Glorious Bastards

Jan 01, 2025

In an effort to take a vacation, I’m publishing some old works on here. This is a piece I wrote in college in 2010 with James Shapiro. It was my first and only A+ ever!!!

My book, Unsolicited Advice: A Consent Educator's (Canceled) Memoir, is available only on Substack and starts here.

What would you like to ask a consent educator? Submit your questions here and I’ll answer them on this Substack.

Being a paid subscriber supports getting anti-carceral consent education as far and wide as possible. If you’re in a country where the exchange rate makes a subscription inaccessible, email hello@sharetheloadinc.com for a 90% off code.

The title, “The Winter’s Tale,” is an anomaly in Shakespeare’s canon. It implies the personification of the season, Winter, and that a telling of Winter’s story will ensue. Where most of Shakespeare’s plays derive their title from a notable character, relationship, or key plot point (i.e. Cymbeline, Troilus and Cressida, and a Midsummer Night’s Dream, respectively), here the winter is given a character’s status, whose figurative journey is traveled on the backs of the human characters of the play. The season kicks off the play in despair and turmoil, setting the stage for a tragedy. Sixteen years pass and, with the return of the banished female heroine, spring sets in and turns the tragedy into a classic tragicomedy. And “not yet on summer’s death, nor on the birth/Of trembling winter” (4.4.94-95), a passionate discussion of the relationship between art and nature becomes a marker of Winter’s cyclical surrender to Spring.

Perdita says that her “rustic garden’s barren” of any “bastards,” and she “care[s] not to get slips of them” (4.4.98-99). There are two sides to the debate within the horticultural world of hybridization, which are discussed here between Perdita and Polixenes, the man who, in effect, got her banished as an infant. One side, argued by Perdita, believes that tampering with the natural purity of a species of flower is blasphemous in the art of gardening. The notion of imposing human will onto nature and the natural order of a flower’s biology goes against the cosmic grain and puts the gardener in a position of too much power. The other side, as argued by Polixenes, maintains the position that Nature is almost asking to be interfered with. “Nature is made better by no mean/But nature makes that mean: so, over that art/Which you say adds to nature, is an art/That nature makes” (4.4.107-109). Nature presents itself to humans in its most organic state (which in itself is art) but then gives us the option to, within the framework of the rules of operation given, bend it to our liking. Perhaps this is even a Deist world-view, presenting the possibility of God as a Divine Watchmaker or an Architect of the Universe, who created the universe and its laws as we know them and set the subsequent passage of time in motion. Within this conception of the universe, a set of rules for nature was determined, and humans exist within that set of rules, but are given skills and free will within them. And, perhaps, we are even given the prerogative to push the boundaries of those rules. So, Polixenes believes that human interference does not ruin the art of Nature, but rather “the art itself is nature” (4.4.114). It is in our human nature to beautify.

This argument inadvertently boils down to a debate over Perdita’s self worth, as she is arguing with her future father in law. Perdita herself is a bastard, and whether she is being self-deprecating intentionally or not, she is indirectly making a case for Florizell not to marry her as she puts down the entire concept of a bastard birth. To call the hybrids “bastards” degrades them, and degrades the gardener as the artist. Perdita sees Nature as the artist, and there is a fine line between adjusting an artist’s work and impeding his talent and vision. She thinks that the intervention of human skill upon something as naturally beautiful as carnations ruins the essence of the thing. Tampering with the natural beauty of an object somehow devalues the beauty and devalues the object as a work of art. In a way, the tampering implies a lack of honesty.

Perdita says, “No more than were I painted I would wish/This youth should say ‘twere well, and only therefore/Desire to breed by me” (4.4.120-123). In simpler terms, she wouldn’t want to wear makeup and have her inauthentic beauty be the only reason why Florizell would want to have children with her. This is an extreme and overly purist statement. She seems to believe that wearing makeup, even if just to make herself appear a slightly more flawless version of her physical self, is dishonest. She wouldn’t want to lie to the man who will marry her, especially about something as seemingly serious as physical beauty, and so she wouldn’t dare apply makeup to highlight some physical attributes or cover a few blemishes for fear of being misleading. This then transfers to her beliefs about gardening, and she wouldn’t even want to guide nature in a way that creates a potentially false aesthetic pleasure. But what about an accentuation of beauty, and in turn a slight manipulation of nature, is a lie? Is it a lie of omission? Dusting a red nose with some powder is hardly misleading, unless the red nose is a cold symptom. The issue of art as artifice appears to be in question here for Perdita; art falsifies the nature that it manipulates. But Polixines is more of the opinion that creating art out of nature is still an art because no essence is lost when creativity is imposed, since creativity is a natural instinct. Yet the notion that art holds a mirror to nature is too passive. Art does not simply reflect nature and show us ourselves, but rather interprets, filters, and then projects nature back at itself in a new shape and color from a new point of view. If this definition of an artist as an interpreter of nature is the one being discussed here, then art cannot be artificial, nor can it destroy the essence of anything natural.

It is said that Shakespeare never wrote autobiographically (or at least no more than anyone can help but write autobiographically), but this dialogue appears to be nothing other than the constant internal conflict within a poet. Polixenes seems to be right, and, in turn seems to represent the winning argument within Shakespeare himself. It is innocently hopeful but impossibly naïve optimism to believe that influencing something’s nature ruins the essence of the thing. If human skill impedes natural beauty, art wouldn’t exist in the human realm. Or, beauty and art would never coincide. Polixenes may be toying with the beautiful young girl he encounters, and sort of pulling at threads because she is endearing, but the argument is definitely not just a rhetorical dodge. He makes a powerful philosophical point about the nature of Art and the art of Nature, and the position of human beings in relation to these parallel dichotomies. His insight may come from Shakespeare’s own conflict with tampering with language as a poet to create art out of the otherwise mundane human habit of communication, but can apply to almost any art form. Artists often talk of the fear of altering something too much from its natural state, and ruining its organic beauty. However, an artist’s talent is the capability to impose his own aesthetic, style, desires, and choices onto his medium—to know when and where to prune his own creation. (Michelangelo talked of his marble carvings of slaves and believed that they were in the marble already, he was just letting them out.) An artist uses the chosen medium to express a point of view or idea of beauty that he believes to be missing from, or inherent in, that medium and the world. And without a somewhat substantial feeling of self-importance and a need to share his point of view with the rest of humanity, an artist fails to create.

Polixenes’ position that altered nature is not bastardized nature triumphs thematically throughout the play. Perdita and Florizell are married despite her supposed illegitimacy, not to mention the fact that she remains beautiful, intelligent, and lovely despite her own apparent bastard status. Leontes is driven mad by his assumption of Hermione’s infidelity, perhaps demonstrating that jealousy is part of his nature. Even in terms of sheer Oedipal plot points, Leontes tries to alter the natural course of events by having Perdita sent to die on the mountain, but fails to change the fate of his daughter. He stubbornly rejects the Oracle’s prophecy, which, in the logic of the play, should be taken as fact. The unfolding of the plot asserts that natural law is somewhat fixed, but that within those laws nature almost begs to be manipulated. Nature (as in physical, organic Nature, but also human nature and the natural states of beings) almost presents itself to humans in such pure a state so as to offer itself for adjustment and alteration. Furthermore, it seems to be an aspect of human nature to push the natural order and impose our will upon it. The instinct to push our limits and the limits placed upon us is embedded in our DNA, not just a fleeting, adolescent form of rebellion.

Later, during the final scene in which Hermione’s statue comes to life, we see our dilemma flipped on its head. The statue is imbued with human life so that the artwork itself literally imitates human nature. However, the “magic” aspect of the statue comes out of nowhere, making the audience wonder if Paulina has been keeping Hermione in hiding and the statue is not a statue at all, but, rather, Hermione in the flesh. In this case, the art is not restructuring nature, but instead Hermione’s nature is restructuring the art of sculpture. Art is said to hold a mirror to humanity: Art imitates life. But in this scene, life imitates art, and in doing so, holds a mirror to Leontes. When the statue comes alive, Leontes exclaims, “O, she’s warm!/If this be magic, let it be an art/As lawful as eating” (5.3.136-138). He refers to her warmth as possible magic, as if it is not only magic that Hermione would return from the dead, but also that the warmth of a living body is its own magic and its own art. Then Leontes refers to eating as an art as well. The word “lawful” is a strange choice of adjective to modify “eating” because to eat is a human necessity, and natural law is the only law which might mandate it. To say it is in our nature wouldn’t even be a strong enough statement; we need food to live. Yet, in referring to eating as an art, Shakespeare implies that our human desires, instincts, needs, are themselves artistic creations. But who is the artist in this context? This again brings up the Deist possibility of a machinist Creator. But Shakespeare throws in a twist: this god is an Artist, and Natural Law is his masterpiece.

Elsie Motz Lowdon, Perdita, 1915

If Perdita were around today to see what has become of genetic modification, she would be shocked and find her own argument about flowers trivial when we have such serious matters as cloning, eye color manipulation, KFC’s animal 57, and plums in the dead of winter. To talk about toying with nature in the 21^st century is an entirely different enterprise than it was in the beginning of the 17^th century. At the time that Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale, mankind was in the middle of the Scientific Revolution, rejecting ideas of God as an omniscient, divine Creator who had personal relationships with individual humans and could intervene and perform miracles. Events that had previously been inexplicable and, therefore, divine were being scientifically explicated based on newly determined facts of the matter. The argument between Perdita and Polixines perfectly captures the paradigm shift in religious thought at the time. Perdita remains stuck a bit in the old view that the mysterious Creator has an agenda or artistic vision and plan, whereas Polixenes maintains the newer view that perhaps that Creator, along with setting the rules of nature in motion, gave humans free will within that natural order and then stepped back to let them do with it what they chose. This discussion in its most modern reincarnation takes on a new face. Our opportunities to manipulate, if not usurp, nature have multiplied immensely. The thought that mankind is somehow hindering an artistic creation is too romantic an idea to even consider. Perdita would think that we greedily try to dominate and suppress nature, even possibly in our attempt to imitate it with increasing flawlessness. We now have artificial intelligence that can receive musical compositions by a given composer, then process the music and create new music that is nearly indiscernible from the originals in style and aural aesthetic even to the astute ear of an educated fan. We are on our way to creating fetuses from skin cells stripped into stem cells, negating the need for natural reproduction. Perdita would be horrified, and to talk of art at this point would be futile.

Unsolicited Advice from Mia Schachter

Discussion about this post