione's courtroom protest that she stand
  somehow outside the restrictive terms of
  Leontes's accusation. ... Her husband's
  'language,' like his jealousy, violates her sense
  of herself" (26).

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II. "Not Guilty" the
female voice in that Ovidian-Petrarchan legacy

• A."When Shakespeare adopts the imagined scene of
  speaking to a stony lady as a way to repair the
  devastation caused by Leontes's jealousy, he
  turns the conflict between male and female verbal
  power into a meditation on Ovidian and Petrarchan
  rhetoric in general and on the role of the female
  voice in that literary legacy in particular"
  (29).
• B. The Rime Sparse and Petrarch's replacement of
  desire with words
• C. The polarity between male speech and female
  silence
• D. The unsettling power of the female voice
• E. The futility of the doublet "to say" and "to
  swear"
• i. Hermione's vain but truthful swearing of
  innocence and Paulina's successful yet false
  swearing of death
• ii. Polixenes's and Hermione's "Not guilty"

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III. "Be Stone No More"

• A. Paulina's imperative to the statue
• B. Hermione's silence
• C. Leontes the interweaving of Pygmalion and
  Narcissus
• D. Hermione's and Perdita and the myth of Ceres
  and Proserpina

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IV. Conclusion

• "Female voices in The Winter's Tale acquire an
  oblique but telling power the power to point out
  that, in the Ovidian tradtion, stories about
  poetic authority, creativity, or 'voice' however
  purely poetic their claim may seem, nonetheless
  entail violence "against the female body. ...
  Challenging Ovidian-Petrarchan tropes for male
  vocal power when they thwart Leontes's desire to
  control speech, the tongues of Hermione and
  Paulina recall recall Ovid's rhetorically
  self-conscious narrative of rape, misogyny, and
  female vengeance .... Investigating the causes
  and effects of rhetorical speech ... Shakespeare
  reveals the cost to women of Ovid's foundational
  tropes for the poetic authority. (44).