"'You speak a language that I understand not': The Rhetoric of Animation in The Winter's Tale" by Lynn Enterline Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997):

Thesis Statement "The elabotate Pygmalion fantasy offtered in the last scene as a way to resolve the problems inaugurated by Hermione's initially 'portent' tongue tells us that before we can begin to hear the full resonance of her concluding silence, we must consider the relationship between, on the one hand, the trope of the female voice in the Ovdian-Petrarchan traditions that Shakespeare inherits and transforms in this play and, on the other, the quite specific rhetoric concerns through whcih The Winter's Tale reads that traditon, turning into theatrical metacommentrary"

I. Shall I Be Heard?"- The Petrarchan tradition and the stony Lady coming to life. A. Ovidian-Petrarchan Tradition and the power of and the power of address and of epideixis B. "the rhetoric competition between Hermione and Leontes C. misogyny and the aesthetic triumph D. Leotes's language and the violation of Hermione's sense of self "Hermione's courtroom protest that she stand somehow outside the restrictive terms of Leontes's accusation.... Her husband's 'language,' like his jealousy, violates her sense of herself" (26).

II. "Not Guilty" the female voice in that Ovidian-Petrarchan legacy A."When Shakespeare adopts the imagined scene of speaking to a stony lady as a way to repair the devastation caused by Leontes's jealousy, he turns the conflict between male and female verbal power into a meditation on Ovidian and Petrarchan rhetoric in general and on the role of the female voice in that literary legacy in particular" (29). B. The Rime Sparse and Petrarch's replacement of desire with words C. The polarity between male speech and female silence D. The unsettling power of the female voice E. The futility of the doublet "to say" and "to swear" i. Hermione's vain but truthful swearing of innocence and Paulina's successful yet false swearing of death ii. Polixenes's and Hermione's "Not guilty"

III. "Be Stone No More" A. Paulina's imperative to the statue B. Hermione's silence C. Leontes: the interweaving of Pygmalion and Narcissus D. Hermione's and Perdita and the myth of Ceres and Proserpina

IV. Conclusion "Female voices in The Winter's Tale acquire an oblique but telling power: the power to point out that, in the Ovidian tradtion, stories about poetic authority, creativity, or 'voice' however purely poetic their claim may seem, nonetheless entail violence "against the female body.... Challenging Ovidian-Petrarchan tropes for male vocal power when they thwart Leontes's desire to control speech, the tongues of Hermione and Paulina recall recall Ovid's rhetorically self-conscious narrative of rape, misogyny, and female vengeance.... Investigating the causes and effects of rhetorical speech... Shakespeare reveals the cost to women of Ovid's foundational tropes for the poetic authority. (44).