Autolycus is one of Shakespeare's more endearing rogues. He robs and cheats with abandon, but no one seems really hurt by him, certainly the Clown recovers well from being fleeced, well enough to accept Autolycus as a servant later in the play. His songs add a cheery musical backdrop to Act IV and his cheerful attitude toward sex is shown with his songs about ‘dildos’ and this contrasts with Leontes's morbid obsession with infidelity. His small-scale villainy serves a purpose, if only to prevent the paradise around the Shepherd's farm from seeming too perfectly idyllic. The romantic comedy of Florizel and Perdita needs him; his cheerful misbehaviour provides an entertaining counterpoint to their earnest devotion.
At the heart rendering moment when Polixenes refuses his noble sons marriage, appearance as the peddler provides both a comic counterpoint to the more serious love-plot. "Here's one to a very doleful tune," Autolycus declares, "how a usurer's wife was brought to bed of twenty moneybags at a burden, and how she longed to eat adders' heads and toads carbonedoed." The guileless shepherdess asks, "Is it true, think you?" to which the salesman replies, "Very true, and but a month old". The sale is made, and the audience can only applaud the virtuosity of the huckster.
Perdita and Florizel make an appealing couple. Shakespeare gives him a number of excellent speeches to direct toward his beloved,” When you speak, sweet, I'd have you do it ever’. This contrasts sharply with the language in which Perdita’s father addressed her mother before her birth, ‘speak you.’ This is an example of how love has been able to blossom between the two as Florizel clearly has very different views to Leontes on the importance and equality of women. Perdita has been compared by critics to Proserpina (goddess of spring) in that she, too, brings the spring, she is crowned with flowers, and dispenses them to all the guests, and the audience feels that this "winter's tale" has broken out into spring colour, and it is all due to her arrival.
The flowers occasion a debate between Polixenes and Perdita over the value of interbreeding flowers--he argues that a gardener can legitimately "mend nature--change it rather", while she prefers a purer nature, unsullied by human hands. The scene is ironic, however, for Polixenes argues for something in flowers--"you see, sweet maid, we marry / A gentler scion to the wildest stock" that he opposes in his son's case, namely, the mixing of royal and common blood. The Bohemian king forfeits our sympathies almost completely in this scene, for while we may sympathize with his anger at his son, nothing can justify the absurd heights of his cruelty towards the worthy Shepherd and the wonderful Perdita. Here we see Polixenes running parallel to the erratic behaviour of his once best friend. The two kings are shown as being alike as "twinn'd lambs that did frisk i' th' sun" in childhood. They are both subject to their fits of madness. Leontes rages against Hermione until she "dies" and would actually have had both Hermione and Perdita burned.
When Polixenes finds out that his son intends to marry Perdita he flies into a fit of madness in which he says to his son, "I am sorry that by hanging thee I can but shorten thy life one week." And to Perdita he says he will have her beauty scratch'd with briers and made more homely than her state, and he will devise a death as cruel for her as she is tender.
The steadfastness of Florizel at this juncture is impressive, he has clearly wrecked matters with his father, but his love for Perdita never wavers, and nor does his desire to do what is right. In his devotion to his future mate, and in his honourable behaviour, he makes a stark contrast with Leontes. Camillo now sets in motion the return to Sicilia, and although his behaviour, involving as it does a sort of double betrayal, is not up to his usual standards of highly moral conduct, he is the agent of the happy ending, and so can be forgiven. Besides, the old man's desire to see his homeland again demands the audience's sympathies.
Once the decision is made to flee to Sicilia, Autolycus takes over this portion of the play. We are given his philosophy of life, beginning with his statement (after robbing the entire sheep shearing party) that "Ha, ha, what a fool Honesty is! and Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman!". In a different context or uttered by another character, this statement would have a sinister cast, and so would his justification for not running to tell the king what has happened--"If I thought it were a piece of honesty to acquaint the king withal, I would not do't. I hold it the more knavery to conceal it, and therein I am constant to my profession". This deliberate evil lacks their capacity for harm. None of his crimes have dire consequences, and his "knavery" actually ends up doing everyone a great deal of good, leaving the audience free to delight in his "constancy," and in his bamboozling of the poor Shepherd and his son, whom he terrifies with promises of the king's vengeance: "He has a son, who shall be flayed alive; then 'nointed over with honey, set on the head of a wasp's nest; then stand till he be three quarters and a dram dead; then recovered again...(and) set against a brick wall, the sun looking with a southward eye upon him, where he is to behold him with flies blown to death".
In conclusion, Bohemia indeed provides comic relief for the audience and can definitely be considered as a ‘healing place.’ Although we do encounter tragedy in a sense with the forbidding of Florizel and Perditas’ marriage, there is always a comic interlude to lift the tension and make things appear rather humorous as opposed to menacing and this is thanks to characters like the Clown and Autolycus. The contrast of Bohemia simply compliments Shakespeare’s’ tragic-comedy, theses scenes are awash with singing, dancing love and happiness, Sicilia on the other hand being fraught with despair, jealousy and death.
Harriet Walker
