Fear of the Queen’s Speed: Trauma and Departure in The Winter’s Tale

Abstract

The essay applies trauma theory to early modern understandings of grief and its contagious after-effects to provide new ways to think about the figuring of trauma’s reach into individual embodied minds and their environments, and about its larger impacts on narrative structures, theatrical spaces, and the people who populated them. To do so, I turn to Shakespeare’s most deliberately tricky play, The Winter’s Tale, and to its undeniably traumatized Queen Hermione, who defies the laws of time, space, and motion to an extent unmatched by any other human character in his canon. The essay explores how Shakespeare imagines and mobilizes the aggrieved Hermione; and how her departure and repeated, belated returns play out different forms and effects of traumatic response. These include the gaps and eruptions endemic to the processes of accommodating the impossible and listening to stories that are structured around absence and aporia. It is my contention that in his later play he was experimenting with how those effects could spill out beyond the brains and bodies of trauma’s original victims, and transform the people and spaces beyond them.