Your Floral Highness: Debating Theatrical Art in The Winter's Tale Samuel Wilcox College

Inaugurated as the queen of the mid-summer festival, Perdita stands on stage, in Act 4, Scene 4 of The Winter’s Tale, dressed in royal garments and draped in flowers. It is a moment of visual splendor, with the floral arrangements of Perdita’s costume brought into the language of the play itself. Amid the ceremony and revelry, she has a discussion with the disguised Polixenes, bringing to him and Camillo, as a token of her beneficent reign over the feast, a series of plants: first, “rosemary and rue,” and later, “[h]ot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram, / [t]he marigold.” This exchange of plants is briefly interrupted by a dialogue on the “streaked gillyvor,” a flower that Perdita refers to as “nature’s bastard[].” As Polixenes comes to the defense of these “bastard” flowers, Shakespeare offers a paradox. Perdita first rejects the gillyvor, with Polixenes arguing on behalf of the hybridized flower, praising the cross-breeding of a “gentler scion to the wildest stock,” while refusing to allow his son, Florizel, to marry his shepherdess interlocutor. Yet the scene plays out akin to a philosophical dialogue, with Perdita, clad in her floral garments, becoming a Socratic heroine, guiding Polixenes to his reasoned conclusion....