Seeming & Being

Seeming & Being

1. Faith in miracles

   • Catholic
   • Superstition
   • Protestant/ Reformative
   • Critic: Walter Linn

2. Reflection

   • Seeming as being
   • Hermione in picture
   • Autolycus as his own aggressor

3. Substitution

   • Polixenes for Leontes (in Leontes mind)
   • Bohemia for Sicilia
   • Reality for dreams

4. Art & Nature

   • Nature's Bastards
   • Hybrids/grafting imagery
   • Floral metaphor used to explore theme of human crossbreeding
   • "Unless another/ As like Hermione as is her picture/ Affront his eye"
     • Disguise + art
       • Seeming over being BUT Seeming = being

5. Seeming "honesty": chastity covering sexually corrupt being

   • Honest/ Honourable
     • "Too true, my lord."
       • seeming and being duality
   • Language as an infrastructure for communication of divine right or societal strata

6. Sartorial seeming as disguise or revealing of identity

   • Florizel
   • Perdita
     • "me, poor lowly maid, / Most goddess-like pranked-up
       • She looks like a queen and she is a queen even if she doesn't know
         • Disguise creates a bigger truth
           • She is her disguise
   • Shepherd and Clown as gentlemen
   • Autolycus
     • Disguise + honour
       • "If I thought it were a piece of honesty to acquaint the king withal, it would not do't."

7. Facsimile/printing imagery

   • Seeming reproduced equates to truth (DNA)
   • Perdita
     • "Yet Nature is made better by no mean/ But Nature makes that mean. So over that art,/ Which you say adds to Nature, is in art/ That Nature makes."
       • Natural disguise of Perdita as royalty makes her nature as royalty more evident. Nature is improved by her acting natural thus seeming plays an important role in her being
       • Nature makes nature better
   • Mamilius

8. Context

   • James I
     • How the audience see it vs what Shakespeare meant
       • Religion

9. Nature & Nurture

   • "Your father's image is so hit in you,/ His very air, that I should call you brother "
     • Seeming = identical to Polixenes, Nature as royalty
       • Being = links to nurture -> difference