Introduction

Abstract

Thus speaks Paulina in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as, summoning music, she awakens the statue of Hermione. The scene evokes wonder in the audience for its enactment of the marvellous, the return from death of the living body. But it plays too on the notion of the body as art: the statue is so ‘Masterly done. / The very life seems warm upon her lip.’; ‘The fixture of her eye has motion in’t / As we are mocked with art’.¹ Where, we ask, is the boundary between art and life? And Hermione’s awakening inevitably gestures towards another art, that of theatre: in the fiction of the play, the statue may indeed live, while the body on stage becomes art, with the potential to inspire, illuminate or strike with awe those who look on it. This play is infused with a profound sense of the frailty but also the transformative power of the body, and the leitmotif of loss and recovery of the body opens onto existential questions of death, memory, faith and the possibility of resurrection. The magic of art, so vividly evoked here, responds to such questions, capturing, idealizing, memorializing or revivifying the body. Art calls similarly on the imagination, whether the body is on stage or on the page, in painting or sculpture, or on the screen. The creative, imaginative power of the arts both shapes the body and is shaped by the body’s potential.

Descend. Be stone no more. Approach. Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come, I’ll fill your grave up. Stir. Nay, come away. Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him Dear life redeems you.