Awake
“It is required you do awake your faith.”
Paulina says this to Leontes and a gathered assembly in a statue and art gallery very near the end of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. This play is a tricky, dark, troubling, and beautiful one where a younger Leontes, King of Sicilia, becomes jealous of his pregnant wife, Hermione, and puts her on trial for adultery with their long-time friend, Polixenes, the King of Bohemia. Hermione gives birth to a daughter, who Leontes banishes from the Kingdom and leaves to die. Their young son, Mamillius, dies of distress. Hermione collapses as Leontes pronounces sentence and is carried off and reported dead. Sixteen years later, a repentant and longing Leontes is reunited with his daughter, Perdita, who as a babe was discovered by a shepherd and his son and who has since escaped from the Kingdom of Bohemia, where she was raised a shepherdess and has fallen in love with Polixenes’s song, Prince Florizel. I know, it’s a lot. Once Perdita and Leontes are reunited and Florizel no longer in trouble with his own possessive father, Paulina takes over. She’s a member of Leontes’s court whose own husband was banished as part of Perdita’s expulsion and later killed by a bear, and has hired a famous sculptor to render Hermione in stone. Here they all are when Paulina says, “It is required you do awake your faith.” Over the next few moments, Leontes watches as the statue of Hermione comes to life. He touches her and says what is for my money the most magical moment in all of Shakespeare: “She’s warm.” Hermione greets Perdita. Possible reconciliation ensues.
The Winter’s Tale is incredibly complex and rich, and I won’t go into all the interpretive possibilities here: is Hermione really dead or do she and Paulina fake it? Is Leontes forgivable? What are we to make of the missing Mamillius? How can Paulina, whose husband dies because of Leontes’s actions, forgive? These are just the starts, really, of the possibilities and problems. I’ve directed the play three times and all I can do is play with them.
But this sequence in the art gallery is really something. So moving I had a neon sign of it made for a production a few years ago. The sign now hangs in my office.
Resurrection? Reconciliation? Repentence? No matter whether you read the moment as an actual statue coming to life or the commitment of two women — Paulina and Hermione — to wait it out sixteen years until stirring the supposed “dead” one towards reuniting with the rest of her family, it’s my belief that magic happens and that it is required we do awake our faith.
I see the play’s title as something of a key for how we’re to understand what could be a parable. Winter lasts a good, long stretch. Spring comes, but the frosts and temperaments of winter are difficult to shake off. For seeds and sprouts, for hibernating bears, for hardened hearts, and for those frozen in whatever kind of unbelief: it is required you do awake.
Meditation
In The Winter's Tale, a moment of seeming magic unfolds as Hermione's statue appears to come to life. Whether interpreted as a literal resurrection or a long-conceived plan of two patient women, the scene captures the essence of faith awakening. It reminds us that, just as winter gradually yields to spring, our faith can reawaken, bringing new life to what we once thought lost or dead. Sit with this.
Examen
Reflect on a time when your faith or belief in something was tested. How did you navigate that period of doubt or uncertainty?
Contemplate the concept of awakening faith. What areas of your life might need this rejuvenation?
Consider the idea of faith as an active choice. How can you consciously choose to "awake your faith" in your daily life, especially during this season of Advent?