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III. Midwives and Magical Medicine
Scholars discussing
The Winter’s Tale
have said much
about the magical nature of the last scene of the play,
23
but
rarely has attention been given to its medicinal meanings or
implications, in particular Paulina’s symbolic midwifery and
the complex image of “birth” itself. Indeed, Carol Thomas
Neely claims that “the play’s central miracle
—
birth
—
is human,
personal, physical, and female. . . . Childbirth is the literal and
symbolic centre of the play” (1999: 169-70). The birth image
is especially emphasized in the play’s second half, beginning
with the shift to the young Perdita
—
who is closely associated
with the powers of transformation and rebirth
—
and
culminating in Paulina’s magical or alchemistic revivifying of
Hermione.
For midwives, it is important to know the most favorable
time for a baby to be born, that is, the time most in accordance
with nature, and the “mankind witch” Paulina knows this well.
As Paracelsus notes, to borrow from Jolande Jacobi: “Only
when the time has been fulfilled, and not before, does the
course of nature and art set in” (1958: 82)
—
this art, in
Paulina’s case, is the art of midwifery. The midwife is also a
kind of alchemist, one who knows that the birth of a new life is
the final stage in the course of nature, the stage at which the
fetus has been fully purified, has become a quintessence like
the Philosopher’s Stone itself, just as the silent stone of
Hermione’s statue is turned into sound and sense. Like those
23
The critic D’orsay W. Pearson, for example, argues that Paulina fully
exhibits the image of the “urban witch”
—
“[b]awd, midwife, agent of the
forces of evil” (1979: 201)
—
in English Renaissance drama, one which can
also be found in three other plays a decade before Shakespeare composed
The Winter’s Tale
: namely, Thomas Heywood’s
The Wise Woman of
Hogsdon
, Ben Jonson’s
The Alchemist
, and Thomas Middleton’s
The Witch
(1979: 199).