He is anxious now to undo all he has done, but he cannot bring Mamilius back to life, he cannot unkill the Queen, he cannot find the child he has ordered exposed. He is doomed to live in endless remorse until "that which is lost" be found.
He can only bow his racked body before the harsh and indignant vituperation of Paulina.
... The deserts of Bohemia
But what of Antigonus and the little baby girl he had been ordered to expose?
In Pandosto the child is given to sailors by the Bohemian King. These take her to the sea and expose her in a boat during a storm. The boat, carrying the child, is carried to the seacoast of Sicily.
But Shakespeare has reversed the kingdoms. It is the Sicilian King, Leontes, who hands out the girl to be exposed. If the reversal is to continue, the ship must land on the seacoast of Bohemia, rather than that of Sicily, and so it does. Act III, scene iii has its scene set on "Bohemia, the seacoast."
The trouble with this is that while Sicily has a seacoast on every side, Bohemia-the real Bohemia-both in our day and in Shakespeare's is an inland realm and has no seacoast. It is, in fact, two hundred miles from the closest seacoast, at Trieste (nowadays part of Italy).
Shakespeare must have known this, of course, but what difference does it make, when Bohemia is not a real land at all, but is the Bohemia of idyll, and may have a seacoast just as well as it may have anything else?
Of course, if we want to be literal, there was a time when the real Bohemia had a seacoast. It was at the height of its power under the reign of Ottokar II ("the Great"), who ruled from 1253 to 1278. In 1269, at a time when the Holy Roman Empire was going through a period of weakness, Ottokar conquered what is now Austria and ruled over an enlarged Bohemia that stretched over much of central Europe, right down to the head of the Adriatic Sea. For four years, then (before the Holy Roman Empire regained these lost lands), and four years only, from 1269 to 1273, Bohemia had a seacoast in the neighborhood of modern Trieste.
The ship carrying Antigonus and the baby reaches land and Antigonus says to the sailors:
Thou art perfect then our ship hath touched upon
The deserts of Bohemia?
- Act III, scene iii, lines 1-2
By "deserts" Antigonus merely means an unoccupied region. If we are not contented with Bohemia as an imaginary kingdom but insist on the real one, we can pretend that Bohemia has its mid-thirteenth-century boundaries and that the ship has landed near Trieste. This is not bad. It would mean that Antigonus traveled from Sicily, through the length of the Adriatic Sea, a distance of some seven hundred miles.
Antigonus has seen Hermione in a dream and she has bidden him name the little girl Perdita ("the lost one"). He puts the baby down together with identifying materials, in case she should happen to be found and brought up. But even as he makes his way back to the ship, he encounters a bear and there follows the most unusual direction in Shakespeare's plays, for it reads "Exit, pursued by a bear."
... things new born
As Antigonus leaves, an old Shepherd and then his son come on the scene. The son is referred to in the cast of characters as "Clown," but in its original meaning of "country bumpkin."
The Clown has seen the ship destroyed by a storm and Antigonus eaten by the bear, but the Shepherd has found Perdita and says to his son:
Now bless thyself; thou met'st with things dying,
I with things new bom.
- Act III, scene iii, lines 112-13
It is the turning point of the play. Until now, the theme of the play has been a kind of dying, as Leontes went insane and drove person after person into flight, exile, or death. But the winter's tale is over and the spring begins, for Perdita the pretty child will not die. She has been found by the Bohemian shepherds and she will live.
... slide o'er sixteen years...
There comes a huge lapse of time between Act III and Act IV. The lapse is necessary and also occurs in Pandosto, which has as its secondary title The Triumph of Time.
This is a particularly radical violation of the "unities." There were three of these, according