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“There is no tongue that moves”
17
Hermione is condemned because of the unintentional
transgressive charms of her “tongue,” just as the tongues of
real women (and witches) in the Tudor and Stuart society were
seen as being poisonous, contaminating, evil. More specifically,
a women’s mouth was thought to be one of the entrances of
hell. The device used for punishing women found guilty of evil
speech, that is, for scolding their “unruly member,” was the
“scold’s bridle,” an iron collar with a metal bit that pressed
down on the victim’s tongue to prevent her from talking.
15
However, in
The Winter’s Tale
Shakespeare, knowing that
woman’s tongue had long been seen as something cursed and
evil, made it a curative body part, a healing female organ that
could retell this winter’s tale of death as an old tale of rebirth,
an old tale of women healers’ midwifery.
If Hermione’s docile and triumphant tongue is the cause
of Leontes’s sudden jealousy, as it led him to restrict both her
body and her speech by imprisoning her, Paulina’s sharp
tongue effectively “purges” the king’s infected or perverted
powers of perception and understanding. Unlike condemned
women healers such as Hermione, Paulina is a bold speaker
with a “boundless tongue” (2.3.92) which immediately
demonstrates its curative powers.
16
She speaks to the plagued
15
For scholarship on the scold’s bridle, see Lynda E. Boose, “Scold’s Bridles
and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman’s Unruly Member,”
Shakespeare
Quarterly
vol. 42 (1991: 179-213), and for discussions of early modern
woman’s tongue as the representation of evil, see J. L. Simmons’, “The
Tongue and its Office in
The Revenger’s Tragedy
” in 1977, pp. 56-88; Carla
Mazzio’s, “Sins of the Tongue” in 1997, pp. 53-79; and Peter Stallybrass’s,
“Reading the Body:
The Revenger’s Tragedy
and the Jacobean Theater of
Consumption” in 1991, pp. 210-20.
16
However, my finding here is not in accord with Mary L. Livingston’s
discussion, in “The Natural Art of
The Winter’s Tale
” (1969), of the impact
of Paulina’s speech, which emphasizes more the relationship between art
and the nature of words, as exemplified by Perdita and the comic Autolycus
in the pastoral scene. Though Livingston indicates that language “is a kind
of magic which can be used for good or evil ends,” she then describes the