ABSTRACT
The ear listens to writing. Writing is the word of the dead father. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Figure Foreclosed’
An early seventeenth-century audience listening to the concluding scenes of The Winter’s Tale would have heard Leontes try to assure Florizel that ‘Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince,/For she did print your royal father off/Conceiving you’ (5.1. 123-5). Concerns about the legitimacy of a child did not, of course, make their debut in Shakespeare’s England, but using metaphors borrowed from printing to express such anxieties was a significant new development. At the center of this anxious account of paternity is the conflation of maternity with the printing press.
