Believing in Apostrophe in <i>The Winter’s Tale</i>

When Hermione’s sculpture awakes and speaks at the climax of The Winter’s Tale, her speech unfolds as part of an unmistakably religious ritual. This essay argues that the religious conversations Shakespeare draws on and secularizes in this scene are primarily arguments about the capacities of language. In staging multiple forms of address to an inanimate or absent figure, the scene interrogates the figure of apostrophe. As this essay demonstrates, contention about apostrophe shapes the period’s debates over the nature of the eucharist and the efficacy of prayers to saints. These debates posed a binary opposition between believing speech that affirms the animacy of its audience, and mere rhetoric; in other words, between prayer and trope. Read through the contested rhetorics of apostrophe outlined in early modern religious debates, the intense ambivalence between trope and believing speech in the play’s final scene poses a question of belief in speech for its audiences even while it imagines a secularized version of transcendent language. By borrowing ambivalence about apostrophe from religion, Shakespeare’s scene anticipates later debates about the performative nature of apostrophe in lyric. [A.R.]