Galleries and Soft Power: The Gallery in The Winter’s Tale

Abstract

This chapter examines the significance of Paulina’s gallery, the setting for the final scene of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. The private gallery, which functions both as a room of state and as a privy space, a place for the successful deployment of soft, coercive power, was only beginning to be commonplace in the early seventeenth century when the play was first performed (1609–11). The Winter’s Tale, stages the work of soft power diplomacy as a remedy for tyranny and as an aid to peace-making, and, in so doing, explores the extent to which such operations are both gendered and spatially rooted. Paulina’s success in brokering peace, resurrecting a tarnished Queen’s reputation, and restoring a lost heir is facilitated by the use of a site that enables a new kind of thinking. Where the palaces, prisons and courtrooms are masculine arenas of social control and correction in which rules are harsh and unbending and penalties are severe, peace-making requires a more contemplative and timeless venue that facilitates shared wonder. Paulina’s gallery, with its rare sculpture by master artist Giulio Romano, is just such a venue. Culturally, the gallery was gendered masculine (a place for male connoisseurs to gather and converse) and, on stage, it was sexualized as well (associated with sexual victimization and conquest). In The Winter’s Tale, however, Paulina makes use of the new stature of the gallery and the new emphasis on connoisseurship to influence a mostly male gathering and sway their hearts.