'Be stone no more': Maternity and Heretical Visual Art in Shakespeare's Last Plays

The fierce confessional dispute over the sense of sight and the delusive nature of images which tore apart early modern England during the Reformation, together with its intertwined story of iconoclasm and resistance, dilapidation of images and their recovery, is what marks at the core England’s relationship with the visual arts. How may that collective story of delusive idols and reformed eyes, eradication, and saving from the wreckage, have remained as a trace in Shakespeare’s representation of the maternal in The Winter’s Tale and in Pericles? Obsessively and consistently in these plays a precluded mother determines a fascination with an economy of representation based on death and resurrection, appearance and disappearance. It is my contention in this essay that Shakespeare’s obsessive un-burial of controversial memories of the maternal, overtly or obliquely indebted to Italian art, is ambivalently intersected by the same interplay of forgetfulness and remembrance that recent criticism has viewed as underpinning the forced “social amnesia” of England’s reformed culture. In such a context, I suggest, references to Giulio Romano, Renaissance Italian art, Paulina’s secret gallery and concealed statue, Cerimon’s and Paulina’s art of resuscitating the dead, can be perceived as the deviated and secular forms of recovery Shakespeare devises to fill up the void inherited from exceptional times of prescribed forgetfulness.