ABSTRACT
In The Winter's Tale, Hermione appears in two ghosts like manifestations: once in Antigonus' dream and again in the last scene when she emerges from what the audience thought was her death. Female ghosts were unusual figures in early modern literature. Most ghosts of the period were male, particularly the revenge ghosts who dominated the London stage. Shakespeare's depiction of Hermione in The Winter's Tale allows for a particularly compelling study of both ghostly eroticism and the blazonic language of the Petrarchan lyric tradition. Hermione's remarkable absent presence at the end of The Winter's Tale comments on one of the most prevalent conventions used in early modern English literature to describe and catalog the features of desirable female charactersthe blazonbut it also explores the tensions between lyric and dramatic representations of the female body. The blazon is a poetic technique used to convey certainty in the lyric as speakers describe the lifeless, inanimate body parts of their beloveds.
